MORE THAN REMEMBRANCE
Veterans like David Barkes try to keep the Remembrance Day spirit alive beyond Nov. 11 by offering a helping hand or educating others about their experiences.
Many Canadians don’t have a personal connection to overseas wars and veterans, but as healthy poppy sales and large crowds that gather around cenotaphs across the country every Nov. 11 indicate, the service and sacrifice of Canada’s soldiers and veterans are not forgotten.
More than 115,500 Canadians died in the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War. Another 188 have been killed since then in peacekeeping missions and the war in Afghanistan.
As of March, there were 658,300 veterans in Canada — 600,300 modern-day vets who have served post-Korean War and 58,000 older veterans whose numbers dwindle every Remembrance Day.
We share the stories of three British Columbians who are keeping the spirit of remembrance alive across all generations: A Second World War veteran who shares his wartime wisdom with younger generations; a former military pilot who battled PTSD and now helps other vets; and a civilian fighting to make sure veterans are remembered.
AT 95, FORMER AIR FORCE GUNNER STILL REACHING OUT TO SCHOOLCHILDREN
At the end of Peter Bone’s talk at a Vancouver elementary school, questions from the children come fast and furious: “How did you feel about dropping bombs?” “Were you scared?” “How did you survive?”
They’re questions Bone has heard before. As a longtime volunteer with the Memory Project, the Second World War vet has shared his wartime stories many times with a generation fortunate enough to not have experienced the horrors of war.
It’s important, he said, that children are aware of the sacrifices made by their grandparents and great-grandparents.
“It’s terribly important for them to realize how lucky we are, certainly in Canada, to have a good government,” he said. “And it’s a plea, too, that when they’re old enough, for goodness sake, to take advantage of that great legacy and use the vote instead of sitting on your hands.”
Bone was a 19-year-old cub reporter in London when he signed up for the Royal Air Force in 1941. He trained at an airbase in Winnipeg, then was dispatched back to Europe in 1943 to join the 626 Squadron.
His aircrew completed 25 missions over Germany between October 1944 and April 1945, bombing military installations and factories that powered the German war effort.
A mid-upper gunner, Bone sat in a transparent Plexiglas bubble in Lancaster bombers, constantly scanning the darkness for attacking Luftwaffe fighters.
Bone knew the bombs, dropped from 20,000 feet and in the dark, would have killed civilians living near military targets. But deep in enemy territory, with search lights sweeping the sky and the plane dodging anti-aircraft fire, his thoughts were with his family living in south London who were in danger of being hit by one of Adolf Hitler’s V2 missiles.
“I wasn’t thinking of the people down below me in the German cities,” said Bone. “I was thinking of my own family at home, hoping that when I went home on leave next time I would find all of them still there.”
One November morning at Kingsford-Smith elementary school, a little girl asked Bone if he was scared while he was in the air. “Scared? Me?” Bone asked incredulously in his British accent. “I was terrified,” he added, earning giggles from the kids.
One child asked Bone how many medals he has. He shows them the medals framed in glass. They weren’t medals for being brave, he told them, but medals “just for being there and doing your job.”
In 1959, Bone immigrated to B.C. as a probation officer, eventually settling in Vancouver. He had visited the city as a young cadet while training in Winnipeg and the constant rain reminded him of home.
After he retired, he joined the Memory Project, a volunteer speakers bureau for veterans and Canadian Forces members to share their stories at schools and community events. It also keeps archives of veterans, including more than 2,800 testimonies and over 10,000 images — the largest of its kind in Canada.
By his count, Bone has given talks to every secondary school in Metro Vancouver except two, and many elementary schools. This year, he gave talks at four schools. He worries the invitations are dwindling; he isn’t as mobile now, and needs a ride to and from the schools.
“I’m 95 now,” he said dryly. “They think, ‘Leave the poor guy alone.’ ” But it’s something Bone loves to do. “If any school rings me, unless I’ve broken a leg or gotten pneumonia, I’ll be there.”
For the younger kids, Bone draws a parallel between the Axis powers and schoolyard bullying, explaining the war in terms children can understand. With the older students, Bone sometimes tells them about the airman he remembers on Remembrance Day, Roderick Donner.
Bone met Donner during training in Winnipeg. Donner was older by about 10 years than the other cadets at the base and was a big brother figure to many, “a steadying influence, a sensible guy.”
In early 1945, Donner, then an
officer, joined Bone’s airbase. One night, Bone and his crew had just returned from a mission bombing a town in the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. When they returned, Donner’s crew was dispatched to bomb another town in the Ruhr using the same plane on which Bone had just flown. Later, they learned the plane was shot down.
“They didn’t come back,” said Bone. “They all perished.”
On Remembrance Day, Bone plans to spend a quiet morning at home, watching the national ceremony in Ottawa on television.
“I don’t like to be with people,” he said. “I like to watch it on my own. So if I shed a few tears, and I do, then there’s no one else to see it.”
FORMER MILITARY CHOPPER PILOT WENT TO HELL AND BACK OVER PAINFUL MEMORIES
For close to 12 years, Capt. David Barkes was a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot.
But for two decades after he left the military, it was an identity he shunned because there were too many memories and emotions he wanted to forget.
Instead, Barkes built a new identity as an air traffic radar controller and a special effects co-ordinator in the local film industry.
“There’s a lot of pain, so I put that away,” he said. “I didn’t do anything veteran-like. It was a mechanism to shut the door to the PTSD.”
In the air force, Barkes was a search-and-rescue pilot, serving his country within its territories, from the rugged West Coast and the vast expanse of the Prairies to the deep waters of the Atlantic, at times in pitch darkness and through severe storms.
Piloting Labrador choppers, painted in their iconic yellowand-red rescue colours, Barkes responded to numerous medical evacuations and search-andrescue missions involving boating mishaps, oil rig accidents and plane crashes.
“Quite often we were flying into weather that killed people, or you’re flying into the place where the seas were so big it’s sinking boats,” said Barkes, who was 18 and fresh out of high school in Victoria when he joined the military.
He managed to keep the nerves at bay during the missions. “I was very steeled. I had a great sense of duty, and that duty was able to override the fear.”
Barkes was based mostly out of bases in Gander, N.L., and Cold Lake, Alta. The work was demanding, technically and mentally. Every day was exciting, he said, but eventually the job took its toll.
Every missing plane call became a stressor. “Almost always the planes just land at a different airport, but you can’t fly like that. You fly like someone has crashed and is in need of rescue; you fly like every minute counts.”
Barkes recalls the despair of arriving at a crash site and finding no survivors. “You think you’re saving lives but all you’d be doing was picking up bodies.”
He remembers one horrific plane crash on a spring day in 1984 in Cold Lake. A CF-18 Hornet piloted by a colleague had crashed while travelling close to 700 miles per hour. The impact vaporized most of the pilot. By the time Barkes and other first responders arrived, whiskey jack birds were pecking at human remains in the trees. The image was burned into Barkes’s brain. He was 23. He left the military seven years later, in 1991: “I’d had enough of being scared to death and dealing with the horrific human suffering and loss of life.”
But the trauma of what he had witnessed and lived through stayed with him. He would wake up screaming at night. Often, he was overwhelmed by despair, loneliness and grief. He self-medicated with alcohol until that stopped working.
Barkes was in such rough shape he doesn’t remember how he was referred to the Veterans Transition Program in the spring of 2015.
“The program was able to help me by changing my outlook about myself and about life,” said Barkes, whose participation was funded by the Royal Canadian Legion’s poppy fund.
“It allowed me to recoup my resiliency. I started working on my relationship with my family and started engaging with the community. It was a road to recovery.”
The B.C.-based organization offers 10-day group counselling programs for veterans and former RCMP members who are struggling with operational stress. It was started in 1997 by a University of B.C. psychology professor and has helped close to 800 veterans in seven provinces to date.
The program is unique in Canada in how it brings veterans together with psychologists and trauma counsellors in group sessions, said Ret. Sgt. Doug Allen, a career soldier of 20 years who went through the program himself in 2013.
From the start, the program has operated on the premise that soldiers are best served by other soldiers.
“It brings veterans together with others who know,” said Allen, now a licensed social worker and program co-ordinator for the Atlantic region. “One of the biggest things is the isolation, in feeling completely alone.”
Barkes is now a peer support worker in the program and works alongside two psychologists to help other vets deal with their trauma. “I like the idea of helping the guys, and you know it’s also going to help their families and kids,” he said. “It gives your life meaning.”
Today, Barkes identifies as a proud veteran. On Remembrance Day, he plans to wear the colours of his veterans’ motorcycle club and attend the ceremonies at the Fort Langley cemetery. He likes to visit the military graves and read the names on the headstones.
“Hang out with the dead vets is what I do,” he said.
'YOU ONLY TRULY DIE WHEN YOU'RE FORGOTTEN'
On a gentle slope overlooking the Fraser River, the military section of Fraser Cemetery is the final resting place for about 450 veterans.
Last week, students from nearby Richard McBride elementary arrived to help clean the oft-neglected graves as part of a program run by the Society of the Officers of the Honourable Guard, a nonprofit formed five years ago with a mission to make sure the graves of New Westminster’s local heroes are not forgotten. The group teaches children how to maintain the grave stones of veterans buried in the cemetery, and shares the stories of the veterans’ lives and service with the younger generation.
“Initially, the teachers had some reservations about bringing children to the cemetery,” said Robert Rathbun. “They left it to them. Every one of them wanted to come.”
The sombre setting didn’t bother the kids. What bothered them, he said, was seeing several unmarked graves.
This propelled Rathbun into the Honourable Guard’s next initiative — to research and put names to at least six unmarked veterans’ graves at the cemetery.
“To have this grave … and nobody knows who he is, it bothers you, right? It bothers me,” said Rathbun, motioning to one such nameless grave, marked only with a blank granite slab.
“To see someone who fought for king and country and made the sacrifice and remains unnamed, it’s inexcusable.”
Rathbun went to work. Using cemetery records, obituaries and other historical records it only took him two weeks to identify William A. Stevenson, a member of the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles.
Stevenson, originally from Manitoba, served in the First World War. He survived the war and lived at 315 Columbia Street in New Westminster until he died of a stroke on April 14, 1939, when he was in his 50s.
“From what we gathered, he had no family locally when he died” so there was no one to pay for a proper headstone, said Rathbun.
Veterans Affairs Canada said there are 950 unmarked veterans’ graves in B.C. and 1,675 across Canada. Through the Last Post Fund, which provides a military marker for any veteran’s grave that has had no marking for five years or more, more than 2,700 veterans’ graves have been marked over the last 10 years, including about 510 in B.C.
Most of the unmarked graves are of veterans who died between the 1940s and 1960s, said Rathbun.
Rathbun is trying to raise $1,200 to pay for a headstone for Stevenson’s grave. He believes money from the Last Post Fund should go toward funeral and burial costs of just-deceased veterans.
This is a passion project for the 47-year-old maintenance contractor. He grew up with his grandmother telling him stories of her two brothers who served in the Second World War. One brother helped liberate prisoners of war in camps in Southeast Asia at the end of the war. Another brother helped retrieve bodies from the battlefield. When he came back, he was never the same, Rathbun’s grandmother told him.
He thinks that’s why he’s driven to make younger generations aware of the sacrifice of Canadian soldiers.
“You only truly die when you’re forgotten,” Rathbun said. “Their stories need to be told. They need to be preserved.”