A day for memories

Phillip Ledoux, who served as a peacekeeper in Cyprus and Lebanon in the 1960s with the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, reads the roll call during the Remembrance Day Service at the Senator Allan Bird Memorial Centre in Prince Albert on Wednesday. © Herald photo by Jason Kerr.

Phillip Ledoux was looking for adventure when he graduated from high school, and he found it in the army.

Ledoux, who hails from Mistawasis First Nation west of Prince Albert, had always been interested in the military, and as soon as he was old enough to enlist he took the plunge.

“I ended up in Regina at the recruiting station,” Ledoux remembers. “I signed up there, and next thing I know I was on a train to Calgary. I was accepted into the armed forces, and after 14 years in residential school, army life was a piece of cake.”

Even though he was young, Ledoux was disciplined, hard working, and mixed easily with his fellow soldiers. Those qualities came in handy as his regiment, the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, began training for deployment in Vietnam.

That assignment never came, and instead, Ledoux and his unit shipped out as peacekeepers across a different ocean and all the way to Cyprus, a small island country in the Mediterranean.

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