{"id":538,"date":"2007-11-14T07:56:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-14T07:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2007\/11\/14\/on-the-highway-of-heroes\/"},"modified":"2007-11-14T07:56:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-14T07:56:00","slug":"on-the-highway-of-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2007\/11\/14\/on-the-highway-of-heroes\/","title":{"rendered":"on the highway of heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"
November 11 is called Remembrance Day in Canada. From my youth it has been a day of older men in medals, somber speeches, and poppies on lapels. The poppies are a distinctly Canadian memorial, inspired by the poem In Flanders Fields<\/a><\/em>, by Lt. Col. John McCrae<\/a>, MD, a Canadian military doctor who died of pneumonia during WWI.<\/p>\n Some TV news items on the day pointed us to a new Canadian memorial of our war dead, this time from the battlefields of Afghanistan. When the bodies of our soldiers arrive home in Canada, they are flown first to an air force base in Trenton, ON. From there, they travel in a funeral procession led by police cars up the 401 highway to Toronto for autopsy.<\/p>\n Our Canadian people have taken to lining the overpasses on the highway, waving flags and saluting the fallen heroes as they return home. I can’t find the news item I saw, but these links will tell the tale. I found the last one, a video with no sound from within one of the cars in the procession, to be quite moving.<\/p>\n A-Channel article on the highway<\/a><\/p>\n