By GREG WESTON

WHILE ORDINARY Canadians honour our fallen soldiers and surviving veterans in this special week of VE-Day remembrance, Paul Martin's government has turned its back on a group of frail and bewildered military widows.

One of them is Velma Braden of Winnipeg, 81 years old and mad as hell. "What's happening here is just unbelievable," she told me in an interview yesterday. Unbelievable, but true -- a story of bone-headed bureaucracy that should both enrage every Canadian, and embarrass every Liberal lunk in the current government.

Flashback to wartime, 1941. Stewart Braden is just a kid in soldier's clothing when he suddenly finds hell, landing in the middle of a perverse military campaign that would forever scar his life and ultimately become Canada's shame. Day after day, Braden and 3,600 other young Canadian recruits were doused in warfare chemicals until their skin peeled, jammed into narrow dirt trenches saturated with mustard gas, forced to breathe toxic poisons until their lungs bled. Incredibly, all this suffering and sacrifice was not spent fighting Nazi armies on the battlefields of Europe, now the graveyards where some of Canada's finest hours of military heroism are being celebrated this week. Instead, Stewart Braden and his comrades were repeatedly gassed in the fields of Alberta and in the laboratories of Ottawa as thousands of human guinea pigs in a secret, government-run program of chemical warfare testing.

Velma Braden's voice breaks as she remembers what happened to the wonderful guy who stole her heart while they were still teenagers, and went off to serve his country before he was 20. "He was a different man when he came back," she says today.

Over the ensuing years, Velma cared for the man she loved through years of chronic diseases associated with exposure to chemical warfare toxins --bronchitis, rashes, nervous disorders and perpetual flus. "Even at the kids' hockey games, he had to go sit in the car because he couldn't take the cold," she says.

HEALTH PROBLEMS

Stewart Braden wasn't alone. Others like him suffered a range of serious health problems -- from cancer to chronic respiratory, heart, and skin ailments, from impotence to a loss of eyesight. Yet, for over 60 years, successive governments did nothing to help Braden and the others. Instead, they denied the testing program had ever existed. Finally, on the eve of last year's federal election and barely pre-empting the release of a damning report on the issue, Paul Martin's government announced it was finally "setting things right." The government agreed to pay $24,000 in compensation to each victim or, since the majority of the vets were dead, to their spouses and other estate beneficiaries. Velma Braden's beloved husband having died in 1992, she applied for the promised compensation. Then it happened: Velma was informed that she would require a copy of her husband's will before her claim could be processed. But like millions of Canadians, particularly of that generation, Stewart Braden had no will -- he simply left what little he had to his wife. Too bad, the bureaucrats told her. Without a will, there was no way the government could be sure who should get the compensation money. It didn't seem to matter that the couple had been married almost 50 years, and that no one was contesting Braden's estate. Nor did it seem to register with any of the bright lights in the Veterans Affairs department that they were already paying Velma her husband's military death benefit. The regulations said no will, no money. Too bad. So sad. "It wasn't very nice after all he went through," Velma says with dramatic understatement. No one is quite sure how many other elderly widows have found themselves in the same mess, except that there are more than a few.

NOTHING RESOLVED

To her credit, acting military ombudsman Barbara Finlay is on the warpath over this issue, but notes it has been over a year now and nothing has been resolved. An official in the office of Defence Minister Bill Graham said yesterday the issue has been mired in legalities. "The minister was briefed a few weeks ago and what he directed was, well, let's figure this out." Last year, former military ombudsman Andre Marin said of the whole chemical testing saga: "If all this sounds incredible, it is only because of its rank indecency. It is unfathomable that this kind of thing would happen in this country today. It is a shameful saga." And sadly, it continues.