Monday, 19 April 2010 05:00
Thule is an impressive place, especially coming out of Alert. Canadians might have the Rangers and their awe-inspiring expertise of operating and surviving in the Arctic, but when it comes to hardware and brute power, one realizes that Canada is an Arctic lightweight.
We checked in the hotel at around 3 p.m. local time and I started making calls to Canada trying to get myself on the flight to Ottawa. After trying seven different numbers and getting on a first name basis with the base phone operator who patiently patched me through as I tried to navigate my way through the military travel bureaucracy, I finally reached an official who promised to look into it and call me back if there was any change.
There was two more hours until dinner, so I ran to the PX store (the U.S. equivalent of CanEX military supermarkets) to get some sandwiches and juice. To my huge surprise I ran into two Ukrainian Air Force officers. I don't know what surprised me the most, the fact that I heard Russian spoken at an American PX store in northern Greenland, or the fact that the Ukrainians had tasked their Il-76 transport planes to work for the Danish military in the High Arctic.
The Ukrainians seemed equally surprised and pleased to find someone who spoke Russian (despite being proud Ukrainians they are all former Soviet Air Force officers whose first language remains Russian). We hit it off immediately and before I knew it I was in a hotel room surrounded by half-a-dozen excited Ukrainian pilots moving furniture to make place for an impromptu dinner of homemade salo, Ukrainian delicacy made of pork lard, with black Russian bread and bottles of Ukrainian Nemiroff vodka, one of the best vodkas for my taste.
They were all from Melitipol, a small provincial city in southeastern Ukraine. My father-in-law is also from Melitopol and it turned out that one of them, Alexander Belov, served in the same unit in Dubno, in Western Ukraine, I had done my compulsory military service in the dieing days of the Soviet Union. It's a small world indeed.
I was deeply touched by their hospitality and somehow felt right at home with them. As vodka glasses filled one after the other we drank to our chance meeting, to our families back home, and the third obligatory toast standing up solemnly to those who lost their lives and many other things. We even drank a toast to the Soviet Union, not the repressive Communist regime of course, but the country that at some point had united and shaped us all for better or worse.
They peppered me with questions about life in Canada and Canada's Ukrainian community. We swapped war stories: some of them had served in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and they felt genuine sympathy for Canadians who were losing their lives there now.
We had to break up our party at half past midnight because half of them were on duty the next day.