Chuck, Americans wouldn't be aware of this but Canadians consider Anzacs their only peers as assault troops. We've always been placed dead-centre in hopeless (Dieppe) and glorious (D-Day) actions. The Germans were in a category of their own, principally because of field leadership of a professional army.
Exactly 90 years ago, Canada requested that the British and French move out of the way to allow it to take Vimy Ridge, a salient that had cost the the French and British 200,000 killed in the previous two years, We took it in three days at a cost of 3,600 dead, 11,000 wounded---and this little former colony gained a place at the armistice table.
Yet I think it was within 12 days of the Australian school massacre that legislators drafted the repressive gun laws. In Canada it took a bit longer for the long-gun registry after the McGill University massacre of 17 women engineering students. The world faced Cold War mutual nuclear destruction with far greater equanimity.
As for risk, if there were 9/11 every three months for five years the risk of being killed in one of them is 0.02 per cent. The American astronomer Allan Harris has calculated that at present rates the probability of anyone being killed anywhere by a terrorist over the same period as 1 in 80,000, about the same as being hit by a comet or asteroid.
About Anzacs our peers, I make no claim for the truth of it. It's only a perception, maybe a factoid from so many years in their company on battlefields. I don't think it has escaped anyone's attention that Canada drew the hottest sector in Afghanistan. Only the Anglo-Saxons are carrying the fight there and if the international community doesn't ante up we should get out of there.
Last edited by King Brown; 04/19/07 09:49 AM.
