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It was a classic battle for the Dominion Command Curling Championship, March 18-23 in Saskatoon as two teams, both new to the national Legion bonspiel, fought it out in an absolute nail-biter on the last day of action.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper joined Governor General David Johnston on a bright and sunny Monday morning, Feb. 6, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne by awarding 60 Canadians with the new Diamond Jubilee Medal.

The soldiers at Camp Blackhorse don’t care about irony. They are from the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and they are about as combat hardened as any Canadian soldiers I’ve met. At the beginning of last November they were just getting rolling on their new task of training the Afghan army and already they were cranky—this new mission was nothing much, to them. A corporal I’d met before in Panjwaii came out to give me a tour of their training grounds. High on a plain up above Kabul, this was the place where fledgling Afghan army companies were taught how to survive combat as a unit. The training ground was vast and largely unprotected. “Does the enemy ever come up here?” I asked. “Yeah,” answered the corporal, nodding across the rolling ground. “Someone just tried to plant an IED on the route over there.” He paused. “Blew himself up though.” Interesting. Only in Afghanistan would a training ground and a battlefield ever get so mixed up. The corporal didn’t find it too interesting; he just liked that the enemy blew himself up.

It’s a problem perhaps as old as militaries themselves—what happens to former soldiers once they leave the military? How can they apply the skills they learned in uniform to civilian occupations? For Sergeant Michael Woolley, 31, a veteran of tours to both Bosnia and Kandahar, it seemed like the leadership and problem-solving skills he’d learned over more than a decade serving in the Canadian Forces would get him, well, not too much. “The experiences the military gave are great, but transitioning to civvy street is a huge challenge,” said Woolley.

Interviewing general officers can be a little difficult, to be honest. Not only do they tend to have the no-nonsense command presence you’d expect from a leader in charge of the fate of thousands, they also tend to be a little cryptic, which is not to say they talk in code, but maybe something close. Perhaps cryptic is the wrong word. Maybe it’s just that one of the reasons a Canadian Forces officer ends up becoming a general is they possess the habit of very rarely ever saying anything too bluntly, nothing too frank or controversial—at least to the media or, at the very least, to me.

Amanda is standing in the sun talking to her brother, trying not to cry. Peter MacKay is reading, name by name, the list of Canada’s war dead. There are so many names, Amanda thinks, who is going to take care of them all? Amanda is asking her brother to check in on all the dead, to take care of them. Her brother is dead. He’s one of the names, her brother is among the lost. Will Cushley was killed in battle in 2006 and Amanda Cushley has been coming to Kandahar ever since. She’s spent three tours here now as a civilian worker. She comes to say thank you and because it’s the last thing she can ever share with Will. There is going to be a moment, Amanda knows, when it’s time to let go. The Canadians are packing up and leaving Kandahar. They are taking down their memorial and bringing it home. But first, there’s one last time to say a final farewell. Amanda’s moment is upon her.

Athletes Shine Despite The Heat It was a whirling hot, record-breaking weekend at the 35th annual Legion Canadian Youth Track and Field Championships, held Aug. 4-8 at the Terry Fox Athletics Facility in Ottawa. Nearly 1,000 young athletes from across Canada flocked to Ottawa to participate in what is one of the largest and most important sporting events of their athletic season. Despite the incredible number of talented competitors and record-breakers, this year in Ottawa was really a show stolen by one guy: the fastest teenager around, the red streak, the undoubted star of the whole event. This was Brandon McBride, a 17-year-old [...]

It’s probably not the thing you’d expect to be most impressed about if you were sitting in a field watching elite Canadian snipers compete against some of the world’s best shooters, but there it is—Corporal Corey is an absolute demon on the calculator.

It was a nationwide effort, an unprecedented attempt by the Legion to reach out to a new generation of Canadian veterans, and, in short, the Legion’s recent campaign to welcome home veterans of the war in Afghanistan was a definite success. In late August and September, an estimated 6,000 Afghan veterans and more than 50,000 well-wishers attended appreciation day events at more than 200 Legion branches across Canada. The celebrations took all shapes and forms, from barbecues and dancing to yellow ribbon-tying and magic shows. And the good effects—on veterans, on their families, and on the Legion itself—are amply reflected in [...]

If you happened to wander by your local Royal Canadian Legion branch this August you might have seen a heartening sight—recently returned veterans of Canada’s war in Afghanistan receiving a proper welcome home party. From Kamloops to Carleton Place to Port-aux-Basques, Aug. 20 was, this year, a time to give recognition to Canada’s military members for their staunch participation in the combat mission in Kandahar Province, 2006-2011. The Legion’s effort to thank Afghan veterans for their service became a nationwide campaign under the direction of Dominion Command President Pat Varga. In the end, well over 100 branches across Canada signed up to [...]