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ONE AFGHAN HERO STANDS OUT

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:24:00 -0500

Last year, when I saw a TV documentary about Captain Trevor Green's miraculous rehabilitation, I cried. He is the Terry Fox of the Canadian Forces today but is so humble he doesn't realize it.

Back in public view, Capt. Greene, 44, was the honored guest speaker at a fundraiser founded two years ago by Canada's former chief of defence staff, Rick Hillier. Greene is the Afghan hero who best represents the families whose members have died and those caring for wounded Canadian soldiers who need assistance from the Military Families Fund so named the True Patriot Love Foundation to support their recovery.

Three years ago, Trevor Greene led his platoon into an Afghan village to negotiate with community elders about ways the Canadian military could help them develop their economy and build schools for their children. He and a colleague removed their helmets as they sat cross-legged within the circle. It was their gesture of respect. They were determined to win the elders' trust, but a young boy suddenly came up from behind and struck Greene with an axe. The brutal slash cut down through his head and effectively split his brain in two.

No one expected him to live, but with dogged tenacity he clung to life. Green calls his rehabilitation "a marathon of baby steps." Through it, his fiancée, Debbie Lepore, has been as brave, steadfast and determined as he has been. She has never lost her faith in him or in God's power to heal him, even when the doctors could not promise he would ever speak again, and then when he was told he would never walk again. Though he gave his speech from his wheelchair, he can now stand on his own.

Next July, he intends to walk down the aisle to marry Debbie. They have a four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Grace, who has waited from birth to see the "impossible" feat of her daddy on his feet and hear her parents say, "mission accomplished."

On November 9, 2009, Governor General Michaelle Jean presented him with a new medal recognizing Canadian soldiers' service and bravery today. On Tuesday night, November 10, 2009, he spoke in soft, halting sentences to high-powered dignitaries including Prince Charles and raised $2 million for the True Patriot Love Foundation. The folks who heard Capt. Greene's speech will never forget him. Neither do the soldiers who have served with him. And neither will I.

RITA GERLACH: A Literary Voice of the Finest Merit

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:41:00 -0400

Rita Gerlach is what Vladimir Nabokov calls an enchanter. But, the author moves beyond the classic novels of Charles Dickens and Gustav Flaubert with her unique voice, electric pacing and concise plotting. Riveting suspense hovers through every twist and cranny in the events that unfold as the reader feels the villain lurking behind every scene, waiting, conniving, ready to pounce with meanness and passion, as he eventually does.

Exceptional editing of Abingdon Press Editor Barbara Scott empowers the author to mesmerize her readers as she transposes them to the post-revolutionary period between England and the United States. A structural counterpoint of VIRTUE and VICE permeates. Often words associated with love are used to describe despair. For instance, the play of dualism on the word “embrace,” with the opposite perception of entrapment intended, is repeated: “High in the heavens the moon broke free from the embrace of clouds.” And later: “The sea crashed against the hull, lifted the ship and brought it down again into the sea’s dark embrace.” This is no mere gift of language. This is literary genius.

Like Dickens and Flaubert, Rita’s minor characters stand out. Literary devices abound throughout her magical imagery. Numerous passages of the novel can be printed as free verse and read in exactly the same way. But most of all, the historical love story of Juleah and Seth set against the terrible retribution of Darden’s unrequited love joins the greatest love stories of all time.

When American patriot Seth Braxton travels to Devonshire, England, to claim Ten Width, the estate his grandfather left him, he falls in love with his sister's best friend, the beautiful and independent spirited Juleah, but terrible happenings interfere with their happy-ever-after ending. Can Seth and Juleah survive Darden’s sinister plotting? The stage is set, and SURRENDER THE WIND is everything the author promises it will be.

The Remarkable Rita Gerlach

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:40:00 -0400

A new author has arrived on the horizon of Historical Romance. RITA GERLACH. Her prodigious elegant style of writing captured me from the opening page of her first book, THE REBEL'S PLEDGE. But in her latest that Abingdon Press is releasing in August 2009?SURRENDER THE WIND, Rita has grown into an author whose voice sings its own powerful song. The way she captures the rhythm and context of language is what distinguishes her from other authors writing in the same time period. Rita has also found her own niche: the two worlds of Britain and America through the years of the American Revolution. Her stories never lag. Readers become so immersed in the lives of her characters, what they face?the adventure, love, betrayal, mystery, suspense?and how they handle it, that you absorb real history without being aware of it.

SURRENDER THE WIND is a must-read. And you'll need to set aside a full day because once you start reading it, you won't be able to put it down. To read more about Rita, go to her web site at http://ritagerlach.com/index.html and order SURRENDER THE WIND at amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Surrender-Wind-Rita-Gerlach/dp/1426700725.

The Hero's Heroine

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:52:00 -0400

Soldier’s widow believes in his mission in Afghanistan.

Mishelle Brown, widow of Warrant Officer Dennis Raymond Brown recently killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, would have made her husband proud. She responded to Prime Minister Harper’s comments on CNN that Canadian and other foreign armies can’t beat the Taliban.

“We may not be able to beat the Taliban. There’s lots of things in our life we can’t beat— obesity, child pornography, crime. But do you give up? Do you stop? Absolutely not,” Mishelle Brown said. “One person can’t make a difference. But if we band together, we can.”

The Globe & Mail columnist, Christie Blatchford, who like Rosie Dimano of the Toronto Star and I have witnessed our forces in action, praised Mishelle Brown for her courage and wisdom. “I thought she also landed a pre-emptive strike against those who, every time a soldier’s casket comes home, purse their lips and murmur some platitude about how sad it is, and what a waste and then ask if, you know, it’s worth it?”

You see our troops do believe in their mission, whatever it is: Kosovo, Rwanda, Cambodia, Haiti, Afghanistan. It’s not a result of brain washing. It’s because they are the boots on the ground taking action and seeing the difference they make. Canada’s General Romeo Dallaire didn’t abandon the Rwandans when the UN ordered him out because he was a decent man defending decent people who were being slaughtered for no reason other than being born who they were. And he abhored genocide.

As a reservist, Mishelle’s husband and the father of four was a special constable with the Niagara Regional Police. He fought to get time off from his job to serve in Afghanistan. He told her: “If we don’t get them [terrorists] in their backyard, they’re sure to get us in ours.”

As Christie comments about the protestors of the war in Afghanistan, who poo-hoo the sincerity of Mishelle’s affirmation of her husband’s proud devotion to duty: “…to do otherwise is to say their loved one died in vain. This is but a version of the belief, widespread among the elite, that they know better than soldiers themselves what’s good for soldiers, the plain inference that soldiers aren’t so bright or informed.”

I found our soldiers highly read and well-informed; some were educated while others were street-smart self-learners. During my tour with them, from private to commanding officer, I enjoyed intelligent conversations. I valued them as people and as friends and felt closer to them than to some of my family. I certainly trusted them more.

In response to those who want to pull our troops out of Afghanistan, retired General Lewis Mackenzie said in his Globe & Mail column that Prime Minister Harper was not making a political statement when he said we can’t beat the Taliban. He stated a fact. “Insurgencies rarely totally disappear. The objective is to reduce them to a manageable scale where they have little impact on the day-to-day lives of the victim country’s population. Much like organized crime in a large American city – or, for that matter, a Canadian city, given the influence of street gangs in the past decade. Violent crime exists, and there are areas in some cities you should avoid; but the level of crime does not cause the average citizen to ask: ‘For safety’s sake, perhaps the better option is to join the bad guys.’

“The objective in a counterinsurgency is to isolate the insurgents from the support they coerce from the general population through fear and intimidation and to cause their influence to be irrelevant. While the military has a key role to play in achieving this isolation, opportunistic and even frequent victories over the insurgents will not, on their own, guarantee ‘victory’.”

Mishelle Brown directed her closing remarks as much to the country as to her husband’s comrades. “Keep your chin up. Remember what you had.”

We all need to remember: without the dedication of our troops, we would not enjoy the freedom to debate whether we do bring them home or not.

Postscript: Today another soldier was killed by a roadside bomb, Trooper Marc Diab, 22, an immigrant young man from Lebanon who had every reason to live yet proudly served in the Canadian Armed Forces. On his web site he posted: “Feeling lonely is only the first stop … but getting to wait and knowing that your [sic] waiting to go back is the hard part … I am coming back … I promise … cause I was born to be a soldier … soldier of freedom.”

Diab's death brings our total to 112. Four of his comrads were wounded, three seriously, and they will be flown to Germany and then home to Canada. They too need our prayers for healing along with prayers for comfort for Diab's family.

Tour of Rwanda

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:36:00 -0500

In 1994, I was sent on a magazine assignment to report on the logistics of the largest humanitarian relief effort ever organized following the Rwandan genocide. The West finally felt guilty about ignoring this modern Holocaust. Because the gruesome slaughter occurred in Central Africa, it was largely ignored by the Clinton Administration. Only the Canadian UN force commander, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, brought attention by disobeying UN orders, along with his Canadian and African contingency of UN peacekeepers, to abandon the victims.

In my interview notes, I rediscovered one of my first introductions to what happened. After Canadian air traffic controllers discovered an orphanage where the Hutus had hacked off the feet and hands of Tutsi children so they could not grow up to retaliate against them, they asked me, "How can we teach peace to children like these, who have every reason to grow up to hate those who crippled them?"

I did not physically go into the refugee camps set up in Goma, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), which bordered the north part of Rwanda on Lake Kivu. But I ended up listening to the horrors many of our Canadian peacekeepers witnessed. Sometimes I hugged them as they cried and wept with them for their pain. I saw the elegance, innocence and resilience of spirit that engaged Dallaire and those who refused to leave the victims to their fate. I also saw incredible leadership in the rebel leader, Paul Kagame, who drove the extremist Hutus out of Rwanda with minimal fighters and, in fact, saved the UN mission from total defeat and decimation. His rebel forces recaptured the Kigali International Airport so that UN reinforcements and humanitarian relief could be flown into the country. Today he has achieved the unthinkable. He has stitched together the country between those who inflicted death and the survivors and relatives of those who were murdered by issuing a proclamation that puts them side by side farming the land. In the aftermath, he has guided the Rwandans to independence and self-sufficiency. He has taught them to embrace forgiveness so they can live as a free nation. That is a feat the world needs to recognize.

Because of my experience in Rwanda, the plight of children in war circumstances will always play a part in my intrigue and suspense novels. Children are the powerless victims of an adult world gone mad. There is no justification for the slaughter and maiming of children. They are not responsible for the deeds of their parents or governments.

I hope you will bookmark my web sites below and follow along as each novel finds a publisher who believes in the story and me:
http://www.bonnietoews.com
http://bonnie-toews.blogspot.com

A Magnificent Moment in History

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:14:00 -0500

Someone mentioned that once President Obama is faced with the real politics of the hill, he will become disillusioned with his idealism. I don't believe this. I can see him getting frustrated, yes, many times, but he has incredible faith and a very stubborn woman by his side. Also he has converted Vice President Biden, who mentioned in an interview yesterday on "Oprah" that he has learned so much FROM Obama as well as about him since they became campaign partners. Biden says President Obama is truly remarkable and has what it takes to carry everyone, even the cynics. The 44th U.S. president has the support of grassroots people and they far outnumber the greedy and corrupt. They will rise up if he needs them in the difficult times ahead. I truly believe this. Kennedy was popular but he wasn't one of the people. He was a rich man with empathy, but he never knew what it was like to be truly poor, even if he emulated it for a short time--like Prince William. A good experience, but when it's over, they return to their rich lives. Not so with Obama. He IS one of ALL the people, not just Black Americans. He worked very hard to realize his dream. Faith and hard work can make mincemeat of the lazy rich, and it's the lazy, or the rich addicted to money and power, who have crippled our economies worldwide with a greedy manipulation of the stock market and abuse of slave labor. I don't think he is offering false hope. I believe we are seeing real hope at work for the first time.

Violence Begets Violence

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:16:51 -0500

One day after I gave support of Israel's attack on Hamas in Gaza, I am deeply saddened by the reports of hundreds of children killed in the bombings. Children are the powerless victims of an adult world gone mad. There is no justification for the slaughter and maiming of children. They are not responsible for the deeds of their parents or governments.

I remember in Rwanda in 1994 when Canadian peacekeepers discovered an orphanage where the Hutus had hacked off the feet and hands of Tutsi children so they could not grow up to retaliate against them. Witnessing this, the peacekeepers wondered, "How can we teach peace to children like these, who have every reason to grow up to hate those who crippled them?"

We have the same dilemma in the Middle East. Mansoor Riaz of Bellevue, Washington, writes in today's Toronto Star newspaper: "Civilian casualties, Israeli or Palestinian, are utterly unacceptable if civilians are specifically targeted. While Israel continues this brutal campaign, it will not only garner ill will internationally, but also engender more hostility from Palestinians and ensure the continuation of this conflict."

Whether civilians are targets or "colateral damage," their sacrifice is not justifiable even when terrorists use them as shields. Canadian Sharmin Rahman of Toronto makes an excellent point in his Letter to the Editor in the Toronto Star: "More than 600 Palestinians have died in this conflict alone, but only 130 were Hamas fighters. The gains Israel is making now will be over-shadowed by the devastation it is causing. And that will leave Palestinians susceptible to recruitment by groups like Hamas in future. Who else will help feed their starving families or give the homeless shelter, as Israel continues to keep a stranglehold over Gaza's borders? If Israel actually assisted the Palestinian people in rising out of their poverty and grief-stricken existence, then their reliance on Hamas would be greatly diminished."

In Israel, there are Jews who want to live in peace with their Arab brethren, who deplore the war between them. What propels the Middle East conflict forward are the radicals filled with hate on both sides. "An eye for an eye." The healing power of love and forgiveness escapes them.

President-Elect Obama has said that if bombs were dropped in his backyard and threatened his daughters, he would retaliate. Towns and some cities in Israel have endured rocket attacks day after day for years. Many Israeli citizens have blamed their government for the helpless fear their children endure, though only four civilian deaths have been reported over this time as a direct result. The Israeli government decided, Enough is enough. But, at what price? What is achieved if the result is perpetual hate, for generation after generation of Jews and Arabs?

A dear Canadian friend, John Smyth of St. Catharines, has reminded me that, regardless of our feelings about the crisis between Israel and their Palestinian and Arab nerighbors, there is an overriding fact goading the antogonists, and he sent me this quote by Benjamin Netanyahu: "If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel."

Is it not time to seek a path to peace, to deflate the Arabs' hate-filled desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth? But how, when extremist Arab and Muslim leaders brainwash their young people with a call for Jihad and death to all non-believers? John further reminds me that Jews do not teach their children how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Arabs and other non-Jews; that not one single Jew has destroyed a church despite the Holocaust and the razing of European synagogues.

Right now, "turning the other cheek" spells suicide for Israel, but leaving in its wake slaughtered children in Gaza maligns its justification in the court of world opinion.

In despair, I have no answer. I only know violence begets violence.

Welcome to my sanctuary

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:55:24 -0400

Books have been my best friends since I first learned to read. My grandmother could never understand why I was so sleepy in the morning, but unknown to her, at night, when I was supposed to be asleep, I tented my sheets over my head and read by flashlight. Many a time I couldn't put the book down and fell asleep over the open pages. I think my mother was my co-conspirator because in the morning I would awake with the book on my night table--a neat bookmark in place--and my flashlight tucked into the top drawer.

I wrote my first novel at age 10, about an army flight nurse, similar to my favorite Cherry Ames series, but this story was set in Korea rather than in World War II. Once again, Canada was part of a world action--this time with the United Nations fighting to protect South Korea from its northern aggressors and Red Chinese invaders. I was too young to join the Air Force and I was too short to be a pilot. If I couldn't fly the wounded out, then I wanted to be a flight nurse when I grew up. I'm the same height now as I was when I was ten, but in later years, I did learn to pilot an old bush plane, a Fleet 80 Canuck. Instead of going into medicine--I was a dunderhead at math, I became a teacher in English and Music. I thought the ideal of teaching kids to march to their own drum was enough, but the lure of printers' ink stole me away. By night, I wrote freelance articles. By day, I configured the classroom into a newsroom. Eventually, my hobby evolved into a career as a trade journalist, editor, publications manager, and then novelist.

Now much of my time is spent in my home office. At any given time, I wear different hats: from book designer, freelance writer, editor, to magazine production manager, but my favorite hours are spent researching background material for novels I want to write.

Beware Anti-Malaria Drug?MEFLOQUINE--Still Being Issued to Troops

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:50:05 -0400

In 1994, the president of my publishing company assigned me to cover the humanitarian relief effort following the Rwandan genocide. My article became a tribute to the overlooked logistics industry for its part in making such efforts the success they are, but I also stepped into the mire of the anti-malaria drug scandal.

Cpl. Scott Smith, a peacekeeper I interviewed, later committed suicide on Christmas Eve, 1994, in Rwanda?two months before his tour of duty was up. He was coming home to a fantastic job, and in my interviews and regular talks with him, I was impressed with his upbeat, resourceful attitude. I have dealt with despondent people and know their skill for covering depression. Scott showed none of the signs, but he did talk about the terrible nightmares and diarrhea he was having especially on the days the troops took their weekly mefloquine pill. He had endured these side effects in deployments to the Gulf War and Somalia as well. (You start taking the pill one week in advance of visiting a tropical area and for four weeks following your return.) For this assignment, the cameraman and I were also issued mefloquine (Lariam�).

When flying on the armed forces transports delivering supplies to the refugee camps in Goma, Zaire, the pilots joked about not being on Mefloquine because ?you can?t have pilots hallucinating in the air.? According to a report from the National Defence Department in Ottawa for the Somalia Enquiry, ?some Canadian Forces pilots and divers received another anti-malarial drug, doxycycline, because mefloquine was thought to cause dizziness and loss of fine motor control in some users. The post-deployment report of the HMCS Preserver, for example, stated that all aircrew on active flying duties used doxycycline.⁵ The report also noted that several CF members who suffered adverse effects from taking mefloquine were switched to doxycycline.?

The peacekeepers described the designated day their companies took mefloquine as Manic Monday, Loco Tuesday, Wacky Wednesday, Psycho Thursday or Freaky Friday. On these days, military stats show the rate of vehicle accidents rose. There are now medical papers available describing the dangers of mixing alcohol with mefloquine, and Scott was naturally drinking on that Christmas Eve in celebration of his going home soon. He loved being in Rwanda and helping the people who were so appreciative of the Canadians who stayed behind and risked their lives to bring world attention to the genocide being executed in Rwanda at a rate much higher and more efficiently than any organized genocide previously committed, even by the Nazis.

I was only on mefloquine four weeks, but just that short time created a state of insomnia that began in Rwanda and lasted six months until sleep deprivation weakened my immune system and I collapsed with pneumonia. Then I was heavily drugged so I could sleep. Twelve years later, I am lucky if I get five hours solid sleep per night, and for seven years, my thyroid had to be monitored because it showed strange scar-like damage. I constantly fluctuated between hyper- and hypothyroidism, so doctors were never sure what treatment course to take. Instead of doing the wrong thing, they decided to monitor it every three months. Somehow, on my own, my thyroid finally corrected itself and is now working normally. Was it mefloquine? Others who have taken this drug have suffered serious damage to their livers, hearts and/or thyroids and haven?t healed themselves.

The military in the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia have minimized the dangers of mefloquine since the U.S. Army asked Roche Labs to create a shot that would prevent soldiers from being infected with one form of malaria they could not treat, and as a result those infected with it often died. Today, the number of troops suffering from the devastating adverse effects from taking mefloquine far outweighs the danger of any of them dying from this form of malaria.

Yet, U.S. and Canadian forces?probably British and Australian and all coalition forces too, but I don?t have confirmation of that?have issued mefloquine in Iraq (but have since stopped) and continue to issue it in Afghanistan, despite reported evidence from the Gulf War, Angola relief effort, Somalia and Haiti UN Missions and Rwandan mission, plus other tropical deployments, that a significant number of troops are suffering from debilitating side effects, including suicides and/or aggressive violent behavior that has ended up in murder, usually of family members and, for sure, of spouses.

SOLDIERS FOR THE TRUTH talk about it on their web site. The Canadian National Defence Department finally issued a paper discussing the adverse effects in 1995, but the public didn?t know about it. CTV broadcaster, Christine Neilsen, produced an investigative report on W5 in October 1997. She took the plea of the suicide soldier?s mother seriously to investigate his death because she too had suffered adverse effects from taking mefloquine on an assignment to Angola. She proved that the Canadian peacekeepers were being used as unwitting guinea pigs for the drug and suggested the true culprit in the Somalia scandal was mefloquine, which affected the soldiers? behavior and emotional states. Her research assistant uncovered the signed documents between Health Canada, the DND and the drug company. Did the Canadian people rise up in revolt as a result of this scandalous treatment of our armed forces? No, there was barely a peep uttered in Parliament.

We say we support our armed forces, but no one puts the brakes on issuing a drug that decimates our forces faster and more viciously than armed conflict. A British Medical Report sites the number as low as 1 in 10 people suffer adverse effects. They have been observing the results because, of all Western nations, a high proportion of British travelers visit tropical countries where malaria occurs. Canada admits that 1 in 1,000 can be adversely affected. Israel estimates 1 in 100,000. Whatever the ratio really is, it is TOO HIGH. We charge our armed forces with the job of saving our butts, but we don?t raise a finger to protect them from a drug company that has expanded its production of mefloquine from the States to Pakistan under a different name, and this subsidiary has yet to place adequate warnings on its label to prescription users. NOT ACCEPTABLE.

USER BEWARE:

DOCTOR MICHELLE BRILL-EDWARDS, Canadian drug safety expert from transcript of radio interview with CBC?s Jennifer Westaway, August 26, 2002, 9:45 a.m., Reference NO. 226387-7:

BRILL-EDWARDS: ?Well firstly, I should mention that there's a spectrum of what you could... as lay people understand this affects on the brain, or neuro-psychiatric side effects. Some of these are very common, every day problems that are not so severe, things like disturbed sleep, terrible dreams and so forth. But the more severe end of that spectrum of effects on the brain are actual psychosis, what we call acute psychosis, which, in lay terms, would be going crazy, someone who is out of touch with reality and whose actions can be bizarre. In particular, a big concern had been unexplained feelings of suicide and homicide.?

BRILL-EDWARDS: ?Usually, there's a very strict order to not use this drug with alcohol. And the U.S. military has a good track record of trying to keep their military men dry in the field of battle. But once they return home, of course, then that restriction is off and alcohol may become a question. And we know that the drug lasts for a very long time in the body and this mixture may be lethal.?

BRILL-EDWARDS: ?There is one study done by the military that was a carefully-done study that watched military men taking the drug in the field and they were seen weekly. And it's a very interesting point that in that study, two men had to be withdrawn from the study because of suicidal ideation.?

WESTAWAY: ?What military was this??

BRILL-EDWARDS: ?This was the American military. And interestingly, of the 203 - I think it was - men in the study who had Mefloquine doses use in prophylaxis, two developed suicidal ideation. That would suggest that we're dealing with a serious psychiatric side-effect rate that is in the order of one in 100, not one in 12,000. . . . It changes the whole balance of whether and when this drug should be used in comparison with other drugs.?

For more information, you can visit BOWDENS MEDIA MONITORING LTD. online.