The mother of a B.C. military family says Canadian troops serving in Afghanistan have been deprived of much-needed holiday cheer after their Christmas parcels arrived in ruins.
Victoria resident Terrie Marchand, whose husband served for 22 years and who has three children in the military, says the gift packages for her son serving at Camp Mike Spann came drenched with water.
"His youngest sister sent him a card, a long letter of how proud she is of her big brother. It was soaked," Marchand said. "She wanted to express her feelings to him and he couldn't read it."
Water also made its way through a parcel, past a layer of wrapping paper and ended up inside a DVD case on the disc itself.
Marchand's son, who she asked ctvbc.ca not to identify, sounded "totally devastated" when she got a chance to speak to him on her computer and told her mail has been arriving damaged at the base since August.
"There are rules in the military: you don't mess with their pay, and you don't mess with their mail. They need their mail," Marchand said, adding that post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide are serious problems among the troops.
"It's about the quality of life out there, the mental state of these guys, and they took that away."
Marchand said she received a phone call from the Department of National Defence in October urging her to bombard her kids with gifts and cards this holiday season. She immediately put a call out to family and friends asking them to take the time to mail something away by the deadline.
Now she wants someone to take accountability for the damaged parcels and to guarantee it won't happen again. "Somewhere there was just a complete failure to take care of our mail," she said.
Mail hit with extreme weather in transit: DND
Lt. Cmdr. John Nethercott of DND public affairs told ctvbc.ca the military takes mail delivery "very seriously" and is investigating what happened.
"It's a key morale issue," Nethercott said. "We certainly understand why there's upset on the part of the member, and particularly on the part of the member's mother."
The military believes the mail was exposed to extreme weather while being transferred out of Kabul on a non-Canadian Forces vehicle.
"We're working in a coalition environment, we're sharing resources," Nethercott said. "[It's possible] it wasn't treated with the same priority that CF would have treated it. We don't know that for certain but that's what we think happened."
The DND is working on putting new procedures in place to ensure no more mail is damaged, including new receipting procedures for in-transit mail and a review of storage facilities.
Nethercott could not say whether troops whose mail was damaged would receive any form of compensation.
More than 1.8 million kilograms of mail has passed through the military postal service since 2005, according to the DND.
