The ‘soldier’s soldier’ who saved others
The National Post has launched Heroes Among Us, a special series on Canadian military valour, celebrating courage in the presence of the enemy. Over the coming weeks, we will propose 10 heroic Canadians who could be the first-ever recipients of the Canadian Victoria Cross, created three decades ago as a homegrown version of the Commonwealth’s highest award for valour. In conjunction with the True Patriot Love Foundation, Anthony Wilson-smith of Historica Canada, Gen. (ret’d) Rick Hillier and entrepreneur/benefactor Kevin Reed, we will celebrate them all at a June 26 gala at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.
Tim Goddard, whose daughter Captain Nichola Goddard, 26, had recently become the first Canadian woman soldier killed in combat, when she was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan the previous May, stood there with Captain Jonathan Snyder, a charismatic PPCLI officer, both looking down at her name newly carved in granite.
It was a contemplative, quiet scene that brought two worlds together, Goddard’s family and her regiment. It evoked the tension between death’s private personal tragedy and war’s common public purpose, how they have always gone together, and how neither can undo the other.
A year-and-a-half later, in 2008, this photograph became doubly poignant. Snyder himself was killed in action, and honoured with Canada’s second-highest military medal for his valour and “heroic leadership under intense fire,” which saved many lives, both Canadian and Afghan.
So now this photograph also illustrates the risk Snyder and Goddard shared with all their fellow soldiers. It showed why valour in the face of this risk is worth remembering and contemplating, because for a soldier at war, death can come in an instant, out of nowhere.
When he died aged 26, Jonathan Sutherland Snyder of Penticton, B.C., was engaged to be married to his high school sweetheart. His mother said he wanted to be a soldier since he was a child, and wanted to go to French immersion to encourage his rise through the ranks.
He was on his second tour in Afghanistan, and he had previously seen intense action at Sangin, in Helmand Province.
Once, after his vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device, he calmly gathered his men and went to the nearest village to warn the
elders there about explosives in the road, emphasizing the peace-making public service aspect of the Canadian mission.
“Just an absolute beautiful thing to see,” his fellow soldier Maj. Ryan Jurkowski once told The Canadian Press. “Jon really did epitomize the modern-day warrior spirit, the warrior ethos.”
Snyder also fought in Panjwaii, where Canadians were fighting through the summer of 2006. He was then promoted to captain, in part for his ability to mentor less experienced soldiers. For example, he once spoke to soldiers coming to Afghanistan for the first time as he was leaving, and told them to look for a common humanity among the Afghan people, even as they hunted Taliban fighters among them. He urged them to be both vigilant and relaxed.
“The people here aren’t much different from the way people act back home in Canada if you’re dealing with teenagers and little kids,” Snyder said in August 2006. “There’s a lot of similarities. I’d say go in there with an open mind and treat people as you would back home in Canada and go from there.”
“His troops looked up and admired him, not just because he was an officer, but because he was a very decent human being,” his colleague Master Warrant Officer Mark Pickford once told reporters.
Snyder had an ease in the chaos and stress of combat.
He impressed the veteran Canadian Press reporter Murray Brewster, whose April 16, 2006 report from Forward Operating Base Robinson in Helmand Province noted Snyder’s “Leonardo Dicaprio looks,” and quoted his optimistic observation: “You can’t beat the weather out here. In Edmonton it would probably still be snowing.”
Three days before his death, Snyder was deployed with four other Canadians as mentors to a company of Afghan soldiers as part of Canada’s Operational Mentoring Liaison Team.
On June 4, 2008, they were ambushed while clearing militant positions in Zhari district, west of Kandahar, although the precise location was withheld for operational security reasons. It was dire. They were facing fire from three sides. Snyder’s citation for the Star of Military Valour, with four co-recipients, says there was “little chance of survival.”
This was the soldier’s risk made real, death out of nowhere, and their decision was to fight back, and to encourage the Afghan soldiers to do the same, reassuring them that no one gets left behind.
“Captain Snyder seized control of the situation and ensured that the Afghan soldiers retrieved their wounded comrades,” Snyder’s citation reads. “Corporal (J. Donovan) Ball led a two-man team across broken terrain to secure an extraction route that allowed for the execution of a fighting withdrawal by Captain (Robert) Peel and Corporals (Steven Joel) Bancarz and (Cary) Baker. Because of their dedication, leadership and valour, many Afghan and Canadian lives were saved.”
Three days later, while leading a foot patrol in Zhari district, burdened with heavy gear and flak vest, Snyder fell into a deep open well, called a kariz, part of local underground irrigation systems.
A frantic retrieval effort failed to save him from drowning. His body was taken to Kandahar Air Field, where he was pronounced dead. Several hundred troops, including many Afghans, saluted his coffin at his ramp ceremony for the flight from Kandahar Air Field to Trenton, Ont.
“Jon was an exemplary junior officer who was an exceptional leader to his peers and subordinates,” said Lieutenant-colonel David Anderson, Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, in a statement. “He will be remembered as a soldier’s soldier who always led from the front, regardless of the risks or hazards involved. Jon’s compassion and care for his soldiers — whether they were Canadian or Afghan — endeared him to all who worked closely with him.”
In announcing his death, Snyder’s regiment also asked reporters not to contact his fiancée, Megan Leigh Stewart, “until she has had time to cope with her loss.” This was an effort by military officials to bridge that divide between family and regiment, to respectfully honour the double tragedy of a soldier’s death, and it was echoed by Brig.-gen. Denis Thompson, commander of Task Force Afghanistan. He said Snyder was a role model, and told his family, “You are not alone in your grief.”