Hundreds gathered at a Vancouver armoury on Sunday to remember Pte. Aidan Goulding, one of four Canadian Forces members killed in an Alberta base fire last month.
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Hundreds of military personnel, family and friends gathered at an armoury in Vancouver on Sunday to remember Pte. Aidan Goulding, 23, who was killed during a training exercise after a grass fire at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Alberta overtook troops.
Goulding was one of four soldiers killed last month: Pte. Hayden Lykkemark, 19, of Langley, B.C.; Sgt. Morgan Wong, 26, of Edmonton; and Pte. Shaun Farrell, 23, of Prince Albert, Sask.
His mother, Sonia Monk, said her son had an infectious sense of humour and that she will miss how he responded even during discipline. “Whenever I was disciplining him, he would start to laugh or he would try to say something. I could never properly discipline him,” she said. “That’s something that our family is going to miss. Nothing is going replace that.”
Monk described Goulding as patriotic and said he joined the army after telling her, “I have one life to live, I want to do something important, and so I’m joining the army. I think that’s so unselfish of him.” She said the Canadian Armed Forces gave him purpose, a sense of belonging and “a family and a place he truly felt at home.”
During the funeral, soldiers carried Goulding’s flag-draped casket into the armoury, with bagpipe music and remarks from a rabbi, before the casket was taken out to be reloaded onto a hearse to head to the cemetery.
Monk said Goulding grew up in North Vancouver with his brother, Wylder, who she described as his best friend. “They had each other’s backs,” she said, adding that their closeness “touched my heart deeply.”
Goulding’s family said he played sports including soccer and rugby and developed a love of cars at a young age, spending hours buying used vehicles, fixing them late into the night on the family driveway and reselling them. They said his first fine-tuning project involved a used Chrysler 300C, with the modification aimed at making it louder, and that he took pride in understanding how things worked and making them his own.
His family also described him as stylish and unapologetically himself, including asking to wear a white suit on his first day of Grade 4 and, when he turned 21, requesting a gold suit.
They said Goulding explored many parts of the world, including Mexico, Germany, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Malta, the Netherlands, England and Spain, and his aunt, Reagan Goulding, said he often made people around him laugh. She also described him as “smart, ambitious, determined, and resourceful,” and said she could see him becoming a police officer or joining CSIS.
Reagan Goulding told the gathering that she had sent a last message to her nephew on the day of the tragedy: “Aidan, you better be OK.” She said she never received a reply and that, if she had known it was her last message, she would have told him more—including how proud she was.
She also remembered the other soldiers killed in the fire, saying they were “young men who matched their calling” and “will not be forgotten,” and noted that their loss is felt by their families, friends, soldiers and everyone touched by the tragedy.
According to the funeral remarks, 39 others were injured in the fire, and many remained in hospitals in Edmonton and Calgary. After the casket was carried back out, the sun broke through the clouds over rainy Vancouver.
After speaking to media, Monk said she felt the sun shining was a sign from her son and that his message to her had been to move forward. She said she felt “supported and lifted” after hearing stories from Goulding’s “brothers and sisters” in the army, adding, “There’s lots of love in Canada.”
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