More than 1,000 Canadian, Dutch, British and U.S. soldiers said their goodbyes Sunday during a twilight ramp ceremony for two Canadian soldiers killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan this weekend.
The bodies of Cpl. Nicolas Raymond Beauchamp, 28, and Pte. Michel Levesque, 25, are being flown to CFB Trenton in eastern Ontario.
Cpl. Dolores Crampton -- Beauchamp's wife and, like him, a medical technician stationed in Kandahar -- walked behind his casket carrying his hat on a pillow. She will accompany his body back to Canada.
"It doesn't get any easier when you sit down with a family member and you have to announce (that) they've lost a loved one," Military Padre Major Pierre Bergeron said to Â鶹´«Ã½.
An Afghan interpreter was also killed in Saturday's blast. Three other Canadian soldiers were wounded and transported to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries after their armoured vehicle struck a so-called improvised explosive device, or IED.
The blast occurred in Zhari district, about 40 kilometres west of Kandahar City, where Afghan soldiers backed by Canadian ground forces and U.S. air strikes reportedly killed as many as 20 insurgents.
Canada has seen 73 military personnel and one diplomat die in Afghanistan since 2002. However, things have been relatively quiet in recent weeks, with no Canadian deaths since Sept. 24.
Public reaction
Steven Staples -- a military analyst and the founding director of the research and advocacy group, The Rideau Institute -- told Â鶹´«Ã½net that seeing so many soldiers dying in Afghanistan can make some Canadians reconfirm their commitment to the mission and make others doubt the reasons we're there.
"This is a recurring scene that we're seeing," Staples said. "It's becoming a common vision, and certainly a week after Remembrance Day ... I think it's especially poignant."
He said some polls have shown that even some people who support the mission are beginning to believe we have given the soldiers a job they can't accomplish.
"Canadian forces were involved in a mission to reclaim territory that we previously held but insurgents had moved into," Staples said. "It wasn't an isolated incident and it was a part of a major counter offensive."
He also said that the fact that they died while driving a LAV-III, an armoured vehicle that had proved fairly resistant to such attacks in the past, suggests that we are in a sort of "arms race."
On CTV's Question Period, NATO's top general, Ray Henault acknowledged the price Canada is paying.
"Certainly all the nations have regretted quite significantly the loss of life that Canada has experienced," he said.
Henault also seemed to side with Canada's General Rick Hillier, who touched off a controversy by predicting that the training of the Afghan army would take at least 10 years, when the government claimed it can be done in four.
"The horizon that we're looking at is one well beyond a five-year time frame, in my view, and so 10 years is possible," Henault said.
Conflict across Afghanistan
In other developments, five abducted Afghan police officers in Uruzgan province have been found tortured and killed, officials said Sunday.
The officers, who had been abducted two months ago, had been left hanging from trees as a warning to Gazak village residents against working with the government.
In a separate incident, Juma Gul Himat, Uruzgan province's police chief, said police shot and killed two suspected Taliban members as they approached a police checkpoint on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Taliban militants in Zabul province clashed with an Afghan army patrol Saturday night, leaving 11 suspected insurgents dead and four soldiers wounded.
On Sunday, disturbing information emerged surrounding a deadly suicide bombing that killed 77 people in northern Afghanistan last week.
A UN report says that up to two-thirds of the casualties and the 100 wounded were hit by bullets from body guards protecting the targeted lawmakers.
The report says guards fired on the crowd, mostly schoolchildren, for up to five minutes.
The Associated Press reports that insurgency-related deaths reached more than 6,000 people in 2007, a new record.
With a report by CTV's Roger Smith and files from The Associated Press
