Dedication to Duty

Heroes Remember

Dedication to Duty

But anyway I'm gonna talk about an individual. And he was a young fella from, from Kamloops, I knew the family by the name of Larue and Robert Larue was with the regiment, common ordinary buck private and he didn't want to be anything else. One of the things that was wrong with Robert, mind you he was a healthy man, but he missed a sense, we all got senses. One of his senses that was missing was a sense of fear. He couldn't explain it nor can I, why he did not have that one sense of fear. I tried to to to dig it out of him to find out well why is it that he didn't feel that that emotion, that emotion wasn't there. Anyway this is what killed Robert, it wasn't a bullet, nor a piece of shrapnel, he walked into a river and drowned, he couldn't swim a stroke but he was told that he had to get to the other side. And he has, I would say, at least 90 pounds on him, of equipment. Now there there was a fresherd going on and it was raining to beat Cane and the river was above its banks. Robert walked right into that river and that's the last we saw of him, the last I saw of him. Now they found him days later, no bullet holes or anything like that, he just walked into the river and drowned. Dedication to duty.

Mr Parker talks about a soldier in his platoon who literally lacked a sense of fear. His fearlessness was unexplainable, and he died in a most unusual way.

Richard Allen Parker

Richard Allen Parker was born in Vernon, BC on May 27, 1917 to a First Nations family. He talks about his early years, the prejudice that he faced, and the meaning of being First Nations. He left home at an early age to work in the mines. He talks about joining the PPCLI in 1942, fighting the SS and Hitler Youth and his time in Algiers and Italy.