Remembrance Day | The veterans, it’s them too

No, not all veterans are old gentlemen in berets with medals. They are even less and less so. For Remembrance Day, The Press met two women and two “new generation” veterans, who also want to be remembered.

Jean-Christophe Laurence
The Press

“People don’t realize how important we were…”

They didn’t know each other until Thursday morning. They are, however, almost the same age. Both served in the Air Force during World War II. Were quartered in Halifax. And are now residents at the Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue Veterans Hospital.

It took a visit from The Press for Noreen Griffith and Anna Marie Kirwin to meet and shake hands for the first time. An unexpected scene, immortalized by our photographer.

M^me Griffith, 99, and Mr.^me Kirwin, 96, are rare birds. They are among the 13% of female veterans in the Canadian army and belong to the more than select club of the 1% of women aged 90 and over who have served in the armed forces.

For them, this is nothing extraordinary. It was the 1940s, they were looking for a way to be financially independent and signed up to participate in the war effort. They were young, adventurous, brilliant. They liked their experience. That is all.

That said, they are well aware of being part of a minority. And they admit that women veterans are not always recognized for their fair value, too often condemned to remain in the shadow of their male counterparts.

“It’s really regrettable, slice Anne Marie Kirwin, without losing her mischievous smile. I have friends who have gone overseas. People don’t realize how important we were. »

Noreen Griffith agrees.

M^me Griffith explains that she was assigned to decoding Morse code signals, which maintained contact with Canadian ships. She gets a little lost in the details (“it’s all so far away”), but remembers that, men or women, without distinction, “we did the work”.

Coincidence: the two women put their uniforms away shortly after the end of the Second World War. They could have continued their career in the military, but real life took them elsewhere.

Anna Marie Kirwin started a family, she had 10 children, in addition to working as a secretary for a mining engineer.

Noreen Griffith found a job with Bell and took care of her mother. She had neither husband nor children. “To remain independent, because independence is the key. »

Regrets ? None, she says, except for not having been sent overseas during the conflict. She laughs: “I wanted to see Europe, I saw the Maritimes! »

A “new generation” less recognized…

“The other day, someone asked me for a fruitcake…”

Sylvain Grenier, 61, is not sure whether to laugh or cry. But he is certain of one thing: the general public is no longer very sensitive to the reality of veterans.

When we met him on Wednesday in a supermarket in Anjou, this ex-soldier, who spent seven years in the army, was selling poppies for Remembrance Day. Next to him, Pierre Berenger, 55, a veteran in Bosnia, Croatia and Afghanistan, shared the same observation.

“It seems to have lost importance,” he said. When I was young, everyone wore the poppy. Today, most people who come to see us ask us why we are here. »

It is true that Sylvain and Pierre do not correspond to the typical image of a veteran with a capital V. They have their medals clearly visible on their chests, but their young age (well, it’s relative…) and their looks of rockers rather make them look like members of the Offenbach band.

Yet they have seen their share of action. Starting with Pierre, who admits to having returned from the front with a few “small sores” relating to post-traumatic shock. He describes himself as “super anxious, in a permanent state of hypervigilance”, super stressed.

“At the time, we think we are made strong. We think we learn something about ourselves. But afterwards, we realize that we have lost bits of it, ”he explains, fully assuming his fragility.

But these “new generation veterans”, as they call themselves, unfortunately do not have the same aura as the veterans of the Second World War or the Korean War, who are moreover less and less numerous.

This can be explained. More recent conflicts have been less publicized. The Habs routine was not affected. These wars were not global and are less part of our collective imagination.

Pierre and Sylvain would no doubt like it to be different. But they can’t do much about it, except by selling poppies for Remembrance Day. A golden opportunity to do their “duty of memory” and “to educate the world”, they explain.

With a bit of luck, we won’t be asking them for fruitcake anymore…