How this school is doing more to remember Canada’s military heroes

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This story is part of Heroes Among Us, a special National Post series on Canadian military valour, celebrating courage in the presence of the enemy.

It is unusual for a war memorial to look to the future.

Military tributes and honours normally look back to the past, whether they are grand installations such as cenotaphs or Ottawa’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or more personal awards like Canada’s military valour distinctions.

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So the students of the Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board in Laval, Que., were in unfamiliar territory when they built their memorial to Canadian military heroes, in special honour of one especially inspiring soldier. With an eye out for others, they have also been reading the National Post’s series Heroes Among Us, describing the brave actions in Afghanistan of several plausible candidates for the Canadian Victoria Cross, struck in bronze but never yet awarded.

The Corporal François (Franck) Dupéré Legacy Memorial, built of wood with metal accents ambitiously engraved “11 November 2023 — November 11, 2123,” is soon to be shipped to the King’s-Edgehill School in Nova Scotia on the first leg of what is intended to be a 100-year journey around high schools in Canada, gaining a new soldier’s name to remember at each one.

These students, under the guidance of Daniel Johnson, whose title is “Spiritual Care and Guidance, and Community Involvement Animator,” have a history of being unsatisfied with perfunctory displays of remembrance that are soon forgotten.

More than a decade ago, for example, the late National Post journalist and celebrated military chronicler Christie Blatchford took note of their “absolutely remarkable” efforts to memorialize Sergeant Chris Karigiannis, an alumnus of their school, a committed Air Cadet who became a pilot, and a member of the Canadian Forces SkyHawks parachute team.

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Serving with the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry from Edmonton, Karigiannis, then 31, became briefly famous in 2007 for writing a letter from Afghanistan to Maclean’s magazine in enthusiastic but modest praise of the beauty of the young woman, Kinga Ilyes, seated at a lecture hall desk on the cover of their university ranking issue. A round of newspaper reports presented her as the Darling of Kandahar, and Karigiannis wrote back to clarify, as Blatchford put it, “his noble intentions.”

The next morning, he was killed in a roadside bomb explosion. Two other soldiers died in the same strike, Cpl. Stephen Bouzane, 26, and Pte. Joel Wiebe, 22. Karigiannis’s charming crush became the most poignant detail of a brutal tragedy.

The following Remembrance Day, in Laval, the students planted a tree for him. “It could have stopped there,” Blatchford wrote in 2013. “Such well-meant tributes, born in the emotion of tragedy, often do. But in the years that followed, something absolutely remarkable happened.”

Karigiannis’s death “just made the world smaller,” Johnson said in an interview. So they thought about what to do next. He remembers them saying: “Why do we just plant trees and put up plaques and walk away and no one remembers? Why don’t we do more?”

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They came up with an unusual idea. His students asked the 3PPCLI if they could adopt the regiment. Both sides of this unusual new family, the soldiers in Alberta and students in Quebec, took to it enthusiastically.

“Everything connected,” Johnson said. Soldiers started showing up to work with the soccer team, to join the summer camp trips to the Laurentians, to run the hockey days. A student leadership program developed out of this adoption, which continues to this day.

Corporal Dupéré, although he was with local Royal 22nd Regiment, known in English as the Vandoos, became an important figure in this program, helping to share his own instructional experiences with adversity.

He was luckier than Karigiannis. On a patrol in an Afghanistan marketplace in 2011, Dupéré was about two metres from a suicide bomber at the moment of detonation. He lost an eye and some function in his left side, but survived, indeed thrived, pursuing volunteer work after retiring from the military in 2015, which put him in touch with the students at Laval. After he died in an accidental fall in 2021 aged 40, they wrote about his optimism, took inspiration from his feats of endurance despite his serious injuries, and eventually chose him as the centrepiece of a memorial to soldiers that they fully intend will outlast even themselves.

“It’s never going to be finished until it’s finished,” Johnson said.

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