My point in posting all these ship and unit memorials is not to single out any one, it is, rather, to remind us all that we have taken casualties before. There were times when we opened our morning papers and saw casualty lists with dozens, even hundreds of names, day after day, sometimes for weeks on end.
On average, over 20 Canadians were killed in action on every single one of the 2,100 plus days that we were at war from 1939 to 1945 ... some days no one was killed, some days they died by the hundreds. The average was higher in the (shorter) First War.
But it all changed.
I was, personally, shocked, by the
official and
general reactions to the loss, on 17 Apr 02, of four Canadian who were killed in a "friendly fire" incident. I was even more shocked when the media failed to remind us that sending Canadian soldiers to war ~ which is what Prime Minister Chrétien did in 2002 ~ has consequences. Instead of
accepting that deaths in battle, and even by accident, is the price of an
active foreign policy, we, Canada, at large, treated ourselves to an orgy of self pity and knee-jerk anti-Americanism. (I can understand the Chrétien governments interest in deflecting attention towards the Americans and away from the Canadian government's decisions to send soldiers to Afghanistan. I can also understand the media's
take: anti-Americanism sells soap, policy criticism doesn't.) Ten years later it was
reported that the Tarnak Farm incident still resonated. Of course it did, and should have, amongst the immediate families, but it became a "model" for reporting Canadian battle casualties. We lost 150+ CF members in Afghanistan over 10 years - fewer, in the
average year than we lost on the
average day in World War II. We have, I fear, lost our sense of perspective about going to war ... and that worries me.
How will we react, I wonder, when one of HMC ships is lost to an enemy attack and, as was the case with e.g. HMS Sheffield, 20 sailors are killed in action? Will the country "decide" that we ought to abandon an
active role in the world just because a few of our sons and daughters were killed in battle?
We need to remember ... not the dead ~ they are dead and nothing can change that ... we must remember that, as my
signature says, that "it is worse to bring nations to such misery, weakness and baseness as to have neither strength nor courage to contend for anything; to have nothing left worth defending and to give the name of peace to desolation." That's my
fear: that our inability to accept casualties will further empower weak, timid, silly governments to withdraw from the world and to refuse to protect and promote our interests in that big, dangerous world.
