GUELPH – The last time Jack Mullin participated in a Remembrance Day parade was decades before his niece and great-nephew were even born.
But on Wednesday the Second World War veteran will be joined in the Guelph parade by Captain Debbie Hynes and Corporal Tom Mullin, who both returned earlier this year from tours in Afghanistan.
“Three generations is what it is,” the elder Mullin said during an interview Saturday at the Guelph Legion. “Or will be, if they do what they say they’re going to do.”
Hynes has wanted to march with her uncle in a Remembrance Day parade for several years, but this is the first time the pieces have come together.
Two years ago Jack was in hospital, and last year Hynes and Tom Mullin were both in Afghanistan.
After the idea of marching together was mentioned again during a family reunion this summer, Jack’s brother Grant contacted Legion president Moe Ferris to see if the three generations of soldiers could be in the parade.
“I was ecstatic,” Ferris said on the weekend. “They obviously don’t need permission. We’d be honoured to have them there.”
Hynes and Mullin Junior will likely take turns pushing their uncle’s wheelchair.
Jack Mullin was paralyzed at Normandy, when shrapnel pierced his helmet and caused extensive nerve damage which robbed him of his ability to use his left side.
“They said it could grow back but it might not be in the right place,” the 89-year-old laughed. “A lot of good that would do me.”
Jack added he still carries three pieces of shrapnel in his head “and they can’t get them out. I don’t want them digging around in there.”
A native of the Fergus area, Jack bought a farm in Luther Township when he got back from an 18-month tour of duty in 1946. He later sold the land to the Grand River Conservation Authority and in 1952 moved to Guelph to marry his wife Patricia, who passed away 20 years ago.
The son of a First World War veteran, Jack Mullin was one of 13 friends who joined the Army on Aug. 9, 1940, “and I’m the only one left now.
“I just wanted to join because my friends were joining,” he recalled. “We came to Guelph to join but they were filled up so we continued down to Brantford and joined there instead.”
He’s looking forward to participating in the parade with his relatives.
“It’s a nice idea,” he said. “It will be good.”
Ferris said it will be wonderful to honour three generations of veterans from one family, though he said many younger soldiers “don’t even think of themselves as veterans. A veteran is someone who puts on a uniform and goes where their country sends them.”
Hynes, 42, of Kingston, is uncomfortable attaching that label to herself.
“I don’t think of myself that way,” said Hynes, who worked as an operating-room nurse at a field hospital in Kandahar. “I don’t put myself in the same class as the World War veterans at all.”
Tom Mullin, 27, of Petawawa, was similarly hesitant to acknowledge the ‘veteran’ tag applied to him.
“It’s nice to be able to show Jack and others that people really do appreciate what they did for us,” Tom Mullin said. “It’s not really about me at all.”
