As each year goes by, there are fewer and fewer veterans attending Remembrance Day Ceremonies. Fewer and fewer people who saw active duty in one of the major wars of the twentieth century.
In 2010, for instance, John Babcock died at the age of 109.
Babcock was the last surviving World War I Veteran.
And, of the approximately one million soldiers who went overseas to fight in World War II, less than 40,000 are still with us, average age, 95.
On the one hand, this is good. Not that they are dying, but because there has not been a major world conflict since the end of WWII where hundreds of thousands of Canadians have had to go off to fight.
Since the end of WWII, Canada has transitioned mostly from active participant to peacekeeper, though has participated in active combat in wars like Korea (25,000 troops), the 1991 Gulf War and Afghanistan.
This transition was solidified during the Suez Crisis in 1957, where Lester B. Pearson—who would become Prime Minister—was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in creating a mandate for a United Nations Peacekeeping Force. He is considered the father of the modern concept of peacekeeping.
But while the lack of global conflicts bodes well for the future of the human race (especially as we live in the nuclear era), the slow attrition of people who remember these wars means that our act of remembering must be … more intense. We must commit harder to remember. We must take special care to not let the memories of these conflicts fade away.
Not just to remember the heroism of those who fought and sometimes died, but also to remember what they fought and died for. Not for conquest. Not for more land or power or authority. Not for the betterment of self. No, Canada’s role in conflict for the last 150 years has been primarily in defense of others.
In World War I and World War II we fought not to protect our own country, but others.
And when Diefenbaker sent troops to Congo in the 1960s, for instance, it was not to conquer the country in the name of the Queen, it was to help stabilize the country during a time of political upheaval and civil war.
Papua New Guinea. Yemin. Cypress. Egypt. Croatia. Bosnia-Herzegovina. Somalia. Rwanda. The list goes on. These are places where Canadians have placed their lives on the line to try and prevent the worst atrocities of war. To protect non-combatants. And to try and help bring about the end of conflict in as least destructive a manner as possible.
Most veterans want a world where there is no conflict. The horrors of war, and the evil that humanity can inflict on people who are “other” is almost beyond understanding.
But if we forget that, the danger becomes that we can fall into the same traps. The same patterns of behavior. If we forget those who died, not for our sake, but for the sake of others, whether it be liberating France from Nazi Germany or enforcing the ceasefire in Bosnia, then we may be doomed to repeat the cycle of violence.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
