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“The thing about the military, Canadians don’t want to talk about their accomplishments,” Guevremont, a Gatineau native, said in a phone call from his new home in Victoria. “It’s why the public doesn’t know a lot about our military. It’s hard to start talking about this stuff. Everyone who reads it thinks it’s a big deal, but within the ranks we don’t even think about it at all.”

Edited by Ottawa city councillor Jody Mitic, himself a wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Everyday Heroes is dedicated to the “men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces, past, present and future, and the public that supports them.” It features stories from veterans of the Second World War, Korea, Afghanistan and other missions such as the Ebola outbreak in Africa and United Nations missions in Cyprus and Bosnia.

Guevremont is one of several Ottawa-area veterans profiled in the book (another being Noel Shanks of Sharbot Lake, who, full disclosure, was this reporter’s uncle).

Guevremont’s modesty notwithstanding, “I can tell you that in the ranks, we are all amazed at that story,” said Mitic. “Imagine knowing that a Taliban lookout with a cellphone could be watching ready pull the trigger when you got close enough. Bruno did that for someone he didn’t know. He didn’t speak the same language. He didn’t have to do that but Bruno gave that person back their life.”

Guevremont did it all in his 15-year military career. He trained as a paratrooper and was on his way to becoming one of a handful of elite navy clearance divers until he damaged his lung in a decompression accident. He retrained as a bomb disposal technician like the ones made famous in the film The Hurt Locker, and went back to Afghanistan for a second tour as part of a counter-IED (improvised explosive device) unit. Their job was to find and defuse the IEDs that accounted for nearly all of the 159 Canadian combat deaths in Afghanistan.