With this post I’m passing the milestone of 500 posts to this blog. It is almost ironic that today’s post is about the latest deaths in Afghanistan. The media has been making much of the fact that the three Canadians killed Friday in an IED attack crosses the ‘threshold’ of 100 deaths during the Afghanistan mission. For the families of the men killed, their friends and their communities they are not 98, 99 and 100 — they are Mark Mclaren, Demetrios Diplaros and Robert Wilson — men who believed in the mission and died trying to see it succeed.

I’m not a person who is moved to tears often but the deaths of each Canadian in Afghanistan moves me. I’ll be one of the Canadians up on the bridges tomorrow. Standing to the left of the Legion colour party, our Sgt-at-Arms will be standing on the right. As the procession approaches he’ll call out “Branch 187 — to our fallen comrades — salute!”, I’ll clench my jaw and hold that salute until the last vehicle passes underneath us. Saluting not only the service of those in the hearses but also the families who will feel their losses not as numbers but the numbing pain of losing one of their own.

At times, I wonder if the losses are too high a price to pay for this mission. Then I remember, the Canadians who are there are there because they have volunteered, some of them more than once. I get it that those who are going the first time are possibly seeing it as an ‘adventure’ and will volunteer to be able to take part in a mission. You know though, those who volunteer the second time or even the third, they have been there, they know what to expect and what the mission is from the boots on the ground perspective. If they can find it in themselves to volunteer to return, there has to be a reason for their willingness to commit to this far off land.

I think about the conversations I had with my late dad about the mission. Dad was able to add a perspective to the conversation I couldn’t even come close to, he had been among the Canadians who fought up through Italy during WW2. Italy was one of the most brutal and lessor known campaigns of the second war. Dad was not a macho type guy, he rarely talked about his service. His view was that like Canada’s commitment to fighting Hitler, we have made a commitment to stand up to the Taliban and we need to carry through on that commitment.

Our losses in the Afghanistan mission has come in single digit numbers. In dad’s war losses came in the hundreds, sometimes thousands. The major difference was that today our soldiers are returned home for burial on Canadian soil. In past wars Canadian dead was buried in the country they died in. In dad’s generation, the losses increased the resolution of those at home to see the mission through, to do what needed to be done for the effort. Today, Canadians wring their hands and howl to bring our troops home.

Those young men are not numbers, until Friday they were living breathing, caring Canadians who committed to put their lives on the line in support of Canada’s commitment to bringing freedom to Afghanistan. No one said it would be a short or easy mission. They knew that, but they went anyways. The least we can do is support their commitment and passion.

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