Canada's Finest CDS since JADEX General Jacques Dextraze
Former CDS General Rick Hillier
Canada's former top soldier says in his new memoir that he argued for Canadian troops deployed to Afghanistan to be kept in the relative safety of Kabul, and he rebuffs claims he was responsible for getting the country mired in the bloody battlefields of Kandahar.
The decision to send Canadian soldiers to southern Afghanistan was largely made before Rick Hillier became the country's military commander, the former chief of defence staff says in a provocative new memoir, A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, which is now available.
Blunt, hard-hitting and often cheeky, Hillier lays out his side of the story through the tumultuous early years of the war, including his strained relationship with former defence minister Gordon O'Connor and an attempt by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office to limit his public profile.
But it was the Liberals both publicly and privately who've tried to shift the blame onto Hillier for getting the country into the bloody, bitter guerrilla war in the south that has claimed the lives of 131 soldiers. One diplomat and two aid workers have also been killed.
It had already been largely decided that the Canadian presence in Afghanistan was shifting to the southern half of the country, Hillier writes about his return to Ottawa in the fall of 2004 after a stint as NATO commander in Kabul.
In vintage Hillier style, the book brims with praise for members of the Forces and is sprinkled with anecdotes about his family and early life. But it is his political and bureaucratic battles that make the most engaging reading.
Hillier clashed publicly with the Liberals over his description of the budget-cutting Chrtien years in the 1990s as a decade of darkness for the Canadian military.
The party's defence critic at the time, Denis Coderre, painted the general as a Conservative stooge, a response Hillier characterized in the book as dumber than dirt.
His relationship with Harper was cooler and more business-like. Hillier describes the prime minister as someone who was sharp, asked good questions and above all was committed to the military.
Officials in the Prime Minister's Office ordered the military to hide the return to Canada of the first female soldier killed in combat because they didn't want her flag-draped coffin seen on the news, according to former chief of defence staff Gen. Rick Hillier.(This would have been a disgrace to Capt Goddard and to Canadians everywhere)
Meddling in the hero's welcome that the Canadian Forces had planned for the repatriation of Capt. Nichola Goddard was Hillier's line in the sand.
We ain't going to do that, Hillier recalls telling former defence minister Gordon O'Connor, himself a former army commander. It's as simple as that.
To read more on this fine canadians book please try this link;
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/afghanmission/article/712802--foiled-hero-s-welcome-was-line-in-sand-for-rick-hillier
Something to watch Thursday CTV Live at 5 a trip to CFB Gagetown
Remember Everyone Deployed
Nil SIne Labore
Robby
