Gloria Hooper always knew her oldest son, Chris Holopina, wanted to enlist with the Canadian Armed Forces.
From a young age, the Manitoba native was playing with toy soldiers and toy guns in the family home, asking when he could join the military.
“He always knew,” she told Global News.
In 1991, at the age of 17, Holopina enlisted as a reservist. After graduating high school, he was deployed on peacekeeping missions to Cyprus and later Croatia.
Finally, when he was 22 years old, Holopina joined the Canadian Army and his dream of fighting in a combat mission came true: he was deployed to the Bosnian War as part of Operation Alliance. Although the war was winding down by that time, the Canadian-led mission was meant to ensure peace amid ongoing tensions in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“I was (proud) because he was,” Hooper remembers. “He was young. I didn’t want him there so young. And I thought, well, if he’s there for a while, he’ll be back.”
Tragically, that was not what happened.
On July 4, 1996 — seven days before he was due to return home — Holopina was en route to rescue a group of British soldiers who had gotten stranded in a minefield when his armoured vehicle crashed in the town of Ripač, killing him.
His casket landed in Canada the day he was to arrive home.
“Instead of coming home as a person, he came home as a body,” Hooper said.
Twenty-seven years later, Hooper has been named by the Royal Canadian Legion as this year’s National Silver Cross Mother, who represents all mothers who lost sons or daughters in military service to the country.
As one of her first acts of service in the role, Hooper will lay a wreath at the National War Memorial in Ottawa during the capital’s Remembrance Day ceremony in honour of the mothers of fallen soldiers. Throughout her year-long tenure, which begins Nov. 1, she will also be asked to perform other duties honouring Canadians lost to conflicts around the world.
Hooper, who has been living with dementia, does not say much when asked what it means to be chosen for the role.
But her eyes instantly light up when she talks about her son, who would have turned 50 this month.
“I would just love to be able to see him now,” she said.
Reminders of Holopina’s service still fill her home in St. Claude, Man., including medals he received and other mementos.
Those include a care package he was sent when he was overseas a week before he died, containing donations from a clothing drive he organized in Canada to help the children of Bosnia.
His memory is marked elsewhere too. The province named Holopina Lake in northern Manitoba after him in 2005, but Hooper has yet to make the eight-hour drive to visit it.
She does occasionally visit the St. Claude War Memorial that is not far from her home, where Holopina’s name is included on a cenotaph honouring fallen soldiers dating back to the First World War.
“That was the last (name) they ever put” on the monument to date, Hooper said.
During a visit to the cenotaph with Global News, Hooper spotted an item placed near the monument that immediately took her back to when her son was a young boy, still dreaming of one day joining the military.
A toy soldier.
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