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Photo courtesy Jim LeithPetty Officer 2nd Class Jim Leith
Posted: by Ron Nurwisah Don Martin,
As if being a deep-sea navy diver assigned to a dusty military patrol in the wilds of Kandahar wasn’t strange enough, he was supposed to dismantle road-buried bombs, not get blown up by them.
Yet in one nerve-wracking hour in 2006 that will make him a Star of Courage recipient this spring, Petty Officer Jim Leith of Shearwater, N.S., did both.
First the roadside bomb exploded under his Bison, destroying the vehicle and badly injuring a medic. “I remember the sensation of being airborne and that sickening, crumbled feeling of hitting the ground in pitch black because of all the dust,” Leith recalled this week. “I did a count — one, two, three, four — to see if all my limbs were still there.”
He was intact, but it’s what Leith did next that will earn him a June date with Gov-Gen. Michäelle Jean to receive Canada’s second-highest honour for extreme bravery.
He quickly found another bomb buried on the key stretch of road being used by coalition forces advancing toward the Medusa showdown against the Taliban. It was a pair of anti-tank mines strapped to a detonator, but he faced one small complication. All his x-ray and robotic equipment had been destroyed in the explosion.
Using only his bayonet, he quickly disabled the explosive allowing the pivotal road to reopen and the military convoys to move forward.
It’s a far different world from his first act of military heroism, when Petty Officer Leith was awarded a Meritorious Service Medal for helping recover the flight data recorder from the sunken wreck of Swiss Air Flight 111.
He neglects to mention that honour, giving an aw-shucks shrug to all the fuss. “We’re just doing our bloody job. It’s no big deal.”
The Star of Courage is awarded just frequently enough (412 have been given out in 37 years) that journalists usually shuffle the announcement from their inbox to the recycling bin after giving the list a cursory scan for notable hometown heroes.
