Remembrance video and song

This story, from todays Canoe news, fits in perfectly here ...

November 4, 2006

Our debt to veterans is eternal

As Stan Kircoff, poppy manager of a Royal Canadian Legion branch in Quebec, accurately put it Thursday, “every year, there’s something.”

Every year some local manager at one chain of stores or another bans a war vet from selling poppies, reversing years of past practice.

And every year, the media get wind of the story, the ban is reported, and within hours the business is apologizing and welcoming the war vet and his or her poppies back into the store.

This week it was Loblaw Co. Ltd, reversing the decision of one of its local managers at a Provigo supermarket the day before in Montreal. Korean War vet Tom Mullin, 76, whose brother died in the conflict, was allowed back into the store along with his small poppy stand.

Loblaw issued a statement apologizing to Mullin and emphasizing its support for vets and Remembrance Day. It said a misunderstanding occurred because recent renovations had limited the free space available in the store and after allowing poppy sales for five days, the manager thought most of the customers had been covered.

Loblaw did the right thing, but the fact these fiascoes keep happening year after year somewhere in Canada suggests too many of us do not realize what we owe our war vets. So we will explain it, again.

We owe them everything — our freedom, our peace, our prosperity, our very way of life.

We can never repay them and their comrades who died, who sacrificed everything fighting on the orders of our governments, on our behalf.

Our debt to them is eternal.

It does not end when the last soldier who fought in First World War, or Second World War or in Korea, or in our current mission in Afghanistan, dies many years from now. But one small way we pay some of our debt is by buying poppies — the money goes directly to assisting war vets — and wearing them on Remembrance Day, November 11.

On that day, we pause for two minutes of silence in their honour, at 11 a.m., marking the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the official end of World War I.

And in those two minutes, we remember them.

Not just this year. Not just next year. Every year. Forever.