CAF Story | Soldier On – Star sailor marches 70 km to honour fallen comrade
Video / January 15, 2021
Transcript
Night was falling. We're both tired. We're limping. Hips hurt. Back hurts. And we keep going.
My name is Zdravko Ivankovic and I'm a sailor third class at HMCS Star in Hamilton.
Matthew Pinczak and I, we had a somewhat inauspicious start. We were doing PT at the unit. We're playing soccer. And all of sudden, somebody runs up and bumps into me. That was Matt. Once we got passed that initial collision of ours, it was definitely something that we could bond over. He was involved in everything at our unit. Where he could do something and it felt passionate about it, he would do that. In him, I saw the best we hope to see in people.
When I heard Matt passed, I felt shock. The last time I'd seen him before that, he seemed fine. I felt this void and we all did at our unit. Rucking is a fundamental aspect of militaries worldwide. It's just the simple idea of you put this weight on your back and you carry it from point A to point B. We decided to remember him in a way and I happened to talk to Chris Bonnell who's a Naval Warfare Officer at our unit, and he goes: "Yeah! It would be cool, so we're gonna do it and we're gonna do it this summer."
Matt would have been 31 this year, so we decided to carry 31 pounds of weight plus the other stuff. And it was gonna be 70 kilometres from HMCS York in Toronto to HMCS Star in Hamilton. And in the spirit of Matt, we wanted to give back. 97% of the money that Soldier On raises, they send to the causes that they support. So initially, it would have been just Chris and myself. Chris' good friend Joe saw what we were doing. He was really excited about it. He's a former service member as well. And then, my friend Phil.
At the 20 K mark, old injuries started to act up, so Joe's legs were in a significant amount of pain and Chris' knees were really acting up. We got to about the 40 kilometres mark and that's when Phil and I said: "Chris, Joe, we can't have you go any further." So Chris and I's initial goal was 2000$. A thousand from each of us. And then, in the end, we were able to raise 3200$.
Night was falling. We're both tired. We're limping. The tears start flowing. Everything that... that my friend Matt had been and all these goals that we set out for ourselves in this ruck, they were coming to fruition. At 11:09 PM, some 19 hours and 97 000 steps, we finally reached our finish line at Star.
I miss my friend. Our unit misses him. But hopefully, because of who he was and what he stood for, we're all inspired to make more of the time that we have here. So one quote by Beckett that stuck with me throughout a lot of things and through many things in my life, it's the simple one: "I can't go on. I'll go on."