Calgary Sun | 15Aug2010 | Orest Slepokura
http://www.calgarysun.com/comment/letters/2010/08/15/15027601.html
Who will be the last?
Polling results show public support for Canada’s mission in Afghanistan
waning since 2006.
And only yesterday, our Minister of Defence reassured Canadians that
Canada will indeed withdraw her combat forces from Afghanistan by 2011.
A timetable, an Ipsos Reid survey found, four out of five Canadians
approve of; a knockout victory over the Taliban now being an issue of
less than supreme concern.
This inconclusive denouement poses a most daunting question, similar to
one a young Vietnam War combat veteran put to a U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee in 1971, even as the course of America’s war in
Southeast Asia was drifting sideways. “How,” Navy Lieutenant John Kerry
wondered, “do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?”
In this final year of our Afghan mission, with the withdrawal date
nearing and victory remaining ever elusive, we will, implicitly, be
asking a Canadian to be the last Canadian to die for the sake of that
overseas adventure.
How tragic is that?
Orest Slepokura
(Canadian soldiers are
fighting bravely and want to see it through.)