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Virginia Hicks is this year’s National Silver Cross Mother. Her daughter, Private Mariebeth Short, died during a training exercise while serving as a sapper in the 2 Combat Engineer Regimen in 2002.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
Every year, Virginia Hicks places red roses in the branches of a lonely maple tree growing on the Mattawa Plains at CFB Petawawa in Ontario.
The tree marks the place where her daughter, 22-year-old Private Mariebeth Short, died in 2002 during a training exercise while serving as a sapper in the 2 Combat Engineer Regiment. Mrs. Hicks remembers seeing the little sapling, randomly sprouting in the grass when she visited the site the day after the accident. Now bushy and tall, the maple is waiting there every Sept. 23, when she returns with flowers and memories.
This year, Royal Canadian Legion chose Mrs. Hicks, a veteran herself, to be Canada’s Silver Cross Mother. On Remembrance Day, the retired sergeant from Trenton, Ont., will lay a wreath at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.
She will kneel there for a moment, she says, and think about her daughter and what she might have accomplished. She’ll think about all the military families, past and present, grieving sons and daughters.
This year, the ceremony will happen less than a month after four soldiers died and dozens were critically injured in a devastating fire at CFB Wainwright in Alberta, during a training exercise that also went terribly wrong.
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Private Mariebeth Short was 22 years-old when she died.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
Sapper Short was always challenging herself, her mother recalls. In high school, she was a competitive long-distance runner – despite standing under five-feet-tall and weighing less than 100 pounds. “She was as strong as she was short,” Mrs. Hicks says.
She had just completed a month of training on the light armoured vehicle at her first posting at CFB Petawawa when she called her mother and Brian Hicks, her stepfather, in Halifax. She was excited that she was about to drive the vehicle for the first time.
“You realize this is a very big piece of equipment,” warned Mr. Hicks, a warrant officer in a construction engineering unit. “Yes, yes, Warrant, I’ll be careful,” Sapper Short promised.
She sounded so happy, Mrs. Hicks, 69, recalls. Despite the cautions on their phone call, she was saving her worry for when her daughter soon deployed to either Afghanistan or Bosnia.
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Sapper Short’s beret sits among a collection of mementos in the Hicks’ basement, including gifts from commanding officers recognizing Short’s work on Bailey bridges.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
Wearing a uniform came with risks, as Mrs. Hicks well knew. She grew up hearing about her three uncles who fought in the Second World War. Her father was a military firefighter, often posted overseas. By the age of 11, Mrs. Hicks had walked among the crosses at Vimy Ridge and stood on the beach at Dieppe. During one posting, her family lived in Lamorteau, a Belgian village near the French border, in a house still pockmarked with bullet holes from the Nazi invasion.
In 1989, she travelled from her home in Moose Jaw, Sask., to sign up at the recruiting office in Regina – a five-foot-tall, 30-year-old mother with four school-aged children. She wanted to serve her country.
“I’m very, very proud to be Canadian,” she says. “When you come home, you realize we take everything for granted. And we shouldn’t.”
At boot camp, the much-younger recruits nicknamed her “Mom.” She helped them sew labels on their uniforms, and traded ironing for boot polishing. When she woke every morning, sore and tired, she’d tell herself: “Shut up. You wanted this. Go to work.”
She was assigned to logistics, co-ordinating supplies. When she was deployed to the Persian Gulf, and her then-husband objected, she arrived for training at CFB Petawawa a single mother. By the time she retired in 2017, she’d also served two missions to Afghanistan.
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Mrs. Hicks holds a bridging pin for Bailey bridges. Her daughter would carry two of these at a time during her work as a combat engineer.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
When Sapper Short announced, a year after graduating high school that she wanted to enlist as well, her mother and stepfather made certain she was serious.
And when she decided to become a combat engineer – a front-line role responsible for building and demolishing roads and bridges to move troops forward and hold the enemy back – they were candid about the difficulties she could face, including resentment from male soldiers who might assume she wasn’t strong enough. Mr. Hicks warned her that, as the smallest person in her crew, she’d likely be sent into the tightest spots and might spend a lot of time standing up to her neck in cold water.
Her mother recalls the defiant reply: “Oh, for God’s sake. I brought the form home for you guys to look at, but this is what I want to do.”
Nothing is guaranteed once you put on the uniform, Mrs. Hicks says. “When you sign on the dotted line, that’s your life for your country.”
Still, you don’t expect a grim-faced padre to arrive at your house when your child is still on Canadian soil. The chaplain delivered the news in the Hicks living room while she cursed and screamed and called him a liar. And then he organized plane tickets for the next-day trip to CFB Petawawa.
In the field by the maple sapling, Mrs. Hicks learned that her daughter had passed the wheel of the light armoured vehicle to a crew member a few minutes earlier. She was standing with her head above the gunner’s hatch, when a front tire hit the groove of an old slip trench, Mrs. Hicks says, and wheel assembly broke off, and the vehicle rolled over twice.
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In the Hicks’ living room, a portrait of their daughter sits next to a piece of debris from the site where the fatal incident occurred.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
In the scramble to pull her back inside, Sapper Short’s gear became tangled. She was declared dead at the scene. The investigation report Mrs. Hicks received 18 months later concluded, she says, that a substandard weld in the new vehicle caused the accident.
This September, Mrs. Hicks and her husband once again made the three-hour drive to Petawawa. The base is part of the couple’s own history: they met here, 35 years ago. Now they come to place the roses – two at the memorial that bears Sapper Short’s name and picture, and 10 in the tree – to make sure her story is remembered.
A few weeks after the accident, Mrs. Hicks received a video in the mail. It was filmed the year before, when Sapper Short was part of a group testing new bomb suits. The video shows her laughing with her fellow soldiers, concentrating on a math task. “You see the life she had,” says Mrs. Hicks. They watch it every year, before they leave for the Petawawa, so the memory of her daughter smiling carries her through the day.
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The Royal Canadian Legion chose Mrs. Hicks, a veteran herself, to be Canada’s Silver Cross Mother.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail