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PHOTO
BY JIM WILKES/TORONTO STAR
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| RESCUE
AWARD: Maj
Steve Murray, right receives the Chief of the Defence Staff
commendation from Maj-Gen Bryan Stephenson yesterday. |
Officer
hailed for helping save famed stallions
By Jim Wilkes
Staff Reporter
It
took a while to catch up with him, but Maj. Steve Murray has finally
received a commendation for his efforts in Bosnia in 1993 to save
the famed Lippizaner stallions.
The 31-year-old reserve
soldier was instrumental in getting vaccines and other medical supplies
to the horses, whose stud farm in Croatia had been destroyed and
overrun by Serbian troops. Croatians thought more than 120 of the
horses were killed, but 94 had been taken to Serbia, where they
languished in secrecy until the commander of the Winnipeg-based
2nd Battalion, The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry,
heard about their plight.
Murray drove the supplies,
including vaccines, shampoos, fly spray and deworming paste, through
the war torn countryside to reach the animals. Very little was said
about the operation at the time because Canadian peacekeepers had
to skirt the economic embargo they were supposed to be enforcing
to get the supplies through. "It had to be kept very quiet
because there was a design to not destroy the stables and the city
where those famous horses were kept, but also to destroy the horses
themselves," Maj.-Gen. Byran Stephenson, commander of the army
in Ontario, said yesterday after awarding Murray the Chief of Defence
Staff commendation at Toronto's Royal Canadian Military Institute.
"So they were
very quietly and expertly removed. A lot of work had to be done
under a shroud of secrecy to protect the horses."
The commendation had
originally been sent to Murray's regiment in Winnipeg, but by then
he had been posted to Halifax. By the time it reached Nova Scotia,
he had transferred to Toronto. But for Murray, commendations are
secondary. "The achievement for me was really in doing the
work. It wouldn't have mattered to me if no one had heard about
it again, " he said. "The horses weren't part of the war
and shouldn't have been treated as a political prize, but they were.
In that area, where there is so much frustration and so many attempts
at building peace, it was very satisfying to accomplish something
so concrete."
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