The Darkest Cost Of Our Longest War

Continuing where I left off yesterday, Canada continued to participate in the missions into the former Yugoslavia to bring order into the various countries springing up out of it. In its wake, war criminals would face justice- or avoid it the easy way by suicide.

Here we have a remnant of one of the two planes that flew into the World Trade Centre on September 11th, 2001. A day that changed the world.

Canada went to war in Afghanistan as a result, our longest war, from 2001-2014.

It was a ferocious war fought in deserts, mountains, and valleys, far from home, against an enemy whose world view was a dark one.

This transport was brought back as an exhibit that has its home here. It hit an IED. Miraculously, the soldiers and reporter inside were saved from serious harm- the underside of the main body of the vehicle had been built to withstand this sort of thing.

A remarkable painting by Douglas Laing, painted in 2009. This is War: Canadian Soldiers In Afghanistan, depicting soldiers during Operation Medusa in 2006.

And this is Waiting For Twilight- Patrol Base Wilson, by William MacDonnell in 2008.

A throwback to the nosecone art of the Second World War, this was added to a helicopter.

But in the end, what was it all for?  The very people overthrown by the West early on in the war- the Taliban, whose world view is abominable- are right back in power again. Women and children will suffer the most. Maybe it was hopeless to begin with.

This photograph, of a Canadian soldier interacting with an Afghan child, carries particular poignancy.

A section of the Museum looks at the commemoration of war. Here we concentrate on peacekeepers, with an early model of what ended up becoming the national peacekeeping monument seen here.

And at the heart of this space is a model of the National War Memorial.