When Corporal Nathan Cirillo stood guard on Wednesday morning at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, which stands kitty-corner from Canada’s Parliament, he carried a rifle that was unloaded. Although the sentries at the monument are real soldiers, their presence is more about preserving the dignity of the monument than defending against violent attacks. The position of memorial guard was created after a 2006 episode in which three hooligans urinated on the tomb commemorating the war dead.
As an unarmed soldier carrying out a civic responsibility, Cirillo, who was in his mid-twenties, existed in a kind of liminal state between military and civilian status when he was shot early in the day, by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a thirty-two-year-old Canadian-born convert to Islam. Zehaf-Bibeau then tried to storm Canada’s Parliament, where he was killed during an exchange of fire inside the building, by the parliamentary sergeant at arms, Kevin Vickers. In a sombre speech that night, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper described Zehaf-Bibeau as a “terrorist” and linked his acts to an “ISIL-inspired” attack two days earlier in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, in which two Canadian soldiers were hit by a car driven by Martin Couture-Rouleau, a twenty-five-year-old who was also a convert to Islam. One of the soldiers, Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, died from his injuries.
