Honouring Aboriginal veterans

An item from the Legion Magazine.

Honouring Aboriginal veterans

Story by Sharon Adams

In Confederation Park, just a block or so down the hill from the National War Memorial in Ottawa, the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument was unveiled on National Indigenous Peoples Day, June 21, 2001, the year Canada entered the war in Afghanistan.

It was a long time coming, for tens of thousands of First Nations, Métis and Inuit people have served in Canada’s military and the Canadian Rangers at home and abroad, and more than 500 have died.

Euphemisms, acronyms and outright lies:
The language of war

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

For decades, politicians referred to the Korean War as the ‘Korean Conflict,’ as if the soldiers who fought and died on the battlefields of the disputed peninsula were somehow less soldierly or less dead if killed by conflict rather than war.

Some 2.5 million people died in the Koreas between 1950 and 1953, including 516 Canadians, and the war is not over yet. The armistice only put a pause on the fighting; 66 years later, there still has been no peace treaty signed to end it.

Officially, there was no declaration of war in Korea—it was a ‘police action’ (another euphemism)—so, technically, the politicians were correct, though ‘conflict’ suggests something more in the nature of a marital tiff than all-out war. Whoever came up with the phrase probably never saw a day of action in their life.