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People lined the streets to see familiar faces in their community don their legion attire and march proudly in unison in Inverness, N.S., where Roy MacEachern was born during the 1970s.
“I would walk to school past my neighbour’s mother, the shopkeeper, and the garage attendant and stare at them sideways. I would ask myself, ‘Is that the same person I saw wearing all those medals on their chest?’ But these stoic warriors often never discussed their experiences overseas, good or bad.”
'We called it shellshock or combat fatigue': Enlisted as a teenager and left battling PTSD after Oka Crisis, N.S. man is finding path to healing with horses“I came from a large and low-income family, and while they never talked about the war, the local legion branch would drop off a box of groceries every holiday. I never understood the significance of it at the time. I just assumed it was because we had no money,” he says.
“For the next three years, I held a series of meaningless jobs, and then my mother passed away of cancer. Death has a way of bringing family together like never before, and regretfully, you end up saying a lot of things you wish you had said while the person was living,” he says. His grandfather, Private Wyrwas, was captured on Dec. 25, 1941, and he died in that camp on Dec. 24, 1944.“I know now why the local Legion branch sent care packages to our home every holiday season. It wasn’t out of a generic act of kindness but out of recognition that my family had paid the ultimate sacrifice. I now knew why my mother disliked Christmas so much," he says.
“It was devasting on the mind. Having come from a small town like Inverness, the environment hit me hard because every destroyed village we drove through reminded me of home."He describes it as"a place where the men drank hard and chopped firewood by axe, and the women hung clothes outside on lines and baked homemade bread."“And every time you stopped anywhere, townsfolk tried to give you what little food and drink they had," he says.
But, during an attempt to move the Canadian troops out of the Medak Pocket, the Croats had other plans.“We lost two soldiers on that tour. No one who came back from that tour was ever the same again; even if they didn’t show instant outward signs, how could they be? I soldiered on through two more tours of Bosnia before the events of 9/11,” says MacEachern.
It was April 17, 2002, and an American pilot mistook them for the enemy and dropped a 500-pound bomb on them.
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