Video: Highway of Heroes

Since the start of our nation’s two wars, we’ve been mostly shielded from seeing the return of our nation’s fallen service men and women. Their arrival back home and many of the services tend to be private.
  Tthat is not the case to our north in Canada. Our two nations have a rich history as allies, including both world wars..
And now a number of canadians have chosen to mark their war dead.. in a special way.
 
As an ally in the war on terror, Canada has lost 97 soldiers in Afghanistan…

A military ceremony welcomes each fallen fighter home…
Then the family accompanies the body for a heartbreaking 100 mile drive to to the morgue…

It’s along that stretch of highway, that a grass roots phenomenon has risen out of a nation’s grief.

Hundreds, of people on bridge after bridge after bridge…I hope that they know that they are not alone

Photographer Pete Fisher noticed something on the bridges…and started taking pictures…

ordinary people…...some saluting…some waving flags…

often…parents bring their children.

Here by word of mouth—waiting, sometimes for hours

“There was one rusty brown truck, before a bridge. and it was a father and son, and the son was maybe 15 yrs. old, standing, touching shoulders, tall as could be, in the back of that rusty brown pickup, both saluting as my son went by. they saluted for my son….“

Each time Darlene Cushman enters the legion hall she kisses a photo on the wall… it is of her son Daryl…killed by a roadside bomb….

Kevin: you wear these everyday?
Darlene: everyday.

Along the busy road now called…. ‘The Highway of Heroes’...
have been firefighters from the town of Cobourg.

KT: it’s in the dead of winter, it must be cold?
Firefighter 3: it can be some days, sure. wet and miserable. we don’t mind. it’s the least we can do.

Darlene Cushman remembers every single moment of that awful trip.

These people that stand on the Highway of Heroes…there is no words, you wouldn’t have enough film and i don’t have enough time to thank them from the bottom of my heart for respecting my son.

What everyone hopes ...is that they will never return to the bridges…to await another soldier’s return.

Kevin Tibbles, NBC Cobourg, Ontario