At McGill, Remembrance Day creates a tense atmosphere. Social media wars are waged on whether disrespect is justified in combating revisionism and oppression. We discuss the glorification of war, selective memory, profiteering, and imperialism. It’s a politicized holiday on campus: There is a group of decorated old men on Lower Field with their hands clasped behind their backs, there’s a helicopter or two chopping above, and there’s a silent Demilitarize McGill protest crowded around the Redpath Museum steps. It’s a controversial time for a reason. The Canadian Armed Forces have a well-documented track record of colonialist violence, sexual assault, and xenophobia. Demilitarize McGill touched on this in a statement issued in advance of last year’s ceremony: “Remembrance Day […] is an exercise in selective memory, organized to enforce the forgetting of any element of war that conflicts with the story the Canadian state wants to tell about itself,” the statement reads. But while it is human nature to reduce debates down to ideals—and to view an issue as the sum of its parts—it gets dicey when the concept at the core becomes divorced from reality. And that’s exactly what has happened over the past few years. The military is seen as an amorphous entity that diminishes the individuality of soldiers within it. In some ways, it’s like pointing fingers at Goldman Sachs employees for the Great Recession—the fundamental outrage is often so great that it can obscure the fact that at its base, a corporation is made of up thousands of complex people to whom the pitfalls of deregulation and Western capitalist
society only make up a tiny sliver what they think about every day.
People forget that for those in the military, being a soldier is just one aspect of their identity. The label is filled with assumptions and stereotypes, all of which overpower other essential aspects that make up an individual’s identity.
Master Corporal Jonathan Carson graduated from McGill in 2014 with a B.A. in History and Political Science, and is currently attached to the third battalion of the Canadian Royal 22e Regiment while he waits to be deployed on a tour to the Ukraine to advise the Ukrainian Armed Forces on combined arms. He joined the reserves on a whim after his first year at McGill.
“I just kind of decided it was something I might be interested [in],” Carson said. “I was overwhelmed with how much [of university] was theoretical—none of it struck me as being particularly grounded. I […] wanted to do something that I thought was real and concrete.”
According to Carson, one of the biggest myths surrounding the military is that every soldier joins the forces out of some sense of patriotic duty. A big factor for Carson’s decision to join the military was simply that he needed a job. When he first signed on, he thought of it as a better alternative to working at the bookstore or in some café.
“A lot of people seemed shocked that I got paid to be in the army,” he said. “We all get a salary.”
On the other hand, Adam Templer, U3 Political Science, remembers wanting to be in the military since high school. The Hamilton, Ontario native tried for four years to apply through the Regular Officer Training Plan (ROTP), which pays for tuition and living costs in exchange for service time.
“Coming from a single-parent home, and not being very well off economically […] I didn’t think I had that many options so I decided that the military would be a good way to do something with my life with limited prospects,” Templer said.
After facing several roadblocks in his ROTP application, Templer ended up joining as a reserve following third year through the Black Watch Regiment on Rue de Bleury just south of Rue Sherbrooke. As a reservist, he trains every Tuesday night from 7 to 10 p.m., and boot camps are typically held in the summer, which leaves him plenty of time for his studies and other commitments. In his time at McGill, Templer has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Political Bouillon, a university commentary journal on international politics, and he is currently an Arts Representative to the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU).
Templer wants to pursue law school at McGill after he graduates, and plans on remaining in the military with the hopes of becoming an officer in his regiment. While he has never been uncomfortable walking to his regiment in uniform, and all his friends know that he is on the reserves, he has at times felt hesitant to open up about that part of his identity.
“I don’t really tell students that I’m in the military, partly because of the politics on campus,” Templer said. “In my capacity as an Arts representative, it’s always kind of been on my mind that if […] it was more widely known, […] would [I] still be as welcome in some of the circles that I have been?”
When Carson was a student at McGill, he also struggled with the assumptions people would make about his identity when they found out he was in the military.
“I was in [a] Canadian foreign policy [class] one year and I brought up that I was in the army, and I found that any time anything military came up, I was the go-to person,” he said. “I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as ‘the military guy’ in classes or on campus.”
Master Corporal Eric Washburn stopped attending Vanier College in 2008 to join the Royal Canadian Regiment as an infantryman, and was deployed overseas in Afghanistan two years later as a machine gunner. After four years of service, having to revert to being a student to finish up his CEGEP degree was an unsettling experience.
“As a 24-year-old veteran of the combat in Afghanistan sitting in a classroom full of 17-year-olds—it was quite intense to say the least,” Washburn said. “I was not ready for that.”
Washburn, who joined the Canadian Grenadier Guards—located in Montreal—as a reservist after returning from Afghanistan, is now in his second year