Standing guard over the return of fallen sons
From Trenton to Toronto, hundreds of ordinary Canadians turn out to pay their respects to three soldiers killed in a Taliban ambush
http://images.theglobeandmail.com/v5...hford68x58.jpg CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
cblatchford@globeandmail.com
September 8, 2008
TRENTON, ONT. -- Killed yesterday by a roadside bomb, Sergeant Prescott Shipway is the 97th Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan.
His name appears in the book I wrote last year about Canadian soldiers,
Fifteen Days.
Like Captain Jon Snyder and Sergeant Jason Boyes, who respectively died June 7 and March 16 this year, Sgt. Shipway was alive when the book was written and first published.
Though I didn't know any of the three, they made the book either because of something exceptional they did, or because the comrades I did know, and was interviewing, found them exceptional and sang their praises.
Sgt. Shipway, for instance, was then a member of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, the soldiers who were the bomb babies of that 2006 rotation.
Assigned to a wretched and now-defunct platoon house called Gumbad which was reachable only by two roads, they were sitting ducks and were constantly being blown up. On June 21 that year, a re-supply convoy carrying Captain Martin Larose, a francophone exchange officer from the Vandoos who was the company's second-in-command, and a beloved soldier named Corporal Ryan Elrick, hit a huge bomb.
Cpt. Larose's ankles were smashed to bits in the blast, but it was Cpl. Elrick who was most seriously wounded.
Sgt. Shipway, a section commander with 3 Platoon, swung into action. While waiting for a chopper, he got on the satellite phone and spoke to a doctor back at Kandahar Air Field, who talked him and a couple of other soldiers through the difficult task of getting tourniquets on the bloodied remnants of Cpl. Elrick's legs. They saved, if not the young man's legs, his life, and the sergeant was mentioned in dispatches for his stellar and composed conduct that day.
And now Sgt. Shipway, on his second tour to Afghanistan, is dead himself.
They are the shadows on my heart, these soldiers. I didn't know them in the flesh (though I remember Capt. Snyder's sunlit face) but I know well some of those who served alongside them, and feel oddly connected to them all. It is part of the enduring hold the Canadian soldier has upon me. I can hardly bear reading or watching any news about the troops, and neither can I stop.
I want to go back to Kandahar for a fifth time, yet fear going back because it won't be the same. I haven't even been able to read my own book, now out for a year, and it took weeks before I could even look at the pictures.
Ridiculously, I miss people I hardly know.
So it was that I drove to Canadian Forces Base Trenton on Saturday for only the second repatriation ceremony I've ever attended, asked to come by a relative of one of the three soldiers killed last week in a Taliban ambush.
The CF Airbus carrying the bodies of Corporals Andrew Grenon and Mike Seggie and Private Chad Horn touched down at 6:48 p.m.
The ceremony is always brief, and this was no different.
The caskets, carefully wrapped in Canadian flags, were brought off the plane one at a time, carried to a waiting hearse, at which point grieving relatives were led on to the tarmac and over the sound of the idling engines, three separate sets of wrenching sobs could be heard.
First came Cpl. Grenon of Windsor (I might have been in his presence too; in 2006; he was on his second tour), then Cpl. Seggie of Winnipeg and Pte. Horn of Calgary. All were members of the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry based in Shilo, Man.
Collectively, the three young men - respectively 23, 21 and 21 - lived a grand total of 65 years, what used to be the normal retirement age in this country.
There were individual mourners older than that on the tarmac, including an old man with a mauve hanky who tried mightily but could not stop weeping or wiping his face. There was a baby in a stroller - I think Mike Seggie's little nephew, Carson, with his soother - and two wheelchairs and at least one pregnant young woman, dozens of crying boy cousins, mothers wearing sunglasses on pale faces, military dads and uncles like Jim and Tom Seggie, former long-serving Patricias themselves, standing ramrod straight and saluting the caskets.
Unusually, because the battle group led by the 2PPCLI is ending its tour in Afghanistan, also on the plane were 108 returning troops in their desert camos, some of whom would have fought alongside the dead soldiers.
Greeting the dead and the living were Governor-General Michaëlle Jean, Defence Minister Peter MacKay, former governor-general Adrienne Clarkson, who is now the honorary colonel-in-chief of the Patricias, and Chief of Defence Staff General Walt Natynczyk.
An hour and 35 minutes later, the official ceremony was over, the hearses and long line of black funeral cars speeding off the tarmac.
This is when the real repatriation began.
Lined along the fence ringing the air field were hundreds of ordinary Canadians, who waited quietly, without the ability to see anything of what transpired, to pay their respects to the soldiers.
The cortege had a 15-minute head start on me, but by driving at breakneck speed, I was able to catch up with it pretty quickly and get close enough to its tail end that I was able to see what the families would have seen.
Dozens of overpasses along Highway 401 to Toronto were still ablaze with lights and people, Canadian flags and homemade signs.
In small towns and cities - Port Hope, Cobourg, Newcastle, Newtonville, Courtice, Oshawa, Whitby, Ajax and Pickering - and all the way through to the Don Valley Parkway, where the cortege heads south to the coroner's office downtown, there is now a format for such occasions.
The local fire departments send out some trucks, which park on the overpasses; at either end, traffic comes to a halt. Side roads - in some places even the sides of the 401 itself - fill with cars as people park and make their way to the bridges so that they will be seen. Well-used banners and flags are hung from the overpasses, so that they too will be seen.
Everyone understands very well the importance of being visible to the families in the black cars in the speeding cortege.
On Saturday night, the sun was down but not quite gone, a half-moon in the clear, rosy sky, the people on the overpasses just silhouettes to those of us below, slowing to watch. They were providing a civilian version of what in military jargon is called over-watch, solemnly presiding over the safe return of their sons.
