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OPINION: Dad's tale needed more than ever

Joe Belanger Sun Media

November 19, 2008

I'm still thinking about my father more than a week after Remembrance Day, but it wasn't always that way.

Joe Belanger

The delay was deliberate because we're supposed to think about our veterans every day, not just once a year.

Joe Sr., who was a gunner or navigator or both on the bombers that laid waste to Germany, has been dead almost 30 years. Although I loved him because he was my dad, we weren't terribly close, possibly because I felt lost in a family of nine children, but probably because he was too busy just trying to live, build a career, put food on the table and cope with the daily chaos that is a large family.

Yet I find myself thinking of him more and more as each year passes.

As I get older, as the awareness of my own mortality seeps into my consciousness, I find the concept of remembrance easier.

Today, tears well in my eyes when I watch war veterans march -- tears of pride, gratitude and sorrow for the tens of thousands of young Canadian soldiers (and millions elsewhere) who selflessly gave their lives for their country, for freedom; tears of guilt for not always caring about those old guys marching in their deep blue berets and blazers adorned with shiny metals whom I once wished would just let go of the past and let me live.

Yes, when I was young I had no concept of the sacrifice these men made, including those who survived. I suspect my thoughts were mostly: "War is bad." "Peace is good." "How's my hair?" "Peace, not war." "That song is so cool (Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young)." And there was baseball, hockey, girls, school. Those were the thoughts that occupied my mind as a teenager, followed by more schooling, work, marriage, babies and a career.

Yet, today, I have tears and I embrace remembrance.

At some point in my life, I came to realize, understand and accept that war is, in fact, a necessary evil, although not necessarily (which means I'm not convinced) a condition of man. It's a necessary evil to defeat evil when it threatens those who love and live in peace.

But it seems so easy, so shallow, to have thoughts and write such words when my generation of Canadians never had a war to fight, were never challenged to lay down our lives selflessly for the concept of nation, or the concept of right and freedom.

I suspect I've come to appreciate the horror of war for two reasons: Hearing the stories of veterans weeping in documentaries for friends obliterated before their eyes or held in sorrow while the lifeblood left their bodies; and, hearing the stories of recent immigrants who fled their war-torn homelands where racists and religious fanatics tried to cleanse their country.

There's the little girl, now a woman, who can't remember if she was holding her father's right or his left leg after he was dismembered. And then there's the other little girl who watched her father beheaded with a knife who is still wondering why the same killer holding her off the ground by the hair didn't cut off her head. Then there's the woman with children running past another mother trying to push the brains of her child back into the skull.

Dad, I so wish you'd have talked to me about what happened to you, how you coped with the flak, the fear, the terror, the loss and the pain that wracked your body the rest of your life after that bomber crashed and you pulled your buddies from the wreckage.

Maybe I would have understood sooner.

Maybe then I'd at least have had something to tell my son, your namesake who has now joined the army, about coping, loss, fear, survival, evil, doing the right thing and about sacrifice.

Maybe I get it, but just don't know it.

I dunno. War is bad. Thanks dad.

Joe Belanger is a Free Press reporter.

E-MAIL: Joe Belanger

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