Sitting in his family home, Graham Lamb reminisced about a different time, talking to me about how the house looked when he first moved in with his dad. There used to be a chain-link fence, and cows used to graze just outside of their backyard.
That was over 40 years ago, so he sat down with me to discuss what happened during his years in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Graham’s biggest motivator for joining the military was the 1981 recession, he had just bought his first car, interest rates were up and mortgages were up 14 to 15 percent. Graham even recalls the effect on the neighborhood “The people that lived next door lost their house because they couldn’t afford to refinance it” Graham told me.
So Graham saw two options in front of him, he could finish high school and then go off to Ryerson University (Now Toronto Metropolitan University) to get an engineering degree or sign up with the military. Graham gave two reasons for his choice, the first was that once the recession was over, he worried about competing with people who had lost their jobs, especially since he would have just gotten out of school. The second was that the military promised to pay him as soon as he signed before he finished high school.
So Graham signed a five-year contract, in case he decided to back to school after service with all the benefits. Graham spent his first 12-13 weeks in Nova Scotia in basic training before being sent to Kingston, Ontario to do his intelligence training. Graham said that he had to write a test similar to an SAT, and scoring high enough in certain departments would open up his future in military service. That left him with engineering (what Graham would have done had he not gone into the military) and signals intelligence. At the time, Graham said the Air Force was trying to push more people into signals intelligence and with the promise of computers, which he had never used before, Graham was hooked.
After he was done with his trade school, Graham was sent to a surveillance base in Newfoundland and began his service. That led him to protect Pope John Paul the 2nd when he was visiting Newfoundland, serving in the UK’s war against Argentina over the Falklands Islands; assisting the United States in 1983 Operation Urgent (also known as the Invasion of Grenada) and again in the first gulf war in the 1990s. The most important day in Graham’s story though, was 9/11.
When the first plane hit the Twin Towers Graham remembers him and half a dozen other military officers standing in a “Command Centre” right out of the movie. Screens playing all sorts of news channels and different feeds, everyone trying to figure out what was going on. Graham remembers how some reporters were trying to say it was a private plane that hit the tower, but as he put it “Are you kidding it took out like 20 floors… Something big hit that tower.”
But in another omen of what was to come, Graham remembers an Operations Officer turning to him “We’re at war now by the way, you see that, we’re at war” while pointing at the towers.
Eventually, the United States invaded Afghanistan and just as Canada was about to follow, Graham Lamb retired. His reason? He didn’t think either the Canadian or U.S. government had a long-term plan for Afghanistan. How does he feel about his retirement now that the U.S. left Afghanistan? His answer was, “They wasted a bunch of lives and billions of dollars and then they gave the whole goddamn thing back. And it’s worse now than when we went in there, and I’ve got friends who are dead because of it… What did we accomplish”
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