Four days after their deaths from a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan, the remains of four soldiers and the first Canadian journalist killed during the eight-year war were returned home Sunday.
Flag-draped caskets carrying the bodies of Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang, 34, and the four servicemen — Sgt. George Miok, 28, of Edmonton, Sgt. Kirk Taylor, 28, of Yarmouth, N.S., Cpl. Zachery McCormack, 21, of Edmonton, and Pte. Garrett Chidley, 21, of Langley, B.C. — arrived shortly before 2 p.m. local time at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, east of Toronto.
Lang’s casket was the first to be taken off the military jet, marched slowly through the blowing snow onto the tarmac by several soldiers in dress uniform, while a bagpiper’s lament filled the air.
As the casket was placed into the waiting hearse, family members huddled against the cold as they took turns saying their tearful goodbyes, throwing roses into the back of the vehicle. The sombre ceremony was repeated four more times, as the flag-draped caskets of the four soldiers were also placed in matching black cars.
The aircraft carrying the bodies from a NATO base in Germany was met at the Ontario base by an official party, including Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean, Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Gen. Walt Natynczyk, Canada’s chief of defence.
People converged on bridges overlooking the stretch of the 401 "Highway of Heroes" between Trenton and Toronto to show their support for the mourning families and for Canada’s gruelling Afghan mission as the hearses transported the remains to medical examiners.
The remains were then to be transported for funeral services in each of the victims’ hometowns.
Sherry VanderVeur was among the first to stand at the overpass in Cobourg, Ont., bringing along a Canadian flag and her two granddaughters "so they know what it means to support our soldiers and the families they left behind."
The girls’ father, Derek, is in the reserves in Trenton.
"I don’t want my son to go there," she said, choking back tears.
As the flag waved, cars honked as they drove along the highway.
Glen Sherwood, a Toronto firefighter, stood on the overpass, on his way home from a family visit.
Sherwood’s nephew was in Afghanistan in 2006. After deaths but not names were announced, Sherwood said he would stay up all night, waiting for his nephew’s e-mails, which always read, "I’m all right."
"Whether you agree with the war or not, you’ve got to support the people over there."
The sorrowful, 10,000-kilometre journey of the dead began Friday in Afghanistan after a ritual ramp ceremony at Kandahar Airfield, the hub of Canada’s mission to secure the southern part of the war-torn country in the face of a Taliban-led insurgency.
It was on a road just a few kilometres from the Kandahar base, on the outskirts of the city last Wednesday, where the armoured vehicle carrying the Canadian soldiers and Lang — a Calgary Herald health reporter who had volunteered for a six-week assignment in Afghanistan for Canwest News Service — was struck by a powerful, improvised bomb that had been buried by insurgents.
The explosion not only killed the four servicemen and Lang, but also left four other Canadian Forces personnel and a second civilian injured. Lang became the second Canadian civilian — along with 60-year-old diplomat Glyn Berry, who died in a 2005 bombing — to be killed during the war.
The deaths of Miok, Taylor, McCormack and Chidley pushed the number of Canadian military fatalities in Afghanistan to 138 since 2002, when Canada joined the international coalition aiming to bring peace to the country after the defeat of its terrorist-friendly Taliban regime in 2001. The conflict was sparked by the deadly terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly 3,000 people — including 24 Canadians — died that day in New York, Washington and rural Pennsylvania, and the roots of last week’s tragedy in Kandahar can be directly traced to the horrors of 9/11.
Lang was a farm reporter in Saskatchewan when the hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center in New York eight years ago. But the story that appeared under her byline in the next day’s Regina Leader-Post recounted a Saskatchewan-born stock broker’s anguish as he watched — from his office across the street in New York — bodies falling from the upper floors of the Twin Towers. "Through billowing smoke and debris," the story reported, "he could see people jumping from the burning building."
Miok and Taylor were just beyond their high school years at the time. Chidley and McCormack hadn’t yet reached Grade 9.
And Lang, a young journalist in the dawning days of a career full of rich promise only partly fulfilled, was soon back to covering news about the effects of a severe drought that dogged Prairie farmers in 2001.
Nearly a decade later, in a world still under the long shadow of 9/11, a fateful sense of duty would lead all five down a dangerous road in Afghanistan and then, on Sunday, along the Highway of Heroes toward home.
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