"Courage Rewarded" 2nd Edition Published with a New Chapter on Afghanistan

The revised edition of Courage Rewarded  was published on Friday, 18 October 2013 and is now available directly from me or from Amazon.com. It has many editing changes, with some topics condensed and others expanded. But the main reason for the edition was to include a full chapter on the missions in Afghanistan, thereby completing the record of courage in battle as experienced by Canadian soldiers in all the wars from South Africa in 1900.  The chapter presents  as much as possible  of the Afghan missions in 35 pages but I think it satisfactorily encapsulates the whole story .

This revised edition should have come out over a year earlier.  Unfortunately, it was held up as DND delayed announcing the final awards until the end of 2012, which seemed to me to be an extraordinarily long time following the end of the combat mission in July 2011. At the same time,, I must thank the Directorate of Honours and Recognition who assisted me without hesitation by providing the citations, statistics and answering questions regarding  the Military Valour Decorations for Afghanistan. I also want to thank those soldiers who agreed to be interviewed by me to make sure I had the right picture of the challenges faced by them when under fire.

For an exceprt from the book about awards of Military Valour Decorations, please go to  http://www.couragerewarded.com/afghan_awards.html

The combat mission is now fading away in the news and in many peoples' memories, but I hope the book satisfies those  who have only had a limited number of books or newspaper articles to help them understand what happened over there. Of course, I could only use open source references since the war diaries will be off limits for years to come. As the full story comes out in coming years, the picture will no doubt change as to whether we made a difference there or wjhether we  opposed the insurgency as well as we could have. There is no doubt we did the best we could under the circumstances, and that Canadians had no hesitation in volunteering to serve.  But until then, I offer the narrative in my book to those who are intereseted.

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