Chris Wattie of the National Post (and a serving Reserve Officer with the GGHG in Toronto) did a review of the book. Unfortunately, Mrs Off did not fair well in the review. To quote Chris "What makes Ghosts of Medak ultimately unsatisfying is that Off has written nearly 300 pages on one of the most dramatic incidents in modern Canadian history and managed to make it boring."
Attached is a copy of the review.
kurt
Author "All Tigers No Donkeys"
In 1993, 600 Canadian soldiers -- half of them reservists -- fought a battle in a desolate corner of the former Yugoslavia. Outnumbered and, outgunned by their Croatian foes, they nonetheless fought them to a standstill and forced them to retreat. In the process, they helped uncover evidence of ethnic cleansing by Croatian forces who were determined to evict ethnic Serbs before the Canadians could
enforce a shaky UN peace agreement.
The story of their battle, and the physical and mental scars that plagued the soldiers for years after, went largely unreported in Canada. Government and senior military officers, distracted by the Somalia scandal of the same year, did little to put out the story of the largest military action by Canadian troops since the Korean War and the troops returned home to little fanfare or recognition.
Eleven years later, along comes journalist Carol Off with The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: The Story of Canada's Secret War, a book that purports to be the never-before-told story of how Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Calvin and the soldiers of 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry fought and suffered.
Well, not exactly.
For a secret war, Medak Pocket has been awfully conspicuous over the past eight years. And Off was far from the first one to let the "secret" out of the bag. In fact, the battle has been in the media since at least 1996 -- three years after Lt.-Col. Calvin's patchwork battalion fought off the Croatians in the
UN's Sector South.
The Ottawa Citizen's a journalist first told the story in a lengthy article which featured interviews with Lt.-Col. Calvin and most of the same soldiers that Off features in Ghosts of Medak. The article was picked up by Canadian Press and reprinted in newspapers across the country. The Toronto Star ran it on their front page.
Global TV and CTV did stories on Medak in the wake of a journalist's article and Scott Taylor, the publisher of the military magazine Esprit de Corps, wrote about it in his gadfly publication and later -- in 1998 -- devoted an entire chapter of his book, Tested Mettle, to the battle, as well as the persistent health problems suffered by the soldiers who served in the nightmarish Croatian battlefield.
In 2002, Dr. Sean Maloney and John Llambias published Chances for Peace: Canadian Soldiers in the Balkans, which exhaustively chronicled Medak, using the soldiers' own words, and remains the definitive published work on the battle.
Some secret. Yet all of this previous work on Medak is given only a passing reference by Off, and in the case of Taylor, a dismissive reference.
Still, for some Canadians, the story Off lays out in Ghosts of Medak is not a familiar one -- which should be as much a national disgrace as the shameful treatment of the veterans of the battle by the government in the years after their return -- and there is a need for a book on Medak that appeals to a broad audience.
In Ghosts, Off covers the events leading up the battle, setting the context with a brief summary of the bewilderingly byzantine history of the Balkans, and she does a reasonable job of laying out the diplomatic wheeling and dealing into which the Canadian troops were thrust in the summer of 1993.
But her description of the action itself, drawn from interviews with many of the soldiers involved, is confused and sketchy. Granted, the situation was "fluid" -- military parlance for chaotic -- but the book gives the reader little help in keeping the main players and significant troop movements straight. A few judiciously placed maps would have done wonders.
But they would not have helped overcome Off's flat prose, which manages to deflate the dramatic impact of the events she describes. A point-blank firefight involving one platoon of soldiers reads like a baseball game covered by a bored sportswriter, and the troops who should be the heart of her story never come to life for the reader as the book skips erratically from one character to another and from incident to incident.
The best passages in the book are those where Off lets the soldiers tell their own stories, including their descriptions of the horrific evidence of ethnic cleansing which Lt.-Col. Calvin and his soldiers found after
forcing the Croatians out of the Medak Pocket.
The last third of the book is the most disappointing, as Off attempts to chronicle the years of sychological and physical problems the troops faced after their return home. She seems determined to prove that the government conspired to hide evidence of the battle from the public, but comes up with no proof. Her contention that senior military officers and a Liberal government with little love for the Canadian Forces co-operated to cover up evidence of a battle that was politically inconvenient may well be true, as other military analysts have claimed, but there is nothing new in Off's discussion of the issue and no solid evidence to support her thesis.
In fact, while the military was probably happy to let the battle slip beneath the media's radar, at least one of the public affairs officers quoted in Ghosts of Medak informed me recently that they had plenty of
co-conspirators in the media. Military spokesmen on the ground in Croatia in 1993 were practically begging Canadian reporters to come see what the troops were going through, but got no takers. Government officials and generals, it seems, were not the only ones preoccupied with the Somalia scandal.
Most of Off's lengthy discussion of the health problems faced by the Croatian veterans -- including the sad and bizarre tale of Warrant Officer Matthew Stopford who was poisoned by his own troops -- amounts to little more than an inelegant synopsis of media reports and the transcript of an official military inquiry into the matter.
What makes Ghosts of Medak ultimately unsatisfying is that Off has written nearly 300 pages on one of the most dramatic incidents in modern Canadian history and managed to make it boring.
© National Post 2004
