The recent unveiling of the Kandahar battlefield memorial in secret, at a secure Department of National Defence site that is closed to the public, was neither aberration nor oversight, says the retired soldier who led the effort to collect mementos and historic material from the Afghanistan mission.
Rather, he said, much of the material has either been dispersed to units, is in storage or has vanished at least from his view, though he retired as a reservist, after a 26-year career in the regular force, only in 2014.
“Our whole ethos is we (the government) talk the talk, but really we don’t spend any money. It’s just lip service,” says former Warrant Officer Ed Storey, who was the war diarist for the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command headquarters.
He was the driving force behind Operation Keepsake, a three-person team that travelled first to Camp Mirage, Canada’s staging base for Afghanistan in the United Arab Emirates, and later to Kandahar Air Field, where the Kandahar memorial sprang up when Canada first began to suffer casualties in the war-torn country.
He later did the same sort of work at Ma’Sum Ghar, a now abandoned Canadian forward operating base in Kandahar.
The battlefield memorial at Ma’Sum Ghar consisted of a large Canadian flag and painted stones to commemorate those who had fallen there.
Because the stones couldn’t be brought back to Canada, they were instead formally buried in Afghan soil under the watchful eye of a pastor.
It was all “emotional and meaningful” work, Storey said in a phone interview from his Ottawa home.
But easily the most touching, he said, were the notes and cards, left by family members of some of Canada’s 158 soldiers who died in Afghanistan. Many of those families later took advantage of a government offer to fly to Kandahar and visit the memorial.
There were two large boxes of such notes and mementos, Storey said.
“It was so emotional we couldn’t catalogue it,” he said.
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