Peacekeeping, our story
I’d like to tell you a story. It is not a complicated story. It takes place in a very complicated world and at a time where many of the participants in the story had doubts they would live to reach the next year, let alone the next generation. It was a time of fear. It was a time of perseverance but mostly it was a time that history forgot and the story needs to be told.
It is a story about the Canadian military and yet, they are not the subjects of the story. It is a story about the Cold War but it is not about the Soviet Union. It is a story about being on or near the front lines of a European war-zone but it is not about soldiers. It is about civilians, but not about Europeans. It is a Canadian story.
In Europe the Cold War had broken out. By 1955 West Germany had joined NATO and the Soviet Union had formed the Warsaw Pact. By 1958, there were literally hundreds of thousands of troops looking at each other and the playing field was Western Europe.
This is where the story begins. In the last 50 years Canadian soldiers have been deployed to hot-spots around the world. Egypt, Cyprus, Bosnia, Iraq; all of these were places that put our soldiers in the potential (and sometimes actual) line of fire. We are used to this on our news stations.
What was different in the ‘50s in Europe?
Our soldiers brought their wives and children with them to the battlefield. This is our story. It is not about the soldiers but of the families of which mine was just one of thousands.
In early 1959 my father was posted (sent) to a battalion based in Soest Germany. Soest is a quaint German town in Westphalia, about 3 hours’ drive north of Frankfurt. To the west was Czechoslovakia (6 hour drive) and Poland, a Warsaw Pact member state. The Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961. We lived about 5 hours west of Berlin and slept with guns in the apartment in case Dad was called in the middle of the night to defend our NATO allies.
The Soviets had partitioned Berlin in 1945 and were looking west. They had marched into Poland during the war. Was NATO paranoid? Many thought so until in 1968 the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and annexed the country like they did in Crimea recently. The first Soviet Hydrogen bomb was tested on August 12 1953.
Into this powder keg stepped thousands of women and children and I was one of them. In early 1959 we were loaded on a train bound for Halifax, my mother and three children all under 4 years old. We were shepherded onto a transatlantic liner called the Empress of France and eventually made our way to Soest, Germany. In our community there were Americans, Belgians, British, Dutch, French and probably many other NATO allies, all in apartments less than 8 hours away from a Soviet land invasion force.
These conditions were all we knew. As children we played and started school. We got medical attention from NATO doctors at NATO hospitals, shopped at NATO commissaries and played with our friends. It wasn’t unusual for us when we had to make new friends every three years as the common practice was to rotate soldiers and their families every three years. No one had childhood friends, friendship was fleeting and relationships were shallow at best.
In 1959 my sister Lynn Marie was born in Soest. Sixty days later she was dead. The army doctors could amputate legs, fish out bullets and patch up battle wounds but a 2 month old infant they couldn’t save. She is buried in Werl, a small hamlet between Soest and Iserlohn. She is buried with hundreds of other Canadian dependents, all wives and children of soldiers serving in Europe. The Canadian Government pays to keep the cemetery tidy.
Every year a small contingent of individuals from Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and other European countries, some of whom are veterans themselves, gather at the cemetery and pay their respects to the people who stood in the way of the Soviets. Every year they have a ceremony honoring not the soldiers, but the Canadian civilians who gave up their homes and communities to come to a strange land and stand shoulder to shoulder with other civilians facing almost certain destruction within a few hours of an invasion.
In 1963 we returned to a small army base in Manitoba. In 1964 we were sent back, this time to a base called Hemer, another small town only 600 KM from Prague. We stayed there until 1967 when we came home for the last time.
The families of the soldiers who were sent to Soest, Werl, Hemer and Iserlohn became a community unto itself. We faced war and the threat of war every day. We grew up playing war using expended, thrown away anti-tank rocket tubes. Our recreation included hockey games at the base. I remember dozens of kids gathered at one end of the rink when the VanDoos played. They had a 30 Caliber machine gun set up and after every VanDoos goal they fired off a few short bursts of blanks at a cinder block wall. The smell of cordite wafted over the arena and the children drank in the smell before going back to their parent’s seats, hoping for another VanDoos goal.
Memories were made there, cherished memories. Tears were also shed there. Recently my brother Rick found the grave of my sister Lynn Marie. In the early 90’s the Canadian Government replaced all the old wooden crosses marking the graves with stone gravestones. At that time many of the families were given the chance to bring the bodies home to Canada and many made that trip home to Canadian soil. Many more didn’t make the trip and rest where they lay and every year, people gather at that cemetery to remember them and to bring flowers and gifts and fly flags and honor the Canadians who came and helped.
This is our story. We are Canadian. We remember why we are who we are. When someone talks about building walls, we remember another time when walls went up and we remember what it took to tear them down again. Nous nous souviendrons d'eux.