For everyone who lived there, that home looked and felt a little different. There’s no way to tell all of Kapyong’s stories. But on the brink of its demolition, maybe it’s time to remember that this once-proud but now-decrepit place had a human heartbeat.

"People call this a military base, they call it a barracks," says Steve Kitching, who served from 1990-95. "We had another word for it: home."

Time for the people who served here to breathe one last bit of life into the former Kapyong.

Now, in the searing August heat, there is one last chance to remember. One last chance for a group of veterans to walk through the gates. One last chance to pose for a last round of photos, to stroll around the base, squinting in the sun.

"You’re going to hear a lot of different sounds when these buildings come down," veteran Dave Stubbert says.

Soon, the old Kapyong walls will fall to the ground. But what stories they’ll take with them when they crumble.

They won’t have to see it much longer. In January, the Department of National Defence confirmed it was ready to move forward on a three-year demolition project. Last month, a contract to raze the buildings was posted for tender.

"When veterans drive by, something happens to them," says Huf Mullick, who served 24 years with PPCLI. "There’s a sense of mourning and a sense of loss, as if you’re passing the grave of a loved one. And there’s some anger."

Yet the longer it stood, the more it seemed to haunt them. For years, 2PPCLI veterans who stayed in Winnipeg found themselves wincing when they drove past. Some kept their eyes forward, refusing to glance at the blight.

But the veterans remember. To the people who served there, Kapyong’s past is impossible to forget.

Today, an entire generation of young Winnipeggers knows it only as a place of stillness, and silence. A lonely gate, guarding an empty square. Empty parking lots surrounded by empty buildings. A faded old scar on Tuxedo’s ribs.

All that time, Kapyong was described only one way: as a legal problem, a bureaucratic boondoggle, a parcel of real estate. To most Winnipeggers, the life that once thrived at the base receded into the distance, and then into dust.

Huf Mullick (from left) Cecil Boulterat and Ed Bonin gather behind weeds growing out of the sidewalk in front of a barrack at CFB Kapyong. The vets were not allowed into buildings on the base. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

So in 2015, when then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Ottawa wouldn’t appeal the latest court ruling in favour of the First Nations, there was a collective sigh of relief in some quarters. After more than a decade of legal wrangling, wasted money and inexorable decay, an end was in sight; the saga was nearly over.

For years, the abandoned site dragged on the neighbourhood like an anchor. Ottawa has spent $20 million to maintain it since 2004. City traffic engineers were — and are — eager to widen gridlocked Kenaston. Nearby residents were — and are — put off by the shabby eyesore.

The soldiers were gone, but the 15-year battle that began in 2001 over the site’s fate raged on between the federal government and a coalition of Treaty One First Nations, who believed they had first dibs to buy the land.

By now, the story of how this came to pass is familiar. In 2004, the battalion packed up and moved to Canadian Forces Base Shilo, about 35 kilometres east of Brandon, and into a new $39.4-million Kapyong Barracks.

The barracks have been vacant since 2004, when 2PPCLI relocated to Canadian Forces Base Shilo near Brandon. (Joe Bryksa / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Today, the grass grows freely, the old square abandoned, a clutch of veterans strolling over its span.

"You’d be out here with spoons," recalls Bonin, who retired as a master warrant officer in 2003 and now lives in Saskatchewan. "You’d be taking pieces of grass off the square, wherever there was a little bit of growth."

Back then, if a young soldier stepped out of line, they might find themselves on their hands and knees, cleaning the hallowed parade ground. For hours, they’d pore over every inch of the square, picking up stray bits of debris.

(That said, sometimes, under cover of darkness, soldiers returning from a night on the town would take a shortcut across the square, betting no officer would see them.)

Ed Bonin poses in the centre of the parade ground at the former Kapyong Barracks. He remembers “policing” the grounds in a row of soldiers picking up cigarette butts and trash by hand. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

Rule No. 1: the parade square was sacred. It was a place of honour for the battalion: a place to welcome visiting dignitaries or receive missives from officers. So nobody was allowed to walk on it without a good reason.

At the time, high-ranking officers at Kapyong were mostly Korean War veterans. To the wide-eyed recruits they seemed stone-faced and battle-hardened. They drove a strict sort of discipline, girded by unbreakable steel rules.

"They said, ‘Who wants to go to Winnipeg?’" Bonin recalls. "I hadn’t been west of New Brunswick. So off we went."

It was so much different in 1973, when Bonin first arrived at Kapyong. He was a youngster from Nova Scotia fresh out of boot camp in Cornwallis, and posted to the famed 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry.

Members of 2PPCLI on parade during rehearsal for the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Kapyong, held on the base in July 2001. (Ken Gigliotti / Winnipeg Free Press)

"If the old regimental sergeant major knew, he’d be rolling in his grave," Ed Bonin says, shaking his head.

The parade square isn’t pristine like that, anymore. The prairies have begun to take it back.

They can hear the unified snap of 600 rifles, lifted to rest against 600 shoulders. They can smell the thick whiff of polished leather, boots shined to a mirror finish. They can feel the concrete, hard and smooth under their soles.

But when the veterans close their eyes, pictures of this place float up from the deep well of time, then break the surface. They can see the long rows of soldiers, straight-backed and still in the unblinking sun.

Nature has taken over the nearly 160-acre site in the 13 years since the military moved out. From cracks in the concrete grow laceworks of weedy grasses, embroidered by tall stalks of goldenrod and sprigs of purple aster.

Nature has taken over the nearly 160-acre site in the 13 years since the military moved out. (Boris Minkevich / Winnipeg Free Press files)

"I’ll tell you one thing," one veteran says while strolling through the site. "It feels like we never left."

If there are ghosts lingering on this patch of land, only the soldiers who lived and worked here can see them.

At the heart of the site, about 25 people round a corner onto the former parade square, squinting. For the next two hours they will mingle, surrounded by a sprawling complex of old memories and even older buildings.

There is movement. And laughter. Something is happening at Kapyong, something that hasn’t happened in a long time.

This article was published 26/8/2017 (1119 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the steps of the B9 barracks, the southernmost of two residences overlooking the parade square, Huf Mullick pauses. Almost exactly 29 years ago, he’d stood at that very same spot, wondering what his future would hold.

It was July 1988, and Mullick was in his fifth year as a Patricia. He’d grown up in Vancouver, and started his military career with the PPCLI’s third battalion, which was then based near Victoria. (It has since moved to Edmonton.)

Huf Mullick served as a sergeant with PPCLI until 2007. He started his military career with the third battalion, but joined 2PPCLI when it was looking to bolster its ranks during a NATO stint in Germany. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

Mullick never expected to end up in Winnipeg. Four years earlier, 2PPCLI had left Kapyong Barracks for a temporary stint at a NATO base in Germany. To bolster their numbers, the military sought volunteers from other battalions.

In Victoria, Mullick raised his hand at the offer. Three years in Germany would be good experience, he thought.

When it was time for the Patricias to return to Canada, Mullick was ready to go home. He missed his old base and the salt air of the West Coast. That’s when the military powers-that-be broke the news: he would stay with 2PPCLI.

"I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re not going back to Victoria,’" says Mullick, who served as a sergeant with PPCLI until 2007, and now serves in the reserves. "We are going to have to endure very hot summers and very cold winters."

The soldiers landed in Winnipeg on one night in July. They piled into a bus bound for Kapyong, where Mullick was assigned a room in the B9 barracks. The next morning he walked down to the front steps and looked out at the base.

That’s when he spied the letters, carved into the cement: the initials "V.R.I.," for Victoria Regina Imperatrix, the cypher of the Royal Canadian Regiment. The RCRs had stayed at Kapyong while the Patricias were away in Germany.

For long minutes, Mullick gazed at the letters, and back out at his new home base, thinking about what it all meant.

"I was thinking to myself, this place meant not only so much to the Patricias, but also to the RCRs, that there was somebody that actually took the time to dig into the steps their regiment’s emblem," Mullick says, of that moment.

"And I looked out, and it was a hot Winnipeg day, and this is the start of a new chapter in my life right in this spot."

Kapyong Barracks in 2002 before the base's closure and lengthy legal battle. (Winnipeg Free Press files)

There’s no trace of the letters in the partially crumbling concrete steps now, although the barracks stand out amid the blight; they got a makeover in 2015 when the site was under consideration to temporarily house Syrian refugees, but that plan never came to fruition.

Mullick is not alone in recalling his barracks days. As veterans wander around the site, many pause to take photos in front of their old quarters. It was, they explain, where so many of their memories were centred.

If Kapyong was like a village, then the barracks — soldiers call them "the shacks" — were the heart of its life. They were equal parts shelter, social hall and right of passage: in the shacks, wide-eyed young soldiers formed bonds.

Most of them arrived in Winnipeg fresh out of boot camp and living on their own for the first time. Like Ed Bonin, many came from the East Coast or southern Ontario, and had never been so far from home.

"For the single guys, the Kapyong barracks was your life," says Lawrence Surridge, who grew up in Owen Sound, Ont., and spent the majority of his 34-year military career at Kapyong. "You never had to leave there."

More than 500 Sea, Army & Air Cadets parade at Kapyong Barracks in a show of appreciation to the Second Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in 2004. (Jeff de Booy / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Well, sometimes they did. "The only time you have to leave was to get a bar of soap, or some toothpaste," he adds. "It was probably a year or so before you even started to venture out, before you got comfortable with the big city."

For most of Kapyong’s life, the shacks were full; in the 1970s, new soldiers were required to live on-base for one year. Once a week — sometimes more often — officers would inspect the quarters, looking for anything out of order.

"We got pretty good at polishing brass, pretty good at shining floors," Surridge says, laughing. "We used to put socks down, to step on your socks and slide around from one side to another, so you didn’t get marks on the floor."

Surridge also remembers returning from Germany to find all Kapyong’s buildings painted in the rival RCR’s colours. The 2PPCLI soldiers began repainting right away: "It took a while," Surridge says. "It was just one of those things.

"Mind ya, I guess it was the same for them," he adds. "They had to do it because we had it our colours."

The shacks had their quirks, Surridge remembers. They had radiators that whistled and wheezed while piping hot steam at night; even in the dead of winter, soldiers would prop open their windows in an attempt to control the temperature.

At night, after work was over, there was always something going on in the shacks: a party, a poker game. Gambling wasn’t technically allowed on the base, but there’s no doubt a few bucks travelled back and forth across the table.

In the mid-1970s, soldiers were paid in cash. On paydays, they’d don their berets and march to Korea Hall — the drill hall — situated on the south end of the shacks. They’d line up in two long, silent rows, waiting to collect their money.

That system posed its own unique problems, Surridge explains with a laugh.

"Everybody you owed money to was standing right there," he says. "By the time you were done paying everyone back, you’d be lucky if you had $5 or $10 in your pocket, and you’d start borrowing all over again for the next week."

That practice eventually changed, when the military brought Bank of Montreal clerks to the base to open accounts for the troops. Ed Bonin recalls the clerks teaching the soldiers how to write a cheque.

The bonds formed in the shacks buoyed soldiers’ spirits. Military life puts a strain on relationships: in the wake of breakups, soldiers would retreat to their company’s rooms to find a cold beer or a friendly shoulder.

Even when it came to the mundane tasks of everyday living, the soldiers often stuck together. A veteran named Mac — he did not want his last name used — who served from 1990 to 2004 remembers a certain laundry-room solidarity.

Mac donned his former fatigues for the visit. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

"If you brought laundry back from exercise covered in mud and you went out, somebody would wash it for you," he says.

"You’d come back the next day and it’d be all folded ready to go, because there was only one or two washers, so you had to keep going," he continues. "Everybody would look after everyone. It was just that brotherhood."

There were times, like early one Sunday morning, when Bravo Company soldiers in the B11 shack awoke to a commotion. A soldier from the company, who lived off-base with his wife, was racing up and down the hallways.

"It’s a girl!" he called out, his voice echoing through the halls. "It’s a girl! It’s a girl!"

In their rooms, some men blinked against the morning light. Maybe they teased the delirious dad about the ugh-o’clock wake-up call — thanks, man — but he was their family, so his joy over a newborn daughter was theirs to share, too.

Gord Little wasn’t planning to meet anyone. It was the middle of December in 1979, a week before Christmas, and the junior ranks mess at Kapyong’s northeast edge was hosting its regular Friday-night bacchanal.

Little, a 23-year-old private, was a few cheap beers into the evening, which was progressing in typical Kapyong fashion. A food fight had broken out in the mess, which was a hybrid bar-lounge open only to junior non-commissioned members.

Gord and Jacki Little in front of the junior ranks mess, where they first met in 1979. Their wedding social was held on the base at Lipsett Hall. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

Little’s shirt was flecked with bits of coleslaw and potato salad when another soldier rushed over.

"I want to introduce you to someone," he said, dragging Little in the direction of a woman sitting at a table.

She introduced herself as Jacki Turner. She hadn’t come to the junior ranks mess that night planning to meet anyone, either. One of her friends had brought her; women were often encouraged to invite friends.

Turner had lived in Winnipeg only a year after moving from her hometown of Thunder Bay. Small world; Little was from Thunder Bay. They had plenty to talk about, beyond the coleslaw and potato salad Little was wearing.

Lipsett Hall, boarded-up and ready for demolition. (Google Street View)

Eighteen months later, they were married. Their wedding social was at Lipsett Hall, the recreation building that stands in the grassy field just north of the main barracks site at Kenaston and Grant Avenue. They celebrated their 36th wedding anniversary in July.

To think, it all happened on that blurry Friday night at the junior ranks mess.

"I wasn’t thinking I was going to find the man that I married," Jacki says now. "You think you’re just going to go with friends and have a good time."

Many veterans’ most vivid memories feature the junior ranks. If the barracks were the heart of the village, then the junior ranks was its guts: honest, sloppy, always churning.

Joe Reidy served with 2PPCLI, 3rd Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, and 17 Wing all at Kapyong. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

Even in its glory days, the mess was a squat, unassuming building on the edge of the base — "stumbling distance from the shacks," one veteran says with a laugh. There’s a satellite dish out back; soldiers chipped in cash to buy it.

Inside was a dance floor, a bar and a lounge area with couches. Around the back of the mess ran a narrow room that soldiers called "the snake pit." There wasn’t much to it: a few utilitarian tables at which to drink beer and play cards.

For as long as Kapyong was open, the junior ranks was a haven of sorts. Officers weren’t typically allowed into the building, so it was the spot where soldiers shook off the upright propriety they kept while higher-ups were watching.

"The best way to describe it, is when you see kids building a fort and putting the sign outside that says ‘members only,’" Steve Kitching says. "That’s what it was. There’s no protocol. No saluting. It’s just sit down, relax."

On weekend nights, the place rocked with parties. The Tragically Hip played there once, in the mid-1980s, while the RCRs were stationed there. Soldiers congregated to play games on Sunday afternoons off.

As is to be expected in a place packed with young men, women were popular guests. Soldiers pestered their girlfriends to invite their friends. The Littles aren’t the only married couple whose romance was born at the ranks.

One beloved visitor stands apart from all who dropped by for a beer and unbridled conversation.

In 1974, Lady Patricia Knatchbull, later the Countess Mountbatten of Burma, was named the PPCLI’s colonel-in-chief. In that role she succeeded her cousin, the former Princess Patricia of Connaught, for whom the regiment was named.

Over the years, the countess made many visits to the second battalion, and others. It always began as an orderly affair: soldiers would troop out to honour her with a ceremonial parade, then she would spend time with the officers.

CP It was a major event when Lady Patricia Knatchbull, Colonel-in-Chief of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, came to visit. She had a soft spot for the lowest ranks. (Fred Chartrand / Canadian Press files)

But after the formal events were over, after she’d greeted every officer, the countess would stroll into the junior ranks mess. She was assigned bodyguards, though in truth, every soldier there would have leaped to protect her.

She was more than a figurehead for the Patricias. Even today, their eyes light up when they talk about her.

"It was a huge deal when she came in; it was massive," Kitching says, and raises his hand to his head. "Morale went like this."

Nearly every veteran the Free Press spoke with has fond memories of the countess as she breezed through the ranks, sipping a beer and telling ribald jokes. She didn’t always remember names, but she rarely forgot a face.

"Oh, Cpl. Loggins," she’d say. "I heard you just had a little one, how is your wife doing?"

The reason the countess mingled with the privates, she told one soldier, was simple. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the teenager was sent to safety in New York, where she lived with the Vanderbilts.

Queen Elizabeth II passes members of the Second Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry as she arrives to attend the funeral service of Patricia Knatchbull, the Countess Mountbatten of Burma, at St Paul's Church in Knightsbridge, London in June. (Matt Dunham/ The Associated Press)

In the newspapers, she saw the images of young men headed in the opposite direction: towards the bombs, towards the beaches, towards the war that was ravaging Europe. She felt helpless, she told the soldier, and it haunted her.

When she inherited the regiment, she vowed that she would give her time to the lowest ranks. She even learned how to drive what soldiers call "tracks," the hulking M1113 APC. Eventually, she’d give tips to drivers in training.

"That was her favourite thing, talking with the troops," Kitching says. "She’d say... ‘It’s the privates, they get no glory, they get nothing. If they’re mentioned, they’re mentioned in groups. They’re the ones that deserve my attention.’"

She served as colonel of the regiment until 2007, when she passed the role to former governor general Adrienne Clarkson. She died in June at the age of 93. When she passed, thousands of Patricias mourned her.

"There were so many generals, so many colonels, so many this-and-the-others that we had to do the formal guard for," Huf Mullick says. "But she was special. She lived in the hearts of so many of us."

Steve Kitching peers through the windows of the junior ranks mess, a squat of a building a ‘stumbling distance from the shacks.’ The bar is still there, but the building is empty for the most part. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

Today, the junior ranks mess is a ghost of its former self. Kitching puts his hand to the window to peer inside: the bar still curves against one wall, but for the most part, the building is empty.

This is what brought Kitching back to Kapyong from his home in Thunder Bay. It was the first time he’d returned to the base since he left the Forces in 1995. For the next 22 years, the junior ranks whispered at the edge of his mind.

Yes, Kitching says, he has good memories there. Once, he staggered into the ranks at about 7 a.m. after an overnight 35-kilometre march. His feet were aching, but the only couch in the lounge was occupied by a sleeping soldier.

"I flopped down on the couch, and I put my feet up on him," Kitching says. "Another guy comes in a couple minutes later, sees us lounging around, jumps on the other end of the couch, puts his feet up... then another guy.

The junior ranks mess holds bittersweet memories for Steve Kitching. It was where he last saw his buddy, Cpl. John Bechard, who later died in Croatia. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

"So there’s five or six of us on the this couch, all mangled together, totally exhausted. You often hear soldiers saying, the biggest thing they miss about the military is the camaraderie. You would never see that in civilian life."

But that’s not the story that drew Kitching back to Kapyong, and back to the junior ranks.

He remembers the first week of April 1993. The next day, almost 900 2PPCLI soldiers were slated to go to Croatia, where they would join a United Nations peacekeeping effort in the former Yugoslavia.

So the junior ranks were packed that night, crowded with reservists, buzzing with tense anticipation. In the snake pit, Kitching was playing a round of euchre with some of his friends, including 24-year-old Cpl. John Bechard.

Kitching wasn’t much of a card player, though Bechard had been trying to teach him for months. This time, Kitching won, following orders relayed by another soldier who was looking over his shoulder.

As Kitching threw down his last card, Bechard swore and laughed. "Kitch has got all the jacks," he said.

The group started shuffling the cards for another round. But someone stood up and announced it was time to go. They were just hours away from deployment. There was a flurry of activity, and the junior ranks cleared out quickly.

At the door, Kitching zipped up his jacket. He looked up to see Bechard leaning back in a chair, resting his head against the wall. Bechard pointed at the deck of cards on the table.

"Hey Kitch," Bechard called. "If I don’t see you over there, good luck. We’ll pick this up when we get back."

Kitching nodded. "Yeah," he replied. "I look forward to it."

Cpl. Bechard's name on the "Yugo" Memorial Stones. (Canadian War Museum)

They never saw each other again. On Aug. 6, 1993, Bechard was killed in a traffic accident in Camp Polom, near the northeastern Croatian town of Daruvar. He had just returned from leave.

"That image of him leaned back in his chair like that is burned into my memories," Kitching says.

Bechard wasn’t the only friend who Kitching last saw at the junior ranks mess.

That is part of the base’s legacy, too. All that time, it was a place where people met, where lifelong friendships were forged and families began.

It was also a place where they said goodbye — sometimes, for the final time.

It would take many books to tell all the tales worth telling from the people who gave life to Kapyong. Some, no doubt, would be lovingly embellished, grown fatter and, in some cases, funnier over the years.

The veterans point at one place, then another on the grounds under the sun. There’s a patch of grass across from the drill hall where they played punishing games of broomaloo — "kind of like broomball, but dangerous," one says.

And there is the old Bravo Company office, a nondescript building where Huf Mullick helped prepare troops to ship out to Croatia. There used to be a sign out front, announcing the company’s name and motto as a mechanized unit.

Bravo Company 2PPCLI: Why Walk When You Can Ride?

"We all kind of hated the sign, but I was fond of it," Mullick says, laughing. "We would make fun of it, all sorts of different variations of that which are not printable. It was an attempt to kind of bring us together."

Members of 2PPCLI prepare to move light armoured vehicles from Kapyong to Brandon in 2004. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press files)

The sign is gone now. Mullick wonders where it ended up. Some things from Kapyong found their way into caring hands: Lawrence Surridge has the last Patricias flag that flew over the base, given to him after it closed.

Yet for all the memories and all the stories, there is, in a way, only one that really matters. A story about what it means to be home.

"This is part of my history, as a soldier, as an individual," Mullick says. "To be very cliché, it was the best of times and the worst of times of my life. Each one of those buildings was a big part of who I am.

"I don’t look at them as just decaying buildings. A piece of my spirit lays in each of them. I’ve trained long hours there, had girlfriends break up with me, celebrated my achievements with my friends, mourned the loss of others.

"There were places I wanted to rail against the system and leave the army, because there was a period I was trying to find myself," he adds. "I remember each spot where all those things happened."

So what does it mean to a soldier, when the home they knew is about to fade into history? What does it mean when the place where they built their lives has been abandoned, left to waste away despite millions of dollars spent to "maintain" it?

Three veterans formerly based at Kapyong Barracks walk away from the former officers' mess. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

It’s a bittersweet summer day. The veterans make their way around the square, snapping photos, swapping stories. They laugh. They look at the peeling paint, and shake their heads.

"Get rid of it, man," one says.

Nearby, another veteran nods. "Good times, though. It was good times here, the stuff we done."

After the visit is over, some of them describe a shifting tide of emotion. On one hand, they say, they’re glad they went, glad to see the old buildings again and say goodbye. Some feel an emptiness gnawing away in their gut, too.

This is also part of the closure. When Steve Kitching called a Free Press reporter in July, asking to be included in the visit, his voice was urgent, even a little desperate: "I have to be there," he said, more than once.

Two veterans pause to privately share old tales of life on the base. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press)

As he approached the site, Kitching felt nervous. But a few days later, sitting on a friend’s back porch in south Osborne, he was relaxed. There was a time he thought the junior ranks mess should be preserved, left standing.

Now, he thinks, it’s best to tear it down and memorialize what happened there in some other way.

Maybe that will happen. In May, Long Plain Chief Dennis Meeches said that alongside condo buildings and a gas station, the Treaty One First Nations want to build a war museum on the site to honour Kapyong’s history.

That plan could soon be a reality. Demolition is set to begin before winter, starting with Lipsett Hall. Before long, there will be memories and not much else.

Maybe that’s for the best, but let this enter the record too: despite the way it’s been discussed for the last decade-and-a-half, Kapyong was more than a legal problem, a bureaucratic boondoggle, a parcel of coveted real estate.

This was where thousands of soldiers grew up, made friends and made mistakes. This is where they raised families, bringing kids into the office to spin on the chairs. This is where they built their lives, marching one regimented step at a time.

Whatever the future of this silent stretch of land, that part of its history can never be bulldozed away.

"We just want people to know this is beyond guys with short hair that carried guns and lived in buildings," Mullick says. "This is beyond a place of work that’s being torn down. This is beyond a repository for armoured vehicles.

"To me, it is a place of spirit. It is about the spirit of that battalion still rests in that place today."