For this Afghanistan vet, no memorial can ever rival this hallowed ground

Mark, tell me a little bit about what this place, being here amongst these gravestones, what does it mean to you? So my one soldier who was killed in action, Sergeant Shane Stashnik, is buried here. And I know many others as well. Either I served with them or perhaps I put them through training. Or in some cases I actually saw their vehicles get hit. And so I come here on Remembrance Day in particular. It's a different ceremony than what you would get downtown with large crowds and then often once the crowds disperse after the official ceremony is over the veterans will remain and it shifts from a processing of grief, the solemn Ceremony that is Remembrance Day and then it's really a celebration of life and so there's that entire roller coaster of emotions and experiences so for me it's an exceedingly special day. Why don't we take a little walk and you can show me? Yeah you're allowed to walk on the grass here. So this is my former soldier Sergeant Shane Stashnik. He was killed in the opening assault. During Operation Medusa, there were four Canadians killed that day. My sergeant major knew them well, and so, you know, because of that relationship, although I wrote a letter to Darcy and to Shane's parents several days after he was killed, I can remember closing the door to my office, sobbing uncontrollably because I had bottled it up until then, and that was right after his ramp ceremony would have been put onto that. that plane for his final trip home. So this is where I will start my walk on you know after the Remembrance Day ceremony and often the whiskey comes out right and so you pour a little bit on the grave. Just a couple more on this row. So this is Sergeant Cruz, or Cruiser as he was known, and I didn't know him that well, although we had crossed paths at the regiment. I used to serve in two combat engineer regiments, and so his wife or his family now will bake a tin of his favorite chocolate chip cookies, and that tin will be here, and so when the crowds disperse and it's the veterans that remain, we will feast on that. The regimental sergeant major, Bobby Girard, I became quite close with him. He was a bit of a troublemaker. And so, you know, his boss, Omar Lavoie, he would often be giving me ---- for whatever. I could make him smile while he was yelling at me. And so, you know, I loved that man. Tell me a little bit about who he was and what kind of man he was. And I never knew him before we started pre-deployment training, because we're often quite tribal in the Army, until we come together to do a particular mission. Man, he had an impressive personality and he was loved by his soldiers. He was highly respected by the officers and I equate it to the line in American Pie, the day the music died. Because when you lose someone so central to the organization, like the Regimental Sergeant Major, it really is a blow. I don't remember each day. From a calendar perspective, right, it's not marked on my calendar. That's what Remembrance Day is about. Like all of, remembering all of these days in one, probably why there's a Day of the Dead, right, or All Souls Day, you know, to do that. Because otherwise you can spend a lot of time living in the past. It's important to remember and we should honor our history doing so without living in the past.