Adventures of a Baby Journalist

In lieu of Veterans Week/ Remembrance Day, the journalism students at Red River College have been assigned a few tasks:

The first: to interview someone someone who has fought in a military conflict or who has served as a peacekeeper or who has been strongly affected by armed conflict.

The second: to attend a Remembrance Day service somewhere in Winnipeg.

The third: to write about both of these experiences in two short news articles, to be handed in to our journalism instructor at the end of the week.

Each task was to encourage us to think about the question: “What is Remembrance Day, and how does it affect veterans.” We’ve spent the last week of journalism classes researching past conflicts (read: World War I & II), as well as more recent affairs (read: The War on Terror). We researched the history of Remembrance Day, and the significance of the poppy; and tackled the question: how do we handle conducting an interview that may or may not prove to be something difficult for our interviewee to talk about?

I’ve spent the last week thinking about my own questions that stemmed out of this assignment. How can I even begin to understand the meaning of Remembrance Day? I am a twenty-something Canadian, who has never even begun to fathom the effects of war or mass conflict. Sure, every year since I started grade-school, I’ve sat through Remembrance Day assemblies, wore a poppy on my coat during Veterans week, and payed my respects during a moment of silence on November 11. I’ve read about war in university textbooks, attended lectures given by those who’ve spent time on the frontlines, and have seen it in videos (read: Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, We Were Soldiers, etc.). But it’s just that. I have only ever listened, read, and watched a television screen. I’ve never actually experienced.

By no means am I someone who supports violence, or war; or the “War on Terror.” I will always identify as an advocate of peace. I am hopeful that my generation believes that peace is possible, and that violence isn’t the answer; I think many of us do. At the same time, sometimes I struggle with the question: can I really be such a strong promotor of all that is peaceful, when peace is all I know?

This week, I interviewed an Afghanistan war veteran. As I sit here reading through my interview notes, I struggle to make sense of it; his experiences are something I cannot even begin to understand.

He tells me about his job as a Logistics Officer with the National Support Element, stationed in Kandahar for seven months in 2006. He tells me of the insanely hot and dusty country, and the rockets that landed in his camp at night. He speaks of his exposure to death and the ugliness of war on a daily basis, for months on end. After telling me this, he explains to me that the easy part of all of it was being there. In context, he refers to life in the theatre of war as simple. “Someone else cooks for you, someone else does your laundry…when you’re in war, you just do your job, eat, sleep and repeat.”

That said, he goes on to explain that the hardest part about his time in Kandahar was coming home to Canada:

“You go from being at a heightened sense of awareness on a daily basis and then come home and have to worry about what kind of chicken you should buy at Safeway. Getting home and listening to people (read: people like me) bitch about their coworkers or their sports team that made a trade they didn’t like or that Ikea only has two sales a year grinds on a person just back from war (read: him, and other returning soldiers) like an anvil dropped on Wile E. Coyote’s head.”

It kind of reminds me of that scene in The Hurt Locker, where Sg. James returns from Iraq and is shown standing in a grocery store, staring blankly at a wall of cereal.

But this isn’t a movie, it’s real life.

My interviewee says the tour was the best and the worst thing he’s done.

When I asked this particular man what Remembrance Day means to him now, after returning from Afghanistan, he tells me the following:

“Remembrance Day to me used to be a moment of silence and some thoughts about men that died in Europe [ read: what Remembrance Day is for the vast majority of us]. But now it’s much more personal than that. It’s about remembering my entire career, all the hard times that you go through being in the army and the friends that were there to help you celebrate the triumphs. It’s like a close family, and when a family member dies in a traumatic way, it hurts and it hurts a lot. Like a person who loses their whole family in a car crash, they really cannot truly speak to someone about it and feel like the other understands unless they have also been through something as horrible. And that is Remembrance Day for a soldier. It’s about having a military parade to honour our Fallen, and it’s about having a bunch of drinks and a toast of rum with our fellow veterans at a Legion because only they can truly know your loss and your pain. It’s about grieving and celebrating with your family, all at the same time.”

I don’t think I, or most of us for that matter, know this Remembrance Day.

My interviewee leaves me with this final comment, telling me that it’s something that only a soldier would know, and even less avidly respect:

“We never refer to someone as ‘a body’. That is because a body is what gets carried on to the back of a military aircraft at a ramp ceremony. When a soldier dies in a theatre of war we have what is called a ramp ceremony. . . a Canadian flag draped casket is carried into the back of a military aircraft, flanked by hundreds of soldiers in uniform, from all countries operating out of that base, all saluting as the bagpipes play Flowers of the Field. What you might not know is that all the bodies go into the back of the plane feet first. . . and that is because everyone gets to walk home. When that reporter from Calgary died, she was given the same respect, we all get to walk home.”

He says, “Remember this for the day you finally get to go into a ‘hot’ country, it will help you to understand us and yourself as a Canadian.”

All that said, this year, I will be wearing my poppy differently than I have in the past. I will be wearing it with a little more meaning, and taking a little more time to think about those involved in war; both Canadian soldiers and otherwise. I will be wearing it with a little more gratitude towards my Canadian identity. I’ll be attending a Remembrance Day ceremony on Thursday morning, and instead of looking at the ceiling and praying for it to be over, letting my thoughts wander during the moment of silence, like so many of us did in high school, I will be sincerely paying my respects, and appreciating the fact that peace is all I have known.