With Remembrance Day approaching, it’s a good time to reflect on what we are remembering — and who we are honouring.
One active service member, who chose to remain anonymous, offered the following advice.
“There’s a lot of attention paid to the war dead and to those who were gravely injured in major conflicts. The World Wars and other major armed conflicts like Korea and Afghanistan tend to get mentioned, but a lot fewer people consider the dedication and valour of people who serve or have served in our military and come away forever changed. Maybe it’s because people just don’t know.”
It’s a sentiment that might well be felt by Robert Cookson.
He served for 35 years in the Canadian Armed Forces and retired as a Chief Petty Officer, 1st Class and, during that time, he fulfilled more roles and had more experiences than most people will have in a lifetime.
Even though his service isn’t the highlight of Remembrance Day ceremonies, perhaps it should be included. “I was with the first group of soldiers that went into Honduras in 1990. Our job was to help disarm (insurgent) forces as they came down out of the hills,” recalled Cookson.
“We were unarmed, but luckily the other nations who were there with us, like the Columbians, were armed. There were a few skirmishes as these men came down from the hills because communication was bad and some of them didn’t know that things were ending. They showed up with their weapons and the clothes on their back.”
Even though that situation exposed Canadian forces to potential danger every day, barely a mention of the mission can be found anywhere in online searches of Canadian involvement abroad.
Another example of untold valour in the forces occurred in 2003, when Cookson was serving as Coxswain on HMCS Ottawa.
The ship was some 200 nautical miles off the Baja Peninsula, acting as an escort for the submarine HMCS Victoria. A major engine room fire broke out in the night, and fire crews responded.
“There were 241 people on the ship,” said Cookson. “We had just finished training workups to test the ship’s readiness for deployment when the fire happened.”
Cookson recalled how the fire crews had to battle the flames in 20-minute alternating shifts because of the impossible conditions.
“The smoke was so heavy that you couldn’t see a foot in front of your face. There was one man, Chief Petty Officer 2nd Class Sidney Smith, who kept going in, leading each crew to the place they had to spray to keep the fire from spreading. He probably saved the ship that night.”
Now, anyone reading the official account of the event might consider it a relatively unimportant blip on the military radar. Under the heading key facts, that report states, “Due to leadership and firefighting efforts the ship was underway again in a normal engineering mode within two hours.”
What exactly happened that night will probably never be known, except by the people who were involved. Cookson and the crew were debriefed, and limits were placed on what they could say.
“I remember standing on the bridge with the captain and we stepped out to see the smoke and flame sparks coming out of the stack. He gave me permission to go check on the crew and when I went to see the fire teams they were running on adrenaline. It was like they’d look right through me.”
The event changed some of the men forever.
“I can tell you that a few were so traumatized that they were never the same again. They were released by the military and took civilian jobs. For me? I don’t talk about it much, but it’s always in the back of your mind.”
Cookson’s experiences are only part of the story.
His wife, Darlene, was with the first group of Canadians sent to Afghanistan.
“On paper her deployment was six months. What people don’t realize is that she was away from me and our two kids for a year and a half. They sent her for training for nine months, let her come home for Christmas and then, on her birthday on Jan. 13, they shipped her to Afghanistan.”
“I was at home with the kids, and we didn’t get to talk to her very often, and you didn’t make any definite commitments for calls because, if for some reason she couldn’t call, it would have been too much to handle,” said Cookson. “I knew she was going out with convoys and hanging out of the top of Humvees with a 50-calibre machine gun, so, yes, I was always worried.”
Darlene won’t talk much about her experiences in Afghanistan, even with her family, but Cookson said that she was forever changed by the experience.
“Even today, she can’t sit with her back to the room in a restaurant, and she hates crowds. She also hates the sound of bagpipes, because they used to play them during the ramp ceremonies when they were sending the dead home.”
But Cookson said that everyone that served probably has some behaviour that’s a result of their service.
“For me, these days it’s when we have a power failure and everything goes quiet,” he explained.
“You see, on ship, when something goes wrong, like a fire, they turn off the ventilation system and that background hum disappears. That’s when you know there’s a problem and, if it’s the middle of the night, you roll out of your rack (bunk) and get to your station even before the alarm sounds.”
“When it happens, even now, a power failure will wake me at home, and getting back to sleep can take a while.”