Response to "An Unknown Soldier"

The front page story of the Saturday Globe and Mail was about Pte. Mark Graham who died in Afghanistan in a friendly fire incident. At first, I was a bit troubled that the Globe would open up a dead soldier's history like that - especially since there weren't a lot of good things to write about. However, I figured people on the Track Canada mailing list might have something to say about it and of course one of the first people to write in was my good friend Zeba Crook, a former national champion in the steeplechase. Here is what he wrote:

There is a very moving and disturbing article on Mark Graham on the front page of the Focus section in today's Globe and Mail. It goes a long way to anwsering the biggest question I had when I had heard he died: what the hell was an Oylmpian even doing in the army?

I am definitely not among those readers who think this story was disrespectful. I am deeply troubled by the claim that to criticise the war shows a lack of support for the troops, as if healthy democratic debate about issues as important as, say, international war, should cease in times of war.

So many people romanticise dying for one's country, as if doing so should protect you from any poor decisions you may have made in your life. It might be a good time for readers to return to Wilfred Owen's well known poem written in 1918. It ends

"My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori."

The latin is a citation from the Horace: "How sweet and right it is to die for one's country." It is a fact that the children of society's wealthy and elite tend not to join armies; the overwhelming number of soldiers are poor with little future. Horace was an elite: his children never died for the Roman Empire. This is not a criticism of the Canadian Forces, as one Globe reader thinks, but a criticism of elite leaders who decide to send other people's children off to a war they would never send their own children off to.

What troubled me most about the news of Mark's death was trying to figure out why someone that accomplished would join the army, since it is a undeniably uncommon choice. In my opinion, Olympians have futures, they have all the potential in the world. Once you have competed in the Olympics, you have proven yourself capable of anything; the Olympics rescue us from lives of poverty. Perhaps I am glorifying the power of the Olympics. I never made the Olympics; it was sport in general that rescued me from a life of poverty and dead end jobs in small-town British Columbia. The article answered that question, and THAT is the point of the article. It's not an insensitive left wing attempt to smear the reputation of a glorious fallen soldier; it's certainly not because he was black; it's an attempt to understand why a man with what appeared to be Olympian sized potential joined the armed forces.

Zeb