Canadians in The U.S. Military
In counter-current to the movement American draft-dodgers and deserters to Canada, about 30,000 Canadians volunteered to fight in southeast Asia. Among the volunteers were fifty Mohawks from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal. One-hundred and ten (110) Canadians died in Vietnam, and seven remain listed as Missing in Action. Canadian Peter C. Lemon was awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor for his valour in the conflict. (This cross-border enlistment was not unprecedented: Both the First and the Second World War saw thousands of Americans join the Canadian Armed forces before the U.S officially declared war on Germany)
In Windsor, Ontario, there is a privately funded monument to the Canadians killed in the Vietnam War. In Melocheville, Quebec, there is a monument site funded by the Association Québécoise des Vétérans du Vietnam. However, many Canadian veterans returned to a society that was strongly anti-war. Unlike the United States, there were no veterans organizations nor any help for them from the government, and many of them moved permanently to the United States. There has been ongoing pressure from Canadian Vietnam veterans to have their comrades' deaths formally acknowledged by the government, especially in times such as Remembrance Day.
Read more about this topic: Canada And The Vietnam War
Famous quotes containing the words canadians and/or military:
“The Canadians of those days, at least, possessed a roving spirit of adventure which carried them further, in exposure to hardship and danger, than ever the New England colonist went, and led them, though not to clear and colonize the wilderness, yet to range over it as coureurs de bois, or runners of the woods, or, as Hontan prefers to call them, coureurs de risques, runners of risks; to say nothing of their enterprising priesthood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)