Boucanier, as everyone of experience in the army knew, “walked the talk.” He won the Medal of Valour during the Battle of Medak Pocket – the night-long battle in the former Yugoslavia in which, on September 15, 1993, the 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry – the Patricias – stood and fought a much larger Croatian force that was threatening four Serb villages with “ethnic cleansing.” It was the first major battle for the unit in the post-Cold War era, and one the Liberal government hid from Canadians for years. There were no news stories, no ceremonies, no homecoming welcome or remembrance for the casualties, just officially imposed silence, lest Canadians discover the consequences of the “decade of darkness” which had starved the Canadian Forces.
But soldiers across the army knew what had happened in the Medak Pocket and then-Sergeant Boucanier’s part in it. That night, he had led a six-man Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) detachment attached to the Patricia battalion tasked to protect the four Serb villages isolated in the midst of the hostile Croatian population. In the darkness and chaos of that September night battle, Will watched through his powerful night-vision scope as Croatian infantry, supported by two T54 tanks and intent on slaughtering their neighbours, worked their way around the Canadians’ right flank.
Will had reported the situation to the Patricia battalion commander, but he knew no one in the unit, already under heavy fire, could slow the assaulting force in time to save the villagers. However, he figured that his little force, off on the flank of the Patricia companies, might be able to surprise and distract the Croatian infantry. Will had stood up, gathered his soldiers, and led them in an attack on the enemy company in the valley below his position. The citation to his decoration read:
Sergeant William Boucanier MMV
Chisasibi, Quebec
Medal of Military Valour
On September 15, 1993, Sergeant Boucanier, commanding a JTF2 Detachment allocated to peacekeeping duties in the area of the Medak Valley in Krajina, came under heavy Croatian mortar and small arms fire. During the ensuing engagement, he observed these same forces preparing to attack an undefended village inhabited by women, children and old people. Without regard for his own safety and under heavy fire, he led his small detachment into the village and there successfully defended the villagers from further assault. During the night, he was wounded twice, once seriously by mortar fire, but maintained command of his soldiers, encouraging them and adjusting their deployment to defeat the Croatian assault. Sergeant Boucanier’s courageous and skilful actions helped prevent a massacre of the villagers and secured the battalion’s exposed flank until reinforcements arrived at daybreak the next morning.
All of that seemed a long time ago, though. Now, he was slipping and sliding slowly into his hometown as the pilot dodged the rain clouds and fought the high winds bouncing the small aircraft around above the bare, grey, granite hills of the James Bay basin. It was the end of a long hip-hop flight from Montreal through Val-d’Or and Waskaganish to Chisasibi. Some homecoming – a flight from modernity to cultural calamity and personal trauma. But Will had steeled himself. The mission brought him here, not family or home. Indeed, his family had disappeared: his brother to Montreal, drink, and jail; his father long ago lost on the land; and his mother in despair to the grave. He was home today because he was Cree, because he knew the land, the language, Chisasibi and Radisson, and who he could count on. The right man for the job. Still a soldier, he told himself. Not a mercenary. A soldier and a man of honour.
Only last month, Will had abruptly taken his release from the army, despite persistent, heart-felt urging from his superiors to stay, and unanswered pleas from the sergeants’ mess for reasons. He was sick at heart to leave the only home he’d ever known, a home made safe by order, merit, and predictability; a home where things made sense. After a childhood of chaos, of feeling worthless, he’d found a real home among soldiers, a special group set aside by society for a special purpose. But just as he had fifteen years earlier, he felt relieved as well as homesick. Across the country, he knew, were villages like his, full of homes like his, and getting himself out of there, no matter how successfully, had always felt a bit like running away. Like going to school and leaving Mom alone with that man. Well, not any more. He had fought the white man’s wars, “for peace and freedom,” they had told him. Now he was coming home to fight for the same things, to fight the only way he knew against the despair he’d escaped so long ago.
* * *
Boucanier, too, had been identified by the Movement. Its leaders had reached out to him several times early in his career and as he advanced in it, only to be rejected. But Will’s gut-wrenching, mind-bending experiences in Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Afghanistan changed him profoundly. His sympathy for the people he helped in those places, people forced by history’s whims to surrender their culture to the tyranny of the majority, affected deeply his sense of himself and his people and his homeland on James Bay. The political jumble that was Yugoslavia, which the UN and the Western allies had turned into the even bigger Balkan region mess, convinced Will that nationalism, not federalism, saves lives and cultures.
He learned also from watching certain Serbian patriots and Afghani communal leaders that strong leaders can achieve a great deal if they have the strength and determination to unite people around their own traditions. The key lesson Will took away from his experience, however, was that the people’s success and security depend on one thing: cultural unity, protected by one unchallenged leader, and set free from distracting entanglements in other people’s causes.
Will convinced himself as he watched the clandestine Movement grow, that it might just prove to be the organization that could create the winning, disruptive conditions that would allow him to set his family and his people and his culture free from its woeful history. He believed, he truly believed, what Molly Grace had told him at their first secret meeting after he contacted those chiefs who had approached him over the years: they really could “take back the land” and reshape it with the power of pride. What he did not reveal to anyone, however, was his longing, his ambition, to become the one to lead his people in their ancestral lands.
Wars change soldiers and the ones that he had seen had changed Will’s faith in his army. The Canada he deserted had deserted honour first when it walked away from its pledge to the Afghanis he had fought to protect. For Canadian politicians, Will thought, honour is a pliable thing. He and a few others soldiers were the real army, the army of soul, duty, singleness of mind and purpose.
He knew and accepted that race meant nothing in the army. There, only truth, duty, and valour command all. The creed needs no explanation, abides no excuses, and has no nationality. But his people, his people, were the Cree; he would not desert them. Instead he was now part of a different army, as honourable as his Canadian Forces, and it would fight as well and maybe even win. He promised himself long before he returned home that no matter the success or failures of the Movement, he would lead his people to his kind of peace and freedom.
* * *
Out the window, below, Will could see his old home, the James Bay territory: a mass of granite, part of the Canadian Shield, one of the oldest geological formations on the planet; endless mountaintops, smooth and peakless, ancient yet enduring, shaped by the grinding of advancing glaciers and the constant assault of wind, snow, and rain; and everywhere the sparse landscape commanded by black spruce, just “the forest” in his youth, but, as he had learned later, actually the largest single-species forest in the world. To the north, where the trees reluctantly gave way, the lichen – reindeer moss, as it was commonly called – covered the rocks and thin topsoil like a soft, pale green mat. Cladonia rangiferina. To the white man, strange green stuff on rocks, but to the people, vital food for the caribou they hunted and, sometimes, for the hunters as well.
His people, the Cree, and the Inuit with whom they shared the land in northern Quebec, had hunted the caribou, along with other animals, for millennia before the whites came. They had learned how
