Host of memories shared with Bonecas

Sarah Elizabeth Brown, Chronicle-Journal, 18 Jan 07

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Shirley and Antonio Boneca were presented Wednesday with Ontario’s Tribute to the Fallen award by MPP Michael Gravelle, a salute to their son Cpl. Anthony Boneca who was killed in Afghanistan in July.

With a box of tissues at their feet to wipe away tears, the parents of Cpl. Anthony Boneca accepted plaques, medals and letters of condolence Wednesday at Thunder Bay’s Park Avenue Armoury.

The memorials started with the elegant Tribute to the Fallen, presented by MPP Michael Gravelle for the Ontario government, and ended with a memory box full of odds and ends put together by Army News in Ottawa, the military’s internal news service.

“Any time I talk about my son, I have to cry,” his father Antonio Boneca told the audience of Lake Superior Scottish Regiment members through tears.

Both he and Boneca’s mother Shirley gave thanks for help from Thunder Bay Garrison personnel after their son was killed in Afghanistan.

“We do appreciate, from the bottom of our hearts, everything that has been done for us,” said Shirley.

“Everybody tells us it gets easier,” she continued. “I can only hope that is true because it has been a very, very difficult time for us.”

The Bonecas lost their only son July 9, 2006, when he was killed in a mud-walled compound at Pashmul, a village west of Kandahar. He was 21.

Wednesday was six months to the day he was buried with full military honours.

Wearing black in a sea of green camouflage and combat boots, Carol Klukie, mother of Pte. Josh Klukie, a Shuniah soldier also killed in Afghanistan, hugged the Bonecas after the parents collected their dead son’s honours.

Presenting the simple framed plaque sprouting a white trillium, Gravelle said the provincial tribute for fallen Ontario soldiers was created this past summer. The wife of a Canadian officer from Kingston, working as a UN observer when he was killed by an Israeli air strike in Lebanon, asked Premier Dalton McGuinty if such an honour existed.

Discovering that none did, Mc Guinty created the Tribute to the Fallen, presented to the families of the 17 military personnel from Ontario killed since 2002. Of those, 15 died in 2006. All but two died in Afghanistan.

Mc Guinty handed out many of those plaques the day before Remembrance Day in Toronto.

Presenting the Bonecas with their son’s certificate of service — the same piece of paper every soldier receives upon leaving the military — Capt. Dave Ratz noted he ushered the young soldier both into and out of the military.

“I recruited him,” said Ratz, who served as full-time assistance officer to the Bonecas when their son was killed. “So it was a little bit extra hard to do something like this.”

The Bonecas received a binder full of handwritten notes from Thunder Bay residents, collected at the Armoury during the week before Boneca’s funeral, along with a folder of letters from all corners of the Canadian military and police communities.

The LSSR received nearly 100 letters and e-mails on behalf of the Boneca family.

The U.S. flag that flew over the coalition headquarters in Kabul on July 9, framed and mounted above a message from the American commander at the time, was also handed over.

The memory box, a wooden box with a hinged lid, holds pictures of the young soldier, as well as the metal accouterments that donned his dress uniform. Tucked in among condolence letters, his service medals and a commemorative coin from Operation Archer is a badge from the Boy Scouts to recognize the Year of the Veteran.

After the brief ceremony, several Lake Sups — pronounced “soups” — led the Bonecas through the warren of hallways and stairs to the reserve regiment’s fourth-floor classroom, where a chunk of wall holds photos of the young corporal as well as the battered helmet his comrades returned to Thunder Bay on Remembrance Day.

When Boneca was shot July 9, his helmet and body armour were left behind until a day-long bombardment of the compound where two Taliban fighters holed up was over. Millions and millions of dollars’ worth of ordnance was dropped on the helmet, chipping green paint and revealing the dented weave of the Kevlar layers below.