UNKNOWN
Over the years I learned fairly little about my grandfathers' experience of war.
He never spoke a word, at least to me, about WWII. I knew he was involved but he volunteered no information, opinions, or images. Only posthumously I discovered a certificate signed by Pierre Trudeau, thanking my grandfather for his 29 years of loyal military service. (Service for which there is no public record and the Department of Defence tells me details may be made available, not to me but possibly to my grand children, in around 2085 or so...)
My other grandfather got ill, along with a number of other men, during their training in Winnipeg. Rather than being sent to Europe and threatening the health of men in the field, they were forced to stay behind. When they recovered and finished training authorities decided they wouldn't be sent to Europe but instead be stationed on Vancouver Island. That's the story I always knew. But I lived with him for a short time he added to the story. He said he spent the bulk of the war retrieving the bodies of dead pilots who'd crashed their planes into the mountains and sea surrounding Patricia Bay. (Naively I assumed this was due to primitive flight equipment and the difficulty of navigating in thick sea fog. He thought that was cute. No, he assured me, these were suicides. Rather than going off to kill and die in a land they didn't know and for reasons they couldn't articulate, they took their own lives – which is a history curiously erased and buried by our annual act of state-ordered remembering.) He shared several times that after being promised leave to marry my grandmother, but being denied several times at the last minute, he went AWOL, got married, and upon returning was punished and spent the remainder of the war isolated in some remote camp in the north of the island.
I think about these men all the time; however, I would never celebrate their service to the country. And if you're doing so on my behalf I don't know why or even what you're talking about – and I'd also have to question your motives.
Which brings me to what I like most about Remembrance Day, and what I'm thinking about today. The folks who criticize the youngest generations for their participation awards – their being rewarded with gold stars and trophies regardless of their input or outcome – are the same people who proudly wear poppies and declare every volunteer and conscript alike an unquestionable hero for all time; folks we're all forever indebted to, apparently, while no one knows virtually anything about the circumstance or consequence of their service (and mostly due to institutional secrecy.) This, to me, is pure comedy.
