A new wave of veterans adds to 'the pity of war'

As someone who was born half way through the Second World War, just old enough to remember the victorious troops marching home, I grew up deeply marked by the emotions of war and remembrance.

To me and my childhood friends, war seemed always with us, at once hateful and yet sinfully exciting, and, in any case, unavoidable.

We grew up playing war games, reading war comics and histories, and then later devoured the poets of the First World War like Wilfred Owen. ("My subject is war and the pity of war," he wrote. "The poetry is in the pity," the essence of all great war art.)

Much later, as a foreign correspondent, I went on, in fear and trembling, to cover 10 war zones. I lost any remaining illusions about war, but not my fascination with it.

I'm old enough to have known scores of veterans who survived the First World War battles of Vimy Ridge, Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele.

They don't seem much more remote to me now than the veterans of the Second World War, who I interviewed at the anniversaries of Dieppe, Normandy or the liberation of Holland.

I once listened to a man wounded at the Somme in 1916 describe to me in vivid detail the morning weather, the soft breeze, the smells, the flowers, and his dead colleagues lying nearby, as if the event had happened but days ago.

His day — frozen in memory — did not feel distant in any way.

A link through history

About a dozen years ago, I used to think that the significance of Remembrance Day every November would fade in our national life. The oldest veterans were dying off and those still with us were fast dwindling in numbers.

In the 1990s, these past struggles and their place in our nation's consciousness began to seem increasingly detached from our speedy change-a-minute lifestyle, especially to a new generation not deeply schooled in history (to put it as charitably as possible).

Then, of course, came 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan.

Canada underwent a decade-long involvement in a conflict that tested a new generation of soldiers in a remote war, deep in the hot and rugged homeland of the Taliban, who were like no enemy we had seen in the past.

From Passchendaele to Kandahar, 90 years separated the fighting in these battles, but I still sensed a unique connection among the participants.

A shared camaraderie of combat that outsiders can never really penetrate.

The war dead linger

I have been thinking quite a bit about this special relationship this week as I was completing a documentary for The National's Remembrance Day special on Nov 11. Again I was able to talk to veterans.

In many ways, Canada's Afghanistan troops are quite different from those of previous wars.

Professional soldiers, they tended to be older, more mature, when they entered the field, and much better trained. But they were also remarkably similar in their willingness to serve.

Dr. Ray Wiss captured that spirit. An emergency medical specialist from Northern Ontario, he stepped out of his practice to sign up for two tours in Kandahar, under routinely dangerous circumstances in the field.

Wiss had been a humanitarian aid worker who had faced risks in other hot spots, and he chose to serve in Kandahar because he viewed the cause — to save people from the terror of the Taliban — as a moral one that Canada had to undertake.

Deeply moved by the horrific suffering that he witnessed (he wrote two books on his experiences), he now feels a bond with older veterans of other wars that he never felt before.

"It wasn't until the end of my second tour that I really got it," he told me. "Young, violent death stays with you forever.

"I finally understood those veterans crying on Remembrance Day over events that happened more than a half century ago.

"It took me a long time to realize I was now one of them"

A new wave of veterans

So now we have a new wave of veterans, the more than 30,000 who served in the Afghan conflict and who will now be among us for many decades to come.

Many of them carry far more intense feelings and pain than the rest of us who saw a very sanitized version of this war on our TV screens.

We generally viewed only the dignified and carefully orchestrated repatriation of our fallen, and many of us may feel that losing only 157 soldiers over a decade of fighting represents a fairly modest level of action.

What we did not see, as a rule, were the nearly 2,000 who were injured, many so horribly shattered that they would have died in past wars had it not been for the skills of people such as Dr. Wiss and others.

We still know little, as well, about the nearly 3,000 veterans that the military expects will suffer from severe forms of post-traumatic stress disorders; or the 6,500 or so who will require some kind of mental health treatment.

One Afghan vet I spoke with recently told me that he has started to seek out Second World War survivors for the first time and that he has been surprised at how much they still have to get off their chest.

In coming years, the Afghanistan vets may well play a larger role in national life as they form networks and, like the veterans before them, learn the basics of political lobbying. They will be an interesting force to watch.

Even now, Afghanistan has given back to our Remembrance Day observances a sharper, more poignant meaning. Most of us, I think, feel it tragic that we have more fallen to honour, and another war to etch onto the concrete or marble memorials.

People will debate the legacy of this mission for years, but one sure legacy is in our national memory. Afghanistan is not something we're about to forget — not with this many new vets around.

And that's a positive thing because war, with its haunting mix of pride, pain, deepest sorrow and intense nostalgia, is like nothing else. It is never something to forget, at this special time or at any other.