[3] Born to British and Canadian school teachers in Madang, Papua New Guinea, Goddard spent most of her childhood in various locations, including Black Lake and Lac la Ronge, Saskatchewan.

She led a local Scout troop with her fiancé (later husband), Jason Beam, while they were officer cadets at the Royal Military College, in Kingston, Ontario.

It was part of a joint two-day operation between Canadian and Afghan troops, to secure Kandahar's outskirts after a rumor of Taliban preparations to launch an assault on the city.

As troops were moving into a mosque to capture 15 alleged Taliban members, several dozen hidden militants began firing from neighbouring houses.

[5] General (Ret'd) Richard Hillier, former chief of defence staff wrote in his autobiography A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, that officials in the Prime Minister's Office ordered the military to hide the return to Canada of Captain Nichola Goddard because they did not want her flag-draped coffin seen on the news.