“If this book makes you pause for a moment in the day-to-day hubbub to reflect on the last few years-even for a short moment-then it will truly have been worth the effort.”-Murray Brewster

Whether or not you meant to reflect on the last few years when you picked up this book, you will. Brewster does a fine job of shoving everything that happened during the Afghanistan war down our throats. I don’t mean that in a bad way. For someone growing up and old enough to know better, I know very little of everything that happened in Afghanistan.

What threw me off most when I read this book was how disengaged I was by Brewster’s tone though. He had SO much to say, all of which things I wanted to learn about, but his brisk, matter of fact writing didn’t do it for me. Maybe that’s how you’re supposed to talk about the war though. Or maybe it was just the one perspective that didn’t appeal to me. He included incredible amounts of people in his book, but what I love about books like Hiroshima is being behind the eyes of many people affected. If you don’t connect with one, another may evoke more of an emotional response. I think the stories of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan might have been stronger if it wasn’t all from his perspective. There were so many stories, all from his point of view mingling with quotes from other people. Like I mentioned previously though, I don’t know a whole lot about this war, so a book like that may exist without my knowledge.

It took awhile for me to get into this book. But by the time I got to page XVII I was stuck on the irony of how the remnants of an attack made in Afghanistan mirrored that of 9/11. A building, which had previously belonged to the al Qaeda had been bombed and deserted by the Taliban. What really struck me in terms of irony is what happened next. A woman pleaded with Brewster to help her find her brother, who had apparently been inside the building during its collapse. This scene was also a big reminder for Brewster of the al Qaeda’s attack on New York in 2001. Though, I was a bit perturbed when he said, “Thousands of people died in New York that fall but this woman’s brother is the one I carried with me.” This statement seemed so out of place with Brewster’s obvious military loyalties.

Another thing about this book that blew my mind were some of the facts. According to some of Brewster’s research (done through a series of Freedom of Information requests) “between 2004-2007, almost 97% of kidnappings, bombings, and ambushings done in Afghanistan were directly or indirectly related to al Qaeda.” This really drove home for me just how much control the extreme terrorist group had over the country.

The way Brewster spoke out females in this book really captured how traditional he must be about gender roles in his life. The quotes he used from them were always somewhat, if not completely sexist. Like when talking about Goddard and how she interacts with her team. He makes her sound like some fussy mother over her baby when she’s one of the team, like anybody.

“”The fact that Goddard now sat before me in the middle of war zone seemed both remarkable and gently inspiring. It was evident by the conversation that she fussed over them; several times she referred to team as “my crew.”

Even though they are all a world over and Goddard is in uniform, it feels like he’s just picturing her in an apron in front of a stove next to a high chair.

I think that women are overlooked a lot in the military because this isn’t a traditional role for them. For example when Desert Lions, a documentary funded by the Canadian military to show what our soldiers have gone through, was shown to us a couple weeks ago, there was little footage with women in it. However, I wasn’t borderline offended the way females were overlooked in the documentary, the way they were in Savage War.

I think that’s something journalists can learn from though. Women are a minority in this line of work, but they still exist. They are still giving up the same things and make the same risks to be there fighting for their country. Though I think this book did a good job of laying out the procedure of things overseas and that’s something new,young journalists can know before heading into war, like women should cover their hair and head when going out in public or local Afghan men will be offended and maybe not talk to them.

I think two things I really took away from Brewster’s experience in Afghanistan is that sexism does still exist in journalism in terms of how he painted the picture of females in the military and that journalists too are damaged from what they see in war. Before soldiers come home they are sent to a restorative camp to help them deal with everything they did or saw before coming back to their regular lives as civilians in Canada. I think journalists should go through something similar when Brewster’s disdain for people with normal lives seeped into the page of this book, specifically referring to when he talks about wanting to spit on people who were oblivious to what was happening in Ottawa and were just focused on the “day to day hubbub.”

“When we don’t know who we are…it’s devastating.” -Christine Cyr

Christine Cyr grew up in what she referred to as a “dysfunctional” home. It took tens of years for her to figure out that a lot of her familial issues stemmed from her fathers upbringing.

“He always called it boarding school. It took a long time for me to figure out that he actually went to through the residential school system. He was able to go home at the end of the day. But the effects were still there.”

The residential school system is something a lot of Canadians don’t know about. I’m kind of ashamed to say that I didn’t know much about it before last week. The residential school system derived from the idea that Aboriginal people were a “problem.” Over the span of hundreds of years, the relationship between European and Aboriginal people disintegrated from friendly business to wary disdain.

“The so-called ‘Indian problem’ was the mere fact that Indians existed. They were seen as an obstacle to the spread of ‘civilization’- that is to say, the spread of European, and later Canadian, economic, social, and political interests.” (Legacy of Hope Foundation (LHF) and Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF))

Around the 1930s, Canada’s federal government supported the legislation of resident schools across Canada, typically in northern areas of the country/provinces. During the height of this campaign, these schools were supported by both levels of government and the church. This support was convincing for some families who believed that if their children were to leave the reserve, they would get a better life. But other children were taken from their families involuntarily. Wait, yeah, that’s right. This was mandatory. Some families didn’t have a choice. In some cases parents were punished if they didn’t send their children, even faced jailtime.

The goal of this system was: to kill the Indian in the child, according to the LHF and AHF.

Which is ironic, right? Canada prides itself on being a mosaic of different cultures yet we have this dirty little secret.

Our government, even though it was 80 odd years ago, forced around 17000 children to these schools. That doesn’t sound so bad, until you hear the truth of it. These kids were often not allowed to see their families outside of the schools and moved to distant locations so their parents couldn’t find them.

It was not uncommon for hunger, overpopulating, and disease to be running rampant around the schools. Some children even died from diseases where malnourishment was a big factor. Others committed suicide, or tried to, because they were so unhappy with what the government had done to them and their families.

These are photos of children fell ill and died while away at school.

I’ll probably never forget Richard Hall. Hall was a survivor of the residential school system. When he was 15 he found a boy who had committed suicide because of the way he was treated… at a school run by the church. This is just SO backwards.

“He hung himself because he just couldn’t take it anymore…we were treated like no human being should be treated.”-Hall

Despite everything that happened to him, Hall said he wanted to forgive the church for what it did to him. To me, that is an amazing show of strength and perseverence. People like him are lucky to have those characteristics. Not everyone is as lucky.

I believe that a great deal of who we are is credit to how we were raised.

Every child is influenced by the amount of affection, dysfunction, or morals their parents impress upon them. And this lasts with them forever. I consider this loosely in terms of my own life. Was I loved enough? Sure I know I was/am. But is the reason why I’m unaffectionate, distant, and hesitant to let people in because my family doesn’t say “I love you” or because we rarely ever hug each other? Sure, maybe. I’ve thought about this on several occasions and wonder if I’ll be different with my own kids.

Cyr doesn’t know the exact details of what happened to her father when he went away to school. But she does know that her family cut off all ties with him when she was in her teenage years and hasn’t spoken to him since. She even went as far as admitting that this influenced her as a mother when she had her first child.

“I wasn’t the greatest mother, I’ll admit that. But I’m trying harder now. I’m better at it now.”- Cyr

It’s devastating to think that one wrong move on our part or of the legistlating body can affect people for years to come, generations that aren’t even born yet.

It’s incredible that so many people aren’t aware of the way young children were treated. Or how this could potentially be the reason why people today are treated poorly or differently. And how that will affect other people’s future.

Visiting the Where are the Children? exhibit really impressed on me how all of our actions build a lasting cycle and this country that we so proudly claim accepts everyone, isn’t as clean faced as it seems.