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Photo by Master Corporal Pierre Thériault/DND

He later did the same sort of work at Ma’Sum Ghar, a now abandoned Canadian forward operating base in Kandahar.

The battlefield memorial at Ma’Sum Ghar consisted of a large Canadian flag and painted stones to commemorate those who had fallen there.

Because the stones couldn’t be brought back to Canada, they were instead formally buried in Afghan soil under the watchful eye of a pastor.

It was all “emotional and meaningful” work, Storey said in a phone interview from his Ottawa home.

But easily the most touching, he said, were the notes and cards, left by family members of some of Canada’s 158 soldiers who died in Afghanistan. Many of those families later took advantage of a government offer to fly to Kandahar and visit the memorial.

There were two large boxes of such notes and mementos, Storey said.

“It was so emotional we couldn’t catalogue it,” he said.

Photo by W.E. Storey Collection

This material was brought back to Canada — part of what ended up being two or three sea containers — but Storey doesn’t know what happened to much of it.

He also served on what was known as the Afghan Legacy Project committee, a vast — and he says dysfunctional — group representing DND’s Directorate of History and Heritage, each of the three arms of the military, various deputy ministers and the National Capital Commission.

“Everyone wanted to see (the Kandahar memorial) come back,” Storey says, “but the committee never gelled.”

In the end, sometime in 2012, the committee recommended the memorial be located at Dow’s Lake in Ottawa, which, though it is home to HMCS naval reserve base, is more open and accessible than the secure new DND headquarters (Carling), where the memorial now sits in a purpose-built hall.