In her house at the edge of Saskatchewan's Flying Dust reserve, Celine Matchee is caring for her son, Clayton, just as she did 30 years ago. She helps him get in the bathtub. She cuts up his food into small pieces so he won't choke. And she takes him for long drives along the gravel concession roads.
Mr. Matchee is 38 now, but brain damage has reduced his intellectual age to about 7 or 8. He looks out the window, watches cartoons and remembers almost nothing that happened after about 1975.
He recalls hunting deer with his father in the poplar stands when he was a boy, riding horses and going to the Meadow Lake Christian Centre Sunday school, where he graduated at the top of his class. But when it comes to the night that he killed a teenaged boy in cold blood in the desert in Somalia, everything has been erased, along with the years that led up to it, and the ones that followed.
"It's like it never happened," his mother says. "He doesn't remember anything. Now, he's my little boy again."
Mr. Matchee no longer resembles the steroid-enhanced commando of 1993. The wing-like pectoral muscles are gone. So are the wrap-around sunglasses, the chewing tobacco and the sneer that he often affected. He's still 6 foot 4, but he has the presence of a child.
His boyish voice calls out when the telephone rings: "Who is it, mom?"
"I'll be with you in a minute, dear," she says, assuring Mr. Matchee that his dinner will be ready soon before continuing her conversation.
As he approaches middle age, Mr. Matchee has completed a circle, returning to the place where he was born, and to the childhood innocence that preceded his descent into mayhem. His dark journey reached its nadir on the night of March 17, 1993, when he killed 16-year-old Shidane Abukar Arone in a Canadian military encampment near Belet Huen, Somalia.
Two days later, Mr. Matchee tried to hang himself in a military jail cell, using a drawstring that the guards forgot to remove from his jacket. He was cut down, still alive, but with massive brain damage.
Since then, he has lived in a hospital in North Battleford, Sask. Each month, his mother takes him to stay with her for a few days. Every two years, Mr. Matchee is brought before a military court, to see whether he is competent to stand trial for killing Shidane. Each time, the answer has been no.
Mr. Matchee is the central figure in the most terrible chapter of the Canadian military's modern history. Now, with the U.S. administration reeling under the impact of the Iraq prisoner-abuse scandal, many believe that the crime committed by Mr. Matchee in Somalia in 1993 provides a disturbing parallel.
"It's a natural reflex of Canadians to think that this couldn't happen here, but it did," says Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian-born author who teaches human rights at Harvard University. "Our soldiers did not behave better. We cannot stand in judgment."
The killing of Shidane Arone had implications that went far beyond the immediate players. The incident tarnished Canada's once-sterling reputation as a military peacekeeper, and led to the disbanding of Mr. Matchee's outfit, the fabled Canadian Airborne Regiment.
David Bercuson, director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary and the author of a book on the Somalia affair, says the "trophy pictures" that sparked the Iraqi-prisoner scandal are similar to the infamous pictures taken by Private Kyle Brown of the Airborne Regiment while Shidane was beaten to death.
The pictures, which showed Shidane trussed and hog-tied in a bunker during an hours-long beating that eventually killed him, provided graphic proof of the Canadian soldier's inhumanity -- in one infamous image, Mr. Matchee holds a baton in Shidane's mouth, like a bit in the jaw of a horse. In another, he puts a gun to the head of the blindfolded and bleeding teen.
The pictures taken by U.S. soldiers in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison -- images of prisoners being dragged through corridors, heaped in naked stacks, and being forced to stand on boxes, blindfolded, with shock electrodes clipped to their bodies -- have been similarly shocking, even if the humiliation focused more on psychological torture than physical abuse.
"Taking trophies is as old as war itself," Mr. Bercuson says. "These days, you're not allowed to pick up skulls off the battlefield, so soldiers take pictures instead."
Canada was not the only country to find itself under the microscope because of pictures documenting abuse by soldiers in Somalia. Another photograph that emerged showed two Belgian paratroopers holding a Somali boy over a fire, and another urinating in the face of a Somali who appeared to be either dead or injured. Two Italian generals resigned after a magazine published photos that showed a soldier raping a Somali woman with a signal flare.
The photographs at the centre of the Somalia affair and the still-developing Iraq scandal have provided incontrovertible proof of deep-seated dysfunction within the military. Although they have stunned the public, the images have been less surprising to those familiar with the ways of war, and with the dynamics of the military.
"What you see here is almost inevitable," Mr. Ignatieff says. "There is tremendous opportunity for inhumanity when soldiers are put in these positions. Without supervision, this is what will eventually occur."
Former Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie puts it another way: "In both these cases, you can explain it. But you can't justify it."
Sergeant John Hooyer, who was with the Airborne in Somalia and saw Shidane shortly before he was killed, is still haunted by the memory of that night, and how it was the end result of the regiment's long fall from grace.
"I've never forgotten it," he says. "I was angry about it then, and I'm angry about it now."
Sgt. Hooyer, who is still in the military, is stationed in Winnipeg, where he lives with his wife and two children. He coaches hockey and baseball, and takes his family camping. But the events of that winter in Somalia in 1993 remain fresh in his mind.
He remembers thinking at the time that the regiment was on a bad trajectory. "I had the sense that things were going bad," he says. "Really bad."
Like the My Lai massacre, the killing of Shidane is considered a defining moment in the history of the modern Western military, exposing disturbing issues of leadership and values. To those familiar with the Airborne Regiment, it did not come as a complete surprise. Instead, they saw it as the almost unavoidable consequence of an ongoing crisis.
During the 1980s and 1990s, it was an open secret in the military that the Airborne Regiment had become home to a small but highly troubling subset of soldiers who revelled in their bad-boy image. One former general referred to the unit as "a car driven by teenagers."
Nick Stethem, a former Airborne officer who went on to become a military analyst, said in an interview after the incident that the regiment had been gradually overtaken by a "Rambo mentality" because of officers who adhered to "an American ideal of the nail-eating, hard-ass soldier."
"That American model was "totally misguided . . . an adoption of some Sylvester Stallone vision. There were a series of organization, mechanical errors. You could see them starting, way back then.
"Because the problems [were]organizational in nature, those at the top must bear responsibility. I recognized it, other people recognized it, it was talked about. I argued on several occasions that there needed to be changes."
In the view of some military insiders, sending the Airborne Regiment to Somalia was a colossal mistake, given the nature of the mission and the unit's recent history: "It was like sending the Hells Angels to Altamont," says one retired officer, referring to the 1969 Rolling Stones concert where the bikers, who were hired to provide stage security, killed a fan while the band played.
The problems had been developing for years. In the early 1980s, it was common knowledge that some Airborne troops belonged to a motorcycle gang near the regiment's home base in Petawawa, Ont. Others were card-carrying members of white-supremacist groups.
In 1985, an Airborne corporal armed with a machete killed one man and seriously wounded another in a bar fight in Fort-Coulonge, a small Quebec town across the border from the base. A few years later, a military policeman concerned about illicit activities at Petawawa carried out a search of the Airborne barracks that turned up a trove of illegal weapons that included handguns and sawed-off shotguns.
Although the discovery called for criminal charges, the military policeman was reportedly told by senior Airborne officers that he should keep quiet about what he had found.
Mr. Matchee joined the Airborne in 1988, at the age of 23. He was assigned to Two Commando unit, a group with a reputation as the hardest-working, hardest-partying unit in the Canadian army. Two Commando had brutal hazing rituals, and quickly latched onto Mr. Matchee's Cree heritage as a point of ridicule, assigning him the derisive nickname of Geronimo.
Although Mr. Matchee wanted to quit at first, he soon became an Airborne convert. His ex-wife, Marj Fay, later said he became "one of the hardest of the hard-asses." Mr. Matchee began chewing tobacco and drinking heavily, and got some new tattoos -- a skull, a rat and a winged Airborne logo. He also underwent a physical transformation, pumping iron twice a day, and consuming steroids at an alarming rate.
Mr. Matchee's disturbing path was paralleled by that of Two Commando itself. In 1992, a sergeant shut down a drinking party when soldiers started firing off powerful Thunderflash pyrotechnics outside the barracks. Later that day, the sergeant's Ford Escort was burned down on the parade square. The next night, Mr. Matchee and several other Two Commando soldiers armed with shotguns took a case of beer to a provincial park, lit a bonfire and fired off more Thunderflashes.
"Some bad apples were spoiling the cider," Sgt. Hooyer now says of that time. "There were some fine soldiers in the Airborne, but there were some terrible ones too.
"There were a handful who seemed to think that because they were paratroopers, they were tougher than other people, that they were above the law. There was a ripple effect. It started with them, but a lot of other people got sucked down into it."
The unit was as unprepared for peacekeeping work as many of the Americans in Iraq appeared to be. When it was announced that the Airborne was going to Somalia as part of a peacekeeping mission, the unit's commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Morneault, told National Defence Headquarters that Two Commando wasn't ready to go -- a decision that appears, in hindsight, as exceptionally prescient.
But his warning went unheeded -- on Oct. 26, 1992, Col. Morneault was relieved of his command. He was replaced by Lt.-Col. Carol Mathieu, a career officer with a reputation for toughness and aggression.
In Somalia, Col. Mathieu took a hard line against roving Somali fighters, as well as impoverished locals who tried to steal supplies from the Airborne encampment. When he arrived in Belet Huen, he announced that he would be "the toughest warlord on the hilltop." Any Somali who levelled a weapon in the presence of a Canadian, he said, had "declared himself a target."
Thieves were a constant problem. Col. Mathieu issued a directive: If a Somali was stealing equipment, the soldiers could shoot to kill.
Not everyone agreed with the order. Major Anthony Seward, the leader of Two Commando, wrote his thoughts in his private diary: "He has amended the rules of engagement ordering us to open fire on individuals pilfering the camp. These individuals are teenaged Somalis. His direction . . . amounts to killing children. . . . I will not willingly accept murdering boys stealing water, rations and even military kit."
The events that followed have been characterized by military observers as classic examples of a unit gradually spinning out of control under the command of a flawed leader.
On Feb. 17, 1993, Airborne soldiers fired on a crowd of Somali demonstrators who were armed with sticks and rocks. One Somali was killed. Three others were critically injured. No one was charged. In early March, Airborne soldiers shot two more Somalis after they entered the Canadian compound. One was killed, the other critically injured.
The shootings had been carried out by soldiers wearing night-vision goggles on what was later described by an Airborne officer as a "hunting" expedition. The day before, Col. Mathieu had ordered the soldiers to get "more aggressive" with intruders.
In his diary, Mr. Brown called the killing "a turkey shoot." Although these events should have been a clear signal that something was amiss, the warning signs were ignored -- as they appear to have been in the early days of the Iraq prison crisis. Instead, the leadership vacuum grew as Col. Mathieu set an example of increasing belligerence.
At a bar set up by relief workers in Belet Huen, there was quote on the wall, written in black marker, that was attributed to Col. Mathieu: "If any of those floppers come flopping around at my checkpoints, they're history."
The killing of Shidane eclipsed all previous events. On the evening of March 16, the Airborne set up what amounted to a trap to capture Somali looters. Shidane was one of three men taken into custody that night. He was handcuffed and placed in an underground bunker known as The Pit, where he was strung up, with his arms pinioned behind him in a chicken-wing position.
Mr. Matchee arrived to take over guard duties. He began what would turn into an epic session of torture by draping a cloth over Shidane's head, then drenching it with water so he couldn't breathe. A short time later, he went to visit Mr. Brown, who gave him some beer, then joined him in The Pit.
Mr. Matchee began kicking Shidane karate-style, over and over. Mr. Brown kicked him as well. Mr. Matchee placed a lit cigarette against Shidane's foot, then resumed kicking him.
Shidane begged for his life, speaking the only word he knew in English: "Canada. . . Canada. . . Canada." Mr. Matchee then beat Shidane with a military baton, wielding it like a baseball bat.
When Mr. Brown asked, "Don't you think he's had enough?" Mr. Matchee retorted: "I want to kill this fucker. . . . I want to euchre this fucker." He told Mr. Brown that an officer had instructed him to beat the prisoner.
As this went on, Mr. Brown began taking the photographs that would later condemn the Airborne. Mr. Matchee posed with Shidane, holding his 9-mm Browning to his prisoner's head. The beating continued.
Some time after midnight, Shidane stopped breathing. By 1:30 a.m., he had been declared dead.
Gen. MacKenzie says the photographs taken by Mr. Brown, as well as those taken in Iraq by the Americans, reflect a misguided zeal that sometimes overcomes soldiers caught up in stressful, disorienting situations.
But he considers the Airborne incident even more disturbing than the new Iraq case. "In Iraq, there is some possible explanation, given the nature of the mission," he says. "These prisoners were high-value targets. Shidane Arone wasn't."
It was later determined that at least 80 men would have heard the piercing screams that Shidane made as he was beaten, and that at least 16 soldiers had visited the bunker and witnessed the beating at various stages. Some saw the violence in its later stages, yet did nothing.
Others saw the earliest phases of the event, before it progressed along its fatal path. Among them was Sgt. Hooyer, who saw Shidane shortly after he was captured. He remembers being disturbed by the shootings that preceded Shidane's killing, and the fact that nothing was done about them.
"I thought those were questionable," he says of the shootings. "There were a few cowboys there who wanted to get a bit of glory."
He says he recalls a regiment marked by two solitudes -- a large contingent of dedicated, decent soldiers, and a small yet influential group of ne'er do wells that included the likes of Mr. Matchee and Corporal Matt McKay, who became infamous for complaining that the Somalia mission was a failure because "we ain't killed enough niggers yet."
Above all, Sgt. Hooyer considers the Somalia affair a failure of leadership. "They put the wrong person in charge. Soldiers like that, you have to lead them. And that wasn't done."
Still, he remains proud of the Airborne, and of the soldiers he served with. He had particular praise for Col. Peter Kenward, the commanding officer who was put in charge of the regiment after Col. Mathieu was removed.
"He was a real soldier," Sgt. Hooyer says. "A fine leader. You looked up to him. If Col. Kenward had been in charge, none of this would have happened."
Even though an official inquiry was held into the Somalia affair, many have dismissed it as a "whitewash" that did little to probe the failures that led to the tragedy.
Although several soldiers were court-martialled, only one -- Kyle Brown, whose whereabouts remain something of a mystery (military prosecutors couldn't locate him two years ago) -- received a significant sentence. He spent five years in prison. The senior officers associated with the debacle remained virtually untouched. Although he was criticized for his role, Col. Mathieu went on to become the head of security for Cambior, a Quebec-based mining company.
"They punished the privates and let the colonels go," Mr. Bercuson says. "The whole process was short-circuited."
He believes that the United States will do a better job of investigating the unfolding Iraq crisis, however. "The U.S. is more open about these things," he says. "The drill is going to go in, one tooth after the other."
For Clayton Matchee's mother, the events that unfolded since that March night in 1993 have been especially painful. Like many mothers, she occasionally longed for the days when her children were small, only to find her wish granted in a terrible and unexpected form.
"My son's life was stolen," she says. "It's hard."
Mrs. Matchee can't even imagine Clayton as the person described in news reports and court-martial proceedings. She never knew the troubled Airborne soldier who killed Shidane, only the loving son she raised. She has listened to the evidence, yet chooses to hang on to her own slender filament of faith, believing in her son against all odds.
"No one really knows what happened out there," she says. "We're never going to know."
Peter Cheney is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.