Canadians’ involvement in foreign wars chronicled

Transnationals — Canadians who voluntarily fought in wars Canada didn’t participate in — comprise a fascinating story. Its telling in this volume, less so.

The conflicts surveyed in this collection of 14 essays, plus a lengthy introduction encapsulating the pieces that follow, are the Papal Zouaves (versus Italy), American Civil War, Spanish Civil War, Sino-Japanese War, Vietnam, the Middle East (principally Syria, Iraq and Israel) and Ukraine.

The authors are academics (mostly historians), museologists and curators. While the writing is lucid, it’s too often delivered in stilted prose. There’s not much verve in these narratives about Canadian men and women who served and fought in another nation’s military.

The quality of the writing varies wildly.

A couple pieces are passable. But most, while learned, are apt to send a non-academic looking for the nearest off-ramp.

One notable exception is the third essay, Fighting in His Father’s Shadow by Sean J. McLaughlin, about Lance Corporal Richard Paul Dextraze, son of Canada’s chief of defence Lieutenant General Jacques Dextraze, who joined the U.S. Marine Corps and died in April 1969 while on jungle patrol in Vietnam. It refrains from being scholarly or clinical by partnering a moving story with the relevant stats and geopolitics.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Telling Canadian Stories of the American Civil War by Timothy Foran and Claire Champ. It’s essentially a mini-textbook-cum-promotional-puff-piece on how they mounted an exhibition at the Canadian War Museum. Unless you’re a museologist, all the technical stuff and not-lightly-worn erudition is a bore.

There’s yet another weakness.

A number of pieces zig and zag through the same conflicts, or aspects of them. Several authors even reference another contributor’s piece. After a while it starts to feel insular and repetitious.

A revelation that emerges from the collection is the historical consensus that the number of American draft evaders who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War is roughly matched by the number of Canadians who joined the U.S. military and served in that war. A couple contributors highlight this, but McLaughlin’s piece best summarizes the scope of Canuck involvement in America’s war in Southeast Asia.

“Sustained research from the CBC, the Montreal Gazette, and journalist Tracy Arial has given us a generally accepted consensus that 30,000 Canadians served in the U.S. military in Vietnam,” he writes. “To put this number into context,” he adds, “there were 120,000 members across the three branches of the Canadian military in 1963.”

Several of the authors allude to Canadian recruits to the Islamic State and jihadist wars, plus there’s a full piece titled Canadian Jihadist Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq: What Happened, Who are They, and What Now?

Although the piece profiles a number of individual Canadians who joined IS, there’s not even passing mention of the famous, or infamous, “Lost Boys of Winnipeg.”

In 2007, three University of Manitoba students — Muhanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, Ferid Imam and Miawand Yar — dropped out of school and travelled to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region to wage jihad against Western coalition forces. They allegedly joined al-Qaida in Iraq, which later rebranded itself as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Imam and Yar have been missing ever since. In 2018, Al Farekh (an American, having been born in Texas) was sentenced to 45 years imprisonment by an American court for his role in a 2009 attack on a U.S. military installation.

Generally rich with research, and not lacking in historical insight, the collection is authoritative — just not accessible to a broader lay audience interested in Canadian military history.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.