'Dad gets shot and they meet in the hospital'
Soldier William and nurse Jan Stirling met in Japan during the Korean War
Evan Kiyoshi French
Northern News Services
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Remembrance Day is a special time for Rod Stirling's family. The 57-year-old - who has lived in the city since moving North when he was 13 - said the family is proud to tell the little-known story of how their parents met at the British Commonwealth Hospital in Kure, Japan, during the Korean War.
Yellowknife's other living war vets
Douglas "Dusty" Miller, 95, signed up with the air force and travelled to Galt, Ont., to study aircraft engineering. There he learned the ins-and-outs of the the British Royal Air Force's De Havilland Mosquito, dubbed the "wooden wonder," it was an unarmed high-speed bomber - built almost entirely out of wood. Miller was deployed to New Castle, England, where he helped keep allied aircraft airworthy until he returned to Canada in 1945.
Ruth Spence - a recent recipient of the Order of the NWT - signed up after she finished high school and served as a military dental assistant for the last year of the Second World War. Spence's son, Kit Spence, said his mother was demobilized just shy of one year in the forces, and was never deployed overseas.
Brock Parsons is another of Yellowknife's living veterans. Although he declined to talk about his time as a serviceman, he said he will be attending the city's Remembrance Day events. |
His mother, 88-year-old Jan Stirling, served as the head nurse of the Yellowknife's health centre for about 30 years before retiring in 1997 (when the building previously known as the Professional Building was named the Jan Stirling Building). At 21-years-old, Rod's mother had volunteered to go overseas as a nurse, where she met his father, William Stirling, in a commonwealth ward of the Japanese hospital after he'd been shot by a sniper on the front lines in Korea.
"It was one of the Florence Nightingale stories, dad gets shot and they meet in the hospital," said Stirling. "I don't know if people know how my mum and dad met."
Stirling said he and his younger brother - Bill Stirling, owner of Overlander Sports - are the keepers of the story.
He said his mother - who was staying at a respite bed in the Avens Community For Seniors at the time of the interview - began suffering from dementia about three years ago.
"A woman with two degrees who graduated from university with a 99 per cent average, nominated to the Order of Canada, all these awards, named a health centre after her, had all these buildings named after her, streets named after her," he said. "And now she can't remember who she had lunch with or what she ate."
His father was a career soldier of 27 years and died suddenly at age 45, two years after the family moved to Yellowknife.
"My dad, he went through two wars," he said. "He was shot in the Korean war. Heavily decorated guy. A total Rambo kind of guy. He goes out for supper and chokes on a piece of steak and dies. It triggered a heart attack."
He said after his father's death his mother decided to set down roots in the North, having lived in Calgary, Ottawa and Germany. She left the army but stayed in the nursing profession, he said.
"I think my mum was always one who wanted to help. If there was a bird with a broken wing or an injured dog, she was just one of those people that was always helping people."
As a child, Stirling said he pestered his father to tell him stories about the war.
"I always asked him questions about the war and he used to say I'll tell you when you get older," he said. "And then he passes away of a heart attack suddenly, so 'When you get older' never came. But my mum, I remember her telling me about people with terrible burns or terrible wounds. People that were in very, very rough shape, and I think that was hard for her."
Fifty-nine-year-old Bill Stirling - who was born five years after his brother, said he remembers a chilling war story his mother told one day. A soldier from New Zealand shot through the guts and unable to eat - was complaining he was choking on something.
"She thought 'that's impossible, we're not feeding him or anything,'" said Stirling. "She looked down his throat and there was this huge tapeworm that was coming up from his intestines. There was no food in his stomach anymore and it was crawling up through his throat and choking him. She pulled this big tapeworm out of him."
Stirling said his father - a platoon leader on the front lines in Korea - was shot through the leg and arm and was transported to Japan for treatment. That's where he began to notice a certain Canadian nurse working on his ward, said Stirling.
"He kind of took a liking to her," he said, grinning.
"He was a charming guy," Rod Stirling added.
Their mother was born in Carlisle, England, and moved to New Brunswick when she was very young, said Stirling. Their father was born and raised in Winnipeg.
He said like her husband, his mother was fearless. As the head nurse in Yellowknife, she was routinely called out to join medevac operations - flying in tiny airplanes in the dead of winter. Once, she delivered a baby on a helicopter, he said.
"There are all kinds of kids around the territory named Jan, after my mum," he said. "She was fearless and it worried my dad too I'm sure, all the medevacs they had to do. We would be sitting down to Christmas dinner and she would get the call that it was her turn to go."
He said his mum has always been a "worrywort" fretting over the safety of her children when they'd travel out of town to watch hockey games, and yet she was always taking risks herself.
"She and her friend Barb Bromley went to China when the Tianamen Square (protests) were happening (in 1989)." he said.
"They had to sort of get her out of there when everything was breaking loose. It was a bit of a cover thing to get them out."
Stirling has received many accolades for her lifetime of service, including the NWT Commissioner's Award for Public Service, the Governor General's Caring Canadian award in 2000 as well as a federal citation for Citizenship by the minister of Citizenship.
