Sometimes ugly memories from one’s past surge back into view. This past week featured extensive media coverage of an incident that happened on July 30, 1974, when an exploding grenade on an army base in Quebec killed six cadets. I was then between my second and third year of law school, serving for the summer on military duty. I was on call-out from the reserve force at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa as a staff officer dealing with military legal matters.
My office was receiving the military messages about the incident. What I have always specifically remembered was my horror at reading the repeated phrase “posted to the dead list” and then a name. I knew the dead were cadets, 14 or 15 years old, I thought (rightly, I now have learned).
From time to time in the years since, I have mentioned this tragic happening to friends. Always I focused on my horror at reading that “dead list” phrase, while knowing that the victims were just kids playing at soldier – not even members of the armed force though in a program set up, maintained, and operated by the Department of National Defence. I said it was inconceivable to me that no military person present had noticed that a differently marked grenade was present. In the course of many years of regular and reserve military service, I occasionally threw grenades on training ranges. I was aware of the precautions taken to ensure they were handled safely – among them that dummy or training grenades were clearly marked in a way that distinguished them from possibly live grenades.
I do not recall hearing any further details about the incident that summer, nor indeed over the 41 years since, until this past week. I assumed the military would have determined how a live grenade got mixed in with dummy grenades. Ironically, as I now learn, they were being shown as part of a lecture on safety practices on military bases where unexploded armaments might be encountered. From the information now available, it appears that while the military determined that military personnel giving the lecture brought in the grenade, amazingly it was never definitively established how that happened. The officer in charge was charged with criminal negligence in civilian court, but acquitted three years later.
I also assumed that the military would have ensured that the long-term psychological and physical effects of the exploding grenade on the surviving cadets were taken care of. No mechanism for that was ever established. The legalistic but incredibly callous stance of the armed forces was that cadets, not being serving military personnel, were not its responsibility. Sue us – let the government lawyers put you through the legal wringer! Now the pushing of the survivors, and of a retired regular force member who had been on duty at the training camp, has helped resurrect this disgraceful mess. Hopefully a long outstanding disgraceful wrong will now be righted.
Writer David Haas is a long term St. Albert resident.
