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Time to remember

With the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of this year fast approaching, it’s timely that the Town of Canmore dedicated a new memorial and field of honour at the cemetery for area residents who made the ultimate sacrifice.

With the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of this year fast approaching, it’s timely that the Town of Canmore dedicated a new memorial and field of honour at the cemetery for area residents who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Kudos to both the Town and the federal government for contributing to the memorial and kudos for choosing a design that includes a woman on it.

Yes, in wars past men typically paid the ultimate price in battle, but Canadian women – as mothers and daughters and workers and in non-combative roles with the armed forces – certainly paid and suffered as well.

Featuring a woman on the memorial also speaks to modern warfare, where the Canadian Forces, like others around the world, now has women in frontline positions – on the sharp end of things.

Having a woman on a memorial is perfectly in keeping with Canada’s changing role for its armed forces – from mostly peacekeeping in global hotspots to a war with the Afghanistan conflict.

This change in role was reflected in the death of Captain Nichola Goddard in Afghanistan in 2006. As a forward observer artillery spotter with the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), Goddard was the first Canadian woman killed in a frontline position; during a battle with the Taliban near Kandahar. She was also the first Canadian woman killed in action since the Second World War.

So it’s more than fitting that Canmore’s new memorial be complete with the image of a woman; much as it is that veterans of fire and police departments be recognized as well.

Here at RMO, we urge everyone to take part in a Remembrance Day ceremony this Sunday (Nov. 11). Take your kids. To take an hour out of one’s hectic schedule, once each year, shouldn’t be too great a burden. And, as each year passes, fewer veterans of past conflicts are around to share the day and be honoured for their sacrifice.

Over the past few years, these ceremonies seem to be better attended than at times in the past, possibly because Afghanistan put the Canadian Forces back in the news.

The Korean War was a long time ago, and Canada’s peacekeeping casualties didn’t seem to generate the same media coverage as the long engagement in Afghanistan, where warriors were on a deadly war footing.

Possibly the visual impact of ramp ceremonies in Kandahar brought home the reality that Canadians were again at war in a far-flung nation.

Whatever the reason for increased attendance, at RMO we’re for it. After all, of our national statutory holidays, Remembrance Day is the purest. No commercial product, other than the long-standing and humble poppy, is present or available.

Further, Remembrance Day is not a day to glorify war; it’s simply a day to pay respect to those who are gone, and those few who remain. To pay respect to those who did or have done what most of us would rather not.

For the veterans themselves Remembrance Day is a day to remember fallen comrades; those they shared the worst of times with.

In the end, when it came right down to it, if you ask most veterans, being at war had nothing to do with politics, philosophy or global adventures. In the end – it was about the soldier, sailor or airman beside them.


Rocky Mountain Outlook

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