It never gets any easier.

I've been at the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team for three weeks and I just attended my third memorial service. On a day to day basis it's easy to forget that you're operating in a war zone, especially if you never leave the camp or live in a place like Kabul. You go about your day to day business and never really have a connection to the people who go outside the wire looking for trouble, so hopefully I and those back home won't have to. But it's hard to ignore it when the reminder is right there in front of you all of the time.

Every person on the camp shows up to these memorials. At the end, everybody except the Soldier's unit dispersed while the unit pays their respect to the deceased. Generally most people don't look back. Today I stayed behind for a bit to watch as the unit filed through to give their comrades one last salute. I don't know why I did. I guess it just seemed like the thing to do. Or maybe I was just a little lost in the moment; trying to comprehend what would it means to never come home. You'd think that I'd be used to this by now, but it never gets any easier.

As I sat there watching the soldiers I couldn't get over how young most of them looked. I honestly don't remember what it was like to be that young. I know it's true, I left for Iraq when I was 21 years old, but it somehow just doesn't process in my mind. I certainly never felt that I was that young. Yet, looking back at the pictures and reading some of the things I wrote back then it's fairly undeniable. When I was a soldier, I thought I had it all figured out. The thought is almost laughable now. The hardest part is the recognition that these soldiers had so much of their life ahead of them. They had families awaiting their return with anticipation and now that will never happen. I guess the biggest difference for me is the perspective that one day this war will end and America and Canada will go on about their lives, none the wiser. I'm reminded of a passage from one of my favorite books, We Were Soldiers once and young.

“In time our battles were forgotten, our sacrifices discounted and both our sanity and our suitability for life in polite progressive American society were publicly questioned. Our young-old faces, chiseled and gaunt from the fever and the heat and the sleepless nights, now stare back at us, lost and damned strangers, frozen in yellowing snapshots packed away in cardboard boxes with our medals and ribbons.

We rebuilt our lives, found jobs or professions, married, raised families and waited patiently for America to come to its senses. As the years passed we searched each other out and found that the half-remembered pride of service was shared by those who had shared everything else with us. With them, and only with them, could we talk about what had really happened over there---what we had seen, what we had done, what we had survived.”

In time, the tears of those soldiers will dry and the memory of their compatriots who made the ultimate sacrifice will dwindle from the consciousness of the nation that sent them into harms way. I guess that's just how it is. You'd think I'd be used to this by now, but it never seems to get easier. 

The names of the Dead:

Private Andrew Miller of Sudbury, Ontario. 21 years old.

Master Corporal Kristal Giesebrecht of Wallaceburg, Ontario 34 years old.

Killed when their vehicle detonated an improvised explosive device about 20 km southwest of Kandahar city while responding to a report of a mine found in the doorway of a home. A third Canadian soldier was also wounded in the blast.