The story was to be about a young man, returning from his fifth tour in Afghanistan, but it turned into a reconnection with lost family.
Master Cpl. William (Will) McCulligh, 33, with the 3rd Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR), was met at the Vancouver airport on Aug. 4 by a sister and a brother he had never known.
“When I saw Brittney at the airport, I just knew it was my sister,” says McCulligh.
“The same yellow-green eyes and goofy smile.”
Brittney, 19, and Jake Buss, 22, McCulligh’s siblings, live at the coast. Brittney had tried looking for her older brother online and wasn’t aware that McCulligh was doing the same thing.
“I made the first contact, I waited until I had a rough geographic area to look, found Grandma Buss on Canada 411 and we went from there.” says McCulligh.
A year ago in August, Dorothy Buss received a phone call.
“Hi Grandma, it’s me, Will.”
Dorothy says when she got that call all she could do was scream Billy, the name she called her grandson 30 years ago.
“When Will was about three, we went to the airport to see him before his mother took him back east, I can still remember all of us holding him, passing him back and forth.” says Dorothy.
“That’s the last time I saw him, until yesterday.”
On Aug. 5 McCulligh was brought to his grandmother’s home in 108 Mile Ranch where he met a whole new side of his family.
Sitting around the table with the family was at once chaotic, emotional and heart warming. A stranger coming onto the scene wouldn’t know that most of these people had never met this young man before.
Dorothy and Will’s father, Les Buss, couldn’t stop looking at the young man they last saw 30 years ago.
McCulligh has always been interested in the military, starting cadets as soon as he could, joining the reserves at 17 and at 19 signing up with the RCR. Little did he know he was following in the footsteps of his father.
His father was in the same regiment that McCulligh joined, although Les was in the 2nd battalion and even McCulligh’s grandfather, Milton Buss (who had lived in Forest Grove), was a volunteer in the South Saskatchewan Regiment.
“Dad’s first platoon commander (then 2nd Lieut. Pittfield) was my battalion commanding officer when I joined, but now he’s Lt.-Col. Pittfield.”
“Blood tells,” says McCulligh, saying that his family on his mother’s side didn’t have any military leanings.
When McCulligh talks of his time in Afghanistan, he talks mostly of the culture shock, that sometimes he felt he was in the middle ages with the donkey carts travelling the streets.
“But, it was my family, you want to be with your brothers and that’s one reason why I kept signing up.”
“This weekend has been amazing, first time in my life I felt like I was truly home.”
McCulligh will be attending Royal Military College (RMC) officers school in Kingston, Ont., where is training to become a platoon commander.
