11,000 km from home, Hamilton peacekeeper spends 3rd Remembrance Day overseas

Having been overseas on Nov. 11 twice already in his long military career, Lieutenant-Colonel Geoff Tyrell says the date brings its own special weight to Canadians stationed far from home.

While people gather around the Gore Park Cenotaph in his hometown of Hamilton, Tyrell will be one of nine Canadians serving as peacekeepers in the United Nations mission in South Sudan.

As commander of Task Force South Sudan, Tyrell is part of a mission to bring stability to a country overwhelmed by famine, displacement and conflict. The mission began in 2011 to ensure peace following the creation of the new country. Since 2023, a bloody civil war in neighbouring Sudan has added to instability in the new nation.

Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) usually assist with military planning and logistics, said spokesperson Brigitte Van Hende.

With peacekeepers from over 71 countries involved in the UN mission there, Tyrell said not everyone marks Remembrance Day, so the small group of Canadians are figuring out their own ceremony.

"We've been wearing our poppies here for about a week now and [trying to] plan what do we do on that day to mark things, where for most of our colleagues, it's just a working day," he said in a phone interview this week. 

Figuring out the ceremony, something Tyrell said he once had to do while in Ukraine, is the easy part.

"The away from home part is difficult," Tyrell said, "because when I've been home, I've gone with my family. We always mark it as a family." 

Tyrell is one of 4,000 Canadians who will be stationed overseas this Nov. 11, according Van Hende.

Each operation is responsible for organizing its own Remembrance Day events, although every deployed mission will take a moment of silence on Nov. 11, she said. 

"This act is a universal tribute within our ranks, a way to pay homage to those who have served and made the ultimate sacrifices, as well as to their families," Van Hende said. 

3rd Remembrance Day stationed overseas

Tyrell said there was an official ceremony on the first Remembrance Day he ever spent stationed overseas and it changed the way he saw the holiday.

After joining the Air Cadets as a boy, growing up in Hamilton's Ancaster community, and enlisting in Canada's Armed Forces in 2001, Tyrell saw combat for the first time in Afghanistan in 2009.

"I deployed myself in October, thinking, 'It's finally my time. I'm going to experience war,'" he said, speaking on the phone from his current station in South Sudan.

Three weeks later, Tyrell said, a fellow officer in his battalion was killed in Kandahar province. Tyrell said he didn't know the man well, but his death brought new meaning to the Remembrance Day ceremony he attended the next month on a Canadian airbase.

"It was such a resonating moment, like, I'm here remembering someone I knew personally … who's given his life here in a war zone," he said. "Someone I know, who's made that sacrifice, is not here today."

In 2016, he was sent to Ukraine with another Canadian officer to train soldiers there. That year, he was alone in his hotel room on Nov. 11. He said it's the first time he wasn't surrounded by soldiers or family on the holiday, and it forced him to look at the landscape outside Ukraine and think of the sacrifice soldiers in that country were making for their own homeland.

"It's costly, but anything worth doing is," he said.

Tyrell said he's reminded at this time of year of people who were forced to make even larger sacrifices and hopes that's something everyone back home will also think of on Nov. 11.

"So you remember the cost of being unable to resolve differences peaceably."