Star of Courage: Recognizing Canada’s Heroes [illustrated] 1550023659, 9781550023657

Table of contents :
Outwitting a Molester..............13
Red River Rescue..............23
Trouble in Cyprus..............35
Hell at Sea..............47
Hostages at Gunpoint..............61
Flash Fire..............77
Nightmare Shift..............87

Citation preview

STAR OF COURAGE

Also by John Melady

Explosion Escape from Canada! Korea: Canada's Forgotten War Cross of Valour The Little Princes Overtime Overdue: The Bill Barilko Story Pilots Heartbreak and Heroism Acts of Courage Search and Rescue

STAR OF COURAGE RECOGNIZING CANADA'S HEROES

JOHN MELADY

THE DUNDURN GROUP TORONTO > OXFORD

Copyright © John Melady 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency. Copy-editor: Cheryl Cohen Design: Bruna Brunelli Printer: Transcontinental Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Melady, John Star of Courage : recognizing Canada's heroes ISBN 1-55002-365-9 1. Star of Courage. 2. Heroes—Canada. I. Title CR6257.M44 2001 1

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NADA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS SINCE 1957

920.071 05

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LE CONSEIL D DU CANADA DEPUIS1957

C2001-902252-2 03

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Canada

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions. /. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.^ Printed on recycled paper.

www.dundurn.com

Dundurn Press 8 Market Street Suite 200 Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5E 1M6

Dundurn Press 73 Lime Walk Headington, Oxford, England OX3 7AD

Dundurn Press 2250 Military Road Tonawanda NY U.S.A. 14150

For Lurinda Beckstead, whose continuing courage has been an inspiration to so many of us.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction

9 11

Chapter One Outwitting a Molester

13

Chapter Two Red River Rescue

23

Chapter Three Trouble in Cyprus

35

Chapter Four Hell at Sea

47

Chapter Five Hostages at Gunpoint

61

Chapter Six Flash Fire

77

Chapter Seven Nightmare Shift

87

Chapter Eight Dinner Blast

103

Chapter Nine Strangers at the Church Supper

117

Chapter Ten Niagara Fall

135

Chapter Eleven Toboggan Terror

147

Chapter Twelve Rescuing the Rescuers

161

Epilogue

183

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

HIS LITTLE BOOK did not come about by chance. Many individuals went out of their way to provide material, advice, and encouragement during every step of the research and writing. To begin with, I am deeply indebted to the Star of Courage winners whose stories are included. I felt honoured to meet and personally interview almost every one of them. In instances where the award was posthumous, family members offered me much assistance. To all, I am grateful. There were also many others who, while they may not be named in the text, helped me in other ways. They are entitled to share in whatever praise this volume elicits. Negative comments or reviews of this book are mine alone. To the following I offer my thanks: Andy Ainslie, Holly Bridges, Trudy Broome, Toady and Glen Butters, Al Capon, Lt.-Col. Walter Chipchase, Carole Compton-Smith, Jack Drew, Kevin Elliott, S.C., Pauline and Cliff Fielding, Fred Gaffen, Diane Galipeau, Henry Geerts, Joan Harris, Susan Hundertmark, Carol King, Rhonda Lafosse, Gregory Laughton, Pauline LeClair, Pat and Jim Lotz, Mary and Doug Macklam, Basil Mclnnis, Detective Tom Nahgang, Sandi Nielsen, Maureen and Grant Paulhus, Jim Sills, Captain James A. Simiana, Wayne Sitar, Lt.-Col. Grant Y. Smith, Robert Smith at Niagara Falls,

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STAR OF COURAGE Captain Beth Wakulczyk, Patsy Westerman, Jane Wise, Paul Zappitelli, and Constable Chuck Zehr. In addition, I would like to thank Kirk Howard for deciding to publish the book, Marc Cote for his enthusiasm for the project, Barry Jowett and Cheryl Cohen for their editorial skills, Jennifer Scott and Bruna Brunelli for their work on the design, and Kerry Breeze for being such a superb publicist. My agent, Kathryn Mulders, was always enthusiastic and encouraging. Mary de Bellefeuille-Percy and Danielle Dougall of Government House in Ottawa supported the project from the beginning and I am indebted to both. Danielle in particular went out of her way to assist in all stages of the research. Without her advice and direction, I might never have found some of the individuals I wished to locate. I owe much to her and I thank her. As always, Esther Parry was a source of inspiration and dedication. She not only did the keyboarding for the volume, but made suggestions — pointed and otherwise — that were so helpful. To my wife Mary — many thanks. While I was researching and writing the book she was always my most valued critic, whether it was in coming up with the right word or in telling me that something or other would not work. Her advice was always pertinent and appreciated. John Melady Seaforth, Ontario July 2001

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INTRODUCTION

LMOST THIRTY YEARS ago, the Government of Canada created a series of bravery decorations for deserving individuals. Prior to that, gallantry medals of various kinds were awarded here, but more often than not, such decorations originated outside the country, and the majority were intended for military personnel, most of whom were male. The best known was the Victoria Cross, and although awarded to ninety-three Canadians, was a decoration whose origin was elsewhere; Queen Victoria instituted it in 1856, and today it is a Commonwealth medal. The Canadian bravery decorations were first given out in 1972, and since then have brought recognition and honour to those who have performed outstanding acts of heroism. One of these prestigious medals is the Star of Courage, awarded to individuals for "acts of conspicuous courage in circumstances of great peril." The decoration is bestowed sparingly, so much so that almost a quarter of those who have won it died doing so. The Governor General presents the award on behalf of the Queen. The medal is a silver star with four points and a maple leaf in each of the four angles. On the obverse is a gold maple leaf surrounded by a gold laurel wreath. The Royal Cipher and Crown are on the reverse, along with the word "COURAGE." The star is an inch and a half across

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STAR OF COURAGE and the ribbon holding it is red, with two blue stripes. The decoration is attractive in itself, but to many it seems even more so because of what it represents. Anyone can win the Star of Courage, and as this book will indicate, winners have come from across the country and beyond the borders. Neither age nor sex are barriers. The medal has been given for a wide variety of heroic acts, and its winners represent a unique cross-section of the population of this nation. And each recipient is a hero.

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CHAPTER ONE

OUTWITTING A MOLESTER

HE MAN CROUCHED out of sight in the bushes and waited for the little girls to come nearer. From his hiding place beside the path, he watched them skipping along, laughing together, both talking at once. He knew who they were, but that didn't really matter. He wanted them badly, so badly. And now, just another few seconds ... Both youngsters were quite small: the seven-year-old, whose name was Jocelyn McDonald, weighed a little over eighteen kilograms, and her five-year-old companion even less. Neither child was tall. "Danielle and I were walking home from Bayridge that day," Jocelyn told the author. "It's a store that sells all kinds of things, and it's also part restaurant and part post office. I worked there last summer."

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STAR OF COURAGE

Danielle Bryant and Jocelyn McDonald were walking home from this store in Minaki when they were accosted.

The "Danielle" in question is Danielle Bryant, who is no longer five. She and Jocelyn are teenagers now — high-school students at Beaver Brae Secondary School in Kenora, Ontario. As this is being written, Danielle is in Grade 9; Jocelyn in Grade 11. Both are popular students and both still regard the community of Minaki as home. It is a small, pleasant, picturesque spot about an hour by car north of Kenora. Minaki is somewhat rambling in nature, and is undoubtedly what might be called a summer place. After Labour Day, most of the visitors leave, the boats are pulled out of the little lakes that surround the community, and skis are put on the float planes. There is ice fishing of course, but most of the fly-in folks who come for muskie, bass, walleye, and northern pike tend to come in warm weather. Minaki is located on the Canadian Shield, so there is a lot of granite around. For that reason, rock climbing is popular, as is wilderness camping, hunting, birdwatching, and hiking. The many walking and cross-country trails are named after plants and animals found in the area. Via Rail services the settlement, and not so long ago, groups of outsiders came by train to the large hotel with convention centre and golf course a stone's throw from the station. Sadly, the centre is now waiting for a new owner with deep pockets. The grass on the greens is hand-high.

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OUTWITTING A MOLESTER To Jocelyn McDonald and Danielle Bryant, the town was familiar, and they loved it as such. Neither knew nor cared that the word "Minaki" was an Ojibwa term for "beautiful country." To them, it was just home — a happy place where they could run and play, explore and pretend, free from care and harm. At least, until the afternoon of April 25,1992. "I will never forget that day," Jocelyn McDonald explained. "It is as clear to me as if it was this morning. Danielle and I were talking, as usual, and we were just walking along a path behind a fence at a construction place. Both of us had gone through there lots of times. We never thought anything of it." But on this day, they could not have known that a big, two-hundred-pound, thirty-year-old child molester was lurking in the bushes up ahead. This man had seen the girls going to the store, and he was sure they would return the way they had come. He could watch the children approach; they could not see him, and no one else could observe the area. The construction fencing and surrounding bushes shielded the path from the public. Danielle and Jocelyn were beside him before they even knew he was there. He blocked the path. The man towered over the little girls, and ordered them to remove their underwear. Danielle began to do so. "She was only five," Jocelyn explained, "and she didn't understand the danger. I knew we shouldn't do that, so I told her to stop. Stuff my mother had said kind of clicked in, I guess." Jocelyn paused as she described the moment, as if recalling the kinds of directions every parent tries to instill. But Jocelyn's shouted warning to Danielle brought about another result: the attacker became enraged. "He grabbed my friend," McDonald explained, "and then he started to take her away. He had one arm around her, and then he put his other hand over her mouth. She was crying but she couldn't scream. "The guy's name was Gus Chicago. I had never talked to him, but I had seen him before and my father knew who he was. I remem15

STAR OF COURAGE ber yelling, 'Leave her alone, you're hurting her, leave her alone,' stuff like that." But the man ignored Jocelyn's cries. Instead he clutched the sobbing Danielle and beat it down the path towards his residence. Jocelyn followed, still yelling, and twice attempted to pull little Danielle from the man's grasp. When this failed, she picked up the biggest rock she could find and heaved it at him. Her aim was good. When the rock hit him, the molester was surprised and momentarily distracted. He dropped Danielle, but the little girl was too afraid to run. Before Jocelyn could intervene, Chicago seized the child again, smothered her cries and ran with her to his home. Jocelyn, desperate, fearful, but determined not to give up, crept along behind, out of sight. "I knew where he lived," she said, "so I followed. I didn't know what else to do. I was sure he was taking Danielle there. I just didn't want him to know I was behind them. I was really scared though and I did not want him to get me. I knew how powerful he was when I tried to pull Danielle away. "I took a shortcut to his place, but he got there first. He already had Danielle inside." In spite of the pounding of her heart, the dryness of her throat, and the terror that swept her frame, Jocelyn emerged from the shortcut she had taken and, as stealthily as she could, stole up beside the molester's house. She found a window low enough to see inside, but because she could not tell where the man had taken Danielle, realized that to free her friend she would have to get into the building. "I snuck in the door," Jocelyn told me, "as soon as I was sure he wasn't just inside it. But I was so scared. Then I didn't know where Danielle was, and I could not see her anywhere. I couldn't see him either." The building where the man lived is a low-slung, single-storey communal structure, with four bedrooms branching off a hallway. A washroom is at one end. The land around the dwelling is heavily treed. "I had been in that kind of place before," Jocelyn explained, "and I knew there were lots of rooms, but at first I couldn't remember how many. I hoped I would not have to search them all." 16

OUTWITTING A MOLESTER As it turned out, she had to do just that. "When I got into his house, I could hear him in the bathroom, so that's when I went looking for Danielle." Silently, frantically, as quickly as she dared, the seven-year-old girl began searching for her friend. She went to one bedroom, quickly glanced around, and then tiptoed to the next. The bathroom door remained closed. "I remember hoping Danielle would be in the first bedroom, but she wasn't there," Jocelyn said. "So I went to the next and the next, but they were also empty." Finally, praying that the sounds from the bathroom would go on, Jocelyn darted into the bedroom adjacent to it. There, on the molester's bed, was Danielle. "She had all her clothes on, I remember that," Jocelyn said, "but I was almost too scared to get her. She did not say anything, and I kind of think she was not sure what was happening. I just knew we had to get out of there. "But we had to keep quiet because I knew the guy might be right back. I just grabbed Danielle's hand and we got out of the bedroom. Then we went down to the door and got outside. Then we ran. I hardly even remember saying anything to Danielle. I was too sure he would find both of us in his bedroom. Then I didn't know what I would do." But the bathroom door remained closed. For some time, both children were too traumatized to tell anyone what had happened. They talked to each other about it, but initially, no adult was informed. Jocelyn remembers seeing the man's house every day — because it was close to hers. Because that place was "scary" for her, she did her best to avoid being anywhere near it. And while keeping it to herself was difficult, divulging the awful secret was too painful. "I wasn't ready to tell my mom," she explained, "because I was afraid she would not understand, or maybe not believe me. I also thought we might be in trouble because maybe we had done something bad." Fortunately, the story did come out. "One day, my aunts were at our house, and I heard them talking about Gus Chicago, and about something he had done to a girl. I lis17

STAR OF COURAGE tened to what they were saying, and finally told my mother that he tried to do the same thing to Danielle and me. "I don't know when the police were told, but pretty soon two or three of them came to our house. That's when I explained what had happened." The investigating officer in the matter was Ontario Provincial Police Constable Tony Hale. Jocelyn is still full of praise for the man. "He was really kind to me," she said, "and I know he did a good job. When I finish high school, I want to go to college and become a cop myself." For his part, the modest, well-liked Hale declined to be interviewed about this case. Undoubtedly however, he did his work, and did it well. Chicago was arrested and taken into custody in Minaki. In the days and weeks that followed, more and more people heard about the incident. At first Jocelyn would say little about it, but the more she was asked about what happened that April afternoon, the easier it became for her to tell the story. In every telling, however, she did her best to downplay her actions, brushing off praise by saying she had done only what anyone else would have done. When I talked to her during my research for this book, she was initially quiet and quite reserved. Gradually, she became more at ease with my inquiries and responded accordingly. By the time my schedule dictated that I go elsewhere, we were on a first-name basis and she was kidding me for travelling so far to meet her. At no time was she the least bit boastful. I did not attempt to contact Gus Chicago. This man was held in custody for some weeks as he awaited trial in connection with the incident involving Danielle. In due course, he came before the courts and was convicted of sexual interference. The conviction itself hinged, to a large degree, on testimony given by Jocelyn McDonald. "I think I was more scared going to court than I was that day when I went into the house to get Danielle," Jocelyn said. "I had to talk about it to a lot of strangers." But her words had impact. Gus Chicago was sentenced to thirty months in prison, most of which was served in Stony Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba.

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OUTWITTING A MOLESTER I told Jocelyn that I assumed she was glad she would never have to cross paths with him again. "Oh, but I do," she replied. "He's out now, and I often see him here in Kenora. I always cross the street when I see him coming." Another aspect of this story was, to Jocelyn at least, quite unexpected. She was singled out for praise from many quarters. Through it all, she never let the recognition go to her head. She and her mother were flown to New York City for an appearance on a national television show. I only learned this some time after I had interviewed her. She not only did not brag about the trip and its purpose, she did not even mention it. Nor did she mention an Ontario Provincial Police Bravery Award, or several magazine and newspaper profiles that were done.

Jocelyn McDonald receives the Star of Courage from Governor General Ray Hnatyshyn. At the time, Jocelyn was the youngest recipient of the award.

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STAR OF COURAGE On the other hand, I did know that the Youth TV network had presented Jocelyn with their Youth Achievement Award after singling her out from more than eight hundred entries. But being informed that she would be getting the Star of Courage was especially pleasant. When the letter telling her of the selection arrived in Minaki, she was ecstatic. When Kevin Connor at the Daily Miner and News in Kenora asked for her reaction at the time, she said: "Boy, you should have seen me when I found out. I was bouncing all around. Now when I write my name, I can put s.c. in big letters at the end, but I'm not sure what it means." She found out when, in the resplendent grandeur of Rideau Hall in Ottawa, then Governor General Ray Hnatyshyn pinned the Star of Courage on her new blue dress. "I was scared when they called me up to get the medal," she said, "but the Governor General was so nice to me. I even had lunch with him, and he gave me a special coin. I still have it. That day was really special." And so is Jocelyn McDonald, one of Canada's youngest Star of Courage winners. The foregoing was written and ready for editing early in January 2001. In the light of subsequent events, I decided to leave the material as it was, but to add the following. I do so with profound sorrow. "Chippy" McDonald, as Jocelyn was nicknamed, made a deep and lasting impression on me. Late in the evening of January 22,1 received a telephone call at my home. The caller was Rob Bearss, a detective with the Ontario Provincial Police in Kenora. Jocelyn McDonald was missing. "She was last seen at a party in mid-October," he told me, "and there has been no trace of her since. I thought you should know." I found it hard to believe. I had interviewed her only a couple of weeks before that, and she was so happy then, so full of life and so enthusiastic about everything in her world. Detective Bearss inquired about photographs I had taken of Jocelyn, and wondered if the police could borrow them. They were 20

OUTWITTING A MOLESTER

Jocelyn McDonald in Kenora, Ontario on September 27, 2000. The photograph was taken following an interview/or this book. Sadly, two weeks later she was dead.

apparently the last taken of her before her disappearance. I readily supplied the pictures, along with the interview notes I had taken when I talked to Jocelyn. I hoped this would be helpful, and that this delightful young woman would turn up safely. Tragically, that did not happen. Detective Bearss and I had several phone conversations, but his call on March 29, 2001, was one I will never forget. "John," he said, "I am calling to let you know before you see this in the papers. I cannot say anything more, but human remains have been found here in Kenora. They have not been identified yet." The next morning, The Toronto Star carried the story on page two. Five days later, the forensic pathology unit of the Office of the Chief Coroner in Toronto positively identified the remains as those of Jocelyn. The cause of death was not determined.

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STAR OF COURAGE Jocelyn's body had been found by someone walking in a rocky, brush-covered area, not far from an apartment building where she had last been seen. The police had searched the area weeks earlier, but nothing had turned up. In fact, there had been many supposed "sightings" of the young woman, but after investigation, none could be substantiated. Now, however, the discovery of her body was all too real. As this is being written, the cause and circumstances of her death are still unknown. Since hearing of her death, I have often thought back to my conversation with Jocelyn that day when she talked in glowing terms about life, and what she hoped for in her future.

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CHAPTER Two

RED RIVER RESCUE

DITH WHETSTONE WILL never forget the knock on the door. It was five o'clock in the morning, and there was a police cruiser in front of the house. She willed herself awake, threw a robe around her shoulders, and hurried to respond. "I was just so thankful our kids were in bed, and I knew it," she said recently, "but even before I got to the door, I dreaded what I was about to hear. For some reason, I was sure this was going to involve John. It was the strangest feeling." John King was Edith's brother, thirty-nine years old and living alone in Winnipeg. She had seen him last when he had come for a visit in April, and it was now June — June 3,1987. Edith and John were two of five children born to Cyril and

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STAR OF COURAGE Gertrude King, who ran a farm near Kleefold, Manitoba, a settlement an hour southeast of the provincial capital. There the Kings raised crops and cattle, pigs, and chickens, and on occasion, sold wood. They were never rich, but all five children looked upon their formative years as happy ones. "John really wanted to farm," Edith recalled, "and when Dad became ill when my brother was in Grade 10, John did a great deal of the farm work that year. That included putting in the crops, milking cows, and doing all the other things that needed doing. But there was always a personality clash between Dad and John. When they quarrelled, our mother was the one who interceded. She was a real peacemaker, quiet and timid, while both Dad and John were strong-willed individuals." Edith and John were close as youngsters, and she remembers her brother with obvious affection. She also recalls his talents. "He was mechanically minded, very interested in cars and engines. I still have a picture of him as a teenager, with an engine he was repairing. Later on, he took a course in mechanics at Red River Community College in Winnipeg. "He had the ability to succeed, and could have done well in school, but like many bright children, was not always interested in what he was being taught. He was attracted to theatre, and acting, but there was little opportunity along that line at the high school we attended. An interest in arts does not necessarily bode well on a farm either. "Some years later, I saw him in a play in Winnipeg. He was quite good, and certainly had ability as an actor. He also enjoyed working backstage, helping with the props, that kind of thing." But there was yet another side to the young John King. Edith continued: "He always seemed to be searching for something — the meaning of religion, the meaning of God. Things that are really, really deep." To illustrate this facet of her brother's personality, Edith showed me an example of his writing. In a paper entitled "The Perfect Circle — an Article on the Composition of Karma, the Means of Reincarnation," John King argues his case with both passion and conviction. The work is well researched; the arguments are substantiated, and the conclu-

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RED RIVER RESCUE sions flow naturally from what precedes them. The paper is not light reading however. "The law of progression, cause and effect, whether it relates to a specific incident, or to a collection of unrelated actions, insists that the future is related to the past," King writes. "Biblical or scientific, this fact is accepted as mathematically correct. In essence the mathematical logic provides the necessary smoke screen which prevents the corruptive use of power associated with knowledge, for it is by honest diligence in algebraic learning that the unknown factor is made known." Here, the depth of King's scholarship is obvious. John King left home shortly after his seventeenth birthday. He travelled extensively, worked at a variety of jobs, and lived in several places in both Canada and the United States. Every so often, he would reappear at home, but then would be gone again. "There was a period in his life when, to our family, he more or less disappeared off the face of the earth," Edith continued. "In a way, he was a drifter, a rover. He lived with a woman for a while, and they had a daughter, but later became estranged from them." King's jobs were unconventional in many ways. He took university courses and became a clergyman for a while. At another time, he sold cosmetics door to door. There was even a stint as a disc jockey. The man had a green thumb — he loved plants and had the ability to make them flourish. When he lived in Winnipeg, his apartment was filled with flowers. In the spring of 1987, Edith Whetstone and her husband Don were living in Portage la Prairie, an hour's drive west of Winnipeg. One day, John called and told them he was coming for a visit. Edith had not seen her brother in almost five years. King did not have a car at the time, so he rode his bicycle to Portage, even though the headwind was so strong he often had to get off and walk. He spent a weekend with his sister, then on the Monday morning climbed back on the bicycle and rode back to Winnipeg. "The visit gave us a bit of a chance to bridge the gaps of the past few years," Edith explained, "but even though he opened up a bit about his difficulties in finding jobs, and so on, he did not reveal a lot." 25

STAR OF COURAGE One time during that weekend, John was sitting in the Whetstone living room, looking out the window. He looked and looked, and made a rather surprising observation: "Oh, okay, that's where that scene came from." He then explained to his puzzled hosts that he had had a strange dream of the particular view before him, but until that moment, had had no idea where it was. Long afterwards, his sister admitted a sense of wonderment as she recalled the incident. She also realized there was much about her brother that was foreign to her. Once, he had told her this, in so many words. "He said I had led a very sheltered life, and I realized at that moment that there were things about him, things he had experienced in life, and in his travels, that I did not know and would never know." During that spring of 1987, when John was living on MacKray Avenue in the north end of Winnipeg, he had put down some roots, and had made some friends. Almost none of these individuals were known to his family, but they had become important to King. He was unemployed at the time, so along with the hours he spent reading in his apartment and tending to the flowers he was growing there, he had plenty of time to go fishing, often with a man named William McDougall, a twenty-three-year-old who would later describe King as "a really decent guy — and a good friend."

The North Main Street boat launch is located in this park.

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RED RIVER RESCUE One of the places the two fished was just outside the Winnipeg city limits, on the west bank of the Red River. The site was called the North Main-Perimeter boat launch, and its exact location would later become controversial — even to those who thought they knew their local geography. At the time, and even today, many locals are sure the place is within the city of Winnipeg. It is not. This fact would later become significant in the story of John King. Nevertheless, late in the afternoon of Tuesday, June 2, King accompanied McDougall to their favourite fishing place, the North Main Street boat launch. McDougall had a new fishing rod and the two men wanted to try it out. The pair laughed and talked as McDougall drove along Main, past the small brown sign for "West St. Paul Municipality" and then, a stone's throw past Riverglen Crescent, turned right onto a gravel road. This road to the river winds eastward through a well-tended, pleasant grassy area known as Winnipeg's North Perimeter Park. A large wooden sign, with "Perimeter" misspelled, marks the place today. Visitors are reminded that they are at their own risk when using the boating facilities. Presumably this also applies to anyone fishing there, whether in a boat or not. The launch site is in a clearing on the riverbank, just below a parking lot specifically designed with slots for boat trailers. McDougall left

The ramps at the North Main Street boat launch. John King was fishing from the floating dock on the right. The Lavallee station wagon sank beside the dock on the left.

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STAR OF COURAGE his vehicle there and the two friends walked to the river's edge, to a small dock on the south side of the launch slips. It was there they began using the new rod. The mighty Red River is about two hundred metres wide at this spot, and the silt of past summers has turned its water tan. The current was strong, and the floating wooden pontoon dock on which the men stood strained at its moorings. There were other people fishing from the same platform, as there were from a matching facility on the other side of the slips. Neither McDougall nor King knew these strangers, who included a young man and a small boy. The child looked to be about four years old. The swiftness of the current was always a natural hazard for anyone fishing the Red in June. So, too, was the water temperature; there had not been that many warm days so far this season. But there was an even greater danger. At the foot of the two launch pads, the riverbank sloped gradually. However, a short distance from the shore, the water was deep. Deep, fast-flowing, mud-coloured, and cold. No one there that evening anticipated trouble. Not long after McDougall and King's arrival at the river, the skies clouded over and a few drops of rain fell. The pair ignored the impending shower and continued to fish. So did most others. Across the way, however, the man with the little boy decided to take measures in case the rainfall increased. He and the child left the floating dock, walked to the parking lot, and a couple of minutes later returned. Now the two were in a grey Chevy station wagon that had its tailgate down. The child sat in the front seat and watched as his father turned the vehicle around and eased it carefully backwards, down the cement ramp of the north launch pad. Once the twenty-nine-year-old man, whose name was Rene Lavallee, got the wagon to the river's edge, he left his son, Rene Junior, in the front seat. He then got out of the 1976 Malibu himself, walked around to the rear, hopped up onto the open tailgate and resumed fishing. He now knew his son would be safe and dry. The child was neither. Because Lavallee was facing the river and was concentrating on his fishing, he failed to notice that Rene Junior had slid across the car and

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RED RIVER RESCUE

A small boat enters the water at the North Main Street launch, where the Lavallee vehicle sank. The river bottom falls away quickly and dangerously here. The bridge in the background is part of the Winnipeg By-Pass.

was now playing with the steering wheel, pretending to drive. As he had seen his father do so often, he reached down and slipped the vehicle into neutral. Without warning the Malibu rolled backwards, ran off the launch pad, and then with sickening speed slipped into the cold Red River. The wagon began to sink. At first, Lavallee failed to comprehend what was happening. He held onto his fishing rod, but in no time found his feet in the water. Almost instinctively, he stood up, grabbed the roof rack of the vehicle, and pulled himself up on it. The full horror of his predicament sunk in. His son was in the car! Lavallee scrambled to the front of the wagon: still clinging to the roof rack, he slid down on the left side of the windshield and swung himself around to the driver's door. Already, the water was halfway up the side window. Lavallee grabbed the door handle with one hand, held the roof rack with the other, and desperately attempted to pull the door open. From inside, Rene Junior looked out at his father, oblivious to the peril. The father was now close to panic. He pulled at the door with all his might, but the pressure of the water against it was too strong. He

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STAR OF COURAGE pleaded with his son to turn the window down, but the child was still playing driver with the steering wheel. He ignored his father. The car sank lower and lower in the water and Lavallee was having trouble holding on. Because he could not swim, his desperation became acute. He screamed for help. Initially, the others fishing that evening on both docks had looked at the sinking station wagon with a mixture of surprise, disbelief, and even amusement. The whole thing was so sudden, so weird, that at first no one saw the potential for tragedy. A car was in the water, and it was going down. The spectacle was almost funny. Lavallee's hysterical screams shook the onlookers out of their reverie. John King reacted. From where he stood on the south pontoon, King was in a position to see Lavallee struggling with the car door. He could also see the top of the little boy's head in the front seat. Then, to his horror, he saw water pouring in through the open tailgate. The child, he realized, was trapped. King did not even hesitate long enough to remove his boots. He dived into the cold water, surfaced, then swam towards the back of the wagon. His jeans, jean jacket, and construction boots dragged him down. The current tugged at his body, threatened to pull him away from the shore, and almost swept him past the sinking car. He grabbed at the open tailgate as he went by, swung in behind the vehicle, and called inside to the little boy in the front seat. The child turned, stood tall on the seat, and faced backwards. He regarded the stranger at the rear opening with a mixture of curiosity and bewilderment. King called a second time, and fighting to keep his voice as calm as he could, asked little Rene to climb over the seat and come to the back. The boy hesitated. King repeated his request. This time, the child did as he was asked. He scrambled up onto the rear of the front seat, then plopped down into the one behind it. He reappeared, now closer to King, but still not close enough to grasp. In a soft, measured voice, John King urged the child to keep coming.

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RED RIVER RESCUE The boy paused, then looked around, as if not sure whether he should go closer to this man he did not know. King pleaded with the youngster. By now, the water was almost to the top of the rear seat and King was floundering. Yet he held on, reached as far into the car as he could and managed to grasp the child's wrist. Then as quickly as he dared, he drew the boy out and held him close. A couple of seconds later, the station wagon sank. In the meantime, while John King was busy rescuing the boy, the child's father was in ever more desperate straits. He still clung to the roof rack, but when it dropped below the surface, there was nothing else to grasp. The man slipped farther down and the water choked his screams. By now, several others had stopped fishing and were doing all they could to help. William McDougall, John King's friend, ran for a chain he knew was in his car. He felt that if he threw the end to the non-swimming Lavallee, the man could grab it and could be pulled to shore. Another fisherman ran to get a rope, and because his car was closer to the boat launch than McDougall's, returned first. The rope was thrown to Lavallee, who by now was trying to stand on the bottom and keep his head above water. "But it was too deep," he explained later to reporter Paul Cantin of the Winnipeg Sun. "I started swallowing water. Everything started to go black. I thought I was dead." But then he heard the screams of onlookers who urged him to grab the rope tossed to him. "They pulled me out and I couldn't do anything," he said. "I just lay there." Robert Fourier was one of the bystanders who helped pull Lavallee to shore. The fifty-six-year-old Grey Goose Bus Lines driver had been fishing with his son, but when the rain began, the two decided to wait it out in their car. That was when they heard Lavallee scream. They ran to assist, and because of their efforts, and the efforts of others, Rene Lavallee survived.

31

STAR OF COURAGE Yet Fourier did more. Once Lavallee was safe, Fourier looked out onto the river and saw John King holding the child he had removed from the car. To his horror, he realized King was now in grave danger as well. "I could see that Mr. King was having trouble keeping himself and the boy up," Fourier explained to the reporter. Fourier set his glasses aside, kicked off his shoes, and swam as quickly as he could to the rapidly tiring John King. Neither the current nor the cold stood in his way, but the effort sapped much of his strength. By the time he reached King, Fourier was exhausted. Yet, he managed to take the little boy King handed to him. At the same time, he marvelled at King's calmness. "He didn't seem scared," Fourier said. "I took the little boy, and I guess the current and the weight of his clothes just pulled him down. I tried to grab him, but I was having enough trouble with myself and the youngster." But John King was fighting for his life — even as Robert Fourier struggled from the water. "In all the excitement of me and the little fellow getting back to shore, it didn't sink in about Mr. King," Fourier explained. No one saw John King drown. There are thick bushes on either side of the boat launch site. It was through these that Rene Lavallee ran as soon as he was able to stand that day. At the time, his son had not been saved, and the father was frantic. He looked out at the river and saw John King desperately trying to hold little Rene's head above the water. Then he saw another man swimming to King, and to his relief, saw the same man coming back with the boy. Now Lavallee helped pull the two to shore — using the same rope that had been tossed to him minutes earlier. In his concern for his son, Lavallee failed to notice King was in trouble. Within seconds of Lavallee's car going into the water, and before his rescue, a spectator ran to phone the Winnipeg emergency number. The caller soon returned to the launch site with information that both surprised and angered everyone there. Neither city police nor firefighters would respond. 32

RED RIVER RESCUE

John King, the quiet hero who gave his life to help a stranger.

Even though the launch site is within the Winnipeg North Perimeter Park, it is, as stated earlier, just outside the city. The call for help was immediately patched through to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Selkirk, about twenty-three kilometres away. In due course, officers from that detachment reached the boat launch. Their arrival however, was too late for John King. RCMP divers located his body about an hour later. On June 5, the Winnipeg Free Press quoted Acting Deputy Fire Chief Burt Graham as saying: "There is a bylaw that says we can't respond outside the city for police or fire calls. "If it was just half a mile past the border we would send a partial response team, but we wouldn't send everything, because that might leave us unable to answer another call here. "Those people outside aren't paying the taxes." 33

STAR OF COURAGE In the aftermath of the incident both Lavallees, father and son, were taken to Seven Oaks General Hospital for treatment. They were soon released. The Mounties in Selkirk retrieved John King's wallet and used information in it to contact family members — one of whom was Edith Whetstone. When she opened her door that morning in Portage la Prairie, her premonition came true. The policeman on the doorstep told her John was dead. He had died a hero.

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CHAPTER THREE

TROUBLE IN CYPRUS

YPRUS, A LAND of legend to many, represents diversity, riches, intrigue, and beauty to others. Unfortunately, it is also a place of partition — physically, geographically, emotionally. And today, as so often in the past, it faces an uncertain future. But first, its history. The island of Cyprus is relatively small, just over two hundred kilometres long and about half as wide. But its location, in the shipping lanes of the eastern Mediterranean, has made it a strategic prize for commerce and conquest for thousands of years. In 2500 BC stooped men were digging the red gold of Cyprus for export to all corners of Europe and Asia. This "gold" was copper, and it is still mined there. Because of its riches and its location, a succession of conquerors and invaders came to the island, made their mark, and then disap-

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STAR OF COURAGE peared into the mists of time. The Egyptians were there. So were the Phoenicians, Romans, Assyrians, Arabs, and Persians. The Crusaders stopped by. So did that romantic figure of myth and legend, Richard the Lionheart. He even married there, in 1191, in a castle that still stands. Later on, the Venetians arrived, then the Turks, and finally Cyprus was ceded to the British in 1878 and by 1925 they had made the island a crown colony. Eventually though, they grew tired of years of guerrilla warfare and granted the island independence in 1960. The new president of the Republic of Cyprus was His Beatitude Archbishop Makarios III. At that time, almost 80 percent of the inhabitants of Cyprus were of Greek descent. Some 19 percent traced their origins to nearby Turkey, while a tiny minority of the population came from elsewhere. For a time, only sporadic news reports about Cyprus made their way into the world press. Both the Turkish and Greek Cypriots were in the new government and each made attempts to make it work. Unfortunately, there was no real understanding and the factions drifted apart. Small irritants grew into crises as Greeks and Turks on the island became ever more wary and distrustful of each other. Seeing that the status quo was totally inadequate for long-term equanimity, President Makarios made several proposals for improvement, but generally resisted giving Turkish Cypriots high-level positions in the unified government. The Turkish side maligned his motives because they saw in them attempts to unify Cyprus with his homeland — Greece. And because they were only a minority on the island, such a union was anathema to them. They resisted. An almost endless series of fights between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots brought the troubles on the island back into world focus. Then, because the feuding became more serious and threatened to become allout war, and one that threatened to spread to the Greek and Turkish mainlands, the United Nations decided to intervene. Troops from several nations were sent to the embittered island to prevent the two sides from destroying each other. One of the countries that agreed to help was Canada. An advance party from here landed at the airport in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, on Sunday, March 15, 1964. Their sojourn on the island was intended to be brief. Few predictions have been more wrong. 36

TROUBLE IN CYPRUS Between 1964 and 1974, several contingents of Canadians and others were based on Cyprus to keep the two sides apart. There was sporadic fighting, and periods of quiet, but no solution. The foreign troops patrolled, took down fortifications on both sides, quelled disturbances, negotiated compromises, and in general kept the peace — although it was often frustrating, short-lived, and dangerous. Still, a kind of fragile calm remained on the island, largely because the combatants were not given the chance to mount large-scale attacks on one another. That all changed in the early morning of Saturday, July 20,1974. "I was waiting in our headquarters in Nicosia for an order about something or other," recalls Alain Forand, a young Canadian captain who was in Cyprus at the time. "While I was there, we heard a lot of commotion outside and people yelling, 'airborne troops, airborne troops!' so we ran out to see what was going on."

Alain Forand as a young captain, his rank when he won the Star of Courage for his heroics under fire in Cyprus.

37

STAR OF COURAGE Above the startled Forand and those with him, the dazzling blue of the Mediterranean sky was darkened by waves of military planes. "There were at least a couple of hundred," Forand says, "and paratroops were jumping out of them. It was really an amazing sight." The thunderous roar of the big engines washed over Nicosia and across the Plain of Mesaoria, then swept towards the Kyrenia mountains north of the capital. The aircraft were Dakotas and Hercules, flying workhorses used by half the countries of the world. On this warm summer morning, they were planes of the Turkish air force. Their arrival over Cyprus was hardly a surprise. A few days earlier, a right-wing coup spearheaded by Greek army officers had forced Archbishop Makarios from power and guerilla leader Nikos Giorgiades Sampson was installed as president. Though only thirty-nine, Sampson was much disliked, even by other Greeks, but was truly loathed and feared by Turkish Cypriots. They knew, instinctively, that with this man in power their position in Cyprus was infinitely more precarious. The government of Turkey warned Greece that unless the leaders of the coup on Cyprus were removed, Turkey would force the issue. The massive air drop was accompanied by selective bombing and amphibious landings. A state of war now existed on the island. As the hundreds of brown parachutes reached the ground, the men under them gathered their gear and began to move. Often they were surrounded by jubilant Turkish Cypriots who cheered the newcomers and tagged after them with tears of happiness in their eyes. At more or less the same time, Turkish fighter-bombers swept low over Nicosia, bombing and strafing known Greek positions. Suddenly, scores of wild fires broke out and people on both sides raced for cover. "Up until then, I don't think we realized how bad things could get," continues Alain Forand. "But as soon as those paratroops came out of their planes, the firing started, all over the place, and we were in it. We Canadians were in the city, the Finns were to our right, and the Swedes were in Famagusta. As soon as the shooting started, the Finns picked up their bags and left, so we Canadians were forced to extend our line of responsibility, and the Brits had to do the same thing from the north. That gave us a lot of problems because we were stretched to the

38

TROUBLE IN CYPRUS limit and our observation posts were a couple of miles in between. It was not the ideal situation, but the order we had was to stay in place and report how everything was." The main objective for the invading Turks was the city of Nicosia, and the highway leading to it from Kyrenia, on the northern coast, where their naval landings took place. Within twenty-four hours the Turks had secured the highway, while the fighting for Nicosia increased in intensity. As Greeks in the capital resisted, more Turkish paratroops landed; augmented by tanks and artillery brought in by ship, the Turks pounded the capital relentlessly. One of the places hit was the Ledra Palace Hotel, a building situated right on the Green Line, the corridor across Nicosia that UN troops patrolled in their attempts to keep the combatants apart. An assortment of Canadian peacekeepers along with Ledra employees, reporters, panic-stricken hotel guests, and Greek soldiers were in the building when the Turks made preparations to shell it. "The Greeks started to use the roof of the hotel as an observation post," Forand explained, "and the UN position was that this was a nono. Naturally the Turks were against it as well, so when they threatened to shoot, I got word to the Canadians to get down into the basement, to a safer area." They did so, and at one point Forand found himself in the wine cellar, preparing for the worst. "I told my guys to grab a bottle of wine because if they were going to be killed, they would at least die happy." All survived. But others were not so lucky. People died in the streets of Nicosia, in shattered houses, factories, cars, stores, and public buildings. Twenty patients perished when a Turkish shell blew up a mental hospital. Children and the elderly suffered most. Press reports mentioned a little boy found crying in the street, so traumatized he was chewing broken glass. Others escaped, among them Archbishop Makarios and foreign tourists who had found themselves in the wrong city at the worst time. The deposed president was led from his residence, through a back garden, and, after his bodyguards commandeered a passing car, lay on the floor in the rear and was rushed to safety. Hundreds of tourists got out the same way — by car. United Nations soldiers escorted a long

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STAR OF COURAGE convoy of automobiles away from the gunfire to a British base on the south coast. And the fighting continued, hour after hour, with Canadian peacekeepers often in the middle of it. "We had no armoured vehicles — only three-tons and jeeps — all painted white," said Forand. The vehicles available offered little protection. "When we started to get some wounded people, particularly in my group because we were a recce [reconnaissance] platoon, we asked the Brits for a couple of Ferrets — armoured scout cars. These gave us some protection and we continued patrolling, trying to ease the fighting. I don't think we were that successful though," he added. But Canada's peacekeepers helped in many ways, often risking their lives to assist Cypriot civilians on both sides, as well as foreign diplomats, reporters, tourists, and others. Then, on July 23, three days after the invasion, Canadians had to help their own colleagues who were caught in a nasty firefight that came about in an unexpected way. By the time it was over, two Canadians were wounded, others were heroes, and our level of engagement in Cyprus had reached a new plateau. Soon after the invasion, several Canadians had been caught in crossfire between the Greeks and Turks, and a handful of observation posts had to be abandoned. Wolseley Barracks, a Canadian location close by the Ledra Palace Hotel, was also shelled. So was Camp Kronborg, near the airport at Nicosia, where some ninety Canadians were stationed. Alain Forand remembers that day. "We were patrolling in the two Ferrets at the time," he said, "and we got a call from our headquarters saying to go immediately to Camp Kronborg because of mortars that were hitting the place. At that time, we had a Red Cross infirmary there, a small building, and the radio call said the infirmary was on fire. "We were to help protect our people so they could get a chance to fight the fire, but by the time we were able to get there, the infirmary had burned to the ground. However, in order for us to position ourselves, we had to go to one end of the camp and turn around. The whole place was only 200 to 250 metres long and about 200 wide. At the time, it was surrounded by Turks on its north and west sides and Greeks on the east and south.

40

TROUBLE IN CYPRUS "As I was turning, I noticed a corporal running, so I stopped him and asked what was the matter. He yelled, 'My officer and another man have been shot. I'm going for help.'" Forand immediately completed his turn and told the men, "I'll see what it is."A short while earlier, as the combatants were shelling each other, the Turks had got themselves into a dilemma more serious than anticipated. "They launched an attack on the Greek position, and obviously it didn't work," said Forand. "When the Greeks counterattacked, the Turks came into a Canadian observation post, looking for protection." In all, fourteen Turks crowded into the Canadian post, running from the pursuing Greeks. The senior Canadian they met, Captain Normand Blaquiere, announced the visitors had to leave. He pointed out that the post was under United Nations control and if they stayed, they would have to surrender their weapons. The Turks refused to do so, but agreed to go if they received an escort back to their own positions. In order to bring an end to the matter, Blaquiere quickly found a white flag, held it above his head, and led them out. Private Michel Plouffe accompanied the group.

Michel Plouffe at parachute training course, not long before he won the Star of Courage in Cyprus.

41

STAR OF COURAGE The first part of the operation went well. Using a bullhorn, Blaquiere informed the Greeks what he was doing. There was no firing. The contingent moved slowly forward, then proceeded down a slight slope into swampy lowland that bordered the Pedhieos River. As they were sloshing through the stream, the lull in firing ended. From somewhere back in Greek Cypriot territory came the sudden sound of a machine gun, and in seconds, four young Turkish soldiers were dead. As well, the withering fusillade cut down Normand Blaquiere. Bullets burned into both his legs; he took a step, stumbled, then fell awkwardly onto his back, half in and half out of the shallow stream. Blood from his wounds gushed into the water and mingled with that from the dead around him. When he realized Blaquiere was hurt, Plouffe bounded forward and threw himself headlong over his captain, hoping to protect the officer from further harm. Plouffe was a big man, something over ninety kilograms. Blaquiere was lean, wiry, and considerably lighter, and he was almost completely shielded by the private's bulk. A bullet possibly intended for Captain Blaquiere went through the private's helmet and then tore his jaw apart, but he continued to shelter his fallen leader. The corporal that Alain Forand found running had been seeking aid for both Canadians. "When I got there," Forand recalls, "I got out of the scout car and went to where I could see Blaquiere lying in the water near the edge of the river. Plouffe was protecting him, but there was still some firing." As soon as he sized up the situation, Forand asked the men in the observation post if they had any weapons. When they told him they had a .50-calibre machine gun, he told them to ready it for action, that he was going to try to get the wounded men to safety. He also ordered that if anyone started shooting at him as he did so, they were to be fired upon. Unknowingly, it was with this command that Captain Alain Forand initiated the first Canadian return of hostile fire since the Korean War. The two scout cars were also positioned so that weapons on each could be used if necessary. Years later, Forand was asked if he felt afraid as he went to help the wounded men. "No," he replied. "I just knew I had to get to them. They were in a hell of a spot, and they needed help. It happened 42

TROUBLE IN CYPRUS quickly of course, so there was no time to be afraid. Later perhaps, but not then." As soon as the .50 calibre was in place, Captain Forand crouched down, and ran as quickly as he dared down the slope towards the men lying in the river. He had only gone a couple of steps when the whine of bullets passed by his head. "Fire! Fire! Fire!" he yelled, and the men covering him began to shoot. "The guys were just waiting for this," laughs Forand today, downplaying the seriousness of the situation, "and they really opened up. I just kept running. "The river was about twenty to twenty-five feet [six to seven metres] wide, and because it was July, there were only six inches [fifteen centimetres] or so of water. Blaquiere was half in the water when I got there and Plouffe was still on top of him, protecting him. I more or less slid down into the stream, beside the two. Then I pulled Plouffe over so I could figure out how to get Blaquiere out. He was hurting a lot, and even though he recognized me, he was not there all the time." Slowly, making sure he kept down as much as possible, Forand got his arm across Blaquiere's chest, and crawling backwards, began to drag the wounded officer over the rocks and up onto the riverbank. All the while, bullets were whining around him, but the incessant pounding of the .50 calibre was reassuring. Hauling Blaquiere was made more difficult because of his physical state. He was moaning with severe pain, his legs were useless, and each time Blaquiere passed out, Forand had to struggle with his dead weight. Crawling over the rocks in the river and then up the bank took every ounce of strength Forand had. Furthermore, the cruel July sun that held the temperature in the mid-thirties Celsius further sapped his energy. Yet somehow, he finally managed to drag the wounded peacekeeper out of the line of Greek fire. Other Canadians grabbed the man while Forand crawled back for Plouffe. "That guy was so heavy," Forand explained, "that I could hardly move him." When they realized the difficulty Captain Forand was having with Plouffe, a handful of other soldiers came to assist. Both wounded men survived. 43

STAR OF COURAGE

Michel Plouffe and the helmet he was wearing when he was shot in the head protecting a senior officer in Cyprus.

Later on, the prestigious Star of Courage was given to Michel Plouffe for his protection of the fallen Blaquiere, and to Forand for his selfless courage in the rescue of both the wounded men. Today, Forand downplays his efforts in the incident and adamantly refuses to call himself a hero. Instead, he deflects questions by recalling the way Plouffe reacted afterwards. "He was a real character and a great guy. He kept joking about the whole thing, and after we got him out, he was actually laughing. Then he showed me that he still had the bullet that hit him in his mouth. 'You crazy ass,' I told him." Canadians remained in Cyprus for several years after the 1974 upheaval — but despite their best efforts, and the loss of many lives, neither they nor anyone else ever succeeded in bringing the Greeks and the Turks on the island together. Cyprus is still divided, and the present-day leaders still refuse to meet face to face at the UN. As for Michel Plouffe, he spent several years in the military before leaving to work as a civilian. Today he is employed by Bell Helicopter Textron. Blaquiere 44

TROUBLE IN CYPRUS

Major-General A.R. Forand shortly before his retirement from the Canadian Forces.

and Forand were career soldiers — the former became a major and the latter a major-general. Both are now out of uniform.

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CHAPTER FOUR

HELL AT SEA

STORM AT sea is worrisome. A storm on the North Atlantic in winter is terrifying. Shards of sleet, shrieking wind, and ragged clouds that touch the ocean can turn day into night and night into hell. Driving snow, slob ice, and towering waves each more powerful than the engine of a train pound anything and everything they encounter. Wind-driven spray is flung from wave crests, and wave crests are everywhere. Surging mountains of rolling water collide, come apart, reform, and collide again. The grey-black horizon is close at hand, but that horizon is just more water — dark, cold, and deadly. Such conditions were encountered on the Atlantic by a Canadian ship in January 1980. On the fourth night of that month, the freighter Bill Crosbie, heavily laden with structural steel, was lurching east-

A

STAR OF COURAGE wards towards Ireland. Progress was slow, and the waves tossed the ship like a toy. One minute the bow of the vessel would plough into a wall of water so high it dwarfed the boat; the next minute, the whine of the screws above a wave crest sent shivers down the length of the ship. Then the Bill Crosbie would right itself and go on — or attempt to go on. Until one wave was too high. The freighter hit the wall of water, shuddered, and as its bow plunged much deeper than before, it seemed to swing to the right. This motion was followed by an ominous tearing rumble below decks, as the cargo of steel slid to the left. Almost instantly, the vessel listed to port — and the ocean hurled itself into the ship. The Bill Crosbie was in serious trouble. There were seventeen people on board, most of them seasoned sailors from Newfoundland. Some could swim, but being able to do so no longer mattered. They were all sure they would die. When the cargo shifted, the ship seemed mortally wounded. Its crew feared as much; they knew the Bill Crosbie and they understood the ship's limits. It had just reached them. Not long before, hundreds of kilometres up the St. Lawrence River from the ocean, the Bill Crosbie had been tied to a pier in the port of Montreal. There the red-painted, 1,600-ton freighter was loaded and Chimo Shipping Ltd., its owners, readied the ship for the crossing to Ireland. When all was in place, the fuel bunkers full, and the lockers bulging with provisions, the ship eased away from the dock. The long trek down the St. Lawrence began. There was some ice on the river, and in places progress was slow. Nevertheless, by the time the Bill Crosbie got to the Gulf of the St. Lawrence and had made a stop in Halifax, expectations for a successful ocean crossing were good. Initially, the weather ahead seemed non-threatening. North Atlantic climatic conditions can change quickly. When the ship was beyond the shallow Grand Banks, and the equally shallow Flemish Cap, wind and water action actually increased. The Bill Crosbie plunged ahead, but the weight of its cargo and the increasing rough-

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HELL AT SEA ness of the sea slowed the ship considerably. Soon it was sailing into the teeth of a gale. The shift in cargo meant the Bill Crosbie could never right itself, even if the sea turned calm. When the rough seas continued, the radio operator, on the captain's command, broadcast a call for help. The terse, nononsense dispatch gave the ship's name, location, crew complement and a description of the freighter's state. In essence, it said the ship was in danger of sinking. The plea was heard by other vessels in the general area and also by the Rescue Co-ordination Centre (RCC) in Halifax. While the RCC began to immediately monitor the situation on a continuing basis, the nearest ship able to respond was the Harmonious, a Panamanian-registered freighter that took on fourteen of the endangered crew. Three stayed behind in the hope of riding out the weather. Because the owners of the Bill Crosbie felt the ship was too valuable to abandon, they made arrangements for an ocean-going tug, the Hirtenturm, to go and attach a line to the freighter. The intent was to tow the Bill Crosbie to the nearest harbour. In this case, the only port considered was St. John's, Newfoundland, although it was about a thousand kilometres away. The Hirtenturm was a German-owned tugboat that worked under charter, servicing oil rigs in the Atlantic. The ocean tug was a workhorse, and powerful enough to tow almost anything afloat. It was rather squat, ugly, and about as far from being a passenger liner as could be imagined. Nevertheless, it was able to accept the transfer of the fourteen Bill Crosbie crew from the ship that had temporarily rescued them. Now, once these men were on board, a kilometre-long towline was affixed to the Bill Crosbie. The trip to land was about to begin. Initially, the operation went as planned. The screws of the tug knifed into the sea water; the long cable gradually became taut, and the Bill Crosbie eased ahead. Slowly at first, ever so slowly, the big ship and the three men on it got under way. The list to port was as pronounced as ever, but the seas were not running as high. For a time. Then the wild winds came on again, and the swirling snow and sleet often made it impossible for those on the tug to see the Bill

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STAR OF COURAGE Crosbie at all. When the weather worsened even more, and the freighter disappeared, the line was held tight enough to do little more than hold the ship's head into the seas. The gale was not localized, nor was it only on the ocean. All four Atlantic provinces were battered incessantly. Roads often became impassible, schools were closed, shops shut early. Blinding whiteouts were everywhere, and cars that moved, moved slowly. Power lines snapped, and thousands of homes soon became not only dark, but cold as well. Snowmobiles had to be used to bring aid to the infirm, the isolated, and the stranded. Workers who were deemed non-essential in their jobs stayed home. To the south, 160 kilometres off the coast of Virginia, a 140-metre container barge, also under tow, snapped its tether line and slammed into the tug that was hauling it. The tug, owned by the Union Carbide company, lost its steering in the impact and sustained such severe damage to the hull that it had to be abandoned. The eight crewmen spent several hours in a life raft before an American Coast Guard helicopter came to their rescue. Closer to the Bill Crosbie, other ships coped with the weather, but found their progress slower than usual. They also reported that the storm was increasing in severity. The three men still on board the Bill Crosbie readily concurred. As the hours passed from day into night, and then into day again, they held on, hoped for improvement, and despaired of its coming. The ship was taken in tow on January 5. By the following afternoon, a Sunday, the weather was much worse, and all through the black hours before the Monday dawn, the three men wondered why they had decided to stay. They were frightened, lonely, and more certain than ever that their ship was doomed. They wanted off. The decision to attempt a rescue of the men was not made in haste. Because the seas were running so high, it was too dangerous for the Hirtenturm to come alongside the freighter. The pounding seas could smash the vessels together, endangering both. As well, the chances of survival in a lifeboat were limited. The only hope for the three men seemed to lie in an air rescue. "Somebody at RCC made the decision that we should try to get the guys off," recalls Rudy Preus, at the time a Search and Rescue helicopter 50

HELL AT SEA

Captain Rudy Preus was at the controls of the Labrador helicopter that rescued three men from the Bill Crosbie. He is pictured here in front of a similar aircraft.

pilot based at Gander, Newfoundland. "There was communication with the ship and things were not good out there. I had a fair amount of experience on the Lab [Labrador helicopter] at that time, and I had done my share of sea rescues, but the main concerns here were weather and distance. We knew we would have to refuel somewhere, even if the weather co-operated." At the time, Captain Preus had 3,300 hours of flying time in the Lab. If he couldn't pull off the mission, no one could. The Search and Rescue (SAR) facility at Gander is a busy one. Every year, planes and people from the military base there are involved in many life-saving operations on land, on the coastal waters, and often far out at sea. The emergency on the Bill Crosbie was about to become another one and Labrador helicopter number 305 would be the main aircraft used. This particular chopper had been built in 1963 and was one of eighteen that came on stream for search-and-rescue use shortly thereafter. It was a big, twin-engined machine that weighed almost 51

STAR OF COURAGE 9,900 kilograms. Capable of carrying eighteen passengers, the Lab range was close to a thousand kilometres. Number 305 had an enviable flight record at that time, and had been instrumental in several noteworthy operations. On April 27, 1974, for instance, it became the first land-based helicopter in the world to touch down at the North Pole. But now, the concern was for three sailors on a ship in distress. In addition to Captain Preus, those who would fly to the Bill Crosbie were co-pilot Chuck Munroe, Sergeant Doug Gardner, the flight engineer, and two Search and Rescue technicians, or SAR Techs. They were Jerry Boucher and Dave Maloley. Of the two, Boucher was the senior. While the ground crew was readying the Lab at Gander, another search plane was taking off from a base at Summerside, Prince Edward

Search and Rescue Technician Dave Maloley endured frightful conditions during his rescue of three stricken sailors from the deck of the freighter Bill Crosbie.

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HELL AT SEA Island. The second aircraft — a fixed-wing, twin-engined Buffalo — was faster and had a greater range than the helicopter. It would reach the ship in distress much faster than the slower Labrador. Once the Bill Crosbie was located, the six-man crew of the Buffalo would assess the situation, establish radio contact with the ship, and when it came time, vector, or direct, the helicopter in its mission. "Shortly before we left Gander," SAR Tech Boucher explained, "we had a briefing from Captain Preus, and he told us where we were going and what would be required. The one thing that would be different on this trip would be a refuelling stop at an oil rig. This procedure is fairly common today, but in 1980 it wasn't. There were not a lot of oil rigs out there then, and generally the only helicopters that landed on them were used by the oil companies." "We left in the morning," adds Dave Maloley, "and we flew directly from Gander to the rig. I remember that the weather going out was no hell. There were lots of snow squalls, and a fair amount of icing as well. It also seemed to take quite a while to get there. "I remember looking out at the sea, particularly when we first spotted the rig, and the landing pad down there looked awfully tiny in this great big ocean. I know I was glad at the time that Rudy was up front. He had lots of experience, and in my opinion, was one of the best pilots we had. I knew he had landed on some pretty weird structures, ships and so on, but I am not sure if he had landed on an oil rig before." "Yes I had," Rudy Preus told me, "so I had a good idea of what to expect. I knew this would be a hot refuel, and that we would not be shutting our engine down." A hot refuel of a helicopter is a dangerous undertaking at the best of times, and was even more so on the Labrador. The machine has gravity feed, unlike the pressure refuelling used by the oil-rig-servicing helicopters. Without the pressure component, the tanks only fill as fast as the fuel runs into them. The element of danger is compounded because the turning of the rotors can create static electricity, and one spark amid the gasoline fumes could cause a flash fire. No wonder no one relaxes during a hot refuel. Oil-rig firefighters are on alert during the entire operation.

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STAR OF COURAGE The twenty-five-minute refuelling stop not only made it possible for the helicopter to continue, but it also made the trip more comfortable for the men on board. "We had a chance to stretch our legs for a minute," Rudy Preus says, "but that was not all. We each had a chance to run to the washroom. That was really welcome," he laughs. Then, the fuel tanks full, Preus eased the big chopper off the rig and flew east into a snowstorm. The next step would be to locate the ship. "That was not really a problem," Preus continues, "because the Buffalo was there for top cover. Chuck [Munroe] was in contact with them as we came over the ship and I did the flying there." At various times on the way out and back, the pilots had alternated at the controls. "When we got to the ship, we did not have a lot of time to get the guys off, because there was only so much fuel," Dave Maloley recalls. "If we ran into problems hoisting, and used up more time than we should have, then the trip back to the rig could have been a bit tense. Particularly if we had weather problems. "We flew around the boat, and all of us had some input into the best way to do the job. Finally, there was a quick briefing and I said I would go down. The flight engineer would operate the cable, and Jerry would tell him how far to put it down, when to pull it up, that sort of thing. "I don't remember now why I went down and not Jerry, although the team leader makes the decisions and that's that. It was important to have him in the helicopter. I was young and probably not as prone to consider the number of things that could go wrong. Only one guy could really go on a rescue like this, and I know if I had been team leader, and I had a young fellow there who was ready to go down and I didn't think he could handle it, I would have gone. But Jerry had confidence in me, I guess. More important though, it is always a good idea to have an experienced person in the helicopter in case anything goes wrong. Anyway, I went." The hoisting operation on the Labrador that day involved stringing a pencil-thin steel cable down from the right front door of the helicopter. The cable ran through a pulley arrangement above the door,

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HELL AT SEA and then passed down inside the plane to where it was attached to a hoisting drum. The device was powered electrically. Maloley donned a hoisting harness, generally called a "horse collar," hooked himself to the cable, and stepped out the door. The flight engineer paid out the line. Down below, the ocean storm was pounding the ship unmercifully. Huge rollers crashed across the bow, and towering waves and spray occasionally obliterated about half the vessel. The Bill Crosbie lurched from trough to crest, and the port side was so low, water was just below the gunwales. A biting wind drove the January snow sideways and the wave crests froze and turned the ship's decks into skating rinks. On one of those decks, aft of the funnel, one and sometimes two or three of the men awaiting rescue stood hunched over, holding on for dear life, watching as the helicopter moved overhead. At times, the chopper was very close to the ship; a few seconds later, it was ninety metres away. The combination of wind and water accounted for both. When the ship was heaved to the crest of a twelve-metre wave, the chopper was close. When the boat slid into a trough, the plane was much higher. To make matters worse, the shrieking wind tossed the Lab all over the sky, swung it from side to side, drove it backwards one minute; the next made it lurch ahead. All the while, Rudy Preus fought the elements and did his best to stay in place so that the man on the wire could do his job. "It was tough to keep the helicopter steady," he told me. "One minute we were 30 feet [9 metres] over the ocean. A few seconds later we were 120 [36.5 metres]. There was a slight calm to the lee of the ship, but not much. The wind and snow made the job difficult at times, and we were there for about an hour." While the thirty-eight-year-old officer used every skill he had to control his aircraft, each member of his crew struggled to do the job for which he had been trained. Chuck Munroe was in radio contact with the ship, advising the men where to position themselves for rescue, checking on their physical situation, then telling them how they would be rescued. Sergeant Gardner stood in the open doorway of the helicopter, operating the hoist. Jerry Boucher held on with one hand,

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STAR OF COURAGE leaned as far as he could out the door and told the flight engineer when to lift or lower the man on the hoist. Both Boucher and Gardner were clipped to cables in case they were tossed out the door. And the man outside? "As soon as the wind caught me, I started to swing from side to side ," Dave Maloley explained. "It was impossible to stop it. I would be away out from the helicopter on the right, and then I'd swing down underneath it to the left side. It was hard on the pilot because he had to try to keep the plane steady, and I was all over." In addition to the swinging motion Maloley was enduring, the biting sea spray cut into his face, obscured his vision, and made it more difficult for him to tell exactly where he was. Then he started spinning, like a top on a table, faster and faster, over one side of the Bill Crosbie, then the other; then back again. But this motion came to a sudden and unexpected end. Maloley slammed into the ship's funnel, then lurched backwards and tumbled into the live electrical feed to the radio antenna. The crash against the funnel injured his right leg; the contact with the power line almost electrocuted him. "The antenna ran from the smokestack back to the aft of the ship," he said. "As I came down close to the funnel, I was spinning around and I saw the antenna. The next thing I knew I hit it and got knocked unconscious." The young SAR Tech hung limp, like a rag doll. Up in the helicopter, his partner stared in disbelief. "There's something the matter with Dave," he yelled. "Pull him up! Pull him up! Now!" Boucher leaned even farther out the door, as if trying to reach down to grab Maloley. Gardner switched the hoist into the "up" position, and the cable began to wrap onto the winch drum. Fortunately, Maloley recovered quickly. "Are you all right? Dave, are you all right?" Boucher bellowed, as his colleague came up to the level of the helicopter floor. "Yea, I guess so," Maloley yelled over the wind and the roar of the chopper rotors. "Yea, I'm okay, but I think I just got electrocuted. Tell them to chop down that goddamned antenna." 56

HELL AT SEA Maloley's request was radioed to the ship, and pretty soon one of the men on it appeared with an axe. A couple of minutes later the cockpit radio link with the ship went dead. From that point on, the rescue operation would have to be done using hand signals. Maloley described what happened next: "At the time, we were just trying out a thing called a sky genie, where a rope is tossed down to somebody below and they are supposed to pull it in to them. So I was going back down and swinging above the ship; the guys on it saw the rope, and I figured they would just grab it and haul me in the rest of the way. "But instead of doing that, they tied the rope to the ship. That's probably the worst thing they could have done. Now you're trapped. You're screwed! "The engineer is saying, cHoly shit!' He can't let the cable out fast enough because the ship is rolling and the pilot can't bring the helicopter down quick enough either. It meant I couldn't go up or down, and the helicopter is tied to the ship. "I kept waving at these guys and hollering: cPull me in! Pull me in!' Now I do have a cutaway, where I can cut the rope, but if I did, just trying to get onto the ship would have been almost impossible. "Well, one fellow on the boat finally figured out what I wanted and he grabbed the rope and started pulling and pulling. Jerry was watching all the time, and he saw that I got more cable. Finally, I got close to the rail and the sailors pulled me in onto the deck." As soon as he got his footing, Maloley told the men just how the operation would work, and what he wanted them to do. Then he signalled to Boucher to send down a wire mesh rescue basket called a Billy Pugh. Boucher did. "So I threw two of the guys into the Billy Pugh, and away they went. It took a while, but I watched Jerry and the engineer hauling them in. They stowed the basket and got ready to send the horse collar down for the one guy and me. This was the first mate. The captain was already off the ship. Anyway, the guy with me had a bag with him, and a briefcase with the ship's papers that he had to take. "When the collar started to come down, the ship was rolling so much I knew I needed more cable, so they let more out. When I got it, I

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STAR OF COURAGE hooked both of us on and signalled to Jerry that we were ready to go. But nothing was happening. All the while, the two of us are down there sliding all over the damned deck, waiting for the line to tighten, and getting mad. "Still nothing. "I signalled again, but as I did, I could see Jerry pointing behind me. That's when I realized the extra cable I needed had got hooked around some equipment, right at the back of the ship. So now the helicopter is tied to the ship again, and it's rolling terribly. "So I told the guy to stay where he was while I went back to release the cable." The trip to the stern was one Maloley says he will never forget. "The damned deck was covered with ice, and you couldn't get your footing. Then the waves were washing over the side, and over me, so I was soaked, and I found it hard to hold on. But I knew I had to unhook the cable or we couldn't get hoisted. As I went back, I'd hold the railing, then grab the next part of it, and so on. Then, when I finally got to the back, to the cable, I noticed that it was badly frayed, and there were these broken strands on it. About this time, I was wondering what in hell else could go wrong. I remember being wet, and cold, and ticked off. "When I finally got back to the guy, I was faced with another decision. If I sent him up alone and the cable broke, I knew I would have to go after him into the sea. If we both went up at the same time and it broke, then at least we would be in the ocean together. If that happened, I knew the guys in the Buffalo would drop a raft to us. So I decided we would go together. "I weighed about 140 pounds [63 kilograms] then, and the guy and the suitcase were a lot heavier, so I knew the cable might snap, but I decided to hook us on anyway. I remember glancing up as I did so, and Jerry was pointing to the front, indicating that I should hurry up because we were short of gas, that the captain wanted to get going. "There was a real shortage of fuel, but we were finally ready. I told the guy: 'We're going for a ride, and if we end up in the water, don't worry. I'll take care of you.' I knew if we didn't get up then, using more time would only jeopardize the entire crew. 58

HELL AT SEA "So I signalled to Jerry. Then we were over the side of the ship and in the air and on the way up. Jerry told the captain to pull away from the ship. They got us inside okay" But the flight to land was still to come. Rudy Preus swung the helicopter around and was under way before the hoisting door was even closed. At the same time, Chuck Munroe was doing a recalculation of the on-board fuel supply, and realized just how short they were. This trip was bound to be nerveracking, particularly if the headwinds were strong. Fortunately, the winds abated somewhat, but the snow never really let up. Then there was an icing problem, so the two pilots had to decide how best to cope with that. "It was still early January," recalls Maloley, "so it got dark early. And because of the icing, the guys up front decided to go higher and see if that would help. It did, I guess, but at one point we were told we might have to throw stuff out to lighten the load to save gas. There were now eight of us on board instead of five. We could have chucked equipment, but in the end, we didn't have to. We found the rig on the way back, got some gas, then flew to St. John's for the night." As he walked away from the helicopter, Dave Maloley was limping. Something about colliding with the smokestack of a ship. There are at least four postscripts to this story: two pleasant, one unexpected, and one tragic. On the lighter side, Rudy Preus remembers a television crew filming the arrival in Newfoundland. Later on, in the hotel where they stayed overnight, he and his crew watched the footage. "I couldn't get over how old I looked," he chuckles. "And when my guys all agreed that I did look old, I felt even worse. We had some laughs about that." The second good thing to come from the matter, apart from the saving of three good men, was that Dave Maloley was awarded the Star of Courage for his role in the rescue. He received the medal a few months later in Ottawa. The unexpected result was bizarre. The tug Hirtenturm actually succeeded in towing the Bill Crosbie to St. John's. The freighter was manoeuvred into the harbour and tied up alongside Pier 16, close to downtown.

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Former SAR Tech Dave Maloley is pictured at his home today. He regards the mission to the endangered ship one of the most unforgettable he has experienced.

Then, as if the saga it had been a part of had been too much, a few hours after being tied up, the ship keeled over and sank in ten metres of water. It was eventually refloated, but ultimately towed back to sea and scuttled. The ship was not worth saving. The remaining note concerns the helicopter used for the rescue. Labrador number 305 flew for several years after the Bill Crosbie incident. However, number 305 came to an end on October 2, 1998, when an engine fire caused the chopper to crash in a forested area not far from Marsoui, Quebec. Six young men died when number 305 went down.

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CHAPTER FIVE

HOSTAGES AT GUNPOINT

ROUND MID-MORNING ON January 25, 1978, two young drinking buddies met on a street in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. They had not seen each other in a while, so not surprisingly perhaps, their thoughts turned quickly to booze. In fact, even as he greeted Ed Gallant, twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gaudet suggested a drink. Gallant liked the idea. After getting into the green Maverick that Gaudet was driving, the pair looked up a local bootlegger. They bought three bottles of wine, then drove around town, drinking, telling tall tales, luxuriating in the warm glow from the grape. A while later, Gaudet decided that some marijuana might further cement their fellowship. They obtained eighty-five grams of the drug

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STAR OF COURAGE at the Broken Cues Pool Hall, then decided to go to Summerside, ordinarily an hour's drive west of the provincial capital. It was now almost noon. As he drove, Gaudet drank with Gallant, shared several of the ten joints the latter rolled, and managed, for a time, to keep the car on the road. Gaudet was still behind the wheel when the car ran into a ditch as they neared their destination. A light rain had fallen and the road was slick, but the weather played no role in the incident. The Maverick remained upright, but its two right wheels became mired in mud. Later, when asked about the condition of the men in the vehicle, towtruck driver Phillip Doucette said the driver of the car did not appear to be drunk, but his companion certainly was. It was after 3 p.m. by the time the car was back on the road. For the next hour, one or both of the pair did little more than make nuisances of themselves wherever they went. This was particularly so at a youth club on Notre Dame Street in Summerside. There, a sock hop was under way when Gaudet arrived. By this time, he was staggering somewhat, his eyes were bloodshot, and volunteers running the event smelt alcohol on him. He spoke to some children before disappearing into the basement. A woman working at the club followed him, and because she was sure he had been drinking, kicked him out. He didn't say anything to her, but he did leave. There is no record of Gallant being in this establishment, although he was certainly with Gaudet at the next place they stopped. Sadly, this visit would end in tragedy. Harold Arsenault was a quiet, unassuming, friendly man who resided at and ran a small grocery store and gun shop at 16 Duke Street in Summerside, a stone's throw from downtown. A long-time resident at this address, he had taken over the family business some twenty-five years earlier. During the Second World War he had been in the Canadian army, leaving when hostilities ceased, as an officer. He was an excellent carpenter, and for some years after the war had his own construction business. By 1978, however, most who knew him in town knew him as the man in the grocery/sporting goods store. But there was more to seventy-year-old Harold Arsenault. He loved sports, was an avid skeet shooter, and until his back began to 62

HOSTAGES AT GUNPOINT trouble him, had been keenly involved in physical fitness. He was proud of his physique and still exercised as much as he could. He was a firm, fair man, but he had little patience for fools. For this reason, when Freddie Gaudet and Ed Gallant arrived and started giving him trouble, he objected. Shortly after he was booted out of the youth club, Gaudet had driven to Arsenault's store, ostensibly to buy soft drinks. Once inside the shop, however, he helped himself to ice cream while the owner was waiting on some children. Gallant stood to one side. As soon as the youngsters had gone, Arsenault turned to Gaudet and asked him if he intended to pay for the ice cream. Much later, Ed Gallant would describe what happened next. Harold Arsenault's question was a simple one, but it set in motion a series of unexpected and terrible consequences that would rock the town to its core. Even today, there are those in Summerside who do not want to talk about what happened that winter afternoon so long ago. As Gallant would explain, his friend apparently became enraged at Arsenault's question. Gaudet yelled at him, taunted him, then gave the storekeeper a strong push. Arsenault resented the insolence, pushed back against the much younger man, and ordered him out of the store. When Gaudet refused to leave, the store owner turned and reached for a phone. Gallant was sure the man intended to call the police. Because he still had some marijuana in his pocket, Gallant decided it was time to depart. He urged his friend to leave, but to no avail. When Gallant ran out of the store, he says, Gaudet was standing by a pop cooler, holding his ground. What happened next is far from clear. The pushing match between Arsenault and Gaudet probably continued, although the extent of the struggle is merely conjecture. At some point, however, the shopkeeper suffered a blow to the back of his head and may or may not have fallen as a result of it. What is certain, is that Freddie Gaudet got his hands on a 12-gauge shotgun owned by Arsenault, and with it, shot the storekeeper in the head. Harold Arsenault died instantly. Later, pathologist Bela A. Borsos revealed that

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STAR OF COURAGE

The house where Harold Arsenault was murdered. The gun shop was in the addition at the front.

the gun was fired from a point very close to Arsenault. Several powder burns from the blast were found on his face. Gaudet ran. The green Maverick was parked only a few steps from the front of the store. Gaudet dove into the vehicle, tramped the accelerator, and tore away from the parking lot before he had even closed the driver's door. He clipped a parked car as he left but didn't slow down. A local man named Kevin Fitzpatrick saw Gaudet leave Arsenault's, then watched with a mixture of interest and alarm as the car roared away, headed east on nearby Market Street, and disappeared. Fitzpatrick went into Arsenault's store, where he found the owner face down in a pool of blood. The horror of the discovery took a few seconds to register. Then Fitzpatrick ran for help next door to a woodworking mill. There he encountered Peter Poirier and the owner, Gerard Richard. All three accompanied Fitzpatrick back to Arsenault's. A minute or so later Poirier called the police. "I was in a cruiser downtown when the call came in," explained Harold Durant, one of the first police officers to respond. "All we got was that there was a gentleman lying behind the counter who might

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HOSTAGES AT GUNPOINT have had a heart attack. Well, it was a lot more than that. He was lying face down, his glasses shot into his face, lying in a pool of blood about four feet around him. There was also a hole from a shotgun blast in the wall." Durant and the officer who was with him did a quick search of the shop, and the house to which it was attached. At first they thought the killer might still be there. As soon as they were sure no one was, they called the Coroner's Office and set about protecting the crime scene. "Then we got a call saying someone had just fired a gun at Smallman's store." Durant responded while the other officer remained at Arsenault's. Fred Gaudet had moved quickly, but not far. His car was seen next, empty, and its driver's door still open, behind Smallman's clothing store, a business that fronted on Water Street, Summerside's main thoroughfare. No one knew why he went to Smallman's, but while he didn't stay long, he still frightened a lot of people there. He also carried the murder weapon into the place. The clothing store was in a stately building, well built out of red brick, that was a landmark in Summerside. "At one time they used to sell toys, radios, furniture and everything else, recalls retired deputy police chief Elmer Matheson, "but by the time of the incident involving Freddie Gaudet, the store sold mainly clothing. There were three floors, with a lunch counter at the rear of the main one. The easiest way to get to it was by the back door and up the stairs. The counter was right there, just beside an elevator that serviced all three floors. I knew the place well, and I often went there for lunch." Gaudet pounded up the rear stairs, half concealed the gun under the parka he wore, and ignored two young women who were on their way down the same stairs. They were mystified by what they had just seen, and after getting into their car, sat trying to decide what to do. No more than four minutes later, the man they had just seen entering the store dashed out of it, looked around momentarily, then ran eastward behind the buildings of the main business block. He never went near the green car with the open door. Nor was he carrying the gun.

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STAR OF COURAGE

The first hostage taking was in this block of buildings in downtown Summerside, Prince Edward Island.

"I was about twenty-one at the time," recalls Debbie Foley, whose name in 1978 was Debbie Mclnnis. "I had been working as a waitress at Smallman's for several months, so I was quite familiar with the lunch counter there. I'll never forget the day that guy came in, but I didn't notice the gun at first." Debbie Mclnnis was and is an outgoing, pleasant, friendly woman whose desire to please is obvious, even to a stranger. Born in Toronto, but raised in Prince Edward Island, she has never been afraid of work, and in life, has been a survivor. Intelligent, athletic, and the possessing a strong faith in God, she was perhaps the ideal person to confront Freddie Gaudet that afternoon. "The day started like any other," she told me. "I got up, went to work, waited on my customers, the whole bit. Then, about three minutes to the five o'clock closing time, those of us who worked in that area of the store were ready to leave. The lady who operated the elevator beside the lunch counter had already gone to get her coat. "That was when this guy came in. He came up the back stairs and just stood there, staring at the back wall of the lunch counter, totally expressionless. His eyes were glazed and he was basically non-reactive. When my supervisor asked if she could help him, or if he wanted anything, he never acknowledged her. He never looked at her. It was as if he was in another time zone. 66

HOSTAGES AT GUNPOINT "I looked at my supervisor and rolled my eyes, as if to say: 'The guy's out of it.' Then I kind of wondered if he had seen me do it, because when I looked back at him, I was looking down the barrel of the shotgun. "It was so quick. I had just looked at her, rolled my eyes, and then looked back and the gun was aimed at us. We were all petrified. Then one of the girls, Tina, went to run, but he raised the gun and aimed it at her. At that time he said: 1 have used this before and I'll use it again if I have to,' or something to that effect. Everybody heard it. Tina stopped dead still; she was so frightened. You could see her physically shake as she walked back towards him. She's a very small person to begin with, but her steps were like baby steps. She could have died of fright." Then Gaudet decided he wanted to go to the top floor of the store, so he ordered four female employees into the elevator. Fortunately, they went nowhere. The Smallman's elevator was tricky to operate. Two sets of doors had to be closed and the floor selected before the cage would move. The operator of the device had gone and Gaudet was not able to work the elevator, so he ordered Debbie Mclnnis to do it for him. "He kept staring straight at me," she explained, "and he said, 'I want to go up' at least three times. I finally told him I couldn't work the elevator, and that was true. I had never been shown how to oper-

Debbie (Mclnnis) Foley, as she is today, disarmed a killer during the first hostage taking.

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STAR OF COURAGE ate it, but I found out later I was the only one in there who couldn't do it. "He told us he wanted to go up, and that the gun was loaded, and that he had five shells in his pocket — more than enough for all of us. I kept looking at him, at his eyes, trying to figure out if he was bluffing or not." She soon learned that he was not. When he failed to get Mclnnis to move the elevator for him, Gaudet attempted to do it himself. He held the shotgun in one hand and started pushing floor buttons with the other. The doors remained open. Then the unexpected happened. When she realized Gaudet's attention was focused on getting the elevator to work, one of the women fled. The killer saw her go, however; he raised the shotgun and aimed at her back. "In that instant, I knew he wasn't bluffing," Debbie Mclnnis said. "He was going to kill her and I had to do something. "So I grabbed the gun." The struggle for the weapon was violent, desperate, and brief. "I threw all my weight on the gun," continued Mclnnis. "I felt myself lurch a couple of times, and he dragged me out of the elevator, trying to pull the gun away from me. "I don't actually know where I had hold of it. My one hand was somewhere near the trigger and my other was on the barrel, trying to keep it down. I thought that if the gun went off and I could keep the barrel down, he couldn't shoot anybody in front of him." Debbie Mclnnis is about five foot six in height. Gaudet was taller, heavier, and had little to lose. He had already killed. Then the gun went off. The shot just missed Mclnnis's foot, tore into the floor, and blew a hole through the ceiling of the department below. "I remember screaming for help as we wrestled for the gun, and praying that I could get it away from him. I also remember thinking, You SOB! You came in here and you were going to kill us, but I'm going to blow you away. At one point, that was the only thought in my head.

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HOSTAGES AT GUNPOINT "I grew up on a farm, and I was familiar with guns and I knew their power, especially a shotgun at close range. I knew if he shot me, they probably would have picked up my chest on the other side of the store. "So I jumped on the gun again. He pulled it back, I pulled, and we lurched around. Each time he got it up, I'd push the barrel down. Then the second shot went through the floor." And the incident was over. "All of a sudden, I realized I had control of the gun," Mclnnis said, her voice rising in a tone of disbelief she has harboured all these years. "I had the gun. I had the gun and he was gone. "When I turned, he was gone! I wouldn't believe it. He must have either jumped from the top of the stairs to the bottom, or else he ran down really quickly, because suddenly he just wasn't there. "I started screaming that I had the gun, and then I realized there were people all around me. Mr. Smallman took the gun from me and someone noticed that my hands were covered with blood. They kept asking if I was shot. Up until then, I didn't know I was hurt. The only thing I can think of was that my finger had been through the trigger guard and he had cut into my hand in order to get the trigger back enough to go off. My injuries were not serious." But the emotional turmoil of these women was quickly apparent. One of them did not want to leave the elevator. She closed the doors and kept riding up and down, up and down, presumably because she felt safe there — within her own security blanket. And Tina, the young woman Gaudet's actions had traumatized earlier, fled the store, raced through traffic across Water Street, and ran shrieking into another place of business where she sought safety. "She could easily have been killed by a car," Mclnnis reflects. "The whole thing was so hard on her." The saga was far from over. A half-dozen businesses away from Smallman's was a large department store called Holman's. It too backed away from Water Street, and like the former, had a rear entrance — a rear entrance that led to an area where guns were sold. The killer ran there.

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The main street in Summerside. The second hostage taking ended when the killer was captured on the second floor of this building.

"He would have known there were guns there ," explains former deputy chief Matheson. "In my opinion, that's the only reason he went to Holman's at all. "If you went in the back door of that store, then went up the stairs, you were in the sporting goods section. It was only a narrow area, and there was an office next to it. This is upstairs in what is called Dominion Square today. The guns were in racks on the wall." Gaudet grabbed a 10-gauge shotgun from the bottom rung of a display and walked into the credit department of the business, where he nonchalantly greeted an employee named Sandra McClure. She had no idea what he wanted, but saw the gun and calmly told him to be careful where he pointed the thing. Gaudet just laughed at her, but then he ordered McClure and thirteen other women who worked in that department to sit on the floor, in a circle. All did as he said, and under the circumstances were reasonably composed. "I hadn't even reached Smallman's when I got another radio call telling me the gunman was now in Holman's," continued Harold Durant. By this time the officer was beginning to question Summerside's reputation as a pleasant, quiet, peace-loving town. Gun calls did not happen here.

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HOSTAGES AT GUNPOINT "Anyway, I went into the store with my gun drawn, a .38 snub nose. Because we now knew that there were women hostages, and where they were, I went up to that part of the store, along with one or two other guys. The RCMP had already been informed and the street was being blocked off." Gaudet's actions at Holman's were bizarre. One minute he was volatile; the next, looked as if he was about to fall asleep. Either extreme was dangerous for the hostages, particularly because neither was predictable. He also bragged about killing a man, "because he would not stop breathing," and threatened to do the same to them if they did not do as he said. All co-operated, for the most part in silent fear, although one or two quietly wept as they endured the nightmare. Initially, the gunman sat in a chair, taunted his hostages, and said he had enough bullets to kill several of them, and then himself. The last remark was perhaps the most chilling of all. To the women who were being held that afternoon, it meant that the man holding the gun had nothing to lose — that it was of no concern to him if he lived or died. And that being the case, each and every one of them was expendable. He also indicated that he planned to kill any police officer who intervened. Shortly before officers Durant, Matheson, Summerside Chief W.J.R. MacDonald, and others were in position outside the store's credit department, Gaudet told his captives that he was going to demand a low-mileage car and some wine, and then when he had both, he would take one or two of them as hostages and flee. As if to show he meant what he said, he grabbed a slight, attractive, bespectacled young woman named Debbie MacLean, and took her out to the front of the department to the credit manager's office. He had his left arm around her neck while he held the shotgun with his right hand, the muzzle against her temple. MacLean had no choice but to co-operate. At this juncture, one of the traumatized women accidentally leaned back into a machine behind Gaudet. There was a noise, and the gunman jumped, nervously hauled MacLean back to where she had been, then demanded a curtain be drawn over a window. He also noticed a two-way mirror in one wall of the store. Paranoid, sure he was being 71

STAR OF COURAGE spied upon, he smashed the mirror with the gun butt, yet continued to brag about his prowess as a killer. Then he brought Debbie MacLean out front again, sat her on a chair, and stood behind her with the gun. As soon as he saw police officers through the partly opened door of the credit manager's office, he became more agitated, shouted obscenities at them, and hopped around like a man possessed. "When I got there, I tried to get into where he was," recalls Elmer Matheson, "but then Harold Durant yelled at me to get down, that Gaudet had the gun. I was not wearing body armour. None of us were. "We did not have a good line of sight into where he was," said Matheson. "I could only see one girl, but we knew he had others behind him. They were all cornered in there, behind a wall, a partitioned area at the back of the building. There was no yelling or screaming from them. It was hard to know there was anybody back there." Now the ordeal for Debbie MacLean worsened. Because Gaudet was behind her, pacing from side to side, and threatening to kill her, any police officer who interfered, and then himself, she was more vulnerable than ever. During this time she could not see what the killer was doing, but was exposed to all his threats, his mock bravado and his non-stop, screamed obscenities. "He kept moving, always moving," said Harold Durant, an elevenyear veteran of the Summerside Police Force, "and he put Debbie MacLean through hell, but she was pretty solid. "A lot of the time, he was in that office with the door almost closed, but we could see him going back and forth. At one point, the door opened a little more and I thought of trying to shoot him through the space. "One of our guys talked me out of it and told me I would never hit him from where we were. The advice was good because, as I thought of it later, I probably wouldn't have hit him. "But it was hard to wait and do nothing. I remember being consciously afraid for those women. This was particularly true when I started to second guess myself. I knew if he shot one of them, and I didn't do anything, I would have to live with that later. 72

HOSTAGES AT GUNPOINT "We had one fellow with a high-powered rifle, but he couldn't get a clear shot, and there was always the danger of hitting one of the women. There was lots of light in there — fluorescent light — but Gaudet stayed behind Debbie, or a door jamb, partition, or whatever. So we started negotiating, stalling for time, doing whatever we thought would help." One of the hostages was pregnant, and when informed of this, the killer agreed to let her leave. He said he did not want her to get hurt. Then he asked for some wine. "That was the last thing we intended to give him," Durant recalls, alluding to Gaudet's semi-inebriated stated. "So he settled for a bottle of pop that we tossed to him." It was then that the authorities got the best break imaginable. From his vantage point just outside the credit department of the store, Police Chief MacDonald got a fleeting glance at the trigger mechanism of the shotgun Gaudet held. Most of the time, the killer had his finger on the trigger, or his entire hand over that part of the weapon. Every so often, however, his hand slipped back onto the stock of the gun, and it was on one such occasion that MacDonald verified what he thought he had seen. Because the shotgun had been for sale at Holman's, there was supposed to be a trigger guard on it. To MacDonald's immense relief, he saw that the guard was still in place. The chief passed the information to Durant, and together they decided to take a chance and rush Gaudet. If the trigger guard was secure, the gun would not fire; if the guard failed, it still might delay the normal operation of the weapon for a second or two. In either case, they decided they could reach the killer before he could react. The two men got ready for what they had to do, deciding to go the instant Gaudet was distracted in any way. The killer glanced down at his gun and the men sprang. Durant reached his quarry first. The six-foot six-inch policeman, his drawn gun in front of him, hit Gaudet as the man began to raise the shotgun. "If he had gotten it up, I was going to fire," recalls Durant as he describes those few seconds of terror, seconds that are etched forever in his mind. 73

STAR OF COURAGE

Police officer Harold Durant subdued and then arrested the killer as the second hostage taking ended at Holman's store.

Unexpectedly, dramatically, he got help from another source. Debbie MacLean saved his life. "Just as she saw me coming, she jumped up, grabbed the shotgun and pushed the barrel away. That gave me another second or so. I came in from the right and she made an exit to the left. Freddie is spun around with the gun, he and I go up against the wall, and game over." Chief MacDonald seized the shotgun, and immediately realized that he had been wrong about the trigger guard. The device was faulty; the gun could have been fired. "We put handcuffs on Gaudet right away, and a couple of us escorted him out of the store and to the station," said Durant. "Then I spent the next twenty-six hours interrogating him. "But I also found time to send Debbie MacLean some flowers."

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HOSTAGES AT GUNPOINT Considering what they had been through, the women in the Summerside hostage situation have borne up remarkably well. Some were bothered a lot by the incident, others less so. Debbie Mclnnis Foley, whom I interviewed in British Columbia where she now lives, said she hasn't had a nightmare since the incident. But some have. Mclnnis and MacLean were commended for their actions. Both won the American Carnegie Medal for bravery, and each can now write the letters S.C. after their names. A few months after their ordeal, these two remarkable women received Canada's Star of Courage in a gala ceremony presided over by the Governor General of Canada. And Gaudet? He defended himself on a charge of second-degree murder in the killing of Harold Arsenault — and totally botched his case. He was sentenced at the Prince County Courthouse to life in prison. His drinking buddy was never charged. Finally, with the whole affair over, the beautiful town of Summerside became again a place of peace.

Debbie Maclean, left, and Debbie Mclnnis together at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, just before each was presented the Star of Courage.

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CHAPTER Six

FLASH FIRE

COTT MACNEIL is a tough interview. He is low-key, self-deprecating, and modest to a fault. But these traits, coupled with a soft voice and an easy laugh, make him a man you want to know better — yet realize you probably never will. In fact, the guy has the ability to make what he doesn't say as intriguing as what he actually tells you. He is not a boastful hero. But he certainly is a hero. He became one on the morning of October 21, 1986, when he put his life on the line to save a young woman from a sudden and terrible death. Back in 1986, Thompson Sports was a gun shop in downtown New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. The small, brown-brick building was just across the street from the local post office, on East River Road. The owner,

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STAR OF COURAGE Paul Thompson, used to say that his establishment was one of the best outlets of its kind around, and judging by its popularity with hunters from across the province and elsewhere, he was probably right. The little shop was always busy, and its owner prided himself in carrying a top-notch line of products. If Thompson's didn't have it, you didn't need it. The clientele base was very loyal. "I dealt there many times," Scott MacNeil explains. "Paul was a good businessman. He was rather abrupt in the way he treated you, but I always liked him. He had multiple sclerosis and he had trouble walking, so a lot of the time he was in a wheelchair." On the October Tuesday in question, Thompson was using his chair, a well-worn model that he propelled by hand. Shortly after ten that morning, Scott told his wife, Libby, that he was going down to the gun shop to pick up a pair of rifles that were in for repair. He took his truck, a half-ton jeep, even though Thompson's was only a block or so away down a hill from the MacNeil home. Later, Scott said he wished he had simply walked. Nevertheless, he drove down his street (Donald), then turned left and pulled in on the asphalt parking area by the gun-shop door. He switched off the ignition and climbed out. The October sun made the morning idyllic. Just inside the shop, a young, attractive, blonde woman sitting on a stool looked up from her work, smiled, and said good morning. MacNeil returned the greeting, wondering, as he did so, who she was. He had never seen her before. He walked a few steps farther into the store, where rows of guns were displayed on either side. As he waited for owner Paul Thompson to finish dealing with another customer, MacNeil struck up a conversation with the woman. Her name, she told him, was Donna Charter, and this was her second day on the job. Thompson had hired her to sell fishing licences at the store, and to look after customers when he was otherwise occupied. She was twenty-eight, a single mother, and a former cocktail waitress. She had a pleasant personality, and her easy, open manner made her a natural for the new job. She offered MacNeil a coffee, and sat chatting with him while he drank it. 78

FLASH FIRE

Mike Broomfield was the ex-naval officer who was trapped at the back of the gun shop when the explosions first began.

By this time, Paul Thompson was about to conclude his conversation with Mike Broomfield, a fifty-one-year-old ex-naval officer who had just bought a Winchester shotgun. "Thompson had ordered it for me some time before," Broomfield explains, "and I had dropped in to get it that morning." Like Scott MacNeil, Broomfield is an interesting man. Englishborn, he was in his teens when he won a scholarship to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. Seventeen years later, he left the navy as a commander, having travelled to almost every country in the world. "Except Russia," he is quick to assert. Broomfield, who is also a pilot, spent much of his military career on submarines. He was second-in-command of H.M.S. Alderney, and as executive officer, was responsible for a great deal of the vessel's opera-

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STAR OF COURAGE tion. This included the ship's trim, ensuring that its position on and under the water was correct and safe. "I also had to be very familiar with firefighting techniques, emergency operations, and that kind of thing," he said. On one occasion, he was in a submarine that caught fire at sea. On another, the ship's valves failed and the vessel was flooding with water and heading down. The crew carried out full emergency procedures and survived the ordeal. All in all, Broomfield was acquainted with crises. He also knew fear. After leaving the navy, he was in business for a time in Halifax; then he worked for the provincial government. Finally, in a fourth career, he went into tourism, promoting the amenities and attractions of three Nova Scotia counties. On the day he was in the New Glasgow gun shop, he was heading to a work-related meeting. Meanwhile, at the front of the store, Scott MacNeil had finished his coffee. He put the cup down and turned to thank Donna Charter for it. By this time, she was back on her stool, ready to turn her attention to her work. She never got the chance to do so. Suddenly a huge, sickly, red-orange ball of fire appeared under the counter where Charter worked. She and MacNeil stared at it for a split second, abject horror on their faces. Charter screamed and MacNeil recoiled in disbelief. There was a sound like a thunderclap. Then fire enveloped the room and everything in it. The blast picked Charter up, spun her around, and flung her to one side. MacNeil was propelled in the opposite direction. Both were on fire, Charter from head to toe; MacNeil on his back, face, and right arm. Already, his beard, eyebrows and hair were gone. Then the room filled with black smoke that seemed to boil up from under the counter where Charter had been sitting not five seconds before. Hundreds of rounds of ammunition began to explode, ignited by the roaring flames that seemed to be everywhere. The sharp, staccato popping of bullets became a crescendo as the hungry flames fed on the powder. There was no place to hide, no shield of any kind, no respite from the unbelievable hell in this enclosed, brick-clad structure that was close to becoming a fiery tomb for the four who were in it.

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FLASH FIRE "At first, I didn't know what had happened ," MacNeil told me, his eyes widening, his breath raspy with the vivid recollection of the terror he experienced that day. "I couldn't believe it. This ball of fire was coming up at us from under Donna's desk. "I hollered at her to run, to get out, but that's about all I had time for. The explosion hit me and it threw me back across the room. Then I was on the floor, trying to get up. I tried and tried, but I was held down by the force of it, by the air being sucked in the door, by the force. Then the whole place turned black, immediately. I couldn't see Donna, and I had no idea what happened to her. When the explosion happened, I was about 12 feet [3.6 metres] from the door, and I knew I had to get out, but I couldn't even move at first. "But somehow I escaped. I was young and in pretty good shape, but it was wild, man! Wild! I half-crawled, half-stumbled out the door, but all the time I fought against being pinned down, as if something was trying to hold me back." MacNeil lurched through the steel gun-shop door, its top hinge ripped out, the door hanging precariously to one side, half across the front steps of the building. To this day, he is unsure exactly how he reached the fresh air, but he remembers the flames licking at his shirt, back, face, and right arm. Then he tore his shirt off, burning his hands in the process. Now he was on the ground, rolling over and over, frantically trying to douse the flames that engulfed him. Often, they seemed to go out, then would catch again, eating into his flesh. But finally, they were gone. "That was when I realized Donna was still inside." MacNeil knew that somehow he had to go to her. "I sort of crawled back into the place, but it scared the hell out of me. There were walls of ammunition going off, just exploding. Ammunition of all kinds. Shotgun shells. Rifle bullets. Just walls of it. The place was just as black inside. I mean black! But there was a clearing, about two feet up from the floor. But from there to the ceiling, it was black. "When I got in there, I couldn't see, and it was more or less her screams that led me to her, that helped me find her. I couldn't see her until I got right beside her, but she was on fire, just like a candle.

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STAR OF COURAGE

Scott MacNeil is standing in front of the door he was blown through when the former gun shop was destroyed by the explosion and fire.

"Her hair had been long, but now it was burning, right close to her head. So I put my hands on her head and got that fire out, and my hands got badly burnt. "She was wearing jeans and a top, a black spandex, and it burned like the devil. It just melted on her. She was in pretty bad shape when I got to her." MacNeil wrapped his arms around the stricken young woman, doused her flames, then scooped her up and blindly stumbled to the door. "Then, just as we got to the threshold, there was another explosion, from one of the kegs of powder that had been under where she had been sitting. It blew us both out the door, down onto the ground at the front, at the bottom of the steps. This all happened fast, but I remember being damned scared. The fire was everywhere." 82

FLASH FIRE And so were shards of glass, chunks of wood, brick, and exploded shell casings. Charter and MacNeil lay in the mess, both still so close to the fire that the heat was intense. Charter, partly clothed and writhing in pain, moaned pathetically and attempted to cover herself. A man named Lyle MacDougall ran to the pair, clutching a blanket. He and MacNeil gently wrapped Charter in it, then carried her down the slight slope of the parking lot to a small park, directly across the street. "There was a little bit of a block wall there, about two feet [0.6 metres] high. I sat on it and held onto Donna. She was still conscious." "What happened, Scott?" Charter asked, her voice shallow, strangled by sobs. "How bad am I?" "I really didn't know what to say," MacNeil recalls. "I could see she was burned badly, but I couldn't tell her that. I just told her she would be all right, that help would come soon, that kind of thing." A siren wailed. "When I was talking to the owner, he was sitting in his wheelchair," said Mike Broomfield, the navy man who was buying his gun at Thompson's that morning. "We were at the back of the store. Donna Charter was to my right, talking to Scott. It was a glorious fall day and I was doing a bit of shopping prior to going to a business meeting. An explosion was the last thing on my mind. "And it happened so quickly, literally like a bolt out of the blue. Things went from bad to ugly to worse so fast, I was sure I was going to cook. I had never seen anything like a fire in a gun shop before. It was like the Dieppe Raid, with all kinds of stuff exploding all over. "I had had plenty of experience with fires. I had seen them develop, but I had never seen a fire that was as instantaneous as this one was. The whole shop was a raging inferno in no time at all. I had been in submarines when we had fires and other near disasters, but then I had training that helped me to cope. I had no training for this thing, so I was very scared. "I remember seeing this flare, an orange-red sort of flare, the ignition. It immediately caused a huge explosion; then there were multiple fires raging across the store because of the ammunition going off." 83

STAR OF COURAGE The first couple of minutes were sheer hell for the two men at the back of the shop. Both realized there was no escape through the front because that was a wall of fire. Instinctively, each turned to anything that promised hope. Paul Thompson spun his chair around, grabbed a small fire extinguisher and began to battle the roaring flames. His efforts were utterly futile. Broomfield knew there had to be another way out. "I found a side door, which led outside, and where there were also steps going down to the basement. But I had a great deal of difficulty getting the door opened. It was a metal one, heavily barricaded, heavily locked. I remember thinking that if worst came to worst, I could probably get down the stairs into the basement." In his frantic, desperate attempts to get out, and to get Thompson out, Mike Broomfield pushed, pulled, kicked, and did everything he could to unbolt the steel door in front of him. Virtually all his efforts took place in total darkness because the explosion had knocked the electrical power out, and in fact, the only light now came from the fire that burned in the room. And that light was becoming obscured by the black, acrid, choking smoke. Finally, with Paul Thompson shouting instructions from the confines of his wheelchair, Broomfield felt the bolt that secured the door begin to ease. He gave one last tug on the thing, almost ripping the flesh from his knuckles doing so, but the lock came free. The door swung open, and when it did, the only escape from certain death was there. "Thompson was close to me as I got the door open," Mike Broomfield said, "but as soon as I did, the rush of oxygen coming in ignited another series of fires and explosions, and both of us were blown out the door." Fortunately, the two survived. Broomfield looked quickly to make sure Thompson was okay, then scrambled to his feet and sprinted around the corner to the front of the shop to check on Charter and MacNeil. He says he will never forget what he saw. "When I got to them, Donna was lying at the front steps, moaning and she was badly burned, particularly about her face and head.

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FLASH FIRE Scott was crouched over her and somebody had brought a blanket. She was wearing nylon, and it had burned right into her flesh. Soon there were sirens screaming and a crowd began to gather. Because this was right in the middle of town, a lot of people came to see what was happening. As he cradled Donna Charter in his lap, waiting for help, Scott MacNeil suddenly realized that Thompson and the customer who had been with him must still be in the store. When the first police officer ran up, MacNeil pleaded with him to check. "Go inside and find those two guys!" MacNeil screamed at the officer. "There are two others, and they're trapped." "Buddy, I'm not going in there," the policeman shouted above the din. Luckily, by this time Broomfield and Thompson were out and an ambulance was at hand. "They put Donna in it and took her away," MacNeil recalls. "I refused to go anywhere in an ambulance, because I wanted to go home and clean up. I run a cartage business, and I had work to do. I don't think I realized then that I had some pretty bad burns." Finally, MacNeil agreed to be taken to nearby Aberdeen Hospital — in a police cruiser, just seconds before his wife, Libby, arrived on the scene. She reached the hospital soon afterwards, and for the next several days was at his side, along with their young daughters, Shannon and Shauna. "They took Donna right on to Halifax to a hospital there " MacNeil explains, "because she was in such bad shape. After I got a bit better, I went down there to see her. Paul Thompson was in Aberdeen where I was, and Mr. Broomfield was okay. I think he had some cuts and stuff, but he was not burned." In the aftermath of the explosions and fire, local and provincial authorities searched for a cause, but found none. They investigated such things as faulty wiring, a gas leak, a water-heater spark, but in the end attributed what happened to an undetermined origin. Some months after the event, Scott MacNeil received the Star of Courage for saving Donna Charter's life. By this time, his truck which

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STAR OF COURAGE

The former Thompson Sports shop in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia is now a Credit Union. A second storey has been added since the explosion.

he had parked outside the gun shop had been repaired and repainted. It had been badly damaged in the fire. Donna Charter, who had received second- and third-degree burns to over half her body, was out of hospital and doing her best to get her life on track again. Mike Broomfield was still selling the wonders of Nova Scotia to anyone interested, and Paul Thompson was back running a rebuilt gun shop. Today, however, he has gone elsewhere and the building houses a credit union. Neither MacNeil nor Charter will ever forget being burned in the fire. "Burns are so painful," MacNeil winces. "I would rather be shot." Then the reluctant hero ends the interview.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

NIGHTMARE SHIFT

ERRY MURPHY DID not hear the sirens. Nor did he see the flashing blue lights that warned of the gas. He was already unconscious, lying on his back, his left leg contorted around a scaffold post; his face had turned dark and he made no sound. Far below him, an iron grate was the floor. Jerry Murphy was a boilermaker, doing a contract job at a pulp mill in Hinton, Alberta. Shortly after midnight on April 15, 1986, he almost died there. Had it not been for his co-workers, he would have. The mill was one of many owned by a company called Champion Forest Products. It produced bleached softwood kraft pulp then, and still does. Today however, the owner is Weldwood of Canada Ltd. At Hinton, there are about six hundred full-time employees. The company

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STAR OF COURAGE prides itself on its product, and on what it calls its "environmentally controlled manufacturing." It is the largest industry in town, and what is done there is impressive. Huge logs — mostly spruce, pine, and fir — are debarked, cut up, cooked, bleached, and baled in processes that have been refined over time. Some steps take longer; most do not. For example, a log that is three metres long can be reduced to nickel-sized chips in three seconds. Over 400,000 metric tonnes of products are produced each year. The mill is just off the Yellowhead Highway that runs through Hinton. It is a huge plant and is visible from almost anywhere in town. Almost always, great clouds of steam drift from the myriad stacks that top the red-brick and light-grey concrete structures. Behind the plant, when viewed from the west, are low foothills and then undulating prairie. The backdrop as seen from the east is much more spectacular. The snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains are close at hand, with the east gate of Jasper National Park only twenty minutes away. Hinton itself has a permanent population of about ten thousand, but this number swells considerably with tourists heading to and from

The former Champion Forest Products mill at Hinton, Alberta is now the Weldwood of Canada plant It was here that nine men almost lost their lives.

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NIGHTMARE SHIFT Jasper. In recent years, however, visitors have been attracted to Hinton itself because they are discovering what the town has to offer, both within its boundaries and close by. There are many hiking trails, some of which are lit and paved. White-water rafting is done nearby, as is boating, fly-fishing, canoeing, and even skateboarding in a park specifically designed for the sport. Elk and bighorn sheep are seen locally. Visitors can sightsee by air, take van tours of surface coal mines, or bathe in outdoor hot springs. But when he came to Hinton back in the spring of 1986, Jerry Murphy did not do or see such things, nor did he really consider them. He was there to work, and work hard, in a dusty, hot, claustrophobic environment that he understood, accepted and expected. Working conditions for boilermakers are generally harsh. Certainly, this was the case in the number 3 power boiler at the Hinton mill. Murphy didn't go there alone. At the time, the boiler in question was shut down for some muchneeded, semi-annual maintenance. Several boilermakers and welders employed by an Edmonton-based firm called Combustion Engineering were to do the work. (Today, this company, like the Hinton pulp mill, has changed owners. Combustion Engineering is now part of the huge, multinational Alstom company.) The project at Hinton was to last for eight days for most of the crew. Two or three others would be there for a while longer to set up scaffolding, and when the main part of the job was done, to take the same scaffolding down, and to unload and load tools. The hiring for Hinton, insofar as this work was concerned, was done in Edmonton, at a union hiring hall. Boilermakers needing work went to the hall, put their names on a list for the contract job, and were hired from there. After the required number had been selected, they went to the site. In the Hinton operation, the men who came stayed at motels in the town. Jerry Murphy was among them. So were Lou Basso, Lynn Elder, and Roger Cherkewick. Before the end of their time at Hinton, these four men in particular would share an experience they would never forget. They already knew one another because they had worked together on other jobs. They all had about the same number of years in

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STAR OF COURAGE the trade and all had done contract work in many parts of Alberta and in other provinces as well. Basso and Elder had also been employed in the United States. Basso, Elder, and Cherkewick are big men, and at the time of the job in Hinton, were all in good shape. They had to be. Their work involved long hours, lifting and climbing, and the use of tools that were not easy to manoeuvre. All are heavy-set, barrel-chested, and modest. Each has a good sense of humour, and Basso in particular loves to tell jokes. He is also a kind, considerate human being. At the Hinton job, he also proved that he was a brave man. The night shift for the Combustion Engineering crew was ten hours; starting at 8 p.m. and ending at 6:30 the following morning. A half-hour meal break began at midnight. At the start of the first work period, everyone involved gathered in a room at the plant for a safety lecture, given by a man from the pulp mill staff. The session lasted about half an hour, and the speaker stressed, among other things, the importance of wearing of hard hats and safety glasses while on the job. In an emergency, an alarm would sound, and all workers were to drop their equipment and go outside immediately to a predetermined mustering point. The location for the Combustion crew was at the base of a large smokestack. In case of an emergency involving members of the Combustion team, a telephone code number was to be dialled. That number was 222, and once it had been called, help was promised at any work station within two minutes. Then the various members of the Combustion group went to their assignments. At the time, none of them knew that there had been a problem with the alarm system at the plant. On a number of occasions recently, false alarms had sounded. These had increased in frequency until they had become such a nuisance that a plant employee had cut the power to the system. He also unwittingly killed the power to exhaust fans in the area where the boiler maintenance was being done. By the time the mistake was rectified, the consequences of the action were catastrophic — so much so that the switch-pulling could well have caused the deaths of nine men. But several hours passed before the problem came to a head.

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NIGHTMARE SHIFT

The steam drum of the #3 power boiler.

To the layperson the number 3 power boiler, where the maintenance was to be done, is a large structure. To those in the trade, however, it is looked upon as being rather small. Nevertheless, it was twenty-seven metres high, and the internal furnace diameter was more than six metres. Huge metal devices called superheaters hung from the inside top of the structure, and what was called a steam drum was outside the furnace at about the same level as the superheaters. The boiler was square, the steam drum round. Wood waste — sawdust and bark — were burned in the furnace, and the heat from the fire boiled water. The steam that resulted from this was then passed through the coiled superheater pipes. Because superheated steam is much drier than the conventional kind, it produces more energy for a longer time. The end result of the whole process was that the energy produced was used to run the plant. There were also other boilers in the Champion complex. They continued to operate while boiler number 3 was being refitted. The floor of the boiler was not a floor in the usual sense of the word. Instead, it was an iron grill that moved slowly — about a metre

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STAR OF COURAGE every six hours. This travelling grate, as it was called, ensured the complete combustion of the hog fuel, or wood waste, that was burned. This material was thrown, mechanically, into the boiler. By the time the Combustion Engineering crew arrived at work that April evening, the boiler was still quite warm, even though it had been shut down for two days. Nevertheless, it had cooled enough for the workers to enter. The scaffolding they would operate from was not complete, although enough had been erected for work to begin. On the fifth-floor level, for instance, only two long planks were in place across the inside of the furnace. These planks rested on the metal scaffold frame. Below them, eighteen metres down, was the iron grate — the floor of the furnace. On the sixth floor of the boiler, an opening had been cut into a side wall so that replacement tubes for the superheaters could be passed inside and installed. The only other openings were small doors, called manways, one on each of the eight floors of the structure. Manway openings were small, no more than forty-six centimetres high and fifty centimetres wide. At first, the only light inside the furnace came from two naked light bulbs hung by scaffold erectors. By any measure, those who worked inside the boiler operated in an unpleasant place: it was hot, dark, dusty, poorly ventilated at the best of times, and dangerous at all times. Boilermakers, boilermakerwelders, and those who labour with them are a special breed. They earn their pay. The lecture finished at about 8:30 p.m., the various members of the maintenance crew went to their designated work areas. Lou Basso, Lynn Elder, and two young boilermaker apprentices climbed to the eighth floor of the plant to replace superheater tubes. Roger Cherkewick was on the second floor. Jerry Murphy worked on the fifth. They all noticed the heat in the building, and the fact that the air seemed to be more humid than usual. Many of them got headaches, and most felt short of breath. However, they continued working, believing their breathing problems were caused by the heat, and the dust in the air. One or two put on dust masks, which did not seem to help.

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NIGHTMARE SHIFT At around 10 p.m., everyone took a ten-minute coffee break and then resumed working. The thirty-minute dinner break ended half an hour after midnight. "At about 12:35," recalled Lou Basso, "we went back to the work area and crawled through the manway into the boiler. The air inside was heavy and hard to breathe." At this juncture, Lynn Elder, who was with Basso, became alarmed. He was sure there was something wrong, so the two squeezed out of the boiler in order to get some fresh air. In fact, although they did not know it at the time, the air they were breathing was saturated with carbon monoxide. Earlier on, as has been said, when the power to the alarm system was switched off, the action also shut down the ventilation fans where the men were working. This caused exhaust gases from another working boiler to flow into rather than out of number 3, and the building where it was housed. Had Elder not become concerned, he, Basso and others would have been overcome by deadly fumes. The matter came to a head with startling urgency. Elder and Basso were barely through the eighth floor manway when they heard someone shouting on a lower floor. A man was hollering about a downed worker inside the boiler. "We all rushed downstairs," said Lou Basso, "and through a small opening in the boiler wall, we could see Jerry Murphy passed out on the scaffolding." Murphy lay on the two planks at the fifth-floor level. Unfortunately, he was deep inside the boiler, about as far from the manway as he could have been. Roger Cherkewick remembered how he became aware of the problem. " C I was at the second-floor tool crib," he said, "when two men, Darwin Leitch and Gary Honig, came running to me and told me there was a man down on the fifth floor, inside the boiler. Then they evacuated to the main floor as per safety instructions." Cherkewick dropped what he was doing and raced upstairs. By the time he got to the fifth floor, he saw that Lynn Elder had located an air hose and was blowing fresh air from it into the boiler and towards the downed Jerry Murphy. This was an obvious attempt to dilute whatever it was that had caused the man's collapse.

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STAR OF COURAGE "I looked around for a Scott airpack," Cherkewick said, "but when there didn't seem to be any around, I ran down to the second floor because I knew there were some there." Cherkewick found a couple of respirators, and more or less at the same time grabbed an emergency phone and dialled 222. Then he headed back upstairs. Suddenly, emergency sirens began shrieking and blue lights flashed on and off. Someone, somewhere had obviously reset the alarms. "By this time, the whole building was full of co [carbon monoxide] and it was really hot and muggy," said Cherkewick. "I went up the stairs as fast as I could, but I seemed to be moving in slow motion. I only got to the fourth floor and I was winded. I couldn't go higher.

Model demonstrates the Scott airpack. Because of its size, Lou Basso was not able to wear the device and squeeze through the boiler manway.

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NIGHTMARE SHIFT "Then one of the other guys was coming down and I asked him if he could take the airpacks up for me. He did. Then I had to rest and try to breathe." Lou Basso continued: "Someone came running up the stairs with a couple of Scott airpacks and I grabbed one. I could see that the guy was winded because when he was running he had breathed a lot of carbon monoxide himself. "I put the mask over my face and I had the bottle on my back, but I couldn't get through the manway that way." "Lou is a big man," Roger Cherkewick said, "and by the time I did get to the fifth floor, he had attempted to go into the boiler with the airpack on his back. But there wasn't room in the opening. When he tried, the pressure gauge on the tank broke." During this time of confusion and urgency, there was little time for discussion about who should enter the boiler. Basso volunteered to go and that was that. He did not hesitate, nor was he the kind of man who

The small doorway at the top of the steps was the manway entered by Lou Basso when he saved the life of the downed worker

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STAR OF COURAGE would have. And even though his actions were putting himself at risk, he insisted on doing what he could for the stricken worker. Getting into the boiler was not easy at the best of times. In addition to the difficulty of squeezing through the manway, positioning oneself in front of the opening was in itself a bit of a challenge. The small door was about a foot above a set of pale-green, steel steps. There was no hand support on either side of the steps, or around the platform on top of them. Even a fall from the platform to the cement floor one and a half metres down could have caused injury. Such a fall might easily have happened in the feverish rush to enter the boiler. At this point, John Brophy came up with a better idea. He suggested Basso go into the boiler backwards. "Lou, turn around and go in feet first," Brophy said. "We'll pass the bottle when you are inside." Fortunately, the second airpack that Cherkewick had sent up was there to replace the damaged one. "So I put the mask over my face and I proceeded to go into the boiler feet first," said Basso. Roger Cherkewick remembers watching his friend through the constricted manway. "Lou is about six foot two, and he would weigh over two hundred pounds [ninety kilograms], so getting into the boiler took time. He lay on his back, held his arms over his head, and squeezed through like a worm. The wall of the boiler would have been about eight inches [twenty centimetres] thick. Once he was inside, we passed the airpack to him." As soon as he was beyond the manway, Basso found himself in circumstances that were as unforgiving as any he had ever encountered. In essence, he was in a huge steel room, with walls as black as a cave, little light, and hot air that could kill. Several feet away, on the two planks that supported them both, was Jerry Murphy, now close to death, foaming at the mouth, and completely immobile. The perch the two shared was far above the floor grate, and a fall down onto it would have been as deadly as the gas they breathed. As quickly as he dared, Basso adjusted the face mask of the airpack, and holding the gas bottle in one hand, turned so that he could go to Murphy.

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NIGHTMARE SHIFT "I got down on my hands and knees and I crawled over to Jerry" said Basso. "My only thought was to get to him and get him out. I positioned his legs so I could get a good grip on his ankles to drag him towards the manway. In doing this, I could no longer carry the air bottle. As I dragged Jerry and the bottle, its weight would break the seal around my face and I was breathing carbon monoxide." Lou Basso is too modest to dwell on the danger he faced in performing the rescue. Because the planks he crawled on were narrow, he could easily have fallen from them himself. But because Murphy was unconscious, he obviously could not hold on, and in fact might have become restless in the poisoned air. He also could have vomited, and had he done so, the involuntary movement might have thrown both men to their death. As well, the concentrated carbon monoxide within the boiler could have incapacitated the rescuer as it had the victim. No wonder Basso took time to drag the man along. Unfortunately, it was time that neither of them had. "I finally managed to get Jerry to the manway," Basso said, "and I handed his feet to someone there, and he was pulled out. I crawled through and took the airpack off, thinking it might be needed for Jerry. I was then helped over to an opening in the wall of the power house where I was laid down with my head out into the fresh air. My heart was pounding very fast and I could hardly breathe. In the background I could hear Lynn Elder saying to Jerry, 'Don't die now! Don't die now!' And I could hear others saying that Jerry was not breathing and he was swallowing his tongue and was turning purple." "Four of us pulled Murphy out," Roger Cherkewick explained. "The four were Elder, Brophy, myself, and I don't remember the fourth guy. It was really hot — worse all the time — and we were all feeling the effects of the lack of oxygen. Everything seemed to be going in slow motion. "We laid Murphy on the floor and I felt for a pulse. The guy's neck and lips were swollen, and his face was about the colour of a new pair of jeans. When I cleared the foam from his mouth, I noticed that his tongue was swollen. "I started CPR, along with Lynn Elder, and we kept at it until I felt a faint breath on my cheek. Then he started gagging because he was choking on his tongue. I depressed it with my fingers."

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STAR OF COURAGE Cherkewick described the conditions under which they worked. "All the sirens were on while we were doing this, and you never forget that sound. It's a whining, wailing thing, something like an air-raid siren. And the loudspeaker was right beside us. We were deafened; we couldn't hear a thing. Blue lights were also flashing all the time. There were red lights flashing at the entrances but blue lights on the gas monitors. "But our concern was for Jerry. We finally brought him back and he was breathing on his own, so we turned him on his side in the firstaid recovery position. But then he started turning blue again. At first we couldn't understand why that happened. "So we put him on his back again, did more mouth-to-mouth and loosened his collar. He was wearing a jean jacket and coveralls and these were buttoned tight. Then, just when we thought he was coming, he would gag on his tongue. "I put my fingers in his mouth to depress his tongue again, but he clamped pretty hard on them. Finally, when this got to be a bit much, I yelled at the others to find a piece of metal, wood, anything to stick in his mouth instead of my fingers." When no other tongue depressor could be readily located, Lynn Elder fumbled for his wallet and handed it to Cherkewick. The wallet worked. Murphy bit down on it and the gagging stopped. By this time, one of the Combustion Engineering workers had located a stretcher on the first floor of the building, and had lugged it up the stairs to where Murphy lay. A minute or so later, the emergency response team arrived. Murphy was carried from the building, while those who had worked on him left on their own. Except Lou Basso. "Someone came and helped me to my feet and took me down to a lower floor," he explained, "where I got left alone. I was disoriented and I didn't know my way out. But then I observed some people running down some stairs and I followed them outside." Once he was in the fresh air, Basso felt light-headed, and soon he was terribly sick. Then he stood in the cold night air and braced himself against a wall until the ambulance arrived. Nearby, John Brophy took a head count.

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NIGHTMARE SHIFT "Jerry Murphy went in the first ambulance," said Roger Cherkewick, "and five or six of us in the next one. I remember that Lou and Lynn were there, and Darwin Leitch and Gary Honig and perhaps one or two others. None of us were in very good shape, so they went to give us oxygen. Now, this wasn't so great then, but when I look back, it was about the only funny thing that happened that night. "We were all sitting in the back, and the attendant passed around an oxygen mask. I remember seeing the guys trying to breathe from it, but they seemed to be getting frustrated. Finally, after about the fourth or fifth person tried, the attendant realized the oxygen wasn't turned on. We laughed about that later, but at the time, nobody wanted to say anything." In all, nine men suffering from carbon-monoxide poisoning were treated at Hinton General Hospital, a modern, red-brick building on a hillside, a mile or so from the pulp mill. Dr. Donna Cave was the attending physician in the emergency department, and at first she and her staff found the rush of arrivals a bit overwhelming. Years later,

Three of the men who risked their lives to save the downed man were honoured by the province of Alberta. Shown here are (L to R): Lynn Elder, Roger Cherkewick, Lieutenant Governor Helen Huntley, and Lou Basso.

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STAR OF COURAGE when I was researching this book, I talked to a nurse who had been on duty that night. She told me about being really busy, not just because of the numbers who came in at once, but also because at that hour the department was short-staffed. Nevertheless, each of the sick was treated as quickly as possible. All survived. Jerry Murphy was the most seriously ill. He spent two days in intensive care. Lou Basso was there for one, while the other seven men were monitored for several hours and were released from the hospital later in the morning. Roger Cherkewick put the experience into context for his colleagues. "We were in a patient waiting room there, just as the sun was coming up. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows and it faced west. I remember that the sky was a brilliant blue, and the morning sun on the

Governor General Jeanne Sauve presents the Star of Courage to Lou Basso.

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NIGHTMARE SHIFT mountain snow was beautiful, really beautiful. As we looked out at the scene, I told the guys: 'This is why we survived last night.'" No one disagreed. In the wake of the incident at the number 3 boiler, the management at Champion instituted several new safety precautions to ensure such a situation never happened again. Lynn Elder, Roger Cherkewick, and Lou Basso were lauded by the Government of Alberta for their role in coming to the aid of a downed colleague. Still later, Lou Basso was the recipient of the Star of Courage for his "conspicuous courage in circumstances of great peril." He accepted the award with his customary humility.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

DINNER BLAST

ow THAT ONE of the worst years of his life was behind him, twenty-nine-year-old Bruce Currie was a happy man. He was in love with a wonderful woman. He was back at work, and his health had finally improved. The intestinal illness that had caused him great suffering had loosened its grip and he was starting to face the future with renewed optimism. Life, he felt, could only get better. In recent months his mother's illness and the cancer that killed her had been difficult to bear, almost as painful as the earlier death of his eight-year-old sister. And to Bruce, living with colitis had seemed like a nightmare that would never end. It finally eased just in time for him to be best man when his young brother Kent got married. Now, as Bruce had said at that wedding, he and Jo-Anne would be next.

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Villeneuve Castle towered over Picton Bay.

Jo-Anne Bones was his fiancee, but because of his illness and the fact that he had been unable to return to his computer programming duties at Canada Post, all wedding plans had been postponed. Jo-Anne, who was going to school in Toronto, returned to Bruce and her Ottawa-area home as often as she could. That was why the two found themselves driving through Picton, Ontario, on Saturday, January 11, 1986. Because it was early evening when they arrived in the town, they decided to find a restaurant. A helpful constable at the local police station recommended the Villeneuve Castle. The Villeneuve was no Windsor Castle, but it did have pretensions of grandeur. There were four turrets, twenty-five rooms, marble fireplaces, a ballroom, and a magnificent staircase that could have graced a movie set. Built between 1805 and 1811 and greatly enlarged in 1860, the building had had a succession of owners. Its size made it hard to heat and costly to maintain, and it was somewhat remote insofar as out-of-town clientele were concerned. Yet, it boasted an excellent dining room. 104

DINNER BLAST That evening, following the policeman's directions, Bruce and JoAnne drove through Picton's business section, then turned left onto Bridge Street. They had no trouble locating the Castle, nor a parking space to one side of the main entrance. A couple of minutes later, they were taken into the dining room, shown to a table, and handed the dinner menu. The meal Bruce ordered would be his last. Elsewhere, others who knew the Villeneuve were going on with their Saturday-evening activities. Reg Havery, the middle-aged, soft-spoken deputy chief of the Picton Fire Department, was at home entertaining friends who had arrived for supper. The meal over, the group chatted over coffee. A few streets away, Havery's colleague Bill Harvey had eaten earlier. He was one of several volunteers on the fire department, though a full-time employee at a local cement plant. Because he had to go in to work at midnight, he lay down for a short nap around nine o'clock. Paul Bartlett was also in town that night. The twenty-eight-yearold was a paramedic who, like Harvey, hoped to get a bit of sleep. He had been on duty for almost thirty hours, although occasional rest breaks during the shift had been possible. Right now, one ambulance at the station sat empty. Directly south, across Lake Ontario in New York state, Bill and Fran Renoy, both from Picton, were having a late dinner after skiing that day at Snow Ridge resort. The skiing had been exhilarating, the runs well groomed, the snow fast. Unfortunately, the ski-area cuisine was not nearly as good as it was at the Villeneuve, their favourite restaurant back home. The weather in Picton that night was cold and the skies were overcast. A winter storm a couple of days earlier had left a lot of snow around and drifted banks covered the lawns of the Castle, right down to the Picton Bay shore. With the cold came other problems. A sewer drain in the basement had become blocked, and this malfunction was an embarrassing annoyance to Ulrich Uhlmann, the owner of Villeneuve. While guests dined and his wife Karen waited on them, Uhlmann was in the cellar, jamming an auger into the drain in

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STAR OF COURAGE an attempt to unclog it. Unfortunately, in spite of his best efforts, the sewer remained blocked. That was when he sought help. Katrina Brown worked in the Villeneuve kitchen. Her boyfriend, Ken Brown (no relation) was employed part-time at a local supply business where propane tanks and other equipment could be rented. Uhlmann knew Ken and his workplace, so he asked Katrina to call her boyfriend and ask if he could locate an industrial propane heater that could be used to dislodge the sewer obstruction by thawing it. Ken Brown said he could. Subsequently, he and Uhlmann transported the equipment by car to the Villeneuve: the heater in the back seat, the forty-five-kilogram tank of propane in the trunk. The men carried the equipment into the restaurant's basement. Uhlmann walked to the rear of the building to look for something while Brown moved the propane closer to where it would be needed. As he did so, he realized that gas was escaping from the canister. He tried to tighten the valve on the top of the tank with a wrench, but to no avail. More gas escaped. Uhlmann returned to the room in time to hear a hissing noise, and as he said later, to see Brown "fumbling with the main valve." The foul-smelling propane flowed into the basement. Ulrich Uhlmann grabbed a pair of pliers, and with all his strength, tried to close the leaking valve as the hissing noise continued and the smell of propane hung heavier in the air. But when the valve refused to budge, both men instinctively knew they were in grave danger. The gas smell was so strong they could barely breathe. Much later, newspaper reporter Allan Capon quoted Uhlmann as he described what happened next: "We tried to lift the tank to the window to let the gas out but we never got to do it. Ken bent to pick it up and I got hold of the top when there was a surge of orange-yellow — a big swish." The resulting explosion rocked the town. 106

DINNER BLAST With what would later be determined as having the force of ninety kilograms of TNT, the blast from the exploding propane roared upwards, tearing apart everything it touched. The beautiful one-hundred-and-eighty-year-old hardwood floors of the dining room and the second and third storeys, then the roof timbers were all shredded like matchsticks. The four-storey tower and turret nearest the main entrance disintegrated. The diningroom disappeared, and when it did, the life of Bruce Currie was over. A rock-hard, foot-square supporting beam crashed down on top of him, breaking every rib in his body and crushing his chest. Miraculously Jo-Anne Bones, though badly hurt, survived. So did Ulrich Uhlmann and Ken Brown — and neither knew how. The two men had somehow escaped up a set of cellar stairs. Both were injured, Brown seriously. His facial burns blinded him for a time, and he was convinced his hands had been blown off. He screamed as much to the firefighters who found him lying on the lawn. The painted plaster of old walls was blasted away, along with windows, cement, wood, dishes, chairs, electrical wiring, bathroom fixtures, paintings, and so many other decorative trappings of the historical building. Instant junk flew high into the night sky, then fell on every side of the castle. There was wreckage on the street, on neighbouring lawns, the roofs of houses, cars, backyards, the ice on the bay. The half-metre-thick cement and stone outer walls of the dining room were no longer there. Nor were the windows, their ledges, the doors, and most of the floor. Large timber joists lay exposed or broken. And then there were the terrified, uncomprehending diners and others who had been inside. About a minute before the explosion, Karen Uhlmann had been serving coffee in the dining room. When she noticed the unmistakable smell of gas, she went into the kitchen and asked Katrina Brown if the stove was leaking. As Katrina went to check, the explosion happened. Somehow, Karen Uhlmann made it out through a back door. Then she stood in the yard, waiting. Katrina was nowhere to be seen. But Katrina was already outside.

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STAR OF COURAGE The blast from the basement had erupted right under her, with a violence that can barely be comprehended. She was thrown high into the air, through where a few seconds before there had been upper floors and a roof, then out onto the lawn, where she landed unscathed in a deep bank of snow. A split second later a stray block of cement landed on her right knee, shattering it. Firefighter Bill Harvey not only heard the explosion, but felt it as well. "I had barely lain down," he said, "when the bed shook, and I bounced out onto the floor. At first I thought a car had run into the house, the concussion from the blast was so strong. We lived about 300 yards [275 metres] from the Castle. "I remember dressing immediately and grabbing my equipment because I knew instinctively that this was something bad, that I'd better

Firefighter Bill Harvey remembered his house shaking when the explosion ripped throuugh Villeneuve Castle.

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DINNER BLAST get ready. I was out in my truck starting the engine by the time the call came in that it was the Villeneuve. I got there as the first fire truck was coming up the street." Reg Havery, the deputy chief, was informed but he was given few details at first. "I assumed it was something minor, so I told our dinner guests I would not be long. That was sure a mistake. I didn't get back until late the next day." Even though Bill Harvey reached the restaurant in about a minute, there was already a traffic jam in front of the place. "My main memory now is of people running, of general confusion, and of seeing the devastated building in the darkness. The power was already out. There were people outside, looking dazed. I saw the lady who owned the place walking up the driveway, oblivious to anyone else. "The firefighter part of me was making me run up and look around, but as I did, I was just trying to comprehend what had just happened. It was unbelievable. You saw things that your mind told you couldn't be. I remember talking to Katrina Brown, out where she lay in

Bill Harvey with his sister, left, and mother.

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RegHavery, Deputy Chief of the Picton Fire Department, left his dinner guests and rushed to the site of the explosion at Villeneuve Castle.

a snowbank. She pointed to what was left of a skylight, away up on top of a wall, and she told us she remembered looking out that window. To do so, she would have had to have been several feet in the air. Basically, the roof went off, she came flying out, then the walls fell back inside. "Some of our guys arrived on their own about the same time I did, and the first fire truck got there half a minute later. It came right into the driveway; the next stayed farther back, at a hydrant. By then, I noticed a woman lying on the front steps, with her upper torso buried under the rubble. At first I thought she was dead, or that her back was broken for sure. Reg Havery ran to her." Havery was appalled at the young woman's condition. "She must have been buried under at least three feet [a metre] of plaster when I first saw her," he explained. "She was alive, but unconscious. Then, when we finally got her dug out, we realized a lot of the right side of

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DINNER BLAST her face was torn off. I stayed with her until the ambulance people could take care of her. I learned later than she was a friend of the man who was killed." Meanwhile, Bill Harvey had pulled away several chunks of rubble and was shining his flashlight under more debris. He swept the beam around the gaping hole below and in front of him to the dust-covered, broken body of Bruce Currie. "I was sure he was dead," Harvey recalled, "and I pointed him out to Reg." "I don't think we can do anything for him," the older man said, helplessly. The situation around the Castle was chaotic. People ran here and there in the blackness while the injured cried, called for help, or both. Firefighters doused small fires that dotted the rubble, and the police and others searched desperately for anyone trapped. "As soon as the woman on the steps was looked after, we concentrated on trying to figure out where the calls for help were coming from," said Harvey. "Basically, when the explosion came, one wall collapsed and a huge timber came crashing down and landed on one of the dining tables. That table, in one area, kept the falling wall from going right to the floor. The wall itself must have weighed a ton, and how one table supported it was amazing. "One lady was sitting in a chair with her back to a fireplace, and she had her arm resting on the table. When this huge wall came down, a beam fell on her arm and pinned it to the table. It just stopped short of taking her arm off. A couple on the other side of the table, five feet [1.5 metres] away, were injured. The man was thrown to the floor, under where the timber went down to meet the floor. He was sitting there, spreadeagled, doubled right in half, and his face was down between his legs, touching the floor. "When I first saw him, I was sure his back was broken, but he was still conscious enough to call for help. That was when I remember thinking to myself, what am I going to do here? "Where the timber went down to meet the floor, there was a shallow wedge, so I crawled down under there, through this little hole that was perhaps twenty inches [fifty centimetres] high, with my flashlight. While I was trying to figure out what to do, I'm lying on my stomach, 111

STAR OF COURAGE and I had just enough space, something like crawling under your car, and lifting your head a little. "I finally had to push him farther back into the hole in order to get some space and turn him around, stretch him out, then I was able to drag him out by the ankles. I was on my stomach, backing up and pulling him. The poor guy also had a piece of wood, about two inches [five centimetres] long, looking like a big toothpick, sticking out of his eyelid. It had to have been right through his eyelid. Every time he blinked, the stick moved up and down. "After I got the man out, I went back into the hole again to work with a lady who was lying on the floor. She had bricks and stuff all over her, so I just stayed there, talking to her, trying to calm her because a couple of the other guys were coming in from the opposite direction. Just by being there and talking to her, I figured I could at least keep her calm while they worked. I knew the woman whose arm was pinned would have to be taken out first, so we could get at the woman on the floor." Paramedic Paul Bartlett was digging down into the debris . "There was still a lot of dust in the air," he said, "and the fire was still going in one corner of the building, just where there seemed to be the only entrance to the basement area. "When I heard Bill Harvey saying that there were still two women trapped, I yelled at him to keep them talking until I could find another way to get to them. "I finally found a small crevice under a pile of wood and plaster — a small cavernous area — and I was able to work my way about eight feet [2.5 metres] down into it. At that point all I had was a small flashlight and it was not much help. "There was dust and rubble everywhere, over me, under me, and on either side - plaster, lathing, chunks of wood, nails and so on. There were also parts of window frames and some broken glass, but most of the glass had been blown out when the building exploded. I don't actually remember watching out for nails or glass because I wasn't really thinking of danger. I felt I was in control of what I was doing. Then as I got farther down into the hole, I could hear moaning." Paul Bartlett is not a big man, but the crevice in which he was working was terribly cramped. He dragged himself slowly forward, 112

DINNER BLAST

Left to right: Paul Bartlett, Marilyn Guty, Wally Guty, Margaret Hellard.

through the debris, and every time he pulled some aside, more fell on top of him, and the dust in the darkness became suffocating. "The first woman I came to was pinned by her arm under a huge beam, but luckily, her arm did not seem to be crushed. Her level of awareness was good and she was asking what happened, trying to give herself some kind of reality check. "Basically, I was able to tell her that the building had collapsed, but if she remained calm we would get her outside as soon as we could. She was crying though, and I was unable to do a proper assessment, but I did as much as I could to reassure her. Her name was Marilyn Guty, although I did not know it at the time. She kept calling for somebody named Wally, whom I later learned was her husband. She was concerned for him, perhaps more than for herself, but as it turned out, he was already outside looking for her. After I had done a quick head-to-toe check on her, I figured there were no broken bones or other serious injuries. But because she was trapped, we had to try to find some way to get her out as soon as possible. That was when I called outside and asked for something to lift the beam."

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STAR OF COURAGE At this point Bill Harvey, Paul Bartlett and those trapped under the debris came into ever-increasing danger. Soon Reg Havery joined them, crawling along with a pry bar and a couple of blocks of wood to help. He had barely reached Paul Bartlett's side when the men noticed that the smell of gas seemed to be getting stronger. "We were trying to do the best we could," Bartlett continues, "when we heard a firefighter run by outside, yelling: 'Get out of the hole. The gas is still leaking. It's gonna blow!' That was probably the only time I was really scared because I knew there were fires still burning. Then both women began screaming: 'We're going to die! We're going to die!' That sort of thing." But now it was the calm, measured reassurance and quiet courage of Reg Havery that came to the fore. The veteran firefighter turned to Bartlett, and in a voice devoid of even a trace of panic said: "No. Don't listen to that. Everything is under control. The gas is off. We're not getting out because we have a job to do here." With that, he handed Bartlett a wooden wedge block and together they struggled to free Marilyn Guty. To no avail. "We didn't have a whole lot of luck that way," Paul Bartlett explained, "so Reg crawled up to the entrance and yelled at someone to go to a fire truck and get a jack. We got it down there and it worked." While Bill Harvey on his side of the wreckage continued to reassure the second woman who was trapped, the young paramedic and the older firefighter manoeuvred the jack under the beam and ever so slowly eased it off Marilyn Guty's arm. "Reg got her outside," said Bartlett, "while I pulled more junk off the other lady. She was lying sort of semi-prone on her side, literally buried under a foot and a half [half a metre] of plaster. She had been at the same table as Marilyn, along with both their husbands, but everyone was tossed in separate ways by the explosion." The second couple were Allen and Margaret Hellard, and Allen had already been rescued by Bill Harvey. Margaret remained under the wreckage alone. "When she was more or less uncovered, I did a quick head-to-toe [examination] on her," Paul Bartlett recalled. "She was absolutely hys-

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DINNER BLAST terical at that point and she could not even feel her legs, let alone walk. She did not think she could move at all. "I knew we were going to have a bit of a situation because I could not get a fracture board or an other type of equipment down into that small hole. And because the place was so cramped, Reg had to move out a bit and I lay on my back. Then I was able to roll Margaret over on top of my legs. I put my arms under her arms, from the back, and hauled her up on top of me." Slowly at first, ever so slowly, Bartlett inched his way backwards. Each time he moved a foot or so, he pulled Margaret up higher on his legs. Then he backed up and repeated the process again and again and again. Aside from a weak flashlight beam Reg Havery shone his way, Bartlett struggled in the dark. Annoyingly, his every movement brought more plaster down on his face and body, and on the crying, helpless woman he dragged. By the time he reached a slightly larger section of the tunnel, his strength was gone and he was utterly spent. Here, fortunately, there was just enough space for Havery to assist. "Reg got a rope around my chest, under my arms," Bartlett recalled, "and I wrapped my legs around Margaret and held onto her as tightly as I could. Then Reg, Bill, and some of the other firefighters hauled both of us out of the hole. Margaret Hellard was still conscious and somewhat hysterical, but because she was covered with so much debris, it was still impossible to properly assess her injuries. "Once we got her out, we were able to clean her off a bit before placing her on a fracture board and setting up our oxygen for her. Then firefighters were so helpful in doing this, as were Guy Sarault and Paul Gentile, the other two ambulance people who were there." While Bartlett, Harvey, and Havery had been under the cramped and dusty wreckage freeing those trapped there, other individuals elsewhere in the restaurant also assisted anyone they found. Three of them — Paul Vidito, Lionel Hicks, and Larry White — received bravery medals for their efforts. And as Bill Harvey told the author, "many others risked their lives and were never recognized." In all, some fourteen people were hurt in the Castle explosion, but only a single person — Bruce Currie — died. By the time the injured had been transported to hospitals, hundreds of curious onlookers and

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Villeneuve Castle grounds today. The former driveway is at the left.

several reporters had descended on Picton. The media reports were widely disseminated and often shocking. "We were driving along a street in Watertown, New York, when we heard the bulletins about the Villeneuve," recalls skier Bill Renoy. "At first, we couldn't believe such a thing could possibly happen. The place had seemed so indestructible. It was hard to see it go." But the Castle was gone — never to be rebuilt. Today, only vacant land and the remnants of a driveway indicate where the building was. There were lawsuits of course, and an inquest, and Bill Harvey, Paul Bartlett, and Reg Havery received Stars of Courage for their heroism on the night of the explosion. But the three, along with everyone else who was even vaguely familiar with the Villeneuve, knew nothing would ever compensate for the life of Bruce Currie, the young man who was convinced that his future would be better than his past.

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CHAPTER NINE

STRANGERS AT THE CHURCH SUPPER

EDLEY is A small place about fifty kilometres southeast of Regina. Fewer than three hundred people live there, most of them hardy souls with links to the land through farming, or farm-related endeavours. Those who do not farm are either related to, or are friends with someone who does. Everyone knows everyone else and the sense of community is strong. The area where the Saskatchewan town is situated is prairie, as vast and overpowering as any in Canada. The land is good land, crop land, and the horizons are distant. Summers can be hot, unmercifully so, but few complain. After all, the bone-chilling winds of winter come all too soon. For those who live in Sedley, distances are seen in relative terms. A quick run to Regina is as commonplace as going to a corner store any-

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STAR OF COURAGE where else. A weekend jaunt to Winnipeg, to Brandon, Saskatoon, or even Minneapolis is not unusual. Without a car, however, or the ubiquitous pickup, going anywhere can be a problem. And when you come from elsewhere, your presence in Sedley is quickly noted. People are curious about strangers, but at the same time, are invariably polite. I drove into the town for the first time one morning in a rental car I had picked up at Winnipeg airport. The fact that the vehicle was from out of the province drew stares. One man looked at the licence, then at me, then back to the Manitoba plates. He finally pointed out that I was a long way from home. I didn't bother to tell him I was from Ontario. That afternoon, I spent some time in Our Lady of Grace Roman Catholic Church. Twice in two days I visited the parish cemetery, a

Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church in Sedley, Saskatchewan. The entrance to the church hall is at the right.

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STRANGERS AT THE CHURCH SUPPER well-tended graveyard at the edge of town. One man apparently saw me making notes as I looked at the headstones. The same gentleman had seen me at the church and was solicitous about my well-being. He bent over backwards offering help, but obviously really just wanted to know who I was and why I was in his town. When I told him, his smile faded and a shadow of sadness crossed his face. "Oh yes, I remember that day," was his only comment. He walked away and I understood his reaction. No wonder he, like so many of his townspeople, now wonder about strangers. They have good reason. On October 17, 1976, three visitors came to Sedley, and the town has never been the same since. The trio went to Our Lady of Grace, as I had, but for the most sinister of reasons. Ironically though, their visit had brought me as well. I had come, however, for a different purpose. But that is getting ahead of the story. Suffice to say, visitors to Sedley are suspect, and have been since that October Sunday in 1976. Our Lady of Grace is a splendid looking, well-maintained, red-brick church. It towers above the town, and, save for the grain elevator by the railway tracks, is the tallest building in the area. The white cross on the steeple can be seen for miles. Sunday mass is at 10:45 a.m. The interior of the church is brightly lit, attractive, and quite spacious. Entry is up the four cement steps to the front door - off Elgin Street. On the Assiniboia Avenue side, a wheelchair ramp provides access for the handicapped. Attached to the right side of the building, as viewed from the front, is a rectangular, box-like structure that allows entrance to the church basement, which is, in effect, the parish hall. This is where, every autumn, the largest organization at Our Lady of Grace, the Catholic Women's League (CWL), holds a fowl supper. The event has been running for years. And while it is the major fundraising activity for the parish, attendance at the event is open to anyone. Indeed, people from all over the area and beyond come to the supper. It has always been popular, well-attended and fun. And the food is good. While CWL members sponsor the dinner, prepare the food and do most of the cleanup afterwards, men of the parish offer, or are coerced

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STAR OF COURAGE into offering their assistance for such things as setting up tables and chairs, disposing of garbage afterwards, or selling tickets. When the annual supper was held back in 1976, two men at the door were Edward (Eddie) Leier and his cousin Joseph (Porky) Helfrick. The two greeted everyone arriving, sold tickets, made change, and often directed visitors to tables. When they had the time, they talked to each other and to anyone around about the weather, crops, and sports. Both men were well known and well liked in Sedley and they knew almost everyone who showed up. Porky Helfrick was fifty-four-years-old, dark-haired, handsome, and despite his nickname, tall and trim. He had a twinkle in his eye and an easy laugh that endeared him to all. He was the father of three — a son and two daughters — and his wife Leota was also working at the dinner that night. Eddie Leier was four years younger than Porky and shared many of the same interests as his cousin: a love of sports — particularly hockey, curling and baseball. Eddie Leier also had a sense of humour that was best exemplified in his ability to tell jokes, to tease, and to quickly put people at ease. He too was a good-looking man whose physical resemblance to Porky Helfrick was noticeable, particularly in the eyes and nose. He and his wife Jean had three sons. She waited on tables at the supper. Porky Helfrick was now working hard at his third career, as a grain buyer for the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool at the Sedley elevator. In earlier years he had driven a truck, and at another time worked as a bulk oil agent. He had a marvellous zest for life and his greatest loves were his family, his church, and all the sports mentioned earlier. He was also an accomplished golfer. Eddie Leier was truly a man of the soil, and he farmed over four hundred hectares in the Sedley area. In addition to growing field crops, he raised pigs, chickens, and turkeys. While his involvement as a player or coach on several sports teams consumed most of his spare time, he somehow found a few hours each week to serve as a municipal councillor. He also collected antiques when he could. Like so many couples whose roots are deep in prairie soil, both the Helfricks and the Leiers knew hardship. This was particularly true for

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STRANGERS AT THE CHURCH SUPPER Eddie and Jean. In 1969 a cyclone nearly wiped them out, and two years later they had a fire. In the first instance, a violent wind lashed the Lewvan area, a few kilometres southwest of Sedley. And even though the strength of the storm abated slightly, it still packed 160-kilometre an-hour winds as it tore across the Leier land. Their extensive flax crop was destroyed and a steel structure protecting it was ripped from its cement foundations and blown up against their house. That day, Eddie was elsewhere on the farm and Jean remembers lying with her kids on a hallway floor until the storm passed. When they emerged, all they saw was wreckage, and the flax had blown away. Two years later, a fire did much the same thing. Sun shining through a farm shed window ignited oil-soaked rags and the conflagration that resulted destroyed almost everything but their home. A fierce prairie wind fanned the flames and made fighting the blaze almost futile. Finally, just about the time Jean and Eddie had pretty much recovered from the wind and fire tragedies, Eddie was almost killed in a serious traffic accident. His red, half-ton Dodge collided with a car at an intersection several kilometres from his home. Eddie was catapulted through the passenger side of his windshield and ended up lying in a ditch, ninety metres from the point of impact. By the time he was released from hospital, doctors had inserted pins in his legs and feet, to enable him to walk. Yet through all this, he never once lost the ability to laugh. He cheered up those who came to commiserate. Six months before the fowl supper in Sedley, a twenty-eight-year-old single mother of two moved into a rented house on MacKay Street in Regina. The woman's name was Janet Vance. The house was rather nondescript, much like many of the others that lined either side of the tree-lined block. Behind the home and to its left was a small garage. It opened onto an alleyway, similar to hundreds of other back lanes common in Western Canada. There was barely space in the garage for a car. In order to supplement her rental costs, Vance sublet an apartment in the basement to a twenty-two-year-old British Columbia man named David Glenn Hares. About two months after he arrived, Vance was introduced to a second man, Regina native Robert George Gulash.

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STAR OF COURAGE Bob Gulash, who was thirty-four, became quite attached to Vance, and the feeling was mutual. He began living with her in early June. No one seems to know how much Vance knew about Gulash when she took him into her home. This stranger had a decidedly unsavoury background. He had been convicted of armed robbery, pointing a firearm at another person, and even kidnapping. Nonetheless, he soon became a fixture in the MacKay Street house. By August of that year, however, Gulash and Vance had a partial falling out. She didn't kick him out of her house though; instead, she ordered him to live in the basement and share the available space with Hares. Gulash co-operated, but both Hares and Vance noticed a marked character change in the man. One day, he stopped in at a local bar and bought a handgun. While the daily lives of Vance, Gulash, and Hares were being played out in Regina, summer ended, and plans for the annual fowl supper were moving ahead at Our Lady of Grace. Turkeys were ordered, meal tickets printed, and advertisements for the evening were placed with obliging merchants in various communities. In the days just before the dinner, work groups were formed, the church hall was given a last-minute cleaning, and the tables were set up for the meal. Meanwhile, area harvesting operations were in full swing. The Sedley elevator was humming. Mid-October was also a busy time for those interested in sports. The Western Canada Hockey League season was well under way, but the nearest team — Regina — was having little success. After seven games with only one victory, they found themselves in last place, behind Brandon, Saskatoon, and Flin Flon. In the Canadian Football League, however, the home team was a powerhouse. Saskatchewan Roughriders led in the west, and on Sunday afternoon, October 17, defeated BC Lions 28-15 in Vancouver. The score brought much pleasure to football followers in Sedley. And baseball fans had something to hold their interest. The World Series was on, and that Sunday the Cincinnati Reds beat the New York Yankees 4-3, in Cincinnati. The win gave the Reds a 2-0 advantage in the best-of-seven series. They went on to win the whole thing.

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STRANGERS AT THE CHURCH SUPPER About two weeks before the supper out at Sedley, the trio from MacKay Street in Regina all went out one evening to the home of a former girlfriend of Dave Hares. For whatever reason, but probably to show off, Bob Gulash took his recently purchased revolver with him. He flashed the weapon around, basked in the attention it brought to him, and apparently left the impression that he might use it to hold up a liquor store. No one at the party reported him to the authorities. Still later, on Saturday afternoon, October 16, he brandished the gun for Janet Vance when they were at home. By this time, Gulash was acting more and more like the thug that he was. He was wild-eyed, argumentative, moody — and armed. Vance didn't throw him out, and still slept with him on occasion. She said later that she'd been afraid of him. That same Saturday afternoon, as he was showing the .22 to Vance, Gulash was drinking anything he could get his hands on. This included rye and scotch whisky, vodka, and prodigious amounts of beer. The boozing went on all day and half the night, and not long after he got up the next day, he continued where he had left off. By mid-afternoon on Sunday, Gulash, Vance and Hares were hungry, and they decided to drive down to the fowl supper in Sedley that they had heard about. Vance called a babysitter for her kids, tossed a dozen beers into Dave Hare's car, and away they went. The three headed south from the city, down the arrow-straight two-lane Highway 33, past the tiny settlements of Kronau and Lajord towards Sedley. Gulash was in the passenger's seat in front, and his revolver was within easy reach in the glove compartment. Once, during the drive from town, Hares stopped and Gulash shot up a road sign. Then he put the gun back in the glove compartment of the dark-blue, 1975 Monte Carlo and they continued the trip. As early as 5:30 that Sunday, the parishioners running the supper at Sedley were assured of its success. Occasionally in other years, the event had been marred by rain, or even an early snowfall. This year the weather had co-operated and the sunshine and 7 Celsius temperature meant that getting to Our Lady of Grace would be easy.

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STAR OF COURAGE In no time, it seemed, cars were parked bumper to bumper on the sides of every street near the church. In many instances, not just one or two, but four or five children and adults piled out of a vehicle. The mood was festive, and the hall filled rapidly — every seat at the tables was taken. As diners finished their meals, plates were cleared, hurriedly washed up, and the tables were immediately reset. Soon there was a lineup to eat, yet few seemed to mind. Anyone who had been at the supper in previous years knew that the wait would not be long, and the meal would be worth it. But three strangers from Regina refused to wait. When Dave Hares and his passengers got to the church, they noticed the crowds, but went ahead and bought tickets anyway. Eddie Leier and Porky Helfrick were at the door when the trio arrived, and the visitors each paid $3.00 for their tickets. The three stood out. All were new to Sedley, to the church, and to anyone who saw them. All looked roughly the same age, but the oldest, the guy in the beige jacket — Gulash — had what people remembered as "hard eyes." He looked as though he should be avoided. Dave Hares stood out because he wore a red leather jacket with white stripes on the sleeves. Both men had long hair and beards. Some dinner guests noticed that the woman had blonde hair, but recalled little else about her. The three waited for about fifteen minutes to have supper, but when told the wait would be a bit longer, became impatient and demanded their money back. A young boy named Dean Lefebvre happened to be standing in the vestibule where the tickets were being sold. He watched as Hares showed up to get the refunds. He also watched and would later remember that Leier and Helfrick returned $9.00 to the man, who then left. A couple of minutes later, the three strangers drove out of town. Unfortunately, they would soon return. Gulash did the driving on the way north from Sedley. Hares, who was sitting in the front seat with him, began to think back to where they had just been. He began to calculate how much money might be in that cashbox he had seen on the table at the church. He voiced his views aloud, and found in Gulash an attentive listener. Hares figured

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STRANGERS AT THE CHURCH SUPPER there were at least three hundred and fifty people at the supper, and if they had each paid $3.00 to get in .... It took only a few seconds to plan the robbery. Gulash turned the car around at Lajord. On the way south again, the men fine-tuned their strategy. Later, Janet Vance would say she tried to talk them out of the whole thing, that she asked to get out of the car. She added, however, that Gulash told her the only way she was getting out was with a bullet in the head. He ordered her to shut up, to stay in the car, and to keep her head down. Dave Hares came up with the idea for the robbery, but Gulash took the notion and revelled in it. By the time the three had reached Sedley the second time, he was giving all the orders. On the outskirts of town, he told Hares they would switch jackets. He also directed the younger man to drive following the robbery, and

Edward (Eddie) Leier was taking tickets at the church supper when he looked up and realized the stranger had a gun.

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STAR OF COURAGE told him which road to take for their getaway. He parked in a driveway at the side of the church and Hares slid behind the wheel. Gulash pulled a hood over his head, and with his revolver in his hand, sprinted to the church. Hares kept the motor running and the right front car door open. Vance remained in the back. Once inside the entrance to the hall, Gulash went straight to the ticket table. He pointed the handgun at Leier and Helfrick, and without saying a word, scooped up the metal cashbox, turned on his heel, and ran. The whole incident took only a few seconds. The robbery was witnessed by Dean Lefebvre, the same youngster who had seen a stranger in a red jacket demanding his ticket money back not fifteen minutes earlier. The boy recognized the jacket, but in doing so did not realize he was now looking at a different person. The misidentification was exactly what Gulash had intended. If the theft could later be blamed on Hares, so much the better. When Gulash barged in, gun in hand, both Leier and Helfrick thought at first that the man was joking; that the little .22 was a toy. But when he snapped the cashbox lid closed and left with it, they quickly came to their senses. Both went after him. As all this transpired, a parishioner named Real Coupal, who knew both Eddie Leier and Porky Helfrick, was standing close to the cash table. When he saw the stranger running out the door with the money, he asked Helfrick who it was. Helfrick said he didn't know, and Coupal took up the chase as well. Outside the church a local farmer Jerry Warnke had already eaten and had returned to his car to go home. He saw a man in a red jacket run from the hall with a cashbox in one hand, a gun in the other. He watched in utter amazement as the fellow dived into a waiting car and roared away. But when he noticed Leier and Helfrick racing for their cars, he realized what must have happened inside. He followed the getaway vehicle, just behind the cars driven by Leier and Helfrick. Others also joined in the wild ride. The robbers went north from town, on a grid road. Many years after that fateful Sunday, I retraced the route of the chase. My guide was Tom Leier, Eddie Leier's youngest son. Tom drove.

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Joseph (Porky) Helfrick followed the robbers in the wild car chase across the prairie.

"They came this way," he said, "and the road was probably not as good as it is now. Apparently they were doing about 80 miles [130 kilometres] an hour though." I shuddered at driving even close to that speed here. The road is straight, single-lane, and gravel-surfaced. While ditches on either side are relatively shallow and the few fences that remain are well back, this is certainly not a freeway. A moment's inattention on the loose gravel and any car would be out of control. As well, the plume of dust that would have streamed back from the getaway car must have blinded the driver immediately behind it. For most of the fifteen kilometres of the chase, that car was an older Chevy Impala driven by Porky Helfrick. Back at Our Lady of Grace, the meal continued for a time because at first only a handful of people knew anything about the robbery. The word spread quickly, however, and in no time, the

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STAR OF COURAGE holdup was the only topic of conversation. For Leota Helfrick and Jean Leier, the shock was particularly acute. Both knew their husbands had been at the door; the news that the two men were pursuing the robbers was unbelievably worrisome. In all, at least five cars were involved in the chase. Ten minutes after being called, the RCMP arrived at the church. The first officer got what information he could, then requested backup because of the chase that was under way. Very soon afterwards, however, the Mounties received another call. This one was much more urgent. As he drove away from Sedley, Hares had the road to himself — for a kilometre or so. He and Gulash revelled in what they had done and prepared to count the take. The whole thing had been so easy. But soon Hares saw a car approaching from the rear, then another and another. The robbers knew they were being followed. Hares tramped on the accelerator, but Porky Helfrick and the rest gradually gained. Vance kept her head down, but she would later remember hearing Gulash giving orders from the right seat. She also heard the rattle of change in the cashbox, the sound of gravel under the tires, and a short time later, the sound of gunshots. Gulash was shooting at Porky Helfrick's car. Sensing the imminent danger he was in, Helfrick slowed somewhat. The shooting stopped but not the chase. Possibly feeling that his cousin's car was unable to catch the getaway vehicle, Eddie Leier sped past Porky and pulled up right behind the fugitives. In all likelihood, with all the road dust, he would not have been aware of the shooting. In any event, he was now directly behind the robbers, and the new Dodge Monaco he drove was a faster automobile than the one up ahead. He pulled out to pass it. All this transpired as the speeding cars topped a slight rise in the road, then started down a shallow incline. At the bottom of the grade, a furious Gulash yelled at Hares to stop. When he did so, Eddie Leier pulled in front of the robbers and cut off their avenue of escape. Porky Helfrick eased in behind. The chase was over. Then, gun in hand and seething with rage, Bob Gulash got out.

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STRANGERS AT THE CHURCH SUPPER As the cars came to a dusty stop, thirteen-year-old Michelle Roest was in a field nearby, riding horseback. Because her parents' farm was not far away, Michelle was quite familiar with most of the prairie around it, and that included the grid road north of Sedley. Around 6 p.m., she was riding through some pasture she knew well, enjoying the freedom and the late day sun. In the days and weeks afterwards, however, she would truly wish she had been somewhere else — anywhere else. Just as she came up by the road, the startled teenager saw a man with a gun get out of a car. She watched as he walked back to a second car and pointed the pistol at the driver, who got out and stood on the gravel with his hands in the air. A few seconds later, another man followed. Speechless with fear, Michelle slid off her horse's back and ducked out of sight behind some farm machinery. Then there were gunshots. Not daring to even look at what might have happened, the girl somehow got back on her horse and raced home to her parents. She had just heard the sounds of a double murder. In the few seconds after Helfrick and Leier stopped their cars, Bob Gulash moved with a kind of insane fury. The robbery was over. He had the money and he had almost gotten away with it. But instead, these two ordinary-looking guys who were not even cops had stopped him. In an utterly grotesque sort of way, he had been humiliated, shown up, by two gentle strangers, two farmers, neither of whom seemed afraid of a loaded gun. For their part, Helfrick and Leier were only doing what they knew they had to do. Money that they had been entrusted with had been taken. More than just the receipts from a dinner was involved — the money belonged to the church, their church. Accordingly, they determined to do everything they could to get it back. These two men were facing a kind of evil they had never encountered before. Their lives had been good lives. They were honest, loyal, hard-working men who loved and cared for family and others in ways Gulash would not have been able to imagine. He had lived most of his life on the fringes of the law. His motto had always been, and would

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It was at this location where Porky Helfrick and Eddie Leier were ordered from their cars. The pursuit was over and the real tragedy was about to happen.

continue to be, that if you wanted something, you took it — even if others were inconvenienced, hurt, or even worse .... As Michelle Roest had observed, even though she did not know any names, Gulash first ordered Porky Helfrick out of his car and told him to walk to the edge of the road. Then he started screaming at Eddie Leier, directing him to move his car out of the way, because it was blocking the escape path. Leier did so. Then he was forced to get out and walk over to his cousin. While Porky and Eddie were standing together on the road, Dave Hares got out of the getaway car and yelled a warning to Gulash. Other cars involved in the chase were close at hand and the gunman was so consumed with anger that he had failed to notice them. He raised his revolver and shot Porky Helfrick in the back. Then he killed Eddie Leier by shooting him in the head. Eddie died on the spot, Porky soon after in an ambulance speeding to a Regina hospital. All for a little over a thousand dollars. Seconds before the shooting, others involved in the chase approached. Jerry Warnke and one or two men in his car got near

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STRANGERS AT THE CHURCH SUPPER enough to see Gulash standing, gun in hand, behind Helfrick and Leier. Warnke made an immediate U-turn and sped to a nearby farm to call the police. R.C.M.P. Constable Steven Broda responded, but was too late. The two Sedley men had been shot and their killers had gone. The funeral mass for Edward Leier and Joseph Helfrick was held at Our Lady of Grace on October 21, five days after they were murdered. The church was packed that day, as was the basement, where closed-circuit televisions were in place for those who could not get seats upstairs. And even then, many others stood outside, unable to get in at all. The mass was concelebrated by three priests, but it was Father Francis Marcotte, the resident pastor, who spoke of the men who had died. "Because of the tragedy, some have said that life will never be the same in Sedley," he remarked. "But life will be better, because of Joseph and Edward being in our midst." The two men were buried close together in the Sedley Roman Catholic Cemetery. Here, as the final prayers of internment were said at the gravesides, those present mourned the loss of the deceased. Those responsible had already been caught. The killers spent the night of the murders with Janet Vance. Gulash gave her $100.00 from the robbery proceeds to pay her babysitter and to buy pizza and beer. Then she helped him shave off his beard. All evening long, the lead item of every newscast concerned the robbery and the murders. Local roadblocks were in place and police across the country were on the lookout for two men and a woman in a 1975 dark-blue Monte Carlo. By this time though, the car was hidden in the garage behind Vance's house. The next afternoon, police traced the vehicle to the last known address for Hares — the MacKay Street residence where he had been living since spring. They seized the car and arrested Vance. But Hares and Gulash had gone — in Gulash's car. Fortunately, the Mounties knew its year, make and licence number and later that evening cornered the killers at a roadblock near Strasbourg,

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The getaway car was hidden in this garage in Regina. The vehicle was discovered by the police and immediately impounded.

Saskatchewan, about sixty kilometres from Regina. The two were returned to the capital and locked up. In the months that followed, the Crown prosecution lawyers gathered the proof they knew they would need to secure convictions of Gulash and Hares. The case involved a lot of painstaking legwork, but one day, rather unexpectedly, help came from a surprising source. Dave Hares began to co-operate. Apparently he decided reluctantly, with his lawyer's advice, to assist the police. Presumably, he concluded that by doing so, he might get off easier than Gulash. As well, however, Hares was now away from the influence and bullying of Gulash. Later on, in court, Hares claimed he had been afraid of the older man. Whatever the reason, one day during his interrogation of Hares, RCMP Constable Edward Iddins was surprised when the accused agreed to draw three maps for him. One of the three seemed to be useless, but the other two were of great assistance to the Mounties. One map gave the precise location of the pond in a game preserve where Bob Gulash had thrown the murder weapon. Police divers recovered the gun. The second map led to a farm granary several kilometres from Regina. There the investigators found the red jacket Gulash had hidden.

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STRANGERS AT THE CHURCH SUPPER When the third map proved to be more confusing than helpful, two police officers actually took Hares to the place he had described. There, from under a tree, Hares dug up two plastic pouches containing most of the money that had been in the cashbox from Sedley. The murder trials for Robert George Gulash and David Glenn Hares began on Valentine's Day, 1977. Ten days later, the jury found the two guilty on two counts each of first-degree murder. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment, with no parole for twenty-five years. Hare's sentence was later reduced on appeal. Gulash is now deceased. Finally, on February 3, 1978, District Court Judge J.G. Mclntyre found Janet Elaine Vance not guilty of being an accessory after the fact in the robbery. She had not been charged with murder. In Sedley, the relatives of the murdered men coped as best they could with their loss. The pointlessness of the tragedy only made the hurt deeper. The two good men were honoured posthumously, and today in Sedley, both are remembered with pride. But the pride is tinged with sadness and an air of protectiveness. For this reason, when I went there in hopes of paying tribute to the two in this book, I was regarded with reservation.

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CHAPTER TEN

NIAGARA FALL

EN THOUSAND YEARS ago, Niagara Falls was born. That was when the glaciers retreated, leaving parts of North America forever changed. Lake Erie no longer drained southward. Instead, its outflow went north, over limestone and shale into Lake Ontario, and then to the sea. Between the lakes, a monstrous waterfall formed and its thunder is with us still. By volume, Niagara is the world's greatest waterfall — close to one hundred and seventy million litres of water per minute pass over the combined Canadian and American cataracts. Taken together, the falls are almost a thousand metres wide, so it's no surprise they are a wonder — as they were to the Native people who saw them first, to the whites who came in 1678, and to us who are awed by them today.

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STAR OF COURAGE Thousands of people from all over the world come to "The Falls" to gape at their majesty, or to get married, or to gamble in the large casino. Niagara has long been called the honeymoon capital of Canada. Visitors marry, then go to take pictures of the falls; they approach the falls in sight-seeing boats and helicopters, ride across the Niagara Gorge on aerial trams, and even descend into tunnels to view the falling water from the rear. Other kinds of attractions exist as well: wax museums, theatres, viewing towers, aquariums, even a butterfly conservatory. Some of these tourist traps are memorable; others are unbelievably tacky. Yet the thundering cascade will never lose its charm. Anyone standing at the lip of the cataract is awed by the roar of the water and its mesmerizing power. This power, this spellbinding attractiveness, encompasses within it a danger that never goes away. Over the years, many individuals have succumbed to the cruel seduction of the roaring waterfall, and have fallen, jumped, or been dragged into its maelstrom. Almost all, if they were seen again, were found bloated and broken, far downstream where a calmer Niagara gives up her dead. Very few have gone into the river above the falls and lived to describe their adventure. Those who have were lucky, incredibly lucky, or they were plucked from certain death by someone who happened to be close at hand, or who had the skills, equipment and courage to effect a rescue. This is the story of how one young woman beat the odds. Early on the morning of May 30, 1983, an attractive twenty-year-old student nurse named Sherry Vyverberg backed her car from the driveway of her parents' home in Rochester, New York. She waved a quick goodbye to her mother, then drove on down Centerwood Drive, heading for the home of her boyfriend, Keith Gandy, twenty-two. The couple had dated for some time, often including others on their dates, as on this day. After collecting Keith, Sherry picked up two other friends — Mike Jarocki, who was twenty-six, and twenty-two-year-old Greg Grant. The four headed for Niagara Falls, Ontario, an easy two-hour drive away. By eight o'clock they had arrived, and had finished breakfast at a downtown restaurant. Then they hopped back in the car and went to see the falls — close up. The sun was shining and this

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NIAGARA FALL American Memorial Day holiday held lots of promise. The four laughed a lot as they swung onto the parkway, the beautiful drive that follows the shore of the Niagara River, on the Canadian side. Anyone who saw the group that morning would have thought none of them had a care in the world. That would soon change. At about the same time Sherry Vyverberg and her friends were leaving the restaurant, three men at the Canadian Niagara Power Company were getting into their utility truck for a day's work at Fort Erie, a short drive south of the falls. They were hardly under way when they realized that their hard hats were not in the truck. "We got chewed out for not wearing them a couple of other times " one of the trio, John Marsh, told the author. "So we headed back to the shop for them. That was why we were down on the parkway that morning. The way we would have gone was blocked off because there were so many tourists around." Marsh, a lifelong Niagara-area resident, was thirty-seven, single, and an iron worker by trade. He admits to having a checkered past, and says he was always a bit of a hell-raiser. Nevertheless, he was a naturally strong, self-taught swimmer, a scuba diver and rather surprisingly perhaps, a champion rodeo rider as well. When he was younger, Marsh also played Junior B hockey. He has a dry, self-deprecating wit and a raucous, infectious laugh. Another of the men in the truck that morning was Pete Quinlin. He was a couple of years older than Marsh, married, and the father of four. Somewhat reserved when meeting strangers, Quinlin is a softspoken, handsome man who still works for Niagara Power. He and Marsh were good friends. Joe Camisa, at fifty-five, was the oldest of the group, and a carpenter by trade. On that Monday morning, he was driving the three-quarter-ton truck back to get the hard hats. Progress was slow because of the crush of tourists. By 8:15 Sherry Vyverberg had parked her car, and with her three friends was sightseeing near an abandoned power plant just upriver from the Horseshoe Falls. None of the group moved quickly, principal-

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STAR OF COURAGE ly because Keith Gandy was using crutches. He had broken an ankle a few days earlier, and was still learning to cope with the cast. His pace did not concern the others. They waited for him where necessary, but split up at the river's edge. Once there, Gandy leaned on his crutches and marvelled at the fast-flowing water, all of which sped from his right, down to the lip of the falls, about five hundred metres to his left. Now while Jarocki and Grant chatted together, Vyverberg began exploring the area around the old power plant. This building, a hulking grey cement-and-stone structure, was owned by Toronto Power, whose name was still etched high on the face of the front. There were plans to turn it into a museum. The building looked foreboding.. As her friends watched, Vyverberg walked over to a spillway that ran along the rear of the building then emptied back into the river on the downstream side. There were, in effect, two small waterfalls there, and she decided to get as close to them as she could. As it turned out, she got too close. There was, and still is, a stubby steel-and-wood barrier leading from about the crest of the spillway, then down a short distance along the river. At the upstream end of the barrier is an ornamental cement balustrade affixed to the power plant wall. This was where Vyverberg went to watch the water. She climbed onto a concrete ledge , and stood

Sherry was behind the building at the upper right when she fell into the river. She drifted to the middle and was rescued near the underwater weir in mid-photo. The lip of the Falls is at the left of the picture.

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One winter morning, John Marsh showed the author the place where Sherry fell into the raging Niagara. This location is just above the Falls.

staring down at the rushing water. The hypnotic effect seemed to make her less cautious than she should have been. Her mind wandered as she stared at the swiftly moving water immediately below her. Light and shadow played across its surface and any stick, leaf, or piece of debris that appeared was gone in a flash. All the while the sound of the water became ever more enticing. Finally, Vyverberg forced her thoughts to the present as she turned to rejoin her friends. That was when her foot slipped and she lost her balance. In sheer desperation she grabbed for the parapet, missed, and a heart-stopping second later, plunged headlong into the deadly spillway. Her friends looked on in horror. The power of the water, its coldness, and its speed were all a shock. Sherry Vyverberg was dragged far below the surface, all the while buffeted by a violent undertow that tore away the bottom of her pink tracksuit. Then half-drowned, half-naked, and terrified, she was swept upwards, only to be sucked down a second and a third time. Once, when she was on the surface, she managed to gulp a mouthful of air. But each time she went down, she was carried farther from shore — and ever farther from any hope of help.

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STAR OF COURAGE At first, the young men on the riverbank had trouble comprehending what had just happened. They stood, immobile, staring, silent with shock. When they finally realized just how much danger Vyverberg was in, they leapt into action. Jarocki and Grant pushed aside some underbrush and clambered down to the water's edge. While Grant did his best to keep an eye on Vyverberg, Jarocki tore off his jeans and dove into the mighty Niagara. Unfortunately, even though he was a strong swimmer, he was no match for the current. He was lucky to make it back to shore. In that half-minute, Greg Grant came as close as anyone will probably come to seeing two good friends go over Horseshoe Falls. Tragically, that was where Vyverberg was now headed. When he went for help, her boyfriend knew that. Tossing his crutches aside and limping awkwardly on his broken leg, Keith Gandy lurched back to the parkway. As he stumbled along, he screamed for help but the first vehicle that came along kept going. Then the utility truck driven by Joe Camisa approached. Pete Quinlin recalls the moment. "As we drove along the river there, this young guy with a cast on his leg came running out beside the road, right by the Toronto Power House. He was yelling and screaming and at first we were not sure what he wanted. At first I thought he had hurt himself. "I remember saying to Joe: 'Pull over! Pull over!' Then, before we even got stopped, the guy told us his girlfriend had fallen into the river. He was pretty upset." "The three of us piled out of the truck and we ran to the edge of the river," explained John Marsh, "but none of us could see her at first. Pete ran down the shore a ways, and I asked the kid with the cast what his girlfriend looked like, if she had blonde hair. "''Why?'he asked me. " 'Because I think I see her out there.' " 'Jeeze, that could be her. Yea, her hair's blonde.'" Marsh yelled: "What's her name?" "Sherry," came the reply. "Then call her. Get her attention. Keep an eye on her," Marsh directed. Then he and Pete Quinlin raced down river to a bridge over a

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NIAGARA FALL sluiceway leading to what was called the Rankine Power Station. Quinlin carried a rope he had grabbed from the truck. Both men knew that river water was diverted into the sluiceway for the operation of power generators at the Rankine. The diversion came about because a long, curved, cement-and-steel weir had been built out into the river, just above the falls. Some water could pass over the weir, but a great deal flowed into the sluiceway. "My idea," John Marsh explained, "was that if the girl got dragged in behind the weir, we might be able to grab hold of her as she went by. If she was farther out, then ..." His voice trailed away. Marsh knew that if Vyverberg went over the falls, she would drown. However, if she was sucked into the sluiceway and he and Quinlin missed her, she would be cut to ribbons by the power turbines. At this point, she was not much more than four hundred metres from the brink of the falls. Either way, her chances of survival were slim. Marsh and Quinlin sprinted for the bridge, while Joe Camisa headed to the Rankine to get someone there to close the headgates leading

The three men who helped rescue Sherry Vyverberg meet with her a few weeks afterwards. They are (L to R): John Marsh, Sherry, Joe Camisa, and Pete Quinlin.

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STAR OF COURAGE to the power generators. If that could be done, the water diverted to the turbines would start to slow. However, even as he ran, Camisa harboured little hope. Activating the machinery took time — and there was almost none of that left. Sherry Vyverberg too, knew as much. She was still conscious, though dreadfully tired and choking on all the water she had swallowed. Unfortunately, despite being a good athlete and reasonably fit, she was a poor swimmer. "So I turned over on my back and relaxed as much as I could," she said later, "but I really expected to die. I thought of my parents and others in my family, and I was sure I would never see them again." She also remembered praying, telling God she was too young to die. And she was so cold. "She was in trouble, big time," John Marsh continues, "no matter what she did. Going over the falls would have been bad, but going into the power house would really have been worse. Everything gets pulled in there, oil drums, shopping carts, old tires, all kinds of junk. Those turbines will make matchsticks out of telephone poles. There are big hatches in there, like the doors on a submarine. When the generator is down, somebody has to go in and clean stuff out. Some guys won't go in because they find what's left of a body.

The winter scene shows the lip of Niagaras Horseshoe Falls. John Marsh pulled the young woman from the water in the immediate foreground.

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The area of snow-covered ice indicates the outer edge of the diversion weir where Sherry was rescued. The Up of the Falls is in the background.

"If I was in the river," commented Pete Quinlin, "I would much sooner go over the falls than through the turbines. However, either way — that girl was dead." But Marsh refused to give up. "I knew that if I just stood there and watched her die, I would never forgive myself. I know Pete felt the same way. That was why we got down there as fast as we could." At the bridge, the two climbed over an iron safety barrier so they were close to where the downstream end of the weir curved towards land. They looked at one another and decided Marsh would go into the water if Vyverberg floated towards the power house. Both men were swimmers, but as Marsh said later: "I was raised in a bathing suit, and I knew the river because I had been around it all my life. Also, Pete had kids." This remark more or less sums up Marsh's feelings about what he was about to do. A fellow human being was in trouble and he knew he had to help in spite of danger to himself. While Pete Quinlin fashioned a bowline knot on the rope he carried, Marsh tore off his boots and shirt. Someone yelled to a passing police cruiser, and Niagara Falls Regional Police Constable James Caddis radioed for help, then ran to the river. He was there when Quinlin looped the rope around Marsh, tightened it and tied off the free end to an iron railing. As soon as Marsh realized Vyverberg was now about one hundred and fifty metres from the

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STAR OF COURAGE crest of the falls, but was starting to drift towards the power house, he dived into the water. In an instant, the numbing cold enveloped him, the current tore against his body, and the rope, even though it was his lifeline, dragged him down. He surfaced, heard Pete Quinlin yell encouragement to Sherry Vyverberg, then glanced to his side and saw her head bobbing on the surface, seemingly far beyond his reach. At that point, his chances of reaching the young woman were almost non-existent. "I couldn't give up though," he explained. "I figured I might only get one chance, and if I blew it, she was a goner for sure." Marsh continued to swim, in quick, powerful strokes, across the current, and ever nearer to the woman he was willing himself to reach. She came closer, faster it seemed, propelled by the rushing water, drifting on the surface and unable to save herself. Marsh charged ahead. The young woman looked at him, silent desperation in her eyes. Then his lifeline grew taut, burned into his flesh, and Marsh could go no farther. The rope was too short! "I was sure I had missed her," he says today, "all because of the length of that damned rope." Just then, miraculously almost, Sherry Vyverberg turned her head; her long hair streamed out behind her, and John Marsh made one last desperate lunge forward, reaching as far as he could. The tips of his fingers touched her hair, tangled in it and brought her slightly closer. Then somehow, Marsh twisted his fingers enough to grab a handful of hair, and suddenly Sherry Vyverberg was within his grasp. "Thank God!" she gasped, and looking at Marsh, "Thank you!" Marsh held on. "I stayed behind her at first," he said, "because sometimes a drowning person will lash out. But she was really calm. She was pretty cold though and I knew we had to get her out of there right away. I yelled at Pete to bring us in." "I got down on the weir so I could grab them," Quinlin said. "That was when I first realized how cold the water was — and I was only wet to my knees."

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NIAGARA FALL Quickly, Quinlin and Const. Caddis hauled in the rope while Marsh held onto Vyverberg. Now that she was this close to safety, he was determined not to lose her. Joe Camisa also rushed back to help. Once Marsh and Vyverberg had been pulled to the side of the weir, Marsh grabbed an old anchor bolt that was protruding from it. As he held on with one hand, he attempted to hoist Vyverberg up to Quinlin. However, because that proved too difficult, he slipped the rope off himself, looped it around Vyverberg, and yelled to Quinlin and the others to pull. A minute later, a shivering, embarrassed, half-dressed Sherry Vyverberg stood on dry land. Constable Caddis took off his jacket and wrapped it around her. She was then taken to a waiting ambulance and rushed away, suffering from hypothermia and shock. "The girl was gone by the time they pulled me out," John Marsh recalled. Once on land, Marsh put on his boots and shirt and dashed home for a dry pair of pants. Then he, Quinlin, and Camisa drove to Fort Erie. While the rescue was certainly not forgotten, the priority now was the job. "We worked there all that morning," Pete Quinlin said, "then we went to a pub for some lunch. That was when the rescue began to take on a life of its own. We couldn't believe it." "I remember sitting at a table, having a beer and eating," adds Marsh. "There was a television there and the news came on. We didn't pay much attention to it until the announcer mentioned something about this fantastic rescue at Niagara Falls. They made such a big deal about it, we started to laugh." At roughly the same time, Sherry Vyverberg was at Greater Niagara General Hospital, gradually recovering from her ordeal, and doing her best to convince the doctors that she was okay, that she had to get back to Rochester. Because it was Memorial Day, she explained, Genesee Hospital where she worked would be short-staffed and anyway she was supposed to go on duty at 3 p.m. The medical people at Niagara General told her their counterparts at Genesee would just have to get along without her. "By the time I got home from work that day, the telephone was ringing non-stop," laughs John Marsh. There were reporters calling

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STAR OF COURAGE from all over the place — right across Canada and the States as well. Some guy later sent me a story out of a magazine in Germany. The rescue was also mentioned in papers in England, Australia, and other places. It was crazy! "The press made such a fuss about it because it happened at Niagara Falls — and it happened to an American, on an American holiday. If Sherry had been a Canadian, probably it would not have been noticed. There have been lots of other rescues that no one mentions. This one got the glory." Even though John Marsh plays down his heroics, what he did that day was extraordinary. Very few others could — or would — have done as much, so he was rightfully lauded for the rescue. A week after the incident Ronald Reagan sent his congratulations and said: "You have proven yourself to be courageous, quick-thinking and concerned for the well-being of your fellow-man." Then the former American president added: "Although others will long remember and admire you for what you have done, your greatest satisfaction must come from knowing you did everything in your power to help in time of great need." Marsh also received the Carnegie Medal for his "outstanding act of heroism," an award from the Royal Canadian Humane Society, and the Canadian Star of Courage, bestowed by the Governor General of Canada on behalf of a grateful nation for his "act of courage in circumstances of great peril." A couple of days after the rescue, he was flown to New York City for the television program "Good Morning America." There he again met the woman whose life he saved. Sherry Vyverberg shared the limelight with him in the Big Apple, and when the tv program was over, took his hand and kissed him. To Marsh, the fact that she was alive to do so was his greatest accolade. The two shared a unique bond, and have been friends ever since.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

TOBOGGAN TERROR

HE OUTING SHOULD have been fun. There was almost no wind; the sky was a brilliant blue; and the snow was deep, fluffy, and fast. A perfect day for tobogganing. It was mid-morning on Sunday, January 8, 1995. Despite the hour, there were many people coming and going at Arena Guy Gagnon, a sports complex at the foot of Desmarchais Avenue in Verdun, Quebec, one of the communities that ring Montreal. As always, ice time at the rink was limited — rental slots were always in demand for hockey, figure skating, and public skating. Most who use the rink live in the surrounding area, where there are single-family homes, many two- and three-storey duplexes and triplexes, and an ever-increasing number of high-rise apartments. Some of

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The entrance to the grounds of the Verdun Yacht Club, on the shore of the St. Lawrence at Montreal.

the older houses have the outdoor, curved-iron staircases once so popular in Quebec. Most — but certainly not all — of the brick buildings are a dark rust colour. The area does not exude wealth. The arena was built for function rather than beauty. It is a large, flat-roofed, tan-coloured, brick-and-concrete structure and is used year-round for a wide variety of community activities. There is ample parking. Basketball backboards and hoops have been erected outside, affixed to black steel poles. Winter in Montreal is long, and it would be several weeks before the weather would encourage the use of the basketball hoops, but there were many things to do in Verdun that morning. The Guy Gagnon backs onto the shore of the St. Lawrence River, directly across from He des Soeurs, or Nuns' Island to English-speakers. Behind the rink, and strung out along the river, are a series of interlinking shore parks, many with obviously Anglophone names in translation: Pare George O'Reilly, Pare Beatty, and Pare Archie Wilcox. This riverfront land is used for everything from birdwatching to biking to cross-country skiing and — where the banks are high enough — tobogganing. Unfortunately, even though it is popular the latter is fraught with danger here. Many of the toboggan run-outs lead directly to the river. 148

TOBOGGAN TERROR The problem is less acute if the winter has been a cold one. After several days of sub-zero temperatures, ice will often extend far out from the shore, or even to the opposite side. This happens in spite of vicious currents that sweep around a bend just upriver between the suburb of La Salle on the north bank, and the Kahnawake Native Territory on the south. In early January 1995, however, great expanses of the river were not frozen. Anyone crossing the Champlain Bridge from the eastern end of Nuns' Island could look down and see nothing but water. Whatever ice there was lay fringing the shorelines, and that ice was far from thick. Nevertheless, some toboggan enthusiasts went ahead and careened down the riverbank. They either did not recognize the danger of their sport or, more than likely, felt they could cope should the toboggan they rode come too close to the ice edge. Some no doubt believed they could simply roll off their sled if it were to glide as far as the water. A few others walked about one hundred metres downstream to toboggan from the part of the bank that went to a wider part of the shoreline. That Sunday morning, thirty-four-year-old mother named Manon Lanteigne decided to take her four-year-old daughter Annie and her daughter's friend, six-year-old Melissa Aubin, tobogganing behind the Guy Gagnon. Lanteigne chose what was arguably the most dangerous

The back wall of the Guy Gagnon arena is at the top right of the picture. The ill-fated toboggan ride was from there down to where this boat is anchored.

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STAR OF COURAGE spot, but may not have appreciated the risk because she knew many others had slid down the slope without incident. The little girls were dressed for the weather. Both wore snowsuits, warm boots, toques and mittens. Lanteigne was also warmly clothed, and the heavy blue jacket and snowpants she wore were ideal for the day. All three were in good spirits. Tobogganing was always fun, and always exciting. For the children, the sport was even a bit scarey — particularly when the sled went fast. On this day, their one ride down the bank would become more than just scarey — it was absolutely terrifying. A short walk down the riverbank from the Guy Gagnon was a small building that served as headquarters for the Verdun Yacht Club. The name belied the fact that most of the boats used by members were rowboats or small outboards. Many of these were left on the riverbank for the winter, turned upside down and hauled well up from the waterline. Some inboards were moved even farther back on club property where they were covered with tarpaulins until spring. The clubhouse was nondescript, but it served its members well. There was a large meeting area where anyone who dropped in could socialize, play cards or pool, or just have a coffee and relax. There is no bar there now, although from time to time someone brings a bottle of their favourite alcohol to share around. There used to be a gallery or deck, on the river side of the building that members used in warm weather. Surrounding trees provided shade, and that shade, coupled with the breeze off the water meant that sitting outside on a summer evening was truly pleasant. It was as fine a place as any in Montreal. To the south of the deck were steps that led down to the St. Lawrence shore. On that January morning in 1995, a few club members were in the building drinking coffee and chatting about the events of the week. Most had not seen each other in a while, and the casual get-together was enjoyable. Those present included tall, patrician-looking, bespectacled Leslie Ledwidge, the club commodore. Another club member present was Doug Warnock, a Canadian elevator mechanic of Scottish ancestry, large-framed, and five-foot-ten-inch-tall. In that down time

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TOBOGGAN TERROR after the holiday season, Warnock was temporarily unemployed. He had his two-year-old son Max with him. Bruno Lavoie and Anthony Vasiliauskas had dropped in. Shortly before noon, Vasiliauskas glanced at his watch and realized he had to leave. "Okay Tony, see you," Warnock called as his friend walked to the door. The conversation in the club continued with scarcely an interruption. Little Max played across the room. He had lots of space to explore, and being there with his daddy was something he enjoyed. Everyone knew Max, and Doug was proud of his boy. Tony Vasiliauskas had barely left when he was back. He opened the door of the club, ducked his head inside and shouted: "There are people in the water! Behind the Guy Gagnon." It took a few seconds before the impact of what he had said sank in. All conversation stopped. Then there was a frenzied scramble of activity in the room. Almost as one, everyone put down whatever they had been drinking, pushed back their chairs, and streamed out onto the snow-covered deck. Only Max seemed oblivious to what was happening. He continued playing. "I remember clearly calling goodbye to Tony," Doug Warnock said, "and in no time, he was back again. Apparently as soon as he was outside, he noticed a commotion down behind the arena, and he could see someone in the water. He came right back in to tell us. "Well, we all went outside of course. From the gallery I could see a group of people down along the shore, shouting, and I figured that was where the trouble was." Warnock realized at once how serious the situation was, and how quickly anyone can get into trouble in the water. He had lived close to the St. Lawrence all his life and had seen more accidents on it than he wanted to recall. His parents, and later he himself, had a cottage on the river. A few years earlier, on a beautiful, warm July day, he had saved the life of a friend who was drowning. By the time the friend had been hauled onto the shore, he was in bad shape. Warnock checked for a pulse, couldn't get any, and realized the victim did not seem to be

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STAR OF COURAGE breathing. "I knew CPR and I used it for the first time when that happened" Warnock explained. "The guy came around." Unfortunately, the young man in question had actually been trying to commit suicide and three weeks later he succeeded. "My friend had gone into the river in the summer" Doug Warnock continues, "so it was fairly warm. I had fallen in during the winter though, and I knew what the water was like. It just takes your breath away. I realized in this case, if I ended up in the water trying to help someone, it was going to be pretty cold." Nevertheless, Warnock knew within himself that he had to do what he could. "I yelled at a guy named Noel, who was at the club, to take care of Max. Then I ran outside and down the steps to the river." Several others ran the two hundred or so metres from the club to where a small crowd had gathered on the shore behind the arena. Already, those who were there were looking out beyond the ice edge to where Manon and little Annie Lanteigne were floundering in the water. The toboggan had sped down the slope, skimmed across the fringe of snow-covered ice at the river's edge, and had shot straight into the frigid, fast-flowing St. Lawrence. The current was already pulling them well away from shore. "I could see someone in the water as I came down the steps at the club," Doug Warnock explains, "and as I ran along the shore, I really had no idea what I was going to do. "But as I got closer, I could see that their situation was getting pretty desperate, and I figured the only thing I could do was jump in and grab them and get them out as quick as I possibly could." Warnock barely took time to take stock of the situation. He glanced at the crowd, but everyone there seemed uncertain what to do. They all gaped, but they did n6t — or could not — act. "It never occurred to me to take off some clothes," Warnock says today, "but there really wasn't time anyway. I was wearing winter boots with removable felt liners, jeans, and a heavy lumber jacket. "My boots came off almost as soon as I started to swim, and I saw them later, floating down the river. My friend Les Ledwidge used to say he figured some Gaspe fisherman ended up wearing them."

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TOBOGGAN TERROR Warnock walked out onto the ice, and a bit more quickly than he expected, it broke away beneath his feet and he was under water. "I swam out to where they were," he said, "and I knew the woman was in real trouble. Her eyes were back, her mouth was open and she had her hand on her daughter, trying to hold the girl's head up because it was under water. She was just kind of floating, holding onto the daughter and not really moving. "The mother was conscious, but she never spoke to me at that time. We had no communication and I had never seen her before. The child was unconscious. "The little girl was face down, so I got her turned over and then I started swimming with her over to the edge of the ice. When I got there, I tried to lift her up onto the ice, but every time I tried, I would slip under water, and I was getting nowhere. She was a tiny thing, and she probably only weighed thirty pounds [13.5 kilograms] or so. But with her snowsuit and boots being soaked, she seemed to weigh more. At first I just could not get her up on the ice." Les Ledwidge heard Doug Warnock yelling for a rope: "We looked around and tried to find a toboggan with a rope, but there wasn't one. But there was a plastic sleigh there with a handle. We held onto the sleigh and pointed the handle out towards Doug." "I thought if I could grab something with one hand in order to anchor myself, I could lift the child out with the other," said Warnock. "At first, that didn't work either. All this time, the poor little girl had water gurgling into her mouth, and I knew I had to get her out of there fast. "I remember that the sleigh was yellow, with a black handle. Les and Bruno Lavoie and some of the others found it. So I held onto the child and grabbed the handle as firmly as I could and went to heave the girl up on the ice." But the increased tension caused the plastic handle to snap and instantly Warnock and Annie Lanteigne slipped under water. The fouryear-old was limp, like a broken doll. "The sleigh was really a piece of junk," Warnock says. "A $10 child's toy. But then I got myself repositioned, and this time I grabbed the frame of the thing where I didn't think it would break."

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STAR OF COURAGE The toy remained intact. Warnock held it with one hand and with his other grasped the back of Annie's blue snowsuit and more or less tossed her up onto the shoreline snow. Willing hands were there to help. Then he turned to the mother. The current had carried Manon Lanteigne farther from shore, and she was now almost beyond trying to save herself. Her movements were sluggish, and her will to stay alive was even less than it had been when Doug Warnock entered the water. She turned to him as he swam closer and by her facial expression silently pleaded for help. "I knew I was cold," Warnock says today, "but the adrenaline rush was so great, I was more or less able to ignore it. My strength was not what it had been though, even if I didn't realize it. I just knew I had to get the mother out and I had to figure out how. Neither of us could have stood much more." "I saw Doug out there, helping that woman, and I was really concerned," said Les Ledwidge. "I remember being really afraid for him because I knew him, and he was my friend, but I would have been afraid if he had been a stranger. When he had to struggle so hard to save the woman, it really drove home for me the seriousness of the whole thing; the seriousness of what had happened. "What can you really say about a person who is willing to put his life on the line for somebody else — for a total stranger? You can't say enough." Ledwidge, Lavoie, and one or two others stood as close to the edge of the ice as they dared, all of them ready to pull the pair from the water if they could be reached. At the same time, no one dared do what Warnock had done. "I really had a lot of trouble with the woman," Warnock explains. "She was of average size, not a big person, but her wet clothes dragged her down. I knew I would never be able to lift her." The struggle in the water continued for two or three minutes, time that seemed interminable. Warnock grasped Manon Lanteigne's coat; then, swimming on his back, he slowly brought her closer to shore. All the while, the current, the cold and the effort tired him immensely.

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TOBOGGAN TERROR As soon as the two reached the ice edge, Warnock managed to turn the woman so she faced the shore. Her will to survive was now evident and she got first one, then both her arms up on the ice — but her exhaustion and the weight of her clothes prevented her from doing much more. Warnock knew this. He positioned himself behind her and put both of his hands on her hips, then, in about the only move that could have worked, pushed as hard as he could. Manon Lanteigne crawled forward a little until the people on the edge were able to reach her outstretched arms. A few seconds later she was safe. Now, for the first time, Doug Warnock thought of himself. "It took me longer than I wished, but I was able to get enough grip on the ice to heave myself out of the water," he recalls, "without anyone helping me." Finally, he found himself standing in his socks in the snow, terribly cold, tired, and soaking wet. But then as he turned to go to the yacht club to shed his clothes and warm up, Bruno Lavoie rushed to his side. "Doug, there's another one! There's another kid in the water!" "I didn't believe him at first," Warnock admits. "I had only noticed the woman and the little girl, so I remember looking around to see what Bruno meant. " 'No, there's just those two,' I told him." But Lavoie knew what he was talking about. "No, Doug, there's another one! There's another one. The lady is telling me there's another one. Down farther." Lavoie, a non-swimmer, grabbed Warnock by the arm: "Come on," he said. "So I took off after him," Warnock explained. "And we ran down about as far as the stairs to the club. Then he pointed out into the river. "I looked out to where he pointed, and saw something, a jacket, but that was all. It was mostly under water, and at the time, I was sure it was only a jacket. I really thought maybe the mother had taken it off and it had floated away." But Lavoie was insistent. He begged his friend to check. "So I did," Warnock said. "I jumped back into the water, but because of the current, I took longer to get out there than I wished. And I still thought I was only going to get this coat — a very light

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STAR OF COURAGE mauve one with a dark flower print on it. I knew at least that Bruno would be satisfied I'd checked it out." The long swim out took its toll on Warnock. He was so desperately tired to begin with, and now because of the cold, found it harder and harder to combat the current. But he struggled ahead, one sluggish stroke after the other. After what seemed like an eternity, he reached the jacket. "I grabbed it," he said, "but then when I lifted it up, I could see all this long hair, and the tip of a little nose peeking out. I found out later that the girl's name was Melissa Aubin. "I was really shocked," he explains. "I was so sure I was going out there for just a jacket. I held the child's head up out of the water and then started swimming back. She was unconscious, and by this time had been face down in the water for a long time. I knew she had to have help right away." At about the same time as Warnock started to swim to shore with Melissa, a young man named Ernest Simpson drove into the Guy Gagnon parking lot. He stepped from his van and was removing hockey equipment from it when he heard a commotion behind the rink. More out of curiosity than concern, he walked over to see what was going on. A man was swimming, holding onto something! Thinking he might be able to help, Simpson half-ran, half-slid down the bank and pushed through the crowd that was gathered there. A few seconds later, he was standing by the water, waiting for the man to reach its edge. By then he could see that the swimmer was holding a child, but the youngster appeared to be dead. "I was afraid I would never get to shore," Warnock explains. "It seemed to take such a long time. Then when I finally did get to the edge of the ice and went to lift the little girl onto it, the same thing happened as before. I would lift, I would slip, and both of us would go under water. "But then, about the third time this happened, I went down far enough that the tips of my toes touched the rocks on the bottom. When that happened, I figured if I could break some of the ice, I might be able to stand and lift her out."

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TOBOGGAN TERROR Warnock held Melissa in one arm and, with his other fist, smashed down on the ice edge closest to him. Finally, he got to where he could stand, and then he put Melissa on the shore. Ernest Simpson started CPR immediately and Warnock climbed out of the river. His legs were weak and he was exhausted, but he walked to where Ernest Simpson was working on the child. "I thought I had better check to see if he was doing the CPR right," Warnock explained later. "If the guy was not sure what to do, I was ready to help. But I was pretty happy to see that he knew. The little girl gasped so we knew she was alive. v "As I was standing there, lots of people started to come around. There was a dozen or so at first, and more were coming. Then I started to realize, man, I'm freezing. I started to shake and my body started to ache and I figured I had done everything I could. She was in good hands. "Then I went running up to the clubhouse and I knelt down in front of the heater. You know, when your hands get cold and you start to thaw out and they start to sting and ache and throb. Well, my whole body was doing that. I took off all my clothes except my underwear and my T-shirt, and crouched in front of the heater, but my body would not stop throbbing. I knew I wasn't going to die or anything, but I was really cold. That's basically it. I did not want to go to the hospital, but there were so many on my back about it, I did go for a while — in an ambulance to Royal Victoria. They warmed me up there, and an hour or so later, a friend came and got me." By this time, Manon Lanteigne and the two girls were already in hospital. Melissa's condition was critical. Doug Warnock, Les Ledwidge, and others who were there that day believe the child was in the water, unconscious for much of the time, for almost fifteen minutes, and perhaps even more. Fortunately, she recovered fully, as did the Lanteignes. As for Doug Warnock — his life suddenly became complicated. "After I came back from the hospital, there were a lot of people at the club. They were all talking about what had happened, and saying nice things to me. Max was okay, as I knew he would be. He was well looked after while I was away.

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STAR OF COURAGE

Doug Warnock was awarded the Star of Courage for his dramatic rescue of three people from the icy waters of the St. Lawrence River.

"I remember going out along the river that afternoon to see where the three had gone into the water. I had been too busy when it happened to really notice. The toboggan track was still there, going right down to the water, and there was one set of footsteps inside the track. To me, the mother ran down behind the toboggan. Then when the kids went into the water, she tried to save them and ended up in the river herself. They were really lucky they didn't all drown. I was just glad I was there to help a bit. "Because I had never met the mother or the girls, or had even seen them before, I was happy later because a little gathering was held at the club and they were there. Now I see them on the street from time to time, and they always say hello. They don't come over and hug me or anything, and I wouldn't want that, but we do see each other. I also see

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TOBOGGAN TERROR Melissa Aubin's mom and Melissa's grandfather. He's a great guy. He always shakes my hand and we talk." But Warnock found the public and media reaction overwhelming. Bulletins were broadcast on local radio immediately, and television news programs ran the story repeatedly. Both French and English newspapers carried accounts of the rescues. The celebrated editorial cartoonist Aislin drew a flattering Gazette sketch of Warnock, over which were the words 'We sure could use a little good news today,' from the Anne Murray song. Then, because word leaked out about Warnock's being unemployed at the time, several job offers came in. So did donations that ultimately totalled thousands of dollars. There was also the trip to Disney World, the food-shopping spree, the dinner at an upscale restaurant, the voucher for free clothes, the request for a re-enactment on the American television show "Rescue 911," and the nominations for bravery medals. The only one of the latter that Warnock accepted was the Star of Courage, largely because there was no money accompanying it. He turned down the Carnegie Medal because there was, and then declined virtually everything else sent his way. He paid his monthly rent once or twice with donated funds because, he said, "things were a little tight there for a while." All the rest he gave away.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

RESCUING THE RESCUERS

HE FLAMES SPREAD quickly on the oil-soaked snow. Burning plastic showered the cliffside, and the swirling winds lifted great billows of black smoke into the evening sky. What had been a helicopter was now a thousand chunks of nothing. A man lay nearby. He was alive, but badly burned, disoriented, and in pain. Only a minute ago, he had been in the helicopter, talking to the pilot. But now, the pilot was gone and so was the chopper, and on every side there was fire. Dustin Hurlbut was on his back, wedged among rocks, so close to the flames he felt the heat. He also felt the sting from the burning debris that fell over him, and he knew he had to move or he would die where he lay.

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STAR OF COURAGE Then the sun went behind a peak, and darkness came over Mount Challenger. Hurlbut found himself where he was because he had offered assistance in time of need. The fact that he ended up in far worse shape than the man he had gone to help is one of the cruel ironies of life. Yet Hurlbut never complained, nor did he second-guess his decision to respond. He knew a hiker was hurt and an airlift was necessary to retrieve him. The hiker was a Canadian from the Vancouver area who was backpacking high on Mount Redoubt, in Washington state. Redoubt is one of many peaks in the Cascade Range, a continuation of the Sierra Nevada that extend from northeast California to the British Columbia border. In Canada, they become the Coast Mountains. The 2,687-metre Redoubt is one of a wilderness of hills, 142 of which are actually named in Washington's Whatcom County. The mountain itself is in North Cascades National Park, just below the Canadian border, and less than sixty-five kilometres from the B.C. town of Hope. The park is popular with hikers who want to experience real wilderness, and the injured man was among them. He was twentytwo at the time, and was there with two friends. As they were walking a ridge line at the 1,800-metre level of the mountain, the man lost his balance, fell, and broke his ankle in two places. As soon as they realized the extent of his injuries, one of his companions left to get help; the other remained with the victim. The next day, word of the matter reached the Whatcom County Sheriff's Office in Bellingham, Washington. It was late in the afternoon of Thursday, September 11, 1980, and the hiker had been stranded for twenty-four hours, without food — with weather forecasters calling for snow at higher elevations. Deputy Sheriff Dustin Hurlbut took the call. Most of the initial information he was getting was fragmentary, but Hurlbut was concerned nonetheless. He knew the mountains, and was sure anyone stranded on Redoubt was in a precarious position. Even though the hiker's injuries were not life-threatening in themselves, they soon could be if the weather closed in and the man had to remain where he was much longer. Death by hypothermia was always a risk. 162

RESCUING THE RESCUERS So at ten minutes after six, the deputy called the operations duty officer (ODO) at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, a military base fifty kilometres or so southwest of Bellingham. Hurlbut explained the situation as he knew it at the time, and alerted the Search and Rescue people there about a probable rescue attempt. He called back a few minutes later with more information, and this time expressed his opinion that a pickup should be made. He offered to go on the mission as a spotter. A few seconds after the initial call, the Whidbey duty officer conferred with the Search and Rescue pilot on call. He, in turn, asked the ODO to notify other crew members. At the time, there was some discussion with the aircraft commander about the available light for the mission. It was already late in the day, but the pilot felt he had enough time before darkness set in. Official sunset was at 7:32 p.m. The helicopter left the tarmac at Whidbey at 6:45. The aircraft being used was a CH-46 Sea Knight, an all-purpose, medium-lift machine made by Boeing. The designated code name for the plane was Firewood One. In addition to the pilot and co-pilot, there were four others on board, one of whom was a nurse. About fifteen minutes later, the chopper landed at the airport in Bellingham and picked up deputy Hurlbut. It departed at 7:01 and flew towards the clouds of the Cascades. At this time, co-pilot Richard Wall, a navy lieutenant, was at the controls. He was sitting in the left seat of the cockpit. Because he was more familiar with the mountain they were heading to, the pilot was navigating. Hurlbut, in a crew seat on the right-hand side of the plane, would help with the navigation as they neared the pickup area. At the time, he was the assistant Search and Rescue co-ordinator for the County. The first part of the flight towards Redoubt was uneventful. Lt. Wall flew east-northeast out of Bellingham, roughly following state Highway 542. Even during those pre-dusk moments, the road was clearly visible from the flight deck. Highway 542 is an all-season, designated scenic route leading into the North Cascades National Park. From the village of Kendall, eastwards, it parallels the U.S.-Canadian border. Glacier, Washington, is one of the small towns along the way.

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STAR OF COURAGE The aircraft passed over this settlement at about 7:15, and not long afterwards, deputy Hurlbut moved to the rear of the cockpit so that he could assist in the navigation as they approached the general area where the hiker was located. Because the underlying terrain was rising, Lt. Wall watched the altimeter and gradually took the chopper up. At about this time, both the pilot and co-pilot became more aware of a cloud layer above them that obscured many of the higher peaks. This included the 2,738-metre Mt. Shuksan, on their right, and the 2,470-metre Mt. Challenger, directly ahead. Redoubt was about fourteen kilometres north of Challenger — or about six flying minutes away. The time remaining before sunset was now running out and everyone on the plane knew the hiker would have to be rescued quickly or it would be too dark. Lt. Wall was still flying as Firewood One passed just north of Mt. Shuksan. Dustin Hurlbut was conferring with the pilot and both men were reasonably confident of a successful mission. Co-pilot Wall continued for another minute or so, but when he encountered clouds directly ahead, he turned to avoid them. It was here that the pilot took the controls, and as he did so, noticed a clear patch of sky on their intended route. He began a climb towards it, and as he did, explained his intentions to Wall. If they entered cloud, he said, he would go to "IFR" — in other words, he would continue, but would use Instrument Flight Rules if he could not see the ground. Fifteen seconds later, they were boxed in by cloud, and the aircraft was still climbing. But not quickly enough. At exactly 7:32 p.m. Firewood One hit the side of Mt. Challenger and disintegrated in a towering fireball. The news that a helicopter was overdue spread quickly at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. The Search and Rescue community there was close-knit. The families of both air and ground crew knew one another, so when bad news came to one, the other felt it as keenly. Initially, the optimists at the base tried to convince themselves that the plane was just a bit late; that it would turn up soon. But as minutes became hours and it had still not returned, even the most hopeful

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RESCUING THE RESCUERS became deeply concerned. And, because there had been no radio contact with the missing helicopter, the silence was interpreted with dread. At the sheriff's office in Bellingham, the worry was just as acute. Everyone knew Hurlbut. He was young, well-liked, and known as a damned good cop. His boss, Whatcom County Sheriff Larry Mount, spoke to the media at the time. He was blunt. "We think it was one of two extremes," Mount explained. "Either they put down in the terrain because they were socked in by fog, or they have crashed." No one wanted to accept the second conclusion and all kinds of theories circulated about the first. Some felt fog might have moved in before the hiker was located and the pilot had landed for the night. He was not able to radio his position because radio signals were often lost in the hills. Others thought they might have landed because of darkness and fog, and that the radios on board were just not working. Yet others thought perhaps they had lost power after putting down and could not communicate at all. Most of these ideas were little more than wishful thinking. When daylight came and Firewood One did not, searching for the plane became paramount — both in the air and on the ground. The flight path of the chopper was checked and rechecked, and at least two witnesses positively identified it as it flew towards Mt. Redoubt. One witness was in the town of Glacier; the second closer to Mt. Challenger. The second observer specifically mentioned the cloud cover on the peaks towards which the helicopter was moving. When Firewood One hit Mt. Challenger, Dustin Hurlbut was catapulted through a wall of flame, and thrown about twenty-two metres from the main point of impact. He ended up on top of a steep cliff, and, despite his frightening experience, he did not pass out. Had he done so, he might not have survived his first few minutes on the mountain. The fire all around him was that intense. Some of the inferno came from what had been the helicopter itself; some was from the signal flares that had been on board. They were exploding only a few metres away, and the burning material from them was falling on his flight suit. When he went to brush the stuff off,

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STAR OF COURAGE Hurlbut noticed that his hands were badly burned, and he was sure his face was as well. As he struggled to drag himself away from the roaring fire, he became conscious of a dreadful pain in his right leg, above the knee. Already his upper leg was swollen to twice its normal size, and he knew that even though there was no blood visible, there had to be internal bleeding. Yet, he had to move. Slowly, very slowly, he dragged himself away from the fire, enduring pain so excruciating, he could well have lost consciousness at any time. The effort tired him immensely, but with an incredible will to survive, he escaped the flames. Now he lay beside a wall of glacier ice — and this, in time, would make him as cold as he had been hot earlier. In an attempt to counteract the trauma to his body and preserve his strength, he ate a high-protein survival bar he had in his flight-suit pocket. Then it was dark and he fell asleep — shivering. He still wore his flight helmet. Five men died instantly in the chopper crash, but unbeknownst to Hurlbut at first, he was not the only survivor on the mountain. Rick Wall was also alive. At the instant of the crash, the co-pilot was tossed through the same inferno that Hurlbut had experienced. Wall too, ended up on his back, but right beside the seat he had been strapped to in the aircraft. The back of the seat was gone entirely, and the seat belt was unclasped. He still had his helmet on, but found that he could not open his right eye at all. Nor could he move either of his arms — although he seemed to have some use of the fingers on his left hand. He was thirsty, but at the time, not conscious of pain. Then he fell asleep. After a long, cold, fitful night, the two young survivors woke to utter desolation on all sides. In spite of the fog that more or less covered everything, each could see smouldering bits of airplane strewn across the terrain. Deputy Hurlbut noticed a man lying a few metres from him, but there was no movement. This body was the only member of the chopper crew he saw then, or as long as he was on the hill. He did, however, hear Rick Wall, and called to him. Wall was about thirty metres below the ridge where Hurlbut lay. He responded to the deputy's shout, and each took comfort in the fact

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RESCUING THE RESCUERS that he was not alone. Neither, however, had the strength to go to the other, although the policeman was the more mobile of the two. Hurlbut was shaking with cold. His injured leg was throbbing, and he knew he was dehydrated because of the internal bleeding there. But it was the cold that affected him the most. He dragged himself a few metres away from the glacier ice to a nearby cliff edge, but took almost an hour to do so. Once there, however, he could see a partly inflated life raft some six metres to one side of his new position. Knowing that it might provide a bit of shelter, he pulled himself across the rock face to the raft. This journey took another hour. By now, it had started to rain. Because the crashed helicopter was not equipped with an emergency locator transmitter (ELT), Wall felt their best chance of being found would be if he could somehow activate the survival radio he had with him. He knew if he could get the radio going, any search plane passing above would detect the signal. The radio was in a chest pocket of his jacket, and the pocket had a buttoned flap. But because he was unable to move his arms, Wall could not simply grab the radio and turn it on. He tilted his head to his chest, and then tried with his teeth to get the pocket flap undone. This small task was dreadfully complicated and it tired him immensely. At first he had trouble bending far enough to get his face close to the pocket. And when he finally managed that, the button held firm. He would just reach it and he would be tired out. Then he would rest for a couple of minutes and have another try. Finally, the button popped open. But the radio still had to be retrieved. Again and again, the injured flier did his best to reach the radio. Initially, he thought the task would be easy because he felt he could get the antenna between his teeth and then tilt his head back and the radio would come loose when he pulled the antenna. However, getting the radio proved to be just as difficult as opening the pocket had been. He tried and failed — over and over again. Then, as he was on the point of exhaustion, the instrument came free. At first it lay there on his chest, then slid to his stomach and slipped off onto the ground beside his left hand — the one he could move slightly. He 167

STAR OF COURAGE managed to grasp the radio in his hand, but realized he could not turn it on. He tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully. Finally, the radio still in his hand, he was forced to give up. His frustration had never been stronger. Meanwhile, thirty metres farther up the rock face, Dustin Hurlbut was trying to figure out the best way to use the life raft he had found. Even though he did his best to manoeuvre it into a better position, he lacked the strength to do so. Then, when the rain became heavier, he dragged himself under the portion of the raft that was inflated and lay there, wet, miserable, scared and cold — all the while wondering if he and Wall would ever be found. At Whidbey Island, air-search efforts were hampered by the rain and the low ceilings over the mountains. Every park ranger and police officer in the county was alerted to the situation, and those who were not informed directly, heard about the missing chopper from radio and television news bulletins. Unfortunately, the main ingredient in the news was no news. The plane was missing and no one knew where or why. Family members of the men on the helicopter were grief-stricken and disconsolate. Nor was the situation a purely localized one. The missing hiker who triggered the attempted pickup in the first place was still on Mt. Redoubt. Because it was felt that his situation now was somewhat less critical, all search efforts shifted to the hunt for Firewood One. Officials in Washington state also alerted the Rescue Co-Ordination Centre in Victoria that assistance would be welcomed from Canada. The countries often worked together anyway, and these missions would be very close to the international border. In British Columbia, all air force searches originate on Vancouver Island, out of the military base at Comox, a community on the east side of the island, across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver. Soon after the request for help came in, fliers from Comox responded. A Buffalo aircraft took off first. One of the men on board was SAR Tech Dave Maloley, whose heroics on the ship Bill Crosbie were recounted earlier in this book.

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RESCUING THE RESCUERS "I had not been at Comox for long at the time ," Maloley said, "so I remember the search for that helicopter perhaps more than some of the others. We went down to the border area and flew in and out of U.S. airspace. There is a blanket permission for such things. If you pick up someone who is critical, you take them to the nearest hospital, regardless of the country. But our job when we went down was to try to find the plane — or as it turned out — the crash site. Obviously, any pickup of survivors would be done with a helicopter." It is common knowledge that many people believe in angels, and particularly guardian angels. Rick Wall and Dustin Hurlbut are today hard-pressed to discount such beliefs — particularly after what happened to them late in the first morning after the crash. The angels in this case were in human form, but they did come from above. Two hikers who had been camping at the 2,340-metre level on Mt. Challenger began descending on September 12. They left the peak shortly after dawn, and slowly climbed down through snow, fog, and rain. The trek was time-consuming and difficult, but because the weather was steadily deteriorating, they continued to push on. Neither was prepared for what they would find on their way. Five hours and three hundred metres down the mountain, the two men started to notice scattered chunks of metal and plastic lying here and there on the snow, or wedged into rock crevices. Then, as they went farther, they saw more junk, twisted and unrecognizable, and in many cases, apparently burned. The men were both puzzled and concerned, particularly when they realized that what they were finding were parts of a plane. As they stood examining a somewhat larger piece of plastic, they were startled by a voice coming out of the fog. Dustin Hurlbut was calling to Rick Wall. The hikers followed the voice, and discovered the deputy lying in the rain, half-exposed, half under the life raft. They immediately began to do what they could for him. When Hurlbut mentioned that there was another survivor below the cliff, one hiker remained with the deputy while the other made the painstaking and dangerous climb down to the co-pilot. 169

STAR OF COURAGE Without the help of the hikers, both crash victims could well have perished on the rain-swept rock of the Cascade mountain. The man who attended to the deputy put a hiker's sleeping mat under him, and laboriously got him into a sleeping bag. The stranger then started a little camp stove and prepared hot cocoa to go with the food and water he was leaving the policeman. And possibly as important as these, he put salve and dressings on Hurlbut's burns. Luckily, both hikers happened to work in a burn unit in Seattle. Before leaving, the hiker moved and then secured the life raft over the deputy and left some emergency flares by his side. The man who went to help Rick Wall was just as competent. He too put a mat under the injured man, then got a parka, rain pants, and a wool hat on him. He fed him and left a bottle of water positioned so the flier could sip it. These tasks complete, the hiker put his small mountain tent over the co-pilot, so that he would be protected from the elements. Before departing for help, the hikers turned on the radio that Wall had tried so hard to activate. It was broadcasting — even before they left to find the nearest ranger station. Twelve long, tiring, and difficult hours later they met up with a ground search party. By then, it was one o'clock in the morning on Saturday, September 13. The search for the missing aircraft had continued all morning Friday, but the mountain weather was overcast and nothing was seen by anyone on the planes doing overflights. More ominously for those trying to locate the helicopter, no radio signals of any kind were heard. Firewood One had simply flown into the North Cascades and had never come out. Relatives of the missing fliers found themselves unable to eat, sleep, or concentrate. They waited by phones, hoped, cried, and prayed as the planes of two nations searched but found nothing. Then, miraculously it seemed, an emergency radio signal was picked up — somewhere on Mt. Challenger. But the weather was so bad that no searcher could go there. Showers became torrential rains, and gusty winds became gales; the cloud ceiling dropped, and so did the temperature.

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RESCUING THE RESCUERS On Challenger, the two survivors coped as best they could. They heard the planes fly past, endured the weather, and somehow kept their spirits from plunging. Nothing changed during the afternoon following the departure of the hikers, but Hurlbut and Wall were sure it would — for the better. All through the long night that followed, the heavy, heavy rain and incessant mountain winds played on their senses. Both men felt they were involved in some kind of survival training and that the scheme would end soon — but no one showed up to tell them it had. Finally, morning arrived in the wilderness. At first light, search planes were being radioed for takeoff. Helicopters were out on the tarmac at Whidbey Island of course, but so was another chopper just north of the border. A Canadian Labrador was receiving its final checks at a military base at Chilliwack, B.C. This plane, number 303, was basically the same as the missing Firewood One, but with a different name. This yellow Labrador was based at Comox, and most of the crew lived there. The aircraft commander was a Search and Rescue (sAR)veteran Gary Flath. He had flown most of the planes the air force used, and had an enviable sar record. The co-pilot on board was Randy Price; the flight engineers were Frank Amadio and Dave McMaster. There were three Canadian SAR Techs — Tom Elliott, Don Lane, and Jim Trumbley — and one American Pararescueman, called a PJ, whose name was Randy Miller. "Randy Miller was on exchange at Comox with us at the time," recalls Tom Elliott. "I was about thirty and he was a year or so younger and we became good friends. Both of us were still learning our trade, and in fact, this search was my first. There were times though when I really thought it might be my last." Because the source of the radio signal was determined to be fairly high on the mountainside, the Lab crew lightened their load by leaving anything not deemed crucial behind at Chilliwack. By doing so, they felt they would be more able to manoeuvre at higher altitudes. They would also have extra room on board if they were able to pick up anyone who had been on board Firewood One. The Lab departed Chilliwack just before seven o'clock, and flew south, southeast. The 171

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Tom Elliot was one of the SAR Techs who helped rescue two injured Americans from the slopes of Mount Challenger in Washington State.

weather in the mountains was still bad, and crew members still recall the violent wind gusts that they encountered before they were even into the mountains. "We were not alone," explains Gary Flath. "The Americans had their planes searching as well, but the thing was, because of the cloud, none of us could see much. However, we did what we could. I had the best possible crew with me, and they excelled on the mission." The sentiments were certainly reciprocated. The members of the aircrew that I interviewed for this book praised Captain Flath. Most knew that he had logged thousands of flying hours all over the world; that he had flown VIPS on many occasions, including Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, members of the Royal Family, scores of high-ranking military officers, and others. They appreciated his sense of humour,

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Gary Flath won the Star of Courage for his incredible flying. He is pictured here in the cockpit of a helicopter in Banff National Park.

his dedication to task, and his reputation for remaining cool under any condition. Dustin Hurlbut recalled later that the area where he and Wall were was "very difficult to access," and that it required "a significant effort to get there." "The weather on the mountains was very bad," SAR Tech Don Lane said. "We had been told that there was a crash, and that a signal had been picked up, but we could not get in to where the signal was coming from. We figured out fairly quickly which mountain it was, but there was heavy cloud right over it, so we just kept circling, trying to find a hole to get in. We would creep closer and closer, then the clouds would come in and chase us away. We ended up doing 360s around the peak — for what seemed like a long time." 173

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Don Lane was the senior SAR Tech who helped save the lives of two seriously injured Americans after their plane crashed on Mount Challenger.

"But then there was a small break in the clouds, and one of the guys in the back saw something," Gary Flath explains. "At first we couldn't tell what it was, so I got closer. "I am not sure if the American helicopters saw anything," Tom Elliott said, "but as soon as we did, Gary told us he'd get in there." "I remember looking down into all this cloud," Don Lane added, "and suddenly there was a clear spot and I could see something orange, and it moved! We were still too far away to tell what it was for sure, but when we got closer, the radio signals were louder, so we knew we had the right place. Then the cloud seemed to pull back and Gary dropped down. "There was a guy on the ground, under a life raft, and he was kicking it up and down, and that was what got our attention. We knew we had to go to him, but that mountain was tough to land on. It was very deceiving when you were in the air, but when you got onto it, it was almost sheer rock face." As Flath began to bring the Lab lower, the clouds suddenly closed around the helicopter and everything disappeared. "I really thought I'd

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RESCUING THE RESCUERS done it that time," the veteran pilot says today, "but we were committed by then. The winds were pretty bothersome as well." To hear Gary Flath describe his work, is like sitting in the back of a commercial aircraft and listening to the pilot nonchalantly giving the weather at your flight destination. He is unflappable, low-key, and businesslike. In reality, on this day, on this search helicopter, nothing was normal, and flying conditions were dangerous in the extreme. No aviation safety board in the world would have approved operating under such circumstances — yet it had to be done. There was still some rain, occasional snow, thick clouds, and incessant winds, which buffetted the plane, tossing it up, down, and to one side and then the other, and often came close to driving it into the cliff face. "It got so bad," Tom Elliott admits, "and I was so scared, I began to question whether I really wanted to be a SAR Tech. I was sure we wouldn't get out of there alive. You could look out, and even when it cleared a bit and you saw mountain snow, you could not tell where the snow ended and the sky began. Then the wind put us somewhere else. I remember hearing the pilots talking and I knew they were having trouble, so I just wanted to get out of the plane. I know Randy [Miller] felt the same way." Then Don Lane climbed out through the doorway using a rope and pulley device called a sky-genie. "I sky-genied down to the rock face," Lane explains, "and when I got there I realized the terrain was so steep you had to hold on with one hand all the time, or you would just fall off the mountain — or the wind would blow you off." Lane's description of danger is often so low-key that risk to himself is downplayed, or passed over completely. Other SAR Techs I spoke to about the man stressed that he always seemed fearless in his work. On this day, he demonstrated it over and over again, as did everyone on board Lab number 303. Tom Elliott and Randy Miller may have admitted that they were frightened, but once their work began that day, the fear vanished — or they willed it to vanish. Jim Trumbley followed Don Lane onto the mountain — and then the helicopter disappeared into cloud.

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STAR OF COURAGE Gary Flath held the helicopter in position so tightly that his fingers became stiff. The slightest second of inattention and he and the others on board would have died for certain. On the mountainside, under the Lab, Rick Wall and Dustin Hurlbut watched and waited as the big helicopter appeared above them like a monster. But it represented rescue, and their imagined "survival exercise" was finally drawing to a close. This was what it seemed to Wall in particular, who, in the words of Tom Elliott, was "not with it." The severely injured Firewood One co-pilot was close to the end of his endurance. "He would not have lived through another night out there," Elliott adds. "The cold had helped their wounds to congeal, but in the end it would have killed both those guys." Dustin Hurlbut was in better shape. The rescuers would find him alert, able to talk, helpful, and "damned courageous." "He was also very happy to see us," Don Lane recalls. As soon as Trumbley and Lane were down, Miller and Elliott prepared to follow. But there was no other sky genie on board for them to use, so Flath had to find another way. He backed the Lab away from the ridge, then crept forward again, this time to within centimetres of the rock face. The rotors of the Labrador were fifteen metres in diameter so he had to be aware at all times just how close he was. A careless centimetre too far and there would have been another fireball on Mt. Challenger. As Flath manoeuvred the huge machine, co-pilot Price called out the clearances, engineers Amadio and McMaster watched on either side, and Tom Elliott and Randy Miller stood in the doorway of the plane, ready to leap out as soon as they felt it was safe to do so. Meanwhile, violent wind gusts and updrafts tore at the chopper, and the clouds seemed to be thickening on all sides. "As soon as we got close enough to the snow, Randy and I jumped out," explained Tom Elliott, "and then we turned to grab our equipment." "Just as Tom reached for his medical kit, Dave McMaster pushed it closer to the door for him," Don Lane said, "but the kit rolled off

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RESCUING THE RESCUERS the front door step of the aircraft and hit the rock ledge. We watched as it caromed down the mountainside, like a little red ball going and going. Then it broke up in a whole bunch of pieces — so we were minus one kit. "We then proceeded over to where we thought there was a survivor. The rock face was very precarious and we had to inch our way along. This was time-consuming because there was no such thing on board as mountain ropes and mountain equipment. We hung on with our hands and sort of shuffled along, leaning into the rock face to keep from falling off the mountain" The rescuers reached Dustin Hurlbut first. "The poor guy was in bad shape," Don Lane says today, "so I knew we had to get him out of there fast. I remember that the first thing he said to me was 'You guys are angels from heaven.' Whether we were angels or not depends on your point of view, I guess," Lane laughs, "but I know the man was pretty happy to see us. He had a broken femur, badly burned face and hands, and lots of cuts and scrapes. I think the cold would have got to him first though." Lane asked if anyone else was alive. "Yea, there's another one," Hurlbut said. "I was talking to him last night, but I haven't heard from him this morning." "My first thought when he said that was that the second person might have perished overnight," Lane explained, "so ... we asked where the other guy was." Hurlbut did his best to give directions, and Elliott and Miller left to find the second individual. "They weren't that far apart, but it was a tough climb down to him " Elliott recalls. "And when we got there, he was too badly hurt to help himself much. He was conscious, but delirious." Miller and Elliott, both of whom had been so uneasy in the helicopter, immediately forgot their fears as they treated Rick Wall and prepared him for evacuation. They worked quickly, often shouting to be heard over the racket from the hovering Lab and the shrieking of the wind. Above them, Gary Flath was doing his best to keep his helicopter steady. Every so often, dense cloud would obscure everything on the

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STAR OF COURAGE hill. Then a vicious updraft would provide a few seconds of clearing, but at the same time, would rock the aircraft to the point where he had to fight the controls to stay steady. He knew if he backed away from the rock face, he might never get close enough to it again to pick up either survivors or SAR Techs. Much later, when he was awarded the Star of Courage for his work that day, his citation would mention "an incredible test of nerves, courage and willpower." Captain Flath exhibited all of these in those thirty minutes he kept his aircraft where it had to be. "We were very limited by time and weather," Don Lane recalls. "These were our biggest enemies. Because we had used up quite a lot of time trying to reach these fellows, our aircraft was getting low on fuel. So we had to work fast. It took a while to secure both victims and get them out of there. "When we were ready to hoist, we tried our radio, but for some reason it didn't work, so everything was hand signals. We had splinted the breaks as best we could and more or less stabilized the two guys, but now we had to get the Stokes in." A Stokes Litter is standard equipment on SAR aircraft. It is a wiremesh stretcher with metal guard rails on all sides. An injured person being rescued is strapped into the device, and the side guards help to prevent the victim from falling out. Both Hurlbut and Wall were hoisted into the Lab in this way. "The helicopter was no more than fifty feet [fifteen metres] above us — tops," said Tom Elliott, "and it had to be extremely close to the mountain because of the cloud. As we set up to take the guys out, we had to hang onto the rock with one hand and do something else with the other" "The rock face was so sheer, you could not stand upright" continues Don Lane. "You couldn't let go for fear of being blown off and tumbling down the mountain. Like the medical kit — if you slipped off, you were long gone. The valley floor was hundreds of feet down." Dustin Hurlbut was hoisted into the helicopter with a minimum of difficulty. Dave McMaster and Frank Amadio eased him through the door of the aircraft and placed him as gently as they could towards the rear.

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RESCUING THE RESCUERS Then it was Rick Wall's turn. "We got the other guy into the Stokes ," explains Don Lane, "and had him about halfway up when all of a sudden the helicopter disappeared. The cloud was so thick you couldn't see it forty or fifty feet [twelve or fifteen metres] above us. "Fortunately, the aircraft captain was Gary Flath, a very experienced pilot, and I was glad he was there that day. He's a great guy, a very good pilot, very competent, and we had a lot of confidence in his abilities. He kept that thing so steady, and I'm sure at times even he did not know where the cliff was. I'm sure he thought, if I keep it steady, I'm away from the rock. "We had righted the Stokes and had given them the thumbs-up to hoist, and the litter was in the air, but we could see nothing after that. The hoist cable just disappeared into cloud. We can hear the helicopter right above us, but we can't see it; the guys in the plane can't see the ground, and the poor victim is halfway up, so we had nowhere else to go and it was important the plane stay steady. "We were praying that the hoist would be successful. Now we will never know if the rotors were inches or feet from the rock, but I knew if they'd hit, we would all have gone; the helicopter would have come down right on top of us. And the Lab was like an old Buick — pretty heavy with lots of metal. "Finally, we got the second guy up, but we were still on the mountain. I can't remember the order, but finally all of us got hoisted." Don Lane was the last to go. "But we had another concern," Tom Elliott explained. "Don and I talked about it and we asked ourselves, what if there are other survivors? We wondered if we should stay there and search. But at that point, the weather was deteriorating so fast, if we had stayed then we would have been stranded and we were not equipped for that. "So we decided to go up into the aircraft, look after the survivors we had and get them out of there, then come back and see if we could find anyone else alive. Our SAR mission is to look after the living before the dead." Almost at the moment Dan Lane was hauled through the Lab door, the cocoon cloud around the helicopter pulled back.

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STAR OF COURAGE "There was a tiny clearing that lasted for twenty seconds at most" Gary Flath says, his voice exhibiting a trace of incredulity, "so I did a quick pedal turn to the left and got out of there fast. Then we flew to Bellingham. "We were met at Bellingham airport by the police, medical people and ambulances, and several others with climbing equipment," said Don Lane. "We unloaded the survivors right away, and then briefed the paramedics on the injuries. We still intended to gas up and go back to look for others, but the Americans told us they would take it from there. I remember one of the mountain rescue people saying, 'You Canadians are crazy! You should never have been up there.' Apparently, he knew the area where we had been. "We were just glad the thing went well." It was not until Gary Flath and his crew were back at Comox that they learned that the injured hiker who had triggered the first search had not been recovered. He was still on the side of Mt. Redoubt, waiting to be rescued. "So they changed the front-end crew, new pilots came on board, and we headed back down to Washington," Don Lane said. "Tom Elliott and I hopped in the back and went along. We found the hiker in this little meadow, high upon a mountain, but because we had room to land, we did so. When we first sighted him, the guy was sitting on a log, waving to us, his injured leg extended. We attended to his injuries and took him." In the days following the rescue of Rick Wall and Dustin Hurlbut, ground search teams succeeded in reaching the crash site on Mt. Challenger. They soon determined that no one else had survived the crash and that the others had died instantaneously. Even if Elliott and Lane had remained on the mountain, their efforts would have been futile. Almost a year after the incident, the Canadians who were instrumental in the rescue were invited to a gathering at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. Don Lane describes the event: "We attended a dinner and were thanked, and they treated us royally. The whole thing was a 180

RESCUING THE RESCUERS very emotional and rewarding experience — to have someone say thanks. For us, it was harrowing performing that rescue, but it must have been devastating for them, surviving on that mountain for two nights, wondering if they were going to be alive in the morning, and knowing some of their friends were probably dead. Some of us kept in touch for a while, but as is generally the case, we gradually lost contact over time." The three men who were rescued regained their health. Rick Wall went on to become a high-ranking military officer. Dustin Hurlbut remained in police work, and is now the chief criminal deputy at the Whatcom County Sheriff's Office. In the fall of 2000, he was a member of a group who dropped a memorial wreath at the crash site. The hiker with the broker ankle did not wish to be identified in this story — and has not been. The three rescuers mentioned most prominently in the foregoing have all left the military. Tom Elliott was a SAR Tech for seventeen years; he has since become a writer. Don Lane retired in 2000, at the time the longest-serving Search and Rescue technician in the Canadian Forces. Gary Flath still flies helicopters all over the world, with people who don't know about his Star of Courage. They just know he is a remarkable man who loves to fly — and is really good at it.

Labrador Helicopter #303, which was flown by Gary Flath in the rescue from the mountain in Washington State.

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EPILOGUE

o DATE, THE Star of Courage has been awarded 387 times. And even though the stories in this book represent only a fraction of that total, they illustrate the kinds of heroism for which the decoration was intended. The medal recognizes those whose bravery might have gone unheralded and been forgotten. All too often, recipients of the award are mentioned by the media, but the news is quickly overtaken by other events. In most cases, the reason why an award was given merits only a few seconds of our time, or perhaps a couple of paragraphs in newspapers. It is rarely mentioned in magazines, and almost never in books. Yet those who have risked or lost their lives for the greater good of all deserve our thanks and our praise. That is why this book was written.

T