John Hasek

The following article by Douglas Fisher appeared in the Ottawa Sun in January 1994. John Hasek was a Canadian infantry officer for 30 years, and served in Ghana, Vietnam, and Cyprus: he was the first commander of the Canadian parachute team, "The Skyhawks". He died on January 1, 1994, in Prague, succumbing to injuries incurred in a reported head on collision with a military vehicle in coastal Croatia just over six months earlier.

A Courageous Canadian

Most of us have heroes and heroines whom we respect, even revere, although we don't know them well in a personal way. John Hasek was a hero of mine. His death last week made me sad, and I keep recalling his way with words in speech or writing and his sturdy handsomeness. In a public sense Hasek was a courageous citizen. In the late '70s Hasek knowingly began to dish his promotion track, then his whole career as an infantry officer, to make public suggestions for our military and de­fence policies.

Out of the army in the mid-80s, Hasek tried to ram a stick of reality through the spokes of the “peace” movement here. For example, he organized a seminar-holding outfit whose title was a take-off on our doves - The Canadian Council for Peace in Freedom. And, typical Hasek, he disbanded the council once it had had a good fling.

In retrospect I think Hasek had more success in taking momentum out of our indigenous peace movement than will ever be credited. Yes, he was tagged by the politically correct as a fascist. Those were the days when the likes of Gwynne Dyer and former general Len Johnson (of NDP renown) were being plugged by the CBC, flogging an unaligned, neutral Canada. His former col­leagues in the military would never openly identify with his arguments because senior officers and the DND mandarins dismissed him as a loose cannon.

At the time my checks with officers who knew Hasek brought not-for-attribution bits such as "bril­liant", "tough as nails", and "an exceptional writ­er". Hasek could write well. In the early '70s he drafted a proposal for "Citizenship service for Ca­nadian Youth" which eventually was taken up by Barney Danson as Minister of National Defence. Unfortunately, Danson's boss, Pierre Trudeau, had a friend, Senator Jacques Hébert, with a youth program. It became the foolish, costly Katima­vik. The Danson-Hasek plan was dropped - Cana­dians were too anti-military! Today's Grits who want a new youth program should resurrect Hasek's plan. It's easy reading.

Although Tory ministers in the mid- '80s like Joe Clark wouldn't give Hasek the time of day, his critique, especially in his 1987 book from Key Porter, titled The Disarming of Canada, got to enough Tory MP's to turn off the cash for peace groups and eventually for the Trudeau memorial, the Institute for International Peace and Security.

As a reader of anything on our military his­tory I still rate The Disarming as having the most clear, clever and pungent account of it all.

Last week a brief news item said John Hasek had died in the Czech Republic of wounds re­ceived while observing the fighting going on in what was Yugoslavia. He was 55 years old.

What was he doing around this bitter strife? I haven't the specifics but battle and war were his close ken. I assume he was prowling along the front, maybe reporting for a Prague paper when his luck ran out.

Where did John Hasek come from? Let me use bits from a letter he sent in 1985 to publisher Jack McClelland. He was trying to sort out what was happening to a manuscript he'd turned in months before to fulfill a contract for a book on Canada's role in global conflicts which would use his experi­ence as a military observer of the Vietnam War. He gave McClelland these reactions to a belated critique of his draft from the publisher's editor. "Imagine my surprise when the second para­graph of the comments read: 'I say these things despite the fact that I am a pacifist, a Viet­nam era conscientious objector and draft evader from the States, and disagree strongly with some of the author's assertions and believe the U.S. is at least as great a threat to world peace today as the U.S.S.R." Hasek said, "It makes as much business sense to have someone with views such as this edit my work as to have Mother Teresa do The Happy Hooker."

What bothered him most was the editor's view that Hasek wasn't sagacious enough to write as "an old, experienced warrior." So he told McClelland: "I am 47 years old, and my first memories are of terror lest the Germans send my mother and me to the extermination camps just as they had my grandparents and aunts. In 1948 when I was 10 we escaped from Czechoslovakia after the Commu­nist putsch made it evident that history, if not about to repeat itself, was about to give a fair re-enactment.... Having spent all my adult life in uniform it was precisely because I am not a militarist and was always critical that I only reached the rank of major.” Only a major. John Hasek should have been more.

Douglas Fisher was the Toronto Sun’s senior parliamentary analyst.