Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
In 1989, Catherine Lang helped her niece, Michelle, with a school assignment.
Michelle had just started high school in Vancouver. Catherine has just begun studying journalism. At the time, Catherine had no idea that her niece would grow up to become an award-winning reporter. But on that afternoon, she helped Michelle and a school friend with a project that involved designing the front page of a newspaper. Catherine explained the fundamentals of journalism, including what a lede is and the “who, what, when, where and sometimes why” principles of reporting. She explained the elements that would make a story newsworthy enough to land on the front page.
Catherine doesn’t know if that afternoon played any role in convincing Michelle to become a journalist. “But I know that her unending curiosity and love of language and learning were key to her success as a reporter,” Catherine writes in her memoir, Embedded: The Irreconcilable Nature of War, Loss and Consequence.
“I was just brimming with my passion for the profession at the time,” says Catherine, in an interview with Postmedia from a book tour stop in Vancouver. “It was a warm September afternoon and we sat out in their backyard and she just caught on so quickly. She was so smart. She had fun with it. She really liked doing that.”
Catherine would go on to become a community newspaper reporter and freelance writer before working as an editor of provincial legislative debates and in treaty negotiations with Indigenous nations in British Columbia. She never spoke to Michelle about the project again, although did find out through the family that she received a good grade. Catherine wasn’t around when Michelle decided to become a journalist, so she can’t say that her niece followed in her footsteps. The younger sister of Michelle’s father, Art, Catherine would visit Michelle and her family in Vancouver over the years. She remembers her niece landing her first journalism job at the Prince George Free Press in 1998 before moving on to The Herald-Times in Moose Jaw, the Regina Leader-Post and, in 2002, the Calgary Herald.
Michelle was on assignment in Afghanistan for the Herald on Dec. 30, 2009, when the armoured military vehicle she was in struck a roadside bomb. Michelle and four Canadian soldiers – Garrett Chidley, George Miok, Zachery McCormack and Kirk Taylor – died in the blast. Michelle’s death devastated her family and colleagues and shook the nation. She was the first and only Canadian journalist killed in Afghanistan.
For more than a decade, Catherine worked through her grief by researching and writing the memoir. She travelled throughout Canada and spoke to Michelle’s friends and colleagues, practising the skills of a job she had left behind. She rediscovered her passion for writing as she discovered more and more about her niece.
“I did a lot of soul-searching,” Catherine says. “I had also worked as a community newspaper reporter and had left that profession and had a lot of regret about that because I felt very passionate about journalism. I loved it, which of course, Michelle also did. So to have her die doing what she loved and I also loved was a blow, to say the least. So I think being able to write about that and consider where I was at in life and what brought me to my life and remembering her and the happy times that people told me about helped me get to know her on a deeper level. ”
Embedded includes Catherine’s interviews with Michelle’s colleagues at the Herald and fellow journalists who were also embedded in Afghanistan. She spoke to Padre André Gauthier, the senior chaplain of the Canadian Armed Forces who first greeted Michelle when she arrived in-country. She interviewed Adam Sweet, a public diplomacy officer with the Canadian International Development Agency who co-ordinated opportunities for journalists to accompany troops and made the decision to place Michelle in the convoy on Dec. 30.
She spoke to relatives of the four Canadian soldiers who were also killed. She spoke to Bushra Saeed, the federal policy analyst for Global Affairs Canada who was sitting beside Michelle when the blast occurred. She survived but suffered life-threatening injuries.
Catherine revisits her niece’s last moments by quoting from an article written by Canadian Press reporter Colin Perkel, which was published a year after Michelle’s death. She writes about how the devastating news spread to the Calgary Herald newsroom, Michelle’s family and eventually the country. She writes about the tributes and memorials, the intense press coverage and grief that followed. Some of the most powerful parts of the book are segments Catherine writes as letters directly to her niece. They roll out like conversations they didn’t get a chance to have and include everything from directly discussing the aftermath of her death, to snippets about family dogs, to stories about Catherine meeting the parents of Lieut. Andrew Nuttall, a 31-year-old soldier Michelle wrote about after he was killed a week before her, on Dec. 23, 2009, in Afghanistan.
“It was an exercise that I did for the book, but it was a way for me to have a conversation with her about what I was learning and what I was experiencing and to talk to her directly,” Catherine says. “It was just something that came naturally to me. I always enjoyed writing letters. There were some topics I just felt I wanted to talk to her about. That’s how it just evolved.”
Through the research and interviews with Michelle’s colleagues and journalists who were in Afghanistan, Catherine was able to paint a picture of her niece’s work ethic and approach to the job that followed her into the war zone.
“She wanted to get at the story, but she wasn’t as interested in the military side of things,” Catherine says. “She wanted to get to meet the people and find out whether some of the things that Canadian troops were doing were making a difference in their lives. She wanted to be out there, as she would have been in Canada covering a story.”
Embedded also goes beyond Michelle’s personal story by covering Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan in a broader sense. The book starts with a timeline that mixes personal family history with historic moments that led to the situation in that country, starting with Daoud Khan deposing the last king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah, in a military coup in 1973. To broaden the story, Catherine interviewed Mellissa Fung, a CBC journalist who never met Michelle but also reported from Afghanistan. In 2008, Fung was kidnapped and held captive in a cave for 28 days. Catherine met the journalist in 2014 in Vancouver when she was speaking at an event presented by Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan.
“She didn’t know Michelle but when she found out that Michelle had been killed she told us she did fall into a depression for a long while,” Catherine says. “I really admire her. I admire her for not letting the story of what was going on there fall from the public eye. She had a connection to Afghanistan, she was a journalist and, while she didn’t know Michelle, she felt a connection to her. That was part of what I wanted to bring into the story and it also allowed me to bring in some of the background of how Canada got involved in the mission following September 11. I didn’t want to be pursuing all of the geopolitics of how we became involved in our military role there but, of course, I felt it was part of the story. I didn’t aim to become an expert in the field, I just wanted to have touchstones throughout my telling of the story.”
While Catherine still feels a sense of loss, she says working on the book has helped her through the grief. In the weeks and months after Michelle’s death, she threw dozens of articles into a cardboard box. In one of the Dear Michelle sections, Catherine writes about the “mishmash of articles about your demise and the importance of a free press to report on our mission, the military status of the combat and reconstruction efforts.” She eventually began stashing articles in file folders “that came to resemble my random emotional journey.” As the files expanded “so too did my knowledge of you, spiralling down pathways of my troubled heart,” she writes.
“As time went on, I reread so many of those articles when I had more presence and the ability to process, reflect,” Catherine says. “It got easier from the point of view that I didn’t feel as frantic as I did initially. I was rediscovering things that people had written about her and I had [forgotten]. I was able to have a little cry and shed a few tears and still feel close to her because of how profound people’s remembrances of her were.”
Catherine Lang will be in Calgary on Nov. 6 at 7 p.m. for an event at Owl’s Nest Books.