...with a rare dose of honesty:
A B.C. father says the loss of his soldier son to a freak accident in Afghanistan will haunt him forever.
"Of course I grieve," David Snyder told CTV News from his home in Penticton on Sunday about the death of Capt. Jonathan Sutherland Snyder.
"Of course I will have a hollow in my being forever."
[...]
"It's about hazard and chance, and unfortunately there was an accident -- and he died," David Snyder said.
The former reservist also said: "War is stupid. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that. Well, no they don't. The politicians don't know that."
He also told The Canadian Press that he supported his son and the military, but not the Afghanistan mission.
You had to see the video yesterday, though--they actually showed this intelligent, articulate man questioning the government, the Afghanistan mission, the stupidity of war. For a corporate, corporatist, rah-rah network like CTV, this was really saying something.
Of course, some commenters on the CTV site took him to task for it, accusing him of "playing politics" like Cindy Sheehan. I doubt whether this is "playing" anything. Cindy was right to question the cause for which her son died, and so is this man. It's a credit to see, however, far more voices criticizing the critics than the grieving father, who has every right in a democratic country to express his obviously well-thought-through opinion.
It's not a soldier's prerogative to question his mission; it is that of the civilians, particularly his family, who can hold the government accountable in the event of his death.
