Phil Egan, special to The Sarnia Journal
(2016) At 5 a.m. on that already hot, steaming morning, Don Poland was thinking about his son.
Packed onto a canvas bench that ran the full length of the military Hercules aircraft, he sat in helmet and full body gear, shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of Canadian soldiers. They were on the tarmac of Camp Mirage, the covert Canadian logistics base in Dubai preparing to depart for Afghanistan’s Kandahar Air Field.
Unlike most of the others aboard this flight, however, Don Poland carried no weapon. His was a different type of mission.
It was April 11, 2008. Just over one year earlier, Don had waited on another airport tarmac – this time at Trenton Air Force Base in Canada. Here he had watched six flag-draped caskets arrive from that same air base at Kandahar. One of them held the remains of Don’s 37-year-old son, Corporal Brent Poland, killed on one of the worst days in the history of Canada’s ten-year combat presence on the desolate and dangerous terrain of Afghanistan.
“We all grieve in different ways,” Brent’s younger brother, Mark, would later explain. For Don Poland, following his fallen son’s footsteps into the war zone was his way to begin healing the gaping wound that was the loss of his son. With the aid of an understanding and compassionate Canadian military, he was able to eat in the same mess hall, sleep in the same barracks, and know the same bleak, brown and gray dust-covered terrain Brent had experienced.
Sitting in church on a joyous Easter Sunday morning in 2007, Don Poland had experienced a sudden and overpowering sense of dread. Although he would only hear the news hours later, his son Brent, together with five comrades, had been killed when their light armoured vehicle (LAV) struck a roadside IED, or improvised explosive device.
Captain Simon Howser of Fredericton, then a private travelling in the LAV behind the six slain soldiers, said the deaths changed the complexion of the entire regiment. “Suddenly, it was serious,” he recalls.
By all accounts, Brent Poland was an outstanding example of the finest young men that signed up to serve their country in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. A bright young man with a sense of honour and duty, he displayed an earnest interest in helping the people of Afghanistan.
Armed with two university degrees, he could have excelled in any career he might have wanted to pursue. Instead, he chose to serve Canada in the infantry.
Brother Mark, now Commanding Officer of the Royal Highland Fusiliers of Canada and a Lt. Colonel, continues to serve to keep his brother’s memory alive.
Brent Poland was a distinguished soldier of Sarnia. This city honours and remembers him.