‘Goodbye, my sweet love’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/04/2002 (8754 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LANCASTER, Ont. — A flood of tears connected two, widely separated Canadian towns yesterday as family, friends and colleagues remembered two of the four Canadian soldiers killed in an accidental American bombing in Afghanistan.

Sgt. Marc Leger, 29, was honoured at a military funeral in the small Roman Catholic church in Lancaster, Ont., where he was baptized.

And hundreds of friends, relatives and military officials gathered outside St. Luke’s Anglican Church in Dartmouth, N.S., after a private funeral to share their memories of Pte. Nathan Smith.

Leger’s widow remembered him yesterday in a love letter she read to the rapt assembly of 400 mourners at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church.

“You have claimed a part of my heart that will always belong to you,” a weeping Marley Leger said as she read from the letter.

“I am so very proud of the man that you’ve become and I’m proud to be called Mrs. Marc Leger. I love you and I will always love you. Until we meet again, goodbye my sweet love.”

While hundreds attended the Leger service — many in specially erected tents outside the church — and the funeral was broadcast live on several national television networks, the service for Smith was more muted.

As Smith’s coffin was taken out of the brick church that sits on top of a hill overlooking Dartmouth, his fiance, Jodi Carter, buried her face in clenched hands and sobbed quietly as a volley of gunfire rang out and a lone bugler played The Last Post.

Inside the church, which was closed to the media, Carter spoke of the man she was to marry this summer near Smith’s home around Ostrea Lake, N.S.

She said she received two letters from Smith — one a day after he died, the other two days later. She also spoke of a letter he had written in the event that he died, said one man who attended the 45-minute service.

“It was just very moving,” he said. “She wanted people to know of the man she loved.”

Nova Scotia Premier John Hamm and other dignitaries joined dozens of grieving relatives for the ceremony that packed two floors of the church, with about 200 people listening to the proceedings from a lower level.

“It was inspiring for all of us to see the absolute strength that they demonstrated in standing up there and speaking of their loved one,” Robert Thibault, federal fisheries minister, said of Smith’s friends who spoke at the service.

Outside, a couple of dozen onlookers stood by on a raw, overcast day and waved small Canadian flags in respect for the 26-year-old soldier.

Smith, Leger and two other paratroopers with the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were killed April 17 when an American F-16 jet dropped a bomb on their unit during live-fire exercises in Kandahar.

Nearly 50 members of the battalion’s sister regiment, based in Edmonton, took part in the funeral. Eight were pallbearers, while others served as guards and formed the firing party.

“It was just such a senseless tragedy,” said Gerald Meade, who lives in the Dartmouth area and came to hand out a bag full of the flags. “I just thought we gotta come up and show we care.”

Smith’s mother clutched one Canadian flag yesterday and wept as she was led away to a limousine that took family members to a facility where he was to be cremated.

At the Leger service, Father Rudolph Villeneuve said Leger’s spirit will live forever.

“The bomb that killed Marc ended his earthly life but it has launched him into a new type of life where he will be rewarded eternally for his heroic self-sacrifice,” Villeneuve told mourners.

“Nothing can prepare us for something like this — neither our education, nor our upbringing nor our experience can save us from the devastating effects of such a blow.”

An honour guard fired off a volley following the service after eight pallbearers had removed Leger’s coffin from the church. Leger was laid to rest next to his grandfather in the family plot in Lancaster.

The word hero was repeated often in the tiny town of 700 as friends and family remembered Leger, a career soldier who worked as a youth in the local grocery store and who played high-school football.

Friends recounted how during a previous tour of duty, Leger scrounged for food and building supplies for a group of Serbian refugees in a remote Bosnian valley as they prepared for municipal elections.

The Serbs were so grateful to their Canadian friend that they elected him as their mayor — twice. Leger informed them it would be impossible for him to fill the post, and he agreed instead to accept their honorary title — “King Marco.”

Leger’s sister, Sofie Leger, said yesterday that her brother’s sacrifices make him a hero — both to his family and to Canada.

“He was the best,” she said after the funeral. “He did this for everyone — all Canadians. He is my hero. He’s my big brother.”

A memorial to the slain soldier was erected in front of St-Joseph’s Elementary School in Lancaster, which Leger attended from kindergarten through Grade 8.

At the school’s front door, a simple white sign with black lettering read: Goodbye and Thank You to Our Hero.

Nicole Jones, a friend of the family, remembered an encounter with Leger when he visited Lancaster a few years ago. He organized a pickup baseball game with the local children, and Jones said his work in the community made him much more than just a soldier to them.

“I think he was a hero in many different ways,” Jones, 14, said in an interview before the funeral.

“He wanted to fight to save his country. He didn’t know he was going to die, I think that that’s really sad. He should have had a chance to live.”

Jones, who is in the same class as Leger’s cousin, said the soldier phoned home just three days before his death.

“He just said, ‘I’m OK, it’s different here. It’s been a challenge to fight this’ but he told them how he misses them and that he will be coming back safely.”

Meanwhile, a deep sense of loss has gripped the small communities on Nova Scotia’s eastern shore, where Smith grew up and went to school.

Neighbours who saw the young man move through Eastern Shore District high school and then leave a commercial diving career to begin training with the reserves described him simply as a “very nice young man.”

A funeral for Pte. Richard Green, 21, of Mill Cove, N.S., was to be held today in Hubbards, N.S.

A service was held Tuesday for Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer, 25, in his home town of Toronto.

Eight other Canadians were injured in the incident. Six of the wounded soldiers were welcomed by anxious relatives in Edmonton yesterday morning.