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Sign in to My VAC AccountBorn and raised in the small town of South Porcupine, Major (Ret’d) Dave Winney always had a desire to expand his horizons. As a young man, he became a civil engineer but soon found that a desk job was just not for him. So, at 30, he went out on a limb and enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Daniel Massé joined the military in 1983. After completing officer training, he was posted to the 2nd Battalion of the Royal 22e Régiment at the Citadel in Québec City. During his time in the Canadian Armed Forces, he served on missions both domestically and abroad. He deployed to Germany, Bosnia and Cyprus, but also served in three major missions here in Canada.
“We were given about two hours to let our families know, get ready and leave on a school bus for Montreal.”
Cole Rosentreter didn’t grow up in a military family or dream of serving in uniform. Born in Calgary, Alberta, and raised in Edmonton, he decided to join the military shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. “It just seemed like the right thing to do.”
What began as a three-year adventure turned into a 15-year military career with the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in Edmonton. “My story is really simple. I never got posted, and I only really deployed to Afghanistan to one province, and that was Kandahar.”
They say there is no greater bond than the one between a mother and her child. The strong connection between Nancy M. Siew and her son, Captain Cletus Cheng, was evident as she recounted their last phone conversation. She described a gut feeling or as some would call it, a mother’s intuition. “During that last conversation we had, I had an inkling that he would die during the competition… when we got the news that he died, I was numb because I knew it was going to happen.
Hamel was named after his uncle Charlie, who lost his leg while serving in the Second World War. His father was an infantry officer with the Royal 22e Régiment and had served in the Korean War, while another of his uncles served in the Second World War, piloting landing craft.
It just seemed like that's where I needed to be.
“My brother had joined three years before me,” Barnes said. “I heard stories about how exciting everything was, I thought I’d give it a go.”
After completing basic training in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, Barnes chose to be a data telegraphist, leading to six months of specialized training. His first posting was to Krefeld, West Germany, during the Cold War. He would later go on to deployments in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s, followed by additional postings to Germany in the 1980s, where he worked to provide communications for NATO groups until 1986.
Warrant Officer (Retired) Brian Prairie is a proud Métis Veteran with both Red River and Ontario heritage. He is committed to preserving and honouring his people’s cultureand history.
Prairie’s military journey began in the early seventies with the Army reserves in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
“It was a time when there was a lot of peace and love and marijuana and experimentation and I just didn’t fit,” he recalled.
Bill Toussaint was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia in 1947. His mother’s family successfully made their way to Canada through the underground railway. His father immigrated from Grenada in the search for work. Toussaint grew up in a community called Whitney Pier, a diverse community filled with many different cultures.
Bambi Gray’s enrollment in the CAF was somewhat unexpected but not completely without reason. As her father brought one of her three brothers to Army Cadets when she was only five and he subsequently volunteered with the Cadets as Quartermaster, she spent the better part of her childhood in uniform. “I swore up and down that I didn’t want to join the military, because I had been going to Army Cadets my whole life, from age 5 to 18. I said I’d had enough of wearing a uniform.”
In the 1990s, the layoff and early retirement of hundreds of nurses in Quebec greatly limited career opportunities for recent nursing school graduates. Annie Tétreault was in this very situation and was looking for work. A friend of hers who was studying at the military college advised Annie to apply for the CAF’s paid education program.
