Soldier risked his life to save a father and son from the Taliban

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The National Post has launched Heroes Among Us, a special series on Canadian military valour, celebrating courage in the presence of the enemy. Over the coming weeks, we will propose 11 heroic Canadians who could be the first-ever recipients of the Canadian Victoria Cross, created three decades ago as a homegrown version of the Commonwealth’s highest award for valour. In conjunction with the True Patriot Love Foundation, Anthony Wilson-Smith of Historica Canada, Gen. (ret’d) Rick Hillier and entrepreneur/benefactor Kevin Reed, we will celebrate them all at a June 26 gala at the Hockey Hall of Fame.

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Before he was a private in the storied Quebec Royal 22nd Regiment known in English as the Van Doos, who in one panicked minute risked his own life to save an Afghan father and son from Taliban gunfire, Taumy St-Hilaire was a football star.

A report from a 2006 game between his Midget AAA Dragons de la Beauce-Etchemin and the North Shore Mustangs tallies up his prowess as a linebacker: 12 solo tackles, eight assisted tackles, three knocked down passes, two quarterback sacks and an interception.

So, by the time he followed his oldest brother into the army three years later, this was a young athlete familiar with performance in the clutch.

After infantry training at CFB Valcartier near Québec City, he arrived at Kandahar Air Field in November 2010, and was there for five months before being deployed on missions. He was still in grade school on 9/11, when al-Qaida was being hosted in Afghanistan by the ruling Taliban, and now he would fight them in the insurgency’s heartland of Panjwaii District.

This had long been his intention. When he was awarded the Star of Military Valour in 2012 for what the Governor General’s citation describes as “exceptional courage,” he told Maclean’s magazine, in response to a question about whether he thought he might go to Afghanistan, as if that would be a worry: “Seriously, it was my goal to go to Afghanistan. When I joined I didn’t have anything else in mind, and I was lucky because I was able to get into a battalion that was getting deployed there.”

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It was his sergeant who saw it happen, the act of bravery that saved two Afghan lives and would later earn St-Hilaire the Star of Military Valour, the second highest Canadian honour, for exceptional courage in the face of the enemy. Like the greater Canadian Victoria Cross, which has not been awarded since Canada took control of its honours system last century, and the lesser Medal of Military Valour, the Star requires two sworn witness statements to be submitted and passed up through the chain of command to the commander level and from there to the Directorate of History and Heritage.

By the spring of 2011, the wider war was almost a decade old. As part of the International Security Assistance Force mandated by the United Nations and run by NATO, Canadians had been working for five years to establish, protect and support a robust Afghan-led security system over Panjwaii and other southwestern districts, far from the capital Kabul in the northeast. Sometimes that meant direct contact with Taliban fighters, but Taliban commanders had long since learned not to meet the vastly more powerful NATO forces in massed formation. So instead they were using suicide bombers and sneak attacks. Much of the Canadian effort was aimed at finding and neutralizing roadside bombs, which killed more Canadians in Afghanistan than any other cause, and posed a constant hidden danger to Afghan civilians, like landmines or unexploded ordinance.

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This was Pte. St-Hilaire’s mission that day to look for IEDs. It was April 19, 2011. There were 18 soldiers on this patrol, 10 Afghan and eight Canadian, plus an interpreter and a dog and handler, moving forward in a line.

Pte. St-Hilaire was a machine gunner, stationed second to last as they entered a village called Chalghowr. This village had long been a base of Taliban influence over local leaders and intimidation of the population. Progress had been made in driving them out and establishing enough security to open a school, but in these final months of Canada’s combat operations in Afghanistan, Chalghowr was effectively on the frontline of the fight for Panjwaii.

A burst of bullets hit the wall of a building. Everyone yelled “contact!” and dove for cover, warning the civilians around them, including children, to do the same. Then they set out getting into position to return fire.

Pte. St-Hilaire got up onto a roof, with a boost by standing on the shoulders of an Afghan soldier. He started shooting back. On the occasion of receiving his Star of Military Valour in 2012, he spoke to Maclean’s magazine: “I was looking around, and I see this father and his kid pinned down in a ditch about 15 m in front of me. He was an older guy, with a beard. I’m not even sure if they saw me. I’m not sure what I was thinking. It might have been, ‘They’re in s–t.’ I screamed that there were civilians, and my battalion gave me cover fire and I jumped off the roof to go get them. I took the kid by the arm and started leading him away. He followed me, I guess out of instinct. His dad was behind. He understood that it was now or never. I came back out onto the road. I left them with the K-9 unit that was behind the fight, where they were safe, and I went back to my position.”

He never saw them again.

His citation from the Governor General for his Star of Military Valour says: “Private St-Hilaire’s bravery and selflessness enabled him to save both lives and to quell the attack.”

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