http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Edmonton/Paul_Stanway/2004/07/28/559381.html

Wed, July 28, 2004

By Paul Stanway -- For the Edmonton Sun

Canada's aging Sea King helicopters have become synonymous with the public's image of our military. Out of date and irrelevant, yet costing a fortune to maintain.

You know the jibes. The Sea Kings are a sick, aging fleet, with pieces literally falling out of the skies. They're "flying coffins." The Sea Kings are so clapped out they are death traps that have killed 10 crew members and injured over a 100 others.

Even the Sea King pilots themselves got into the act, famously adopting as their theme song an adaptation of the 1970s pop hit Seasons In the Sun: "Goodbye papa, please pray for me. My helicopter's crashing in the sea. (Chorus) We had joy, we had fun, we had Sea Kings in the sun. But the engines are on fire and the Sea Kings must retire."

Very funny. The sort of black humour the folks in uniform love. In a strange way, Canadians inside and outside the military have come to revel in the image of our poor little army, navy and air force as outmanned, outgunned and forever nickel-and-dimed by successive Liberal administrations.

And there is, of course, much truth in the image - particularly when it comes to politicians screwing up military procurement programs. That's been par for the course in Ottawa since the days when we sent Canadian boys into the trenches in the First World War with modified hunting rifles that jammed in battle and boots which seemed to melt on contact with mud.

But what the vast majority of Canadians outside the military don't know, perhaps because they couldn't care less, is that our Forces have a reputation for getting the most out of their aging, inferior equipment - and that when they are given decent, modern gear they can do the most remarkable things.

The Sea King, believe it or not, is a perfect example.

Back in the 1960s, when they entered service, they were state-of-the-art anti-submarine helicopters with a real role in the Cold War. They had only a couple of serious drawbacks. Sea Kings are big, weighing nearly nine tonnes, and conventional military wisdom was that you needed an aircraft carrier to operate them - and Canada had just scrapped its last aircraft carrier.

And you couldn't operate them successfully at night.

So when the Canadian navy suggested Sea Kings could be operated from the deck of a modified destroyer, day and night, most military experts thought they were nuts. But they did it, inventing something called a "beartrap" which snags a cable dangling from the helicopter and then winches it down onto the heaving deck - an area about the size of your average driveway.

I've watched this operation a few times, and you couldn't pay me enough to do it in a North Atlantic storm, at night, but our people did just that for decades. To say most of the world's navies were impressed is an understatement, even if the vast majority decided you had to be daft, or Canadian, to make it standard operating procedure.

The European-designed Cormorant helicopters we bought several years ago for search and rescue are already conducting operations which would have been impossible for their predecessor, the old Labrador. In December, 2002, a Cormorant conducted a 1,600-km round-trip to get an injured Norwegian sailor to hospital - in winds of up to 130 kmhr, refuelling twice at the Hibernia oil production platform! In January 2003 another Cormorant rescued all 16 members of the crew of the Finnish cargo ship, "Camilla," - in a single, death-defying trip.

The military version of the Sikorsky H-92, which will be Canadianized into the Cyclone, is similarly state-of-the-art, if a little smaller. It is based on the same technology used in Sikorsky's Black Hawk helicopters, which have seen five million hours of service with U.S. forces.

I am not a helicopter expert, and I don't know if the Cyclone or the Cormorant is the better machine. But I do know this. Give the Canadian military either one and they will do things with it no one else can or would do.

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Fri, July 30, 2004
Here's to our troops

It's once more back to Afghanistan for the brave men and women from the Edmonton Garrison. We would have liked to wish them bon voyage and a safe return under different circumstances.

But voters in Ontario - and the federal Liberals - made that decision for us.

Instead of a beefed-up military, as promised by federal Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, Canadians must now endure the same level of disrespect and disregard that Edmonton soldiers faced from their national government the last time they were deployed to that war-torn country.

To add insult to injury, the Paul Martin Liberals campaigned in the last election with destructive anti-military attack ads.

The 600 members of the Lord Strathcona's Horse, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, 1 Combat Engineers, and 1 Service Battalion are not returning to Afghanistan to be peacemakers, following their tragic first tour of duty where four members died and eight more were wounded in a friendly fire incident.

And it won't be a benign peacekeeping mission either.

Just this week the battalion on duty - the Quebec-based Van Doos - were required to take part in a show of force through the streets of Kabul following growing tension in the buildup to presidential elections.

And there's a new concentration of forces from other NATO countries in anticipation of more troubles.

Lt.-Col. Chuck Lamarre described it as a "high-risk environment," but added proudly, "The guys are ready."

And we're absolutely confident they are in the same way the western-based soldiers distinguished themselves in the first Afghanistan assignment when they were sent out on search-and-destroy missions against the al-Qaida terrorists and the Taliban operatives who were harbouring them.

It's their political masters in Ottawa we have concerns about.

The reason why Canadian soldiers are in Afghanistan appears to be lost on the Liberals, who spent much of the election campaign saying nasty things about Americans who chose to hunt down, capture or kill the evil people who flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

Many innocent Canadians perished in those attacks - a fact that Liberals seemed strangely reluctant to acknowledge.

The terrorist threat still exists in the world. And men and women with Maple Leaf shoulder patches are out there in some of the globe's more hostile cesspools protecting us from it.

We pray that the Afghan deployment is successful and our Forces return to the Edmonton Garrison safe and sound, with the knowledge that they have accomplished something good for the world.