The fire a kilometre away

One · What happened

Four soldiers, and a fire a kilometre off

Major-General Wade Rutland told reporters on Sunday 18 October that eighty-four soldiers had been training with live munitions the afternoon before. They belonged to the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. Most were throwing hand grenades on a range while ten ran attack simulations. Training leaders knew of a grass fire about a kilometre away, according to Global News’s account of the day. In the first minutes nobody saw it as a threat. Global News also reported that Environment Canada had issued a high-wind warning for parts of Alberta, with gusts up to a hundred kilometres an hour.

“It is not normal for a fire to move a kilometre in 30 to 60 seconds,” Rutland said, in the words Global News published. The wind had shifted when the fire stood about a kilometre from the troops. Four soldiers died. Prime Minister Mark Carney confirmed the deaths in a televised address on 18 October and ordered flags lowered to half-mast. He called the fire one of the worst tragedies for the Armed Forces on Canadian soil in peacetime, according to Global News’s timeline of the days that followed. The House of Commons stood for a moment of silence the next day. Carney told the members they were meeting “united in grief.”

Premier Danielle Smith said on 18 October that thirty-nine patients were in hospital and nineteen of them were in critical condition, Global News reported. Patients were moved to hospitals in three Alberta cities. On Monday 19 October Carney named the dead in the House of Commons, among them Sergeant Morgan Wong of Edmonton and Private Shaun Farrell of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The other two were Private Aidan Goulding of North Vancouver and Private Hayden Lykkemark of Langley, British Columbia.

Rutland said the fire did not start inside the training area and that its cause is under investigation. Global News reported that investigators expect it could be weeks before a cause is determined. According to CBC, fifty investigators are on the case. CTV reported that Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff has committed to releasing the inquiry’s findings publicly. Whether anyone on that range could have acted differently belongs to the inquiry, since the reporting so far settles nothing on that point.

Two · What it is doing

The verdict that arrives before the report

“The fire was known” began the Canadian Press headline that CTV carried on 18 October. A reader who stops at those four words has a defendant. The commander should have pulled the soldiers back, or the range officer should have, or whoever approves grenade training under a high-wind warning. Hindsight fills in each of those names with a confidence nobody had on the range, where a grass fire a kilometre off looked like what grass fires usually look like.

Another reader finishes the story from Wainwright and thinks of his own ground. A lump he found in the spring has stood a kilometre off from him ever since. A letter from the county sits unopened in a kitchen drawer, and the longer it stays there the less it looks like a thing that could hurt him. Each looks, from where he stands, like what it has looked like for months. Nothing has moved yet. The soldiers in Alberta watched their grass in much the same way up to the afternoon the wind turned.

The hunt for a name has a use for the man doing the hunting. If the fire had a culprit, then fires belong to the kind of trouble a careful person prevents. The reader who is careful is then safe. Solomon wrote, “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame” (Proverbs 18:13). Whoever convicts a commander he has never met has given his answer before the first witness was heard. Nineteen soldiers lie in critical condition across Alberta. A verdict handed to their families before anyone knows whether there is a person to blame leaves them with an anger and nowhere to put it.

Three · Where the ground is

Job’s friends, and the question about the innocent

Job was told of a fire before he was told of anything else. A messenger came while another was still speaking. He said a fire had consumed the sheep and the servants and that he alone had escaped to tell it. Job answered with the line the church has repeated at graves, “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away,” and then blessed the name of the LORD. The narrator adds that in all of it he did not sin or charge God with wrong (Job 1:21–22). The book never hands him a reason for the fire.

Eliphaz, the first of three friends to speak, put it as a question in Job 4:7, “who that was innocent ever perished?” He worked backward from the loss to a cause. A headline invites a reader to do the same. In the end the LORD told him, “My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7). Reasoning from the ashes to a guilty party cost the friends the one thing they came to give.

The net that closes, and the prudent man

“Time and chance happen to them all,” the Preacher observed after looking across life under the sun (Ecclesiastes 9:11). He was writing about the kind of trouble that nobody sees in time and that falls on the careful as readily as the careless. Then he gave the picture, “Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them” (Ecclesiastes 9:12). Fish never see the net before it closes. The book does not say why one net closed on one day. Nobody who goes searching the reporting from this week for a cause will find one there, because the book itself offers none.

“The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it,” Solomon wrote just as firmly (Proverbs 22:3). Prudence is commanded. No change in the weather waves the command away. Whether prudence was practiced on 17 October is the question the inquiry exists to answer, and weeks of investigation lie between the reader and any answer. Anyone holding both verses can wait for the answer. Proverbs says the prudent take cover while Ecclesiastes says even the prudent can be caught. Neither verse tells the reader which one happened at Wainwright.

Free from the fear of it

Paul wrote to Timothy that Christ Jesus “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10). The dread of the next fire, for a reader with a child at a range or a sleeper in a bunkhouse, is a small piece of the larger dread of death. Christ went through a death that no report ever reaches and rose again. Anyone who belongs to Him is held by Him in death and past it. The reporting says nothing of what any of the four soldiers believed, and a reader who wonders about it should leave the question with God.

“Weep with those who weep,” Paul told the Romans (Romans 12:15). He told the Thessalonians he did not want them uninformed about those who are asleep, “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). The families in Edmonton, Prince Albert, North Vancouver and Langley will be carried by neighbors and congregations who show up with meals and a ride to the hospital. A man far from Alberta can do the same work for the family in his own pew who has someone in uniform.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Each of the five starts with something already in the house or the pew, and none waits on the inquiry into the 17 October fire.

1. 01

   Walk up to the fire you have been watching.

   Name the one matter you have watched from a distance since spring, a lump that has stayed or a letter from the county that is still sealed, and deal with it today. For the lump, phone the doctor’s office this morning and take the first opening they offer. Open the letter at the kitchen table with your wife or a friend beside you. Write the first question down.

2. 02

   Test the alarm in the hallway tonight.

   Press the test button on every smoke alarm in the house and replace any battery that chirps. Pick the mailbox or the tree where everybody meets if the house ever burns, and walk the children out to it once. Write 911 on the card by the phone for the babysitter.

3. 03

   Write to a family with someone in uniform.

   Ask your pastor which family in the congregation has a son or daughter serving, in Canada’s forces or in this country’s. Write the card by hand and say in a sentence or two that the church thought of them after Wainwright, then mail it before Sunday. Galatians 6:2 says, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

4. 04

   Go back to the person you explained to.

   Think of the last grieving person who heard from you that it happened for a reason, or that it could have been prevented. Call or write today and tell him you spoke too soon and are sorry. Job’s three friends were at their finest during the first week, when they sat in silence beside him for seven days and seven nights (Job 2:13). Their mistake came when they started to explain.

5. 05

   Put the four names on the refrigerator.

   Write Sergeant Morgan Wong, Private Shaun Farrell, Private Aidan Goulding and Private Hayden Lykkemark on a card and stick it where the house will pass it. Pray for their families by those names and for the nineteen soldiers listed in critical condition on 18 October. Lamentations 3:22 says, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases.” Keep the card up until the inquiry reports, and read what it says before you speak of it.