In the summer of 1974, a routine lecture on a Canadian Forces Base in Valcartier, Quebec, went horribly awry. Somehow, a live grenade found its way into a box of teaching aids and exploded during a demonstration. The explosion killed six young cadets and injured 54 others. More than 30 years later, Gerry Fostaty, who was at the time an 18-year-old sergeant and one of the first people on the scene following the explosion, has written a first-hand account of the incident.

Fostaty combines his own descriptions of what happened that day with material gleaned from the official Department of National Defence inquest and interviews with former cadets and officers. Since both the DND and the media seemed determined to give the tragedy as little coverage as possible at the time, Fostaty tasked himself with getting to the bottom of how the live grenade made its way into the box of duds, and who, ultimately, was to blame.

The book is written in a clear, engaging voice and never descends into sensationalist finger-pointing. Fostaty spends more than half the book recounting the events of the tragic day, but his narrative moves along briskly, without unnecessary detail or excessive editorializing. And his analysis of both the media coverage of the incident and the subsequent government investigation is concise and objective.

The CFB Valcartier explosion may not qualify as an epic event in Canadian military history, but this book provides a cogent and provocative reassessment of a tragic incident the DND has done little to address.