Best and Worst Aspects of my Tour

Heroes Remember

Best and Worst Aspects of my Tour

Transcript

The one thing that sticks out in my mind, not the most but the one I can talk about was being in a village and there was during the war one of the school buildings was destroyed but there was some unexploded ordinance still in the rubble and the children were always playing on the rubble and they would get wounded so the village elder approached us and told us. I had a child, the concrete was all over it but there was just enough, a gap that they could crawl up and it was a rocket-propelled grenade so I went up inside to the rubble and I put the charge onto the grenade. We disposed of it and the village elders were so happy and the children were so happy because then they could go play again and we got to save a couple lives by doing that. We had a country music group come over, “Farmer’s Daughter” so I got to be security detail for them while they were there. And hanging out with them and seeing how this was not affecting, the country was not affecting them the way it was affecting us so they were joking and happy and the morale was so high so I just kind of took some of that for me and, you know, listening to them sing in the evenings just around the guitars and it was really intimate and close and that’s probably the best thing that I can remember there. When we arrived they still had soldiers in the trenches and in between trenches was maybe two hundred metres so they were still fearful that it wasn’t going to work so to be with the Farmer’s Daughter and their little entourage of people was probably the highlight. Interviewer: And there’s always a flip side, what about some of the worst aspects? They outweigh the good. The parents of some of the children where they didn’t have anything, they would send their kids into our camp at night time. So we didn’t have, our perimeter wasn’t shut tight where it couldn’t be penetrated and so they would send their kids in knowing that we would find the children and they weren’t there to cause mischief, we would find them and we would feed them and we would give them water and we would give them clothing. They knew that so they were so desperate that they would do that. We had a garbage dump and we would burn our garbage but to see the children, to see the children running into the fire to grab our garbage. It sticks with me to this very day so we stopped doing that right away.

Description

Mr. MacEachern recalls the suffering and poverty of the local children.

Brian MacEachern

Mr. Brian MacEachern was born August 2, 1975 in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. With his father being a reserve soldier for over 30 years, Mr. MacEachern knew his own destiny at a very young age. Joining the reserves with the Combat Engineers division, he later specialized in combat diving and ordinance disposal. Throughout his military career Mr. MacEachern was part of the Swiss Air recovery mission and credits this exercise as being his reasons for continuing to serve in the Canadian military. In 2004 Mr. MacEachern accepted a deployment to Ethiopia and later that year travelled to Afghanistan and again in 2007 holding rank of sergeant with Combat Engineers. After being released from the military, Mr. MacEachern accepted support through Soldier On and in 2016 became a member of Team Canada Invictus Games travelling to Orlando, Florida as part of the cycling team. Mr. MacEachern continues to stay involved in the sport and now resides in Nova Scotia with his family.

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