The City of St. Albert's top staffer, Chief Administrative Officer Bill Fletcher, is featured in a new campaign to have Canada finally award the country's highest honour for military service.
The Canadian Victoria Cross was created in 1993 after the 20-year debate that followed the major overhaul of Canada's military honour system in 1972, which eliminated the British Victoria Cross from the country's list of honours.
Just like the British version, which was created in 1856 and awarded to 81 Canadian soldiers up until 1945, Canada's Victoria Cross was created to recognize veterans who displayed “the most conspicuous bravery, a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice, or extreme devotion to duty, in the presence of the enemy,” the government of Canada's website explains.
However, Canada's Victoria Cross has never been awarded.
In April, the National Post, along with the True Patriot Love Foundation; the president and chief executive officer of Historica Canada, Anthony Wilson-Smith; and one-time chief of the defence staff, retired Gen. Rick Hillier, launched a new series of articles called “Heroes Among Us” to highlight former Canadian Armed Forces members thought to be deserving of the honour, including Fletcher.
Fletcher, who's from St. Albert, joined the army at the age of 17 and served for 33 years right up until he landed the job as St. Albert's top bureaucrat two years ago.
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Immediately following an eight-month deployment to Afghanistan in 2006 as the commanding officer of Charles (Charlie) Company, Fletcher was awarded the Star of Military Valour, Canada's second-highest military service recognition. Fletcher was just the second Star of Military Valour recipient, following Sgt. Patrick Tower, who also served in Charlie Company during the United States-led war in Afghanistan.
“From January to August 2006, Major Fletcher repeatedly demonstrated extraordinary bravery by exposing himself to intense fire while leading his forces, on foot, to assault heavily defended enemy positions,” reads Fletcher's official Star of Military Valour citation from early 2007. “On two occasions, the soldiers at his side were struck by enemy fire. He immediately rendered first aid and then continued to head the subsequent assaults.”
“On these occasions and in ensuing combat actions, his selfless courage, tactical acumen and effective command were pivotal to the success of his company in defeating a determined opponent.”
Fletcher called it doing his job.
“It was a super long day,” Fletcher said of one of the two occasions he was recognized for. “We were in an area called Panjwei; it's a river valley that, because of the water, supported a fair amount of agriculture off to the southwest side of Kandahar City.”
“We spent a lot of time in there because as it turns out, in hindsight, the Taliban had been massing for a significant attack, and it was really a big campaign to try and take Kandahar, but I didn't know that at the time.”
One night Fletcher, along with a battalion of at least 600 other Canadian soldiers, as well as members of the allied Afghanistan army, were advancing in the valley district when they came upon a Taliban-fortified area and a firefight began.
“We fought our way in, and we consolidated in this small built-up area — a series of villages where one leads into another, and they're all interspersed by grape fields,” he said. “The next day we were doing a series of clearing patrols looking for weapons caches, looking for enemy combatants, and we were searching a grape hut, and, I remember this quite vividly, I had a section (8-10 soldiers), out ahead securing the open ground so that when we finished we could move on to the next compound.”
“Like something out of a movie, this individual came around the corner, was armed, had a tactical sort of rig on with magazines and extra ammunition, and stopped short, our guys stopped short, he turned around and took off as you'd expect one against 10, so they chased him.”
Fletcher's section organized outside the compound the individual ran into and prepared to breach it, and upon entering Taliban gunfire hailed down from the roof of the compound, killing Cpl. Anthony Boneca, a 21-year-old army reservist.
“At that point in time I brought the rest of the group forward, we surrounded the entirety of the complex and started figuring out how we were going to gain access,” Fletcher said. “We tried a number of times to do a traditional method — throw in some grenades — [but] incidentally, every time we did that a couple of grenades failed to go off, which is a sinking feeling.”
“I didn't want to bring in artillery, because as accurate as it can be it's still an area weapon, and we didn't know what or who was in the surrounding compounds, so I wasn't willing to take the chance that, God forbid, by doing that we hurt or kill some innocent civilians.”
Eventually the unit called in air-support in the form of a U.S. helicopter to take out the combatants on the roof of the compound, which led to what Fletcher called a “massive explosion.”
“It was huge,” he said. “I was sitting behind a small wall waiting for the helicopter to fire so that we can coordinate the subsequent assault, and both the individual on my left, who was an American trainer for the Afghan army, and my signaler, a guy named Keith Mooney on my right, both got hit by shrapnel from this explosion.”
“Why they got hit and not me, I guess, is anybody's guess.”
In the rush of administering first aid and evacuating Mooney and the American, Fletcher said the plan to breach the compound immediately after the helicopter attack fell apart, and instead a drone was called in to fire a missile into the compound.
“We came in, assaulted the compound this time over a wall onto the roof [and] two were dead and there wasn't much left.”
The other occasion for which Fletcher was awarded the Star of Military Valour for following his deployment to Afghanistan is described in the National Post's feature on Fletcher.
“At the end of the day, I was in charge of a company, so about 150 and then with attachments sometimes 200 soldiers, they were the awesome ones,” Fletcher said.
“The award that I did get, I wear it very proudly, but it wasn't Bill Fletcher, it was Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry — each and every one of them.”
The Victoria Cross campaign
When it comes to the new campaign to have the Victoria Cross awarded for the first time, Fletcher said he doesn't know if it should be awarded or not.
“Most of Canada's key allies have a process to review cases and files because the reality is that in the fullness of time, additional detail, texture, and context comes out,” Fletcher said. “Canada doesn't really do that, so I'm certainly supportive of having something like that that would look at a couple of the National Post [choices] — I exclude myself from that — and say, ‘Hey, did we get it right in the first instance?’ because people did their best at the time, and maybe [a review has since taken place] and the answer might be there's no Victoria Cross going to be awarded.”
Fletcher isn't surprised there's a civilian-led push to have Victoria Cross awarded.
“You read a couple of those [National Post articles] and can certainly see why people are galvanized by this,” he said.
He said he would understand if those governing the military honour system, namely Canada's Governor General, was concerned about the significance of the Victoria Cross honour being watered down, so to speak, by awarding it now.
“I don't want to cast dispersions at anybody, because everyone's doing it with their best intentions ... but I wonder if perhaps we're being a little bit too hard on ourselves to be perfectly honest with you,” he said. “The pendulum swung from being concerned about being too permissive, or not holding the standard, holding the line, to maybe being a little bit overly concerned about that, and maybe there's a sweet spot in the middle, but, you know, I could be wrong.”
“Perhaps we are a little bit harsh in terms of our expectations for some of these things,” he said, adding that "harsh" is a harsh word to use.
Other military veterans featured by the National Post include Ernest (Smokey) Smith, who was awarded the British Victoria Cross in 1944 following a near single-handed effort wherein he destroyed three German tanks and held off 30 German soldiers in the Second World War; Cpl. Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibwe soldier and former Chief of Wasauksing First Nation who was credited with killing over 350 Germans in the First World War; Sgt. Patrick Tower mentioned previously; and many more.
