Front Lines

Of contemptible pirates and desert isles: The saga of Captain Barnabas Lincoln

On Nov. 13, 1821, Captain Barnabas Lincoln and his crew, including a Newfoundlander, set sail from Boston aboard the schooner Exertion. They were bound for the Cuban town of Trinidad loaded with foodstuffs and furniture.

They had no idea what they were in for, but the tome-like title of the skipper’s 40-page account, completed in April 1822, pretty much sums it up:

Narrative of the Capture, Sufferings and Escape of Capt. Barnabas Lincoln And His Crew, Who Were Taken By a Piratical Schooner, December, 1821, Off Key Largo; Together With Facts Illustrating the Character of Those Piratical Cruisers....

Jack Widdicombe: From combine to Lancaster and back

Lancaster pilot Jack Widdicombe was a wide-eyed Prairie farm boy about to be thrust into the inferno of Second World War Europe when he boarded a double-decker bus and toured London shortly after arriving in England.

The 21-year-old native of Foxwarren, Man., and a pal set out to see the sights and instead encountered block after block of rubble. Twenty-three bombing missions over Nazi territory and 1,200 hours of combat  and other wartime flying lay ahead of him...

The medic’s trauma book

As a member of 5 Field Ambulance in Afghanistan, medic Macha Khoudja-Poirier treated so many patients with such a variety of ills and injures, she didn’t know what more she could see to fill out her “trauma book.”

Better known in English as a casualty book, the journal is a log of the cases a medic handles, like the “life list” birders keep of the birds they see or the logbook a pilot maintains of the planes they fly and the hours spent airborne....

More angel than mortal: The nursing sisters of The Great War

They provided medical aid, comfort and peace to wounded and dying soldiers throughout decades of conflict, but it was during the First World War that the nursing sisters of the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps came into their own.

Nicknamed “Bluebirds” for their blue dresses and white veils, many soldiers considered the 3,141 nursing sisters who volunteered their services between 1914 and 1918 more angel than mortal....

Born on the first of July | Canadians in the Vietnam War

Rob Purvis was 20 years old when he, Butch, Larry and Billy—school buddies from Winnipeg—crossed the border and joined the United States Army in Fargo, N.D. It was 1968, they needed work and they yearned for adventure. They got work, all right, and more adventure than they had bargained for. They all wanted to go to Vietnam, and they all did.

Larry Collins, 22, would die there. Purvis and the others would eventually return home changed men to an indifferent Canadian public that, for the most part, didn’t know and didn’t care where they had been or what they had done...

Always the first one to know

“Seeing people decapitated, it’s not that usual for anyone,” says former army medic Hélène LeScelleur. “I saw a lot.”

It wasn’t an image she had contemplated when she signed up for the militia and fell in love with the military....

Performance enhancers and war go hand in hand

The use of performance-enhancing drugs has a long history in war, both as a product of state-sanctioned programs and illicit use by participants.

Aggression, energy and alertness have always been critical to any warfighter, but artificial means of achieving and maintaining a state of combat readiness have evolved—or devolved, as the case may be—and possibly spread in recent decades..

Lives measured in kilograms: Mitigating the soldier’s load

In March 2002, on a mountain near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border known as the Whale’s Back, a company from the vaunted U.S. 10th Mountain Division joined 400 Canadian troops and a handful of U.S. Navy Seals on an assault to clear enemy positions, bunkers and suspected cave complexes.

The undulating rock overlooked a valley through which Taliban and al-Qaida fighters were escaping into mountain passes that led them to safety in Pakistan’s hinterlands a few kilometres away...

The dream of space thrives

When I was young, the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launches out of Cape Canaveral were family television events without parallel.

There was a sense of awe surrounding those NASA missions, culminating years later in the triumphant moon landings. We followed every one, minute-by-transfixed-minute, on a big old black-and-white TV with four legs, rabbit ears and an outsized wood-veneer cabinet...

Winston wets his whistle: Churchill’s indulgences

In December 1941, just days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed his wife Eleanor that a guest, or guests, would be coming to stay at the White House.

“He told me I could not know who was coming, nor how many, but I must be prepared to have them stay over Christmas,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote years later in The Atlantic. “He added as an afterthought that I must see to it that we had good champagne and brandy in the house and plenty of whiskey.”...