The special guests invited to Racette School’s Nov. 10 Remembrance Day ceremony gave the school’s junior high students an insight into the sacrifices men and women made to give Canadians the rights and freedoms they enjoy today.
Special guests included Cpl. Daniel Yun and Master Cpl. William Skinner, from 4 Wing Cold Lake fighter base, and St. Paul Royal Canadian Legion members Bill Blower and John Trefanenko.
Yun and Skinner both spoke, about their experiences with deployment abroad, and what Remembrance Day has come to mean to them.
Students may still recall the Oct. 22, 2014 shootings that occurred at Parliament Hill, said Yun, who reminded them of the fatal shooting of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, who was standing on ceremonial sentry duty at the time.
Cirillo was a colleague of Yun’s, and the two were once roommates, he told those gathered, which made Cirillo’s sacrifice really hit home to him.
“He will never be forgotten – we will always remember him. I will always remember him,” he said.
He told students about his experiences being deployed in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, and watching students of the same age not being able to attend schools. Canadian forces were on the ground in Afghanistan to build schools and infrastructure, and distribute school supplies, but would return to these sites only to find schools and supplies destroyed by the Taliban.
“It’s very unfortunate the people of Afghanistan have to live through that,” he said, adding that Canadians, including these young Canadian students, should know and appreciate the “price paid by men and women” so that they could be free and enjoy the life they had.
After standing for a two-minute silence just after 11 a.m., students heard about the experiences of past Canadians, who traded in their farm and work boots for combat boots from the time of World War I onwards. They listened in silence, to hear that 120,000 pairs of those boots and their owners would never return home.
Each of the students pinned a small set of boots onto the wall, under a white cross, remembering the sacrifices of these fallen, as the school’s Remembrance Day ceremony drew to a close.
