The vagaries of war
Michelle Lang was killed by an IED that blew up the vehicle in which she was travelling.
February 20th, 2025
Reporter Michelle Lang, embedded in the Afghanistan War, 2009.
Michelle Lang’s grieving aunt, Catherine Lang, has written a book about her niece, Embedded: The Irreconcilable Nature of War, Loss and Consequence.
Review by Tom Hawthorn
The news flashed across the globe: an improvised explosive device had destroyed a light-armoured vehicle carrying 11 Canadians in Afghanistan.
Four Canadian soldiers were killed in the bombing on the penultimate day of 2009, as was Michelle Lang, a reporter with the Calgary Herald. The journalist was midway through a six-week embedded tour with Canadian armed forces personnel in the war-torn country.
The shocking news of her death a month before what would have been her 35th birthday caused grief in newsrooms across the land, most strikingly at the Herald. Only a year earlier, Michelle had won a National Newspaper Award, one of the top prizes for her profession, for her coverage on the health beat. Michelle’s vacated desk became a shrine with a magenta pashmina shawl wrapped around the back of a swivel chair in which no one ever sat.
The reporter’s death broke the hearts of her colleagues and shattered her family, including fiancé Michael Louie, brother Cameron, and parents Sandy and Art. One of the grieving family members, an aunt who had once been a journalist, was driven to learn why her niece died in a dusty, far-off land, which she writes about in Embedded: The Irreconcilable Nature of War, Loss and Consequence (Caitlin $26).
“There was little I felt more passionate about than the senseless, devastating loss of Michelle, my niece who had gone where I had not in journalism,” Catherine Lang writes. “Michelle who was on an upward trajectory, Michelle who brought life and laughter into our lives.”
Catherine Lang. Photo by Bruce Martin.
Back in the early 1980s, Catherine Lang was a 29-year-old school secretary in Victoria when she decided to follow a clairvoyant’s prediction by pursuing journalism as a profession. She studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and won a scholarship to the journalism program at Langara College before getting an internship at the Gulf Islands Driftwood on Salt Spring Island. She later worked at the Ladysmith Chemainus Chronicle. One of the stories she covered for the Chronicle led to the publication of O-Bon in Chimunesu (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1996), which is based on personal narratives of the Japanese Canadian residents of Chemainus forced from their homes into camps during wartime. The book won the 1997 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction prize at the BC Books Awards.
In her grief, Lang returned to the interviewing and researching techniques of her journalism days.
Michelle’s “death woke a restlessness in me,” she writes, “to go where she had connections, scouring up bits of information and getting glimpses into the life she was living.”
The aunt spent more than seven years writing and researching a book about her go-getter niece, “as if my writing is a vain attempt to resurrect her.”
Catherine Lang is nagged by doubts about her motivation.
“Was I doing this for Michelle or for me?” she asks with refreshing self-awareness. “Was my ego tainting their memory, their steadfast love of someone so dear as Michelle?”
The result is less a conventional biography and more of an exploration of grief. Every death leaves a void, but it is a peculiarity that in death an absent person becomes so overwhelming a presence in mind that on the street a grieving person mistakenly thinks they’ve spotted the dead person. The author has this experience, staring in intense disbelief at a Michelle lookalike in a café.
Lang travels across the country in pursuit of her niece’s story. She is on hand for the heart-wrenching repatriation ceremony at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, east of Toronto, when Michelle’s remains arrive from Afghanistan. She is touched by the strangers who respectfully line the Highway of Heroes to honour the five fallen Canadians.
Over time, the author pays her respects at the BC Afghanistan Memorial behind the law courts in Victoria and does the same when the marble Kandahar Cenotaph comes through the British Columbia capital on its way to a permanent home in Ottawa. Lang is there when a memorial plaque is unveiled at Magee Secondary in Vancouver, where Michelle once attended classes. (The aunt remembers having helped a young Michelle with a school project to design a newspaper front page.) She takes a long journey ending with a chartered float-plane flight with two of Michelle’s journalism buddies to an isolated lake in northeastern Saskatchewan on which a previously unnamed feature is now known as Lang Bay. They settle on a rock they dub “Michelle’s Landing” to drink white wine, recite poetry, and retell tales.
Lang interviews classmates, old boyfriends, military personnel, newsroom besties (including one whose son carries the middle name Lang after Michelle), and former CBC reporter Melissa Fung, who survived a kidnapping by a criminal gang supporting the Taliban, as well as Bushra Saeed-Khan, a civilian civil servant who sat across from Michelle inside the light-armoured vehicle, yet survived the explosion, albeit with grievous injuries.
Seat selection determined who lived and who died. Such are the vagaries of wartime. 9781773861517
Tom Hawthorn’s Play Ball!, an anecdotal history of professional baseball in Vancouver, will be released this year by Echo Storytelling.
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