Thursday, November 10, 2011 Surrey/North Delta Leader 7
Large fire destroys wood plant Fleetwood building burned Wednesday morning by Kevin Diakiw A HUGE blaze kept Surrey firefighters busy into the late
EVAN SEAL / THE LEADER
Surrey Firefighters extinguish a fire at ST Wood Products, a lumber storage facility on 84 Avenue near 162 Street early Wednesday morning.
hours of Wednesday morning in Fleetwood, as a wood processing plant continued to burn. At about 2:30 a.m., Surrey fire crews were called out to the fire at ST Wood Products, located at 16241 84 Ave. When firefighters arrived, most of the structure was ablaze. As of 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, two trucks and several firefighters were still on scene putting out small fires in the building, which was destroyed in the fire. The source of the blaze is not known yet. It’s not believed anyone was injured in the fire. kdiakiw@surreyleader.com
Medals: From two countries, for the same war From page 1 The young man loved the jungle lifestyle. “You’ve always got a smile on your face, bloke,” one Australian soldier told him. His bases were in the northern quarter of the island of Borneo, in the old Malayan/ new Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. His job was to attack the bases and supply routes of Communist insurgents trying to take over the north. Dominick would patrol along the western coast of Borneo and would quietly enter Indonesia-proper, south of the border between the two countries. As a soldier, “you don’t listen to the politics of it when you’re on the ground fighting,” says the South Surrey resident, now 64 and a businessman in North Surrey. Dominick was part of a unique military force. The coalition was composed of special forces soldiers (including British SAS and Royal Marine SBS) from throughout Commonwealth countries; Malaysian police; professional Gurkha Regiment soldiers from Nepal; and Dayak Indians, indigenous tribes of Borneo notorious as headhunters. Dominick describes the military force, which included the Royal Navy on picket duty along the coast, as “a lot of different entities fighting for the same goal – freedom.” Their weapons: “Everything from Sterling submachine guns to blowpipes.” There were no set-piece battles, no front lines and little distinction between civilians and combatants. “It was very difficult to identify the enemy from civilians, which is something that one could say is the start of the current wave of warfare,” says Dominick. “In World War Two, for example, everyone wore jolly old uniforms, and you could spot who they were a mile away.” The new conflict was a war of terrorist bombings, ambushes, massacres and unplanned engagements deep in the undergrowth. In comparison, Dominick says, today’s soldiers are fighting with different rules of engagement under the eye of cameras, limiting their effectiveness.
In Malaysia, with fewer restrictions, the soldiers did their jobs to the fullest, and won – in contrast to the far bloodier, and more public mess in the jungles of Vietnam. “We had to do things that CNN would be all over today.” In Borneo, the insurgents had little support from the local population, the interdiction of their supplies was relatively effective (North Vietnam had several borders with their weapons suppliers), and leaders in communist countries lost interest in continuing to help what they realized was a lost cause.
own comrades). But tens of thousands of the t enemy were killed in the war – no one knows exactly how many, Dominick admits. The death toll on the “allied” side was 519 British or Commonwealth persono nel, 1,300 Malaysian police and about 3,000 civilians. BOB DOMINICK remembers B the austerity of the immediate post-Second World War period in the UK, where rationing didn’t taper off until the early 1950s. “I can remember not seeing an orange or a banana until I was about five years old.” Since his grandfather had served in the
Bob Dominick fought alongside Malaysian and Commonwealth troops (including Australians, above right) in the mid-1960s to defeat a Communist insurgency. Most importantly, Dominick says, is that the Commonwealth army had better-trained soldiers who were more disciplined, better armed and fed, and more dedicated to their cause. The Commonwealth forces also did their best to not antagonize local populations while hunting for insurgents among civilians. On rare occasions, they fed and sent back prisoners with the message that the British weren’t going to do what the enemy was told they would – meaning torture or kill prisoners. (Dominick doesn’t know what happened to those prisoners who returned to their
Royal Navy during the First World War, and his father and six uncles were officers and soldiers in the Second World War, Dominick joined the Military Academy at the age of 16. “To grow up with men that had been through those conflicts was quite inspiring for me.” He recalls family stories of liberation in particular in Europe and found a growing passion about people’s freedom. “I see two parallels now. One where I grew up as a little boy where I was free, and another with my mother-in-law growing up in a (Belgian) town that was occupied by the Germans.
“I grew up to treasure the freedom that I’d been given. In a way, it seemed a natural progression for me to move into the job I did.” Dominick would return for his second 18-month tour in the jungle as a volunteer. “You couldn’t (volunteer to be in combat) without feeling that you’re helping people feel free from oppression. I don’t know many people who would fight without that passion.” While he admits it seems odd to call his experience an adventure today, he doesn’t shy away from it. “This is something I struggle to understand when I read about ‘our poor guys’ overseas. If they’re anything like the guys I used to be with, they want to be there because that’s what they’re trained to do. They don’t want to be sitting around in a camp waiting for something to happen. They want to be on the ground.” After his two tours in Asia, Dominick returned to the UK and was involved with the military’s Special Investigations Branch, which works on drug trafficking, major crimes and terrorist threats to the UK. Finally looking for peace and quiet, Dominick moved to Canada in 1987. He is the president and CEO of Lightyear Digital Theatre, a Surrey and Beverly Hills company that last year donated a $500,000 digital and 3D theatre system to SFU Surrey. He works at WestStone Properties near Central City, is the immediate past-president of the Downtown Surrey Business Improvement Association and is the chairman of the Surrey City Centre Economic Development Committee. In 2010, British veterans of the Malayan War, including Dominick, were each given a Pingat Jasa Malaysia medal by the Malaysian government for their service in the campaign. The British Ministry of Defence had to give special permission for the medals, since the British veterans had already received medals from their own country. The veterans now have two medals honouring their participation in the same war. bjoseph@surreyleader.com