Dear Alice
Editorial in Ottawa Sun, 1 February 2004
"The day Cpl. Murphy died
Cpl. Jamie Murphy died Tuesday at the hands of a suicide bomber on the filthy streets of a decimated city torn to shreds by a generation of war. Half a world away in Conception Harbour, Nfld., his grieving mother Alice was haunted by a question.
Why, she asked, did her boy have to die in a country like Afghanistan whose people "don‘t want peace or even know what it means?" Why, indeed.
Prime Minister Paul Martin said the question, while understandable, was "one I wish she didn‘t have to ask." Well, she did ask, and from a grateful nation she is owed an answer.
Dear Alice:
Most of us never got to meet Jamie, by all accounts a fine soldier, a good friend and partner and a devoted, loving son.
You‘d know far better than us what caused him to don a soldier‘s uniform, but we suspect Jamie was like so many young men and women drawn by an irresistible urge to serve their country.
Not all of us hear that call of duty, fewer still are drawn to act upon it. But Jamie did.
Your son served this country even though it meant leaving the comforts of home and enduring a prolonged separation from those he loved.
His calling took him to a world utterly shattered by war, where hatred is drenched in blood and where people‘s hopes and dreams have been reduced to dust along with their homes.
Alice, we‘ll never know for sure, but we‘d bet Jamie saw that he was making a difference in Afghanistan. He‘d see it in the eyes of strangers who, for the first time in a generation, were beginning to see hope for peace in their homeland. He‘d see it in the smile of a child going to school for the first time or in the face of a mother who had begun to feel the warm embrace of security for her family, thanks largely to a military presence comprised of Jamie and his colleagues.
This week, as he approached the end of that posting, he died -- tragically, violently, under the most awful circumstances.
Alice, we cannot begin to find the words sufficient to console you as your family grieves its terrible loss, except to say that Jamie died a hero. No, he didn‘t die while plunging into a river to save a drowning child or pulling someone from a raging house fire.
But he died doing what he knew was right -- trying to restore civility and dignity to a people who had long lost both. He did it even though they were complete strangers to him and even though there were terrible risks from those who saw him as an enemy of tyranny and terrorism.
Alice, he died ... cruelly and incomprehensibly. But heroically too.
Pull the boys out? Bring them all home? You‘re right to ask, Alice. But we believe the Afghan people do want peace, they do know what it means, and we suspect Jamie believed that more than most of us because he saw it with his own eyes.
Alice, soldiers like Jamie are the last hope of the people of Afghanistan. Jamie died, but his death was not in vain.
"
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