Fellow Soldier Catches on Fire.

Heroes Remember

Fellow Soldier Catches on Fire.

Transcript

We come back into a spot where, a safe spot well back behind everywhere. There's four of us sitting there in a small circle like this, and usually we have heat tablets to heat up our food. One of our, one of the guys, the leader, had a sniper suit on. He, when we were talking and sitting and cooking our stuff up, we're sitting on the ruck sacks, you know, getting whatever we need out of it that way, we were talking and his hat fell off. He was digging in his bag and his hat fell off and it caught on fire. So one of the guys says, “Hey, your hat's on fire.” So then he put it out and put it on, and then he went to reach for something else and he he just went up in a ball of fire. And so from that, what happened at that point, and we've since talked about it, we've since replayed it back and we've written statements about it, but generally what happened is that the grass was extremely dry so everything around was catching on fire. We got him, I remembered a flash back from when I was a kid and one of my friends got caught on fire from some gas on his leg and his father said, roll, roll, roll, you know to put it out. So, I was telling him to roll and he, all that was happening was that more grass was catching on fire. We still had all these jackets on, all our adrenaline was pretty well shot. So, his uniform was melting on him because it was nylon. So, what I did at one point is I got the guys to run him into me so I, and I took my knife out, I was going to cut, he had binoculars on his neck as well and I was going to cut them off, cut his clothes off. Well, what happened is that they ran him into me but we were chest to chest and he pinned me to a tree, and all I could see was his eyes looking at mine and a big flame around his head and he said, “Duke, help me.” So I dropped my knife and started ripping clothes apart. We got him out, he was down on all fours just panting and breathing and everything was out and all of a sudden another piece of cloth flashed, he got third....and his ears melted. I remember watching his ears melt. He had third degree burns to about a third of his body.

Description

Mr. Leduc tells us about the time when his fellow soldier’s hat caught on fire and the measures taken toward protecting his life.

Harold Leduc

Mr. Harold Leduc was born on November 18, 1953 in Montreal, Quebec. He was the second oldest in a family of five children. Mr. Leduc’s desire to join the military was influenced by his strong military family background and at age 12 he began his journey by joining the cadets, followed by the reserves and then the regular forces and was posted with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. In 1976, Mr. Leduc joined the Canadian Airborne Regiment as a paratrooper. During his service he became a member of the Pioneer’s Platoon with in-Canada service and later joined the Reconnaissance Platoon with service in North Carolina. Mr. Leduc retired from military life in 1992. He continued to be a strong advocate for the military and held the position of National President, Peacekeeping Veterans Organization.

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