Scarce Heard Amid the Guns: An Inside Look at Canadian Peacekeeping

John Conrad

Sep 2011 · Dundurn

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Scarce Heard Amid the Guns tears the curtain of myth away, providing a rare, visceral inner perspective of the various Canadian peacekeeping missions.

“In the Service of Peace” — simple words that adorn the obverse of every United Nations medal, yet behind this eloquence lurks violence and an unheralded heroism invisible to an often misunderstood quarter of Canada’s military history. The Canadian contribution to peacekeeping is enormous but ensnared in a lethal mythology that has seen it abandoned to popular folklore. From the early and intrinsic Canadian contribution to the U.N. Emergency Force in 1956, through the blur of the frenetic 1990s down to the anemic level of contemporary Canadian participation, it is difficult to make sense of the wide circumference of this significant legacy. Until now.

Scarce Heard Amid the Guns provides an incisive perspective on the various Canadian missions: their omnipresent doubt and un-telegraphed terrors. This insider’s guided tour of our military at war in peace introduces us to some of the men and women who carried the day — ordinary Canadians who did extraordinary things and continue to bear the scars of forgotten fields in their bones.

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Lieutenant-Colonel John Conrad is a reserve army officer with 28 years of experience in the Canadian Forces. He is a veteran of both the United Nations and NATO brands of peacekeeping and has served in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. His previous book about his experiences in Afghanistan, What the Thunder Said, was a bestseller. He lives in Orono, Ontario.