JULY 6 Griffon Down

A very bad day.

Right on the heels of the deaths of Corporal Bulger and Master Corporal Michaud came the news that one of our Griffon helicopters had crashed. This was not caused by enemy fire. Flying of any kind does not allow for much in the way of malfunction or error before catastrophic events occur; flying helicopters in combat conditions magnifies this risk. It takes a special kind of person to crew these aircraft, a person who has both courage and skill, in ample measure.

We know that two Canadians are dead, but we are unsure as to their identities. This is causing a lot of anxiety on the FOB. The pilots and flight engineers are from the helicopter squadron. We will feel the pain of their loss as we do that of any fellow soldier. But the door gunners are infantrymen, from the same regiment currently deployed here. The combat troopers are desperate to learn if one of their friends is dead.

Everyone feels a little guilty at times like this. It starts when we hear that there have been casualties on our side. We know the likelihood is that they will be Afghan, because in this civil war it is the ANA that is taking most of the casualties. If that turns out to be the case, we are relieved, although no one would ever admit it. If we learn a Coalition soldier has died, we hope he is from another country.

The guilty feeling increases when it is confirmed that one or more Canadians have died. Now we are wishing for the death of someone we know less well. We are wishing for another Canadian family to be devastated instead of ours. None of us enjoys feeling that way, but none of us can help it.

No matter who these fallen Canadians are, they will be the first to die in one of our own helicopters. It has only been since the winter of 2009 that our squadron, equipped with Griffon gunships and Chinook transports, arrived in Kandahar. They have been flying continuously ever since.

I had thought that most routine Canadian FOB-to-FOB travelling on this Roto would be done in our own helicopters. I had emphasized this to Claude as a way of minimizing her worry before I left. And while some Canadians fly back and forth from the FOBs to KAF, the number of people we have travelling by convoy appears unchanged. It seems our aircraft and crews have been integrated into the overall war effort and not specifically assigned to us: our Griffon crashed at an American FOB.

Griffon gunship door gunner

So it was already a bad day, and it came to a bad ending. At last light, as I was working in the staff lounge, I heard a hissing sound I recognized. A rocket was flying overhead and was a second or two away from impact. I threw myself against the wall, waited for the detonation and then ran for the bunker. The rest of the medical team had been on the bunker’s porch. When I got there, they were scrambling to get inside. We got our helmets and frag vests on and waited for the all clear.

It looks like “rocket season” is upon us.

Addendum, July 7 (morning): We now know the name of one of the dead Canadians. He is Master Corporal Patrice Audet, of the 430th Tactical Helicopter Squadron. There is no information about his duties on the aircraft, but there are already recriminations against his branch of the service.

Our helicopter crashed on takeoff. “Experts” have been on the CBC news explaining how this was predictable because our pilots, our aircraft or our procedures are not good enough for the kind of combat operations we are flying here in Kandahar province. Apart from being extraordinarily insensitive—coming even before the bodies of our dead comrades arrive home—this criticism is Monday-morning quarterbacking at its worst.

In this heat, a helicopter’s blades generate far less lift than they do in colder, denser air. This makes the aircraft harder to control and much less forgiving of even a tiny misstep at low altitude. The dust is so bad that pilots land and take off in a cloud through which they can see nothing. By themselves, these environmental factors would make for the most challenging flying conditions a helicopter pilot can face. And our pilots also contend with the enemy threat. Takeoff and landing, the trickiest manoeuvres in flying, are also the occasions when helicopters are most vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire.

In spite of these potentially lethal hazards, our air crews keep flying. In doing so, they give us an enormous edge over the Taliban: they resupply us in the most difficult terrain, they provide fire support that drives off Taliban attackers and they shuttle us around the battlefield, safe from IEDs.

Helicopters crash—even with the best pilots, flying the best machines, in the best of conditions. This is combat flying, so we should be prepared for the inevitability of incidents like this. I am sure that when this war is over our helicopters will have had an admirable safety record. I will not hesitate to get on one for the rest of my tour.

Addendum, July 7 (afternoon): The worst fears of the infantrymen here have come true. So have mine.

Corporal Martin “Jo” Joannette was a member of the Third Battalion, Royal 22nd Regiment. These are the Van Doos, the French Canadian infantry regiment that is serving here now. A lot of people on the FOB, including me, knew Jo. Though still a minority, veterans make up an important proportion of the troops deployed on this rotation. That Jo and I met during my previous deployment is no more than a minor coincidence, but it makes writing this entry physically painful.

Jo and I were together at Sperwan Ghar, the first FOB I served at in 2007. He was the combat team commander’s LAV (light armoured vehicle) driver. He went on every mission, big and small, that we ran out of that FOB. His vehicle was struck by an IED twice, had a near miss a third time, and he was under direct enemy fire numerous times. He came out of it all without a scratch. He had served another tour in Afghanistan before that. Knowing he came through so many close calls makes it somehow harder to accept that we have lost such a superlative soldier.

What I remember most about Jo was his uncanny ability to coax balky motors back to life. The internal combustion engine is something I know nearly nothing about, but Jo knew the inner workings of his armoured vehicle better than I know anatomy. He was the go-to guy for the combat team when it came to engine problems, and he was always ready to help.

In his photograph (at the back of this book), you will notice that Jo does not wear the traditional green beret of the infantry but rather the maroon beret of the airborne troops. So I close with the traditional parting wish of the paratrooper: “Light winds and soft landings, my brother.”

JULY 7 | Junior

On the two-way rifle range you will not rise to the occasion. You will sink to the level of your training. The combat arms attracts more than its fair share of big guys. Individuals of smaller stature stand out. Corporal Nicholas Cappelli Horth (the missing hyphen is intentional) stands out, in more ways than one.

—RSM BRIAN MCKENELLEY, Second Battalion, The Irish Regiment of Canada

Corporal Nicholas “Junior” Cappelli Horth

Although he is based here at FOB Ma’Sum Ghar, I had the opportunity to meet him before coming here. He is the medic assigned to the provincial reconstruction team, and these guys get around a fair bit. Whenever his team came to FOB Wilson he would pop by the UMS to look in on his medical brethren. He participated in some of the patient encounters I have described.

I know. In this photograph he does not look older than twelve, and I doubt he weighs more than fifty kilograms soaking wet. His nickname, “Junior,” seems almost preordained. But he is twenty-two and one of the more impressive young men you will ever meet. The gear he carries on patrol weighs almost as much as he does, but he never falters. It must be said that he is in amazingly good shape, being a marathon runner. He is also the prototypical “good soldier.” He always has a positive, can-do attitude.

His skills and attitude made him pretty much the perfect “garrison soldier.” In other words, he had everything the army looks for during training: fitness, drive, teamwork and smarts. But how will the aptitudes demonstrated during training translate when under fire? That is the question on everybody’s mind as a unit heads to war. For Junior, we got the answer today.

The provincial reconstruction team had been on a patrol not far from our FOB. The team was in the process of clearing a road, searching for IEDs. Junior was somewhere in the middle of the column of soldiers. An Afghan civilian on a motorcycle began to overtake them. Before he was allowed to go on, he was stopped and searched. He checked out: a villager, making his way to his fields.

The villager got back on his motorcycle and began to pass the soldiers. When he got level with Junior, a Taliban triggerman detonated a “directional” IED. The rear half of such a device is high explosive. This would not be lethal beyond a few feet. The front half consists of hundreds of metal fragments, which the high explosive will project forward at high speeds. You could think of a directional IED as a gigantic shotgun firing massive pellets.

The directional IED was a metre from the Afghan villager when it went off. Junior was two metres farther away. At such close range, a directional IED massively damages the human body. The villager had most of his mid-section blown apart. Junior was thrown to the ground, covered in blood and pieces of flesh, but the Afghan’s body had created a “blast shadow.” Junior’s ears were ringing, but he was otherwise unhurt.

What did Junior do then? On a patrol, soldiers are assigned an “arc of responsibility,” that area of the 360-degree circle around the patrol that they must watch. By the time Junior had finished rolling on the ground, he had his weapon up and facing outwards, covering his arc. In the time it took for the blast to stop acting on his body, he was back to being a fully operational combat soldier.

A patrol’s first priority when it comes under fire is to defeat the enemy. Even if there are wounded soldiers who need care, the combat medics will first help to drive back the enemy, “winning the firefight.” We are soldiers first, and Junior had reacted exactly as he had been trained to.

Although the IED attack was not followed up with gunfire or grenades, the patrol was still in grave danger. There were signs that the Taliban had laid secondary IEDs, additional mines whose purpose is to kill medics and others coming to assist those wounded by an initial blast.

When the patrol had secured the area, Junior rendered whatever aid he could to the villager. Before this, he had radioed the UMS to prepare us to receive a critically wounded patient. I got the team together and briefed them on the patient’s possible injuries, and we set up our IVs and other gear. Unfortunately, the man was long dead by the time we got to him.

Junior reported to the UMS when the patrol returned to the FOB. He still had his smile and his positive attitude . . . but his eyes had a slight watery sheen, and his voice had a touch of a tremor. I took him outside the UMS to have a word with him privately.

What do you say to someone who has come as close to dying as it is possible to do? You start by telling him how happy you are that he is okay. You follow that up with statements that are “normalizing.” This means that you list the possible reactions a normal human being might have after an event like this, so that he understands that what he is feeling is to be expected. Then you open the door for him to come and talk to you about those reactions if they prove to be distressing.

Then you step back, give your comrade some space and hope that he will prove to be one of the many who come through something like this psychically intact. And not one of the few who will be damaged forever.

Addendum, July 31: I am leaving FOB Ma’Sum Ghar in a few days. I have spoken to Junior a number of times since his close call. He seems remarkably well. His sleep patterns got back to normal three days after the incident and, a week ago, he had a dream in which he saw the Afghan villager who was killed. He could not recall much about the dream except that it had not been upsetting.

He has had a couple of other emotionally tough days, one of which I will describe in some detail later, but I think he will come through this war without any long-term emotional ill-effects.

JULY 8 | MRE: Medical Rules of Eligibility

One of today’s serious casualties was unusual, as war zone casualties go, because he was suffering from blunt trauma. This is the kind you get when your body is thrown against something hard. Whereas penetrating trauma is relatively simple to manage—plug the holes, stop the bleeding, get them breathing, ship them out—blunt trauma is a much more cerebral exercise. Patients have no holes or lacerations indicating where the damage lies. They must be examined much more carefully so that no serious injuries are missed. Keep that in mind as I present today’s interesting case.

As was the case at FOB Wilson, the perimeter security on the camp is the responsibility of a private company. One of their men was involved in a head-on collision with an American armoured vehicle. He was driving a pickup truck, so he was the loser in this exchange.

There was no external bleeding, and the patient was not having any difficulty breathing. He had no bruises, his vital signs were normal and ultrasound examination of the chest and abdomen were negative. He had no neurological symptoms, meaning that he had normal strength, sensation and movement in all four limbs. His only complaint was pain at the top of his head and in his cervical (neck) spine. He was alert and oriented, and he described having been projected into the roof of his vehicle.

A case like this could not be more straightforward. The accident had delivered a tremendous amount of “axial load” onto the patient’s cervical spine. This is the same thing that happens when people dive into shallow water. These individuals often break their cervical spines and end up paralyzed from the neck down. The medical team must therefore immobilize the patient’s spine immediately and keep it secure until X-rays or a CT scan can be done to rule out the presence of a fracture.

Pretty basic, eh? Not to some goof at KAF. The message we got back was: “We’re busy. Send the patient by road.”

I hit the roof. We are now doing helicopter medevacs for Canadians who need nothing more than a couple of stitches. The message I was getting was that this Afghan, with a potentially devastating injury, was not worth the same consideration. He may have been, for all intents and purposes, a mercenary, fighting for our side only for the money. That is irrelevant. He had been injured as a byproduct of the war. As a result, his care was our responsibility. Had he been a civilian or a Taliban soldier, I would have treated him the same way.

I am happy to report that this aberrant behaviour was limited to a single individual at battle group headquarters. I barked once (via a one-paragraph e-mail, dripping with sarcasm, venom and threat), and the air medevac was approved.

JULY 10 | Tac Recce: Tactical Reconnaissance

A quiet day—only a few patients, none of them critically injured.

It looked as though I would not have much to write about, but that changed shortly after lunch. Two distinguished-looking gentlemen wandered into the UMS. One of them introduced himself by saying, “We are here to replace you.” I had no idea who he was so I flippantly answered, “Yeah, right! In my dreams!”

It was a poor choice of words. I was addressing Commander Robert Briggs, the head doctor of the rotation arriving in September. He was accompanied by Major Graeme Rodgman, who will be in command of the FOB medics. They were performing a “tactical reconnaissance,” a direct eyeballs-on look at the combat area. As part of this recce (pronounced “wreck-ee”), they had come to Ma’Sum Ghar to check out the FOB UMS, to learn what our capabilities were and to see where their people would be deployed starting this September. I showed them the UMS and our quarters, and we discussed the medical work of the FOB.

Not wanting our guests to be bored, Master Seaman Turcotte (one of the Bison crew commanders) decided to provide us with a chance to show them how sophisticated the care in our UMS could be. So he got on top of his vehicle . . . and fell off.

A Bison is not a small vehicle. A fall from the top generates precisely the kind of kinetic energy necessary for one of those blunt trauma cases I described in the previous entry. To enable us to display even more of our skills, MS Turcotte helpfully landed on his face. This gave us a tricky facial laceration to repair as well. This was an act of selfless devotion to the job, one that we will be reminding MS Turcotte about for some time.

I got the patient sewn up quickly. Apart from the cuts on his face, he had no other apparent injuries. That left the non-apparent injuries he might have suffered in his chest or abdomen. This presented me with the opportunity to give an impromptu lesson in EDE to my two visitors, neither of whom were familiar with the technique. They were interested in the ultrasound examination, so we discussed ways they could integrate this into the practice of their physicians.

We ended the visit with a run up to the hilltop observation post. You can see most of Zhari-Panjwayi from up there. You can also see where 85 per cent or more of the Canadians who have been killed in Afghanistan met their end. Neither of my colleagues had fully appreciated that before.

I brought them back to the UMS, and we talked about a few more things before it was time for them to go. I wished them well as they headed back to KAF.

I hope they have the most boring tour imaginable.

JULY 11 | Visitors

Two notable encounters with visitors today.

MORNING: THE QUIET ONES

Every morning, right after I wake up, I run to the top of Ma’Sum Ghar a few times to get my daily exercise. It is a steep climb, and I need to breathe a bit at the top before coming back. I usually say hello to the men manning the observation post located there. Depending on the situation, they could be from the private security company or some of our own troopers. Not today.

The men looking out over the Panjwayi valley this morning were unlike any you would ordinarily see on the FOB. They had beards and longish hair. They wore no insignia of rank or unit, no name tags. Their weapons had silencers and more sophisticated scopes than the ones on a standard infantry rifle. Their body armour was custom-made and lighter than that normally issued. This represented a tradeoff: less protection in exchange for increased mobility. Their demeanour, while polite, was distant. They asked no questions and offered no information about themselves, and introductions yielded only a first name.

The Quiet Ones had come to Ma’Sum Ghar.

When a soldier joins the combat arms, he is timid. The environment is new, his instructors are terrifying, and the skills he is being asked to master are foreign. No one feels self-confident in this situation.

When a soldier finishes basic training and can now call himself an infantryman, the opposite is true. He feels like a Dangerous Man. Even if he had no self-confidence before joining the army, he has a lot now.

If the soldier receives further instruction, such as paratrooper or reconnaissance training, his self-confidence grows even more. He may even become somewhat annoying, adopting an aggressive, in-your-face attitude. I can state this with some assurance, having been that annoying guy when I graduated from the Combat Training Centre. Most soldiers mature over the course of a few years, retaining the self-confidence while shedding the bluster.

There are a few soldiers who choose to go beyond the advanced infantry training available in the regular battalions. They go on to become some of the most skillful and lethal soldiers in the world. They are our best and they take a backseat to no one, regardless of what you may have heard about the British SAS, the American Green Berets or SEALs, or the Israeli Commandos.

The paradox is that, with this additional training, the linear relationship between training and bravado is broken. Instead, the opposite occurs. You can be in a room with several of these men and still feel like you are alone. Far from bragging about their considerable accomplishments, they prefer to fade into the walls and they do so quite effectively.

I had the opportunity, a few weeks before coming back to Afghanistan, to train a number of these men in some advanced emergency medical techniques. Even in that setting, with a man who was a veteran as their teacher, they kept to their strict code of self-effacing silence.

The Quiet Ones are not assigned to any particular FOB. Rather, they wander around Afghanistan on various assignments. They will not get into major confrontations with the Taliban. They will not be involved in reconstruction work. They will not help rid the country of IEDs. What they will do is watch. Silently. And with infinite patience.

The Quiet Ones are looking for a face, one that has been identified beyond any reasonable doubt. More often than not, their patience is rewarded. The face suddenly appears in their binoculars or telescopes. Just as quickly, the face disappears. But now they know where the face is.

The culmination of all that watching is coming soon. The Quiet Ones are human, and they are no doubt feeling excited and apprehensive about what is to follow, but you could not read that on their faces. Their conversation is muted, limited to an exchange of information as the plan is developed. Their faces remain neutral.

The Quiet Ones continue to watch, until the most propitious moment. Then they move, in the same silence and with the same patience they displayed while they watched.

Then they strike.

When I was at my first FOB during Roto 4, there was a poster on the wall showing the faces of the Taliban commanders in our area of operations at the start of the rotation. Roughly half of the faces were crossed out with a red X.

Thanks to the Quiet Ones, the life expectancy for Taliban commanders in Zhari-Panjwayi is not very good.

AFTERNOON: THE PRISONER

The ANP captured a Taliban soldier last night. The circumstances of that capture are unclear to me, but the Talib was in a prisoner cage this morning. It is also unclear to me how he got out of that cage, but get out of it he did. He then attempted to flee at high speed. The ANPobjected to this. An AK-47 bullet shot through the Talib’s left leg settled the squabble in the police’s favour.

It was a nasty wound. The bullet entered just above the calf muscle and exited in the middle of the leg, just below the kneecap. When a high-powered bullet such as this goes through a limb, it shatters the bone and causes a small explosion to occur where the bullet exits. While the entry wound was the size of the bullet (smaller than a dime), the exit wound was somewhat larger than a kiwi.

This was bad news for the patient. There are two bones in your leg: a small one on the outside that you can do without—the fibula— and a larger one on the inside—the tibia—that carries all your body’s weight. The part of the tibia closest to the knee had been destroyed. When I explored the exit wound, the bone seemed to end five centimetres short of where it should have. I could not detect a pulse in the foot, indicating that the patient’s blood vessels had also been damaged.

If a patient was to have a chance to keep his leg he needed surgery as soon as possible, so we called for a helicopter medevac, priority Alpha. We controlled the bleeding, bandaged the wound, splinted the leg and gave him intravenous antibiotics and pain medication. When I was done, I allowed two military intelligence types to question him.

It was interesting to watch this process. If you have visions of the interrogation sessions straight out of a James Bond movie, you could not be further off base. I had the impression I was watching the neighbourhood cops questioning a well-known and mostly harmless delinquent. The questioner was only mildly stern. He did not touch the patient, even when the patient tried to doze off. His questions were factual, and neither his words nor his tone were ever threatening. His companion took notes but said nothing.

Within thirty minutes we got word that the medevac choppers were arriving. I took a minute, as I always do in these situations, to tell the prisoner that we were Canadians and that we had taken very good care of him. I hoped that this would convince him to turn against his former Taliban mentors. Failing that, I hoped he would remember our kindness if a Canadian ever became his prisoner. Even if neither of these results ever occurs, this doesn’t change my approach: I will fight this war as hard as I can, but I will fight humanely.

JULY 14 | The Elements, Part 2: Earth

The FOBs are on the front line of a war zone. Although things are better than they were during Roto 4, our existence here is still one of physical discomfort. I would be denying a key part of the soldiers’ experience if I did not recognize that.

I have already described the effects of the heat. I am shielded from the worst effects of this because both the UMS and my bunker are air-conditioned. But none of us can get away from the dust, which is all-pervasive. It is a fine powder that coats everything it touches. Every footfall raises a small puff. Even in this relatively windless area, the dust seeps into the most remote recesses of our buildings. Master Corporal “Red” Ricard wages a daily battle, armed with mop and broom, to keep the floor of the UMS clean.

The dust also seems to impregnate all our belongings. Food becomes gritty before the meal can be finished. Clothing comes out of the dryer with sand trapped in the fibres. Even right after stepping out of the shower, you get the feeling that you are not completely clean.

It is in the air, however, that this phenomenon is most apparent. There was a stretch of three consecutive days last month when the dust in the air was so thick the sky looked like grey milk. There is menace in such a sky: dust is responsible for nearly all the “medevac red” periods, when our helicopters are grounded.

These are times of considerable anxiety for a FOB doc. I can do anything the patient needs for the first thirty to sixty minutes of resuscitation care. After that, the treatment options available to me are exhausted. If I have been unable to stabilize the patient, as would be the case with ongoing bleeding into the chest or abdomen, he or she needs to be in the O.R. at KAF. These patients need a blood transfusion and an operation, neither of which I can offer here. If the medevac birds are not flying, I might have to watch one of our soldiers bleed to death.

JULY 15 | Stand To

Stand to: the procedure whereby all soldiers on a base, regardless of their normal tasks, will grab a weapon and take a defensive position. Used when the base is under imminent threat of attack.

The FOB Ma’Sum Ghar combat team left for an operation at first light this morning.

It is impossible to conceal the departure of a dozen or more tanks and other armoured vehicles. The Taliban spies will have noted this. Usually, they are more concerned with where the combat team is headed. This time, it seems they focused their attention back towards the FOB.

It is unusual for the Taliban to attempt a ground attack against one of our FOBs, but it does happen. During one such attack against Ma’Sum Ghar during my last tour, the gunfight lasted so long that the soldiers on our perimeter began to run low on ammunition. The FOB commander ordered the cooks and the medical staff to reinforce them.

At today’s unit commanders meeting, we were told that our intelligence had reported the FOB being observed, possibly with an eye to a ground attack. Given our reduced numbers, the FOB commander called on all of us to be more vigilant than usual and to be prepared to repel any assault.

I reflected on our previous experience and thought that we could do better this time. The cooks and medical staff, though more than willing to get into a gunfight, are initially tasked to defend the UMS. On Roto 4, it had not been clear where the commander had wanted the perimeter reinforced. I mentioned this to the FOB commander, and he agreed to come by later to give us a precise assignment.

But once an infantryman, always an infantryman. When I got back from the meeting I went for a quick walk up the hill behind the UMS to look at where I could best place Red, the remaining Bison crew (one crew went on the operation) and myself to defend our little patch of ground. As frightening as it would be to get involved in a close-range gunfight, I found that prospect far preferable to sitting in our bunker, unable to see outside and waiting for someone to come to the door.

Before the FOB commander could come to visit us, the Taliban hit us with another rocket. This one landed right on the helipad, narrowly missed one trooper, bounced up and over another trooper and then slammed into one of the concrete walls but did not detonate. Had we been running a helicopter medevac or personnel transfer at the time, it could have done a lot of damage. The EOD team went to get the rocket and placed it on the other side of the little hill located right behind the UMS. How comforting. They plan to BIP it tomorrow.

The threat of a ground attack takes everybody’s anxiety up a notch. It is one thing to know that there are people here who want to kill us. It is another thing to contemplate that they might come and try it tonight.

JULY 16 | Terror

When you’re wounded and left on

Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

—RUDYARD KIPLING, “The Young British Soldier”

The day started badly. When Red and I came into the UMS and checked our communication devices, we saw that we were in “coms lockdown.”

This meant that one of our own was dead. As bad as that was, things soon got much worse.

One of our recce patrols had been deployed southeast of here onto a mountain known as Salavat Ghar to support the operation that jumped off yesterday. It is their job to explore the battlefield, to detect the enemy and report their location to the main body of our troops.

The recce troopers are highly skilled and extremely fit. During a pre-deployment exercise I underwent prior to this mission, I was taken on a patrol by one of these men. He was so adept at camouflaging himself and was able to move through the bush so quietly that I felt I was walking with a ghost. Usually when these men go out, the Taliban have no idea they are there. Today was one of the rare exceptions to this rule.

The recce soldiers were establishing an observation post when one of them, Private Sébastien Courcy, tripped a mine. The explosion threw him off a cliff. At the same time, the patrol was under fire from a Taliban mortar. After the blast, the other members of the patrol had no idea where Private Courcy was.

That news travelled back to the FOB at lightning speed. As bad as we feel when one of us is killed, this was much, much worse. Our comrade might have been captured. It has been said that the Taliban do not take prisoners. That is inaccurate. What they do not do is allow prisoners to live. And the way they torture prisoners before killing them is nothing short of barbaric. When we heard the first reports about our missing recce trooper, we were terrified that this would be his fate.

Within an hour of the initial reports, we had more details. It was uncertain whether he had been blown off the mountain by an explosion or if he had slipped off while running, but there was no doubt that our comrade had fallen a long distance, to his death. It was nonetheless some small comfort that his body was found by Canadians, and not by the enemy.

THE POWER OF FEAR

Terror works.

If it did not, terrorists would not use it. By torturing and beheading their captives, al Qaeda and the Taliban extremists demonstrate how far they are willing to go to achieve their goals. When they threaten the local civilian population with reprisals if those civilians co-operate with us, those threats are often effective.

Occasionally, I hear a Canadian soldier complain that the Afghans are not doing enough to ward off the Taliban themselves. When I hear that, I get annoyed and I say so. For a member of a heavily armed Canadian battle group to compare himself to unarmed Afghan civilians is beyond ridiculous. Our experience of terror in Canada is limited, mostly confined to the 1963–70 bombing-and-murder campaign of the FLQ. We cannot know how we would react if we were constantly subjected to it. But the historical record is clear. When a powerful group terrorizes a population, nearly all the members of that population—regardless of ethnicity, nationality, religion or anything else—try to get along with those who are able to harm them. This is true even if it is virtually certain that the intent of those in power is to kill everyone. The key word in that last sentence is “virtually.” People in these situations will cling to the slightest hope that they might survive, and they will go to unimaginable lengths to appease those who might kill them rather than commit suicide by fighting them.

But if terror can make people do unspeakable things, is it a source of real power? Only in the short run. Terrorists can cause unimaginable suffering and be very difficult to oppose, but they cut themselves off from any legitimate claim to authority. All through history, tyrants have done their best to terrorize populations. They have always fallen.

JULY 17 | Boredom

Against boredom, the gods themselves struggle in vain.

— FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Reading the entries in which I describe dealing with multiple war casualties, you might get the impression that those days are busy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even a MasCal with multiple casualties only occupies me for an hour, two at the most if we include cleanup and debrief. After that, all the casualties are either evacuated or have been treated and released. The busiest day here does not begin to approach an average shift in a large emergency department.

It would also be a mistake to assume that the presence of imminent danger, which has loomed large in the previous two days’ entries, is in any way entertaining. As described in “Downregulation” (June 17), soldiers get used to this quickly. It is common to feel bored while being scared. But as boring as even my busiest day can be, one group of soldiers are a lot worse off than I am.

Individuals who have drawn shifts in the various observation posts (OPs) that ring the FOB have the worst job to which one can be assigned here. It combines the need to be constantly vigilant— a source of stress and fatigue—with the need to look at the same unchanging terrain for hours—a source of yet more stress and fatigue. If wars are 95 per cent boredom and 5 per cent terror, OP duty is 99.99 per cent boredom and 0.01 per cent “What the fuck was that?”

The graffiti one encounters in an OP reflects the mind-numbing boredom of hours spent watching the Afghan dust . . . get dustier: “I spent two weeks in this OP and nothing happened and the same will happen to you. I’m telling you it would be easier to end your life now.” A few feet away, we find the franco version: “Oubliez pas vous êtes ici pour un crisse de boutte.” (“Don’t forget you’re gonna be here for a fuck of a long while.”)

Observation post philosophy

A third one says: “They should really change that military commercial so that it says: Fight boredom. Fight bullshit. Fight each other.” The commercial in question shows Canadian soldiers saving civilians, either on search and rescue or peacekeeping operations. The captions are: “Fight fear. Fight chaos. Fight distress.”

Our army is at war, yet it produces a recruitment ad that does not mention that key detail. A little disconcerting, that.

JULY 18 | Middle of the Night Conversion

Catchy title, eh? A reference to our converting the heathens? Nope. The Coalition forces are respectful of the Islamic faith. This is about a completely different kind of conversion.

At 0230, the phone linking us to the command post rang and Red answered it: “Afghan soldier. Unconscious. ETA five minutes.” Red and I bolted for the UMS. Corporal Bouthillier, the Bison medic, joined us a minute later. A minute after that, a jeep drove up. The unconscious patient was quickly moved into the UMS. Corporal Bouthillier started an IV, and Red checked the vital signs while I proceeded with my examination. When I finished, I had a patient without any detectable injuries or signs of a drug overdose but who was deeply unconscious. Stumped, I went outside to question the other Afghan soldiers.

The soldier had been on a patrol that had returned to the FOB at 0200. A half-hour later, he suddenly collapsed. They had not come under fire during the patrol, and he had seemed fine until that point. The patient had had a similar episode six months earlier and been evacuated to KAF. He had been kept there for a couple of days, but no diagnosis had been established. I went back in the UMS and carefully examined the patient again to ensure I hadn’t missed any subtle signs of disease or injury. Finding none, I began to wonder if I was dealing with a “conversion reaction.”

Sometimes called “hysterical conversion reaction,” this is a psychological state in which stress produces a direct effect on the body: the mental feeling is “converted” into a physical symptom. This can take the form of paralysis, blindness or a number of other manifestations. The patient has very little control over a conversion reaction. It is quite different from malingering, which is the conscious attempt to fake an injury or disease.

The societal demand on Afghan men to be good fighters is extreme. To fail as a soldier is to fail at everything it means to be an Afghan man. During my previous tour, there was only one Afghan soldier who I thought might have had a conversion reaction. I was reluctant to advance the diagnosis in this case. An emergency physician should always hesitate before deciding “it’s all in his head.”

I then noticed that we had not checked the patient’s temperature, the most commonly forgotten vital sign. Since an unconscious patient cannot co-operate with an oral temperature, I ordered Red to use the rectal thermometer. As Red touched the thermometer to the patient’s anus, the buttocks clenched tightly. Seeing that, I began to relax. The patient might be unresponsive, but it was unlikely that he was sick. When Red tried again, the patient opened his eyes to look at me, then quickly shut them again.

At that point, the jig was up. While this patient may have had a conversion reaction when this all started, he was now malingering. I told the interpreter to tell him to get up and walk out. Within a couple of minutes, he did exactly that. No trip to KAF this time, bucko.

JULY 19 | Haji Baran

The title of today’s entry is based in part on one of the Five Pillars of Islam. The teacher in me cannot resist telling you about all five.

The shahadah is a verbal expression of belief that recognizes the singular nature of God and accepts that Muhammad was God’s messenger.

Zakat is compulsory charity. In Islam, you get hit for 2.5 per cent of your total income. The key question is how low your income has to be before you can cross over from payer to payee. The answer is clever, in that it has remained the same since it was established: three ounces of gold. Today, that would be a per annum income of $3,139.29 in Canadian dollars.

Salat is the requirement to pray five times a day: at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and night. Each salat is performed facing towards Mecca, the Saudi Arabian city that is the holiest place in the Muslim world.

Sawm is compulsory fasting during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims must abstain from food, drink and sexual intercourse from dawn to dusk. The fast is a way to empathize with those who are hungry and to express gratitude to God for his gifts—kind of a Thanksgiving in reverse.

The hajj is a pilgrimage to Mecca. All Muslims who can afford it are obliged to do this at least once in their lifetime. After a Muslim makes the hajj, he or she is known as a haji or a hajja. This is a high honour in the community, so much so that many small villages in the Panjwayi are named “Haji-something,” in homage to the one member of their village who went to Mecca.

This concludes the educational session; onward with current events. One of the Afghans we most depend on in the Panjwayi is Haji Baran, the district leader. I had seen him a couple of weeks ago for a stomach ailment, which I diagnosed as gastric reflux (heartburn) and treated with antacids.

Like many powerful people, Haji Baran is mindful of his special status. The first time we met, he had gone out of his way to explain to me how he had no confidence in Afghan doctors and would only be treated by Canadian M.D.s. This is a common thing for Western physicians to hear when we are overseas. It is an unfortunate example of reverse racism, and I am always a bit offended by it. I am sure most of my developing-world colleagues are doing the best they can with what they have.

Haji Baran returned today, complaining of chest pain. This placed me in a quandary. He had been seen at the FOB for chest pain a few months ago and had been helicoptered to KAF, where he underwent a standard North American cardiac workup. The workup had been negative, and Haji Baran was returned home without any cardiac medications. There was a strong probability that he was looking forward to the same treatment today. He had intimated as much during his last visit.

A satisfied patient

The Canadian officer who had come with him remained neutral on the surface. It was obvious, however, that the happier I made my patient the better things would be for our mission. Given his stature in the community, you could make an argument that another helicopter medevac might be money well spent in terms of earning his loyalty.

The complicating factor was an e-mail we received yesterday informing us that the medical rules of eligibility had been tightened up considerably. As things stood today, there was no way Haji Baran would qualify for a helicopter medevac.

What to do? There is a simple action that goes a long way towards convincing patients that your attention is focused on them. All you have to do is sit down. Numerous studies have shown that physicians who interview patients while seated are perceived to have spent twice as long with the patient as they actually did. Patients are far more satisfied with these encounters. When Haji Baran walked into the UMS, I sat us both down and proceeded with the lengthiest and most thorough interview I have done since medical school. When we were done I was convinced that Haji Baran was suffering from nothing worse than more heartburn. More importantly, he was convinced as well.*

JULY 20 | Tanker

I was run over by a tank once.

In the summer of 1980, I was at the Combat Training Centre completing the process of becoming a CF infantry officer. All my training until then had been done with small groups of foot soldiers. In this last phase, we had to learn how to operate in conjunction with the other branches of the combat arms: the artillery and the tanks.

In the June 21 entry, I described the relationship between the infantry and the artillery. The infantry go out and get into a fight. When they figure out where the bad guys are, the artillery is called to blow them to ratshit. It is a long-distance affair, the parties being at either end of a radio set.

The infantry’s relationship with the tanks is very different. Since World War One, tanks and infantry have always fought side-by-side on the battlefield. The affiliation is much more intimate than with the artillery.

The tanker instructors assigned to us wanted to make this point forcefully. They achieved this the first day we were with them by having us lie down in a straight line on a road and driving over us with a tank. I do not know what I learned by having dozens of tons of metal pass less than a foot from my nose while treads clanked a few feet on either side of me. I did listen attentively to everything the tankers said after that, so that they would not want to run over me again. That may have been their objective.

When civilians see a Leopard tank for the first time they cannot help but be overwhelmed by the size of the main armament. Pointing phallicly forward is a 120 mm cannon, not much smaller than the 155 mm M777 I have described earlier. This gun can shoot a massive shell several kilometres and destroy even well-protected Taliban bunkers. This massive firepower is great, but the Leopard’s contribution in this war goes further. The complete story takes a bit of explanation.

Although our initial deployment to Afghanistan began in Kandahar province, this lasted less than a year. By 2003, the mission was focused on providing security to the capital, Kabul. Our soldiers were based outside the city at Camp Julien. We would conduct some combat operations, but mostly we patrolled Kabul and the surrounding area on foot and in jeeps.

In October 2003, Sergeant Robert Short and Corporal Robbie Beerenfenger were conducting one of these patrols on the outskirts of Kabul when their vehicle hit a mine. By the time they were discovered, both of them were dead. In January 2004, Corporal Jamie Murphy was killed while patrolling downtown Kabul, when a suicide bomber jumped onto the hood of his vehicle and detonated himself.*

The vehicle implicated in both these incidents was the Iltis jeep. This was a “soft skinned” vehicle, meaning that it was not armoured and offered virtually no protection against IEDs and other explosives. Following these deaths, the CF was pilloried for sending soldiers to Afghanistan without such protection.

There was some justification for this criticism. The Afghan resistance had made extensive use of IEDs and mines in the war against the Russians in the 1980s, and many Taliban fighters had benefited directly or indirectly from this experience. As for suicide bombing, it was a staple of Islamic extremism. It was predictable that our enemies would launch attacks on our patrols using high explosives delivered by a variety of means.

Pain may not be the best way to teach, but it is undeniably effective. Within months, contracts were rushed through for the purchase of small armoured vehicles called G-wagons. These were used with some success in Kabul.

Even before Canada shifted its deployment to Kandahar, however, the push was on to equip our forces with the LAV. The LAV is a wheeled vehicle. With even marginal roads or reasonably solid terrain, it can get around far better than a tank. Armed with a 25 mm cannon, it packs more than enough punch to defeat soldiers on foot. Its armour is thick enough to offer good protection against bullets and moderate protection against mines and other explosions. At three million dollars apiece, a LAV costs less than half what a tank costs.

With the end of the Cold War, it was unlikely that we would ever again have to face an enemy equipped with thousands of tanks, like the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies had been. The L AV was more suitable for the low-intensity conflicts in which we might become involved. We would become a lighter, more nimble force. After dominating the battlefield for a century, the tank seemed to be on its way out (in the Canadian Army, at least).

Task Force Afghanistan was equipped with L AVs by the summer of 2006. This is an important date because at the end of that summer, in September 20 06, we launched Operation Medusa, Canada’s largest combat operation since the end of the Korean War. Over several weeks the Canadian battle group fought its way into Zhari-Panjwayi.* Among other things, these Canadians established our first crude outposts in this area. These outposts evolved into the FOBs we have today.

The fighting during Op Medusa was unlike anything we have seen since. The Taliban had massed over a thousand fighters in a determined attempt to take, or at least to attack, Kandahar City. The city had been the capital of Afghanistan during their reign, and it still held a powerful attraction for them. It was the job of the Canadians to prevent this.

Canadians may recall that period, the late summer and early fall of 2006, because a dozen Canadians were killed—more than in the previous four years combined. What very few Canadians know is that Op Medusa was an overwhelming Canadian victory. Hundreds of Taliban were killed, and their access to Kandahar City was permanently denied. Apart from the infiltrators who have come singly or in pairs to plant bombs, there has been only one meaningful Taliban incursion into the city limits since then.* This was also the last time that large numbers of Taliban attempted to go toe to toe with a Canadian battle group.

The Taliban learned from their pain as well as we had. Since they could not defeat us in face-to-face encounters, they turned to IEDs. They were mirroring the actions of insurgents in Iraq, who had learned that vehicles like the L AV could be defeated with IEDs. Tanks, on the other hand, were almost impervious to these weapons.

As our losses from IEDs mounted, an urgent call went out for tanks to be deployed with our battle group. In an astounding tour de force, the Lord Strathcona’s Horse was able to deploy a squadron of tanks to Kandahar in only six weeks.

When the Canadian Leopards took to the field, they gave us a weapons platform that was invulnerable to anything the Taliban could throw at it. Wherever one of these beasts goes, it automatically creates a circle several kilometres in diameter within which any Taliban foolish enough to fire a weapon is very likely to die.

Another important feature of the tanks is their ability to smash through the mud brick walls that surround the compounds and line many of the roads and tracks in the area. Taliban ambushes are often launched from abandoned compounds or other areas where these walls can afford them some protection. This protection can be nullified by having a tank drive through the wall, a procedure called “breaching.”

Finally, the sound of a tank attacking with its main armament is an experience that defines “shock and awe.” This element is explained by Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman in his seminal book On Combat. * Grossman calls it the Bigger Bang Theory.

The equivalent of the Leopard in the American army is the Abrams. It has the same-size cannon and roughly the same dimensions. In his book, Grossman relates that battles fought in Iraq between insurgents armed with rifles and RPGs (much like the Taliban are here) lasted only a minute or two when Abrams tanks were involved. The insurgents would break contact and flee as soon as the tanks opened fire.

When the same insurgents went up against Stryker vehicles (the equivalent of our LAVs), the battles could last for hours, even though the 40 mm grenade launchers and .50 -calibre machine guns on the Stryker were as lethal against insurgents on foot as the 120 mm gun of the Abrams. It seems that the sound of the tank’s gun affected the insurgents on a primal level.

There are many similar occurrences throughout history. The first time muskets were used against men armed with crossbows is an excellent example. A man armed with a crossbow could fire a deadly projectile farther, more often and with greater accuracy than could a man armed with a musket. Nonetheless, the bowmen fled in disorder when confronted with the roar of these primitive firearms. The Leopard tank gives us a similar advantage over our enemies.

A successful mission, a happy crew

Captain Sandy Cooper’s tank is named “Stephanie,” after his wife. Clockwise from left, standing: Trooper Derek (“Never-Miss”) Tonn, gunner; top right: Master Corporal Darryl Hordyk, loader, tank second-in-command (a new master corporal, but he seamlessly starts directing the crew when Captain Cooper is busy talking to his commander on the radio); bottom right: Trooper Felix “I brake forIEDs” Lussier, driver; Captain Cooper.

Most importantly, this firepower, breaching capability and psychological impact can be delivered with minimal risk to our troops. Leopards lead the way down the roads of the combat area and they routinely hit IEDs, but virtually all of the damage is suffered by the vehicle rather than by the men inside.

Basing our Leopards at Ma’Sum Ghar places them in the centre of our area of operations, making them readily available anytime heavy firepower and strong protection are required. They go out on operations as often as the infantry, and yesterday they returned from a five-day jaunt through Nakhonay (Operation Constrictor IV), during which they kicked some serious ass.*

JULY 21 | Michelle and Mariam

I had finished eating dinner around 1715 and my thoughts were turning to the pleasant experience I would soon have of hearing the voices of my wife and daughter. Michelle is usually full of energy in the morning, eager to tell me her plans for the day.

Mariam probably woke up the same way. She had come from Kandahar City to visit her grandfather. He lives in Bazaar-e-Panjwayi, the village beside FOB Ma’Sum Ghar. Like Michelle, Mariam would have been excited at the dawning of a new day. A trip like this would have been quite an adventure for her.

Mariam would have spent the day exploring her new surroundings. Bazaar-e-Panjwayi is a lot poorer than Kandahar City, but children do not focus on things like that. I imagine Mariam’s attention was drawn more to the big mountains right beside the village. For a little girl from Kandahar City, this is “the country.” It may be poor, but it is full of new sights and sounds that fascinate the young mind. No doubt she also spent a good deal of time today snuggling up to her grandfather. He may have been a fierce Pashtun in his youth, but age has mellowed him. I have no trouble seeing him doting on his granddaughter. This gives the two girls something else in common: my parents adore Michelle and love her almost as much as I do.

When one looks for hope in a place as desperate as Afghanistan, it is almost a cliché to look at the children. Will they have the wisdom and the strength to do a better job than we have? Will they find a way to bring peace to this land? I hope Michelle becomes the kind of person who could contribute to this process. Mariam, tragically, will never get the chance to do so.

Around 1800 hours, one of our patrols was checking things in Bazaar-e-Panjwayi. These “presence patrols” show the enemy that we are keeping our eye on things and that there is no place we cannot go. The patrol entered the marketplace, where more people than usual were shopping and walking around.

This was neither a good thing nor a bad thing. The presence of many civilians does not guarantee that the Taliban will not detonate a mine or launch an ambush, as we have seen countless times in the past. Occasionally, the local population will get some warning of an impending Taliban attack. This makes it a very bad sign to see villagers scatter as we approach. This is called a “combat indicator,” and our troops go on high alert when that happens.

Whenever our troops are out and about, they maintain a security bubble into which no civilian can penetrate without showing due cause and harmless intent. After IEDs, suicide bombers are the most lethal weapon at the Taliban’s disposal. We want to make it difficult for them to get close enough to us to launch their attacks.

Taliban suicide bombers wear civilian clothing and are indistinguishable from the innocent. That is why Coalition forces have made strenuous attempts to educate the population. Signs on the roads and on our vehicles admonish civilians that they must never approach our patrols, checkpoints or convoys in a threatening manner. After eight years of war, a civilian would have to be mentally deficient not to be aware of this.

At approximately 1815, a man on a motorcycle drove towards the patrol. As he approached, the patrol made hand signals that clearly indicated the driver had to stop. The driver ignored these signals and kept driving, passing an Afghan police vehicle at the head of the patrol and getting even closer to the Canadians. This led to an “escalation of force”: the patrol aimed its weapons at the motorcyclist. That did the trick, and the driver stopped at a safe distance from the patrol. He was apprehended by the Afghan police and taken away. People who approach Coalition patrols are so likely to be motivated by nefarious intent that they are inevitably questioned and, almost as inevitably, released for lack of evidence.

The patrol had gone only a few metres farther when a second man approached, also on a motorcycle. He circled the patrol four times, just outside the security bubble. He stopped and turned his motorcycle directly towards the patrol and gunned the engine several times. Then he sped forward.

The two soldiers closest to the motorcyclist had already discussed what they would do if they had to go beyond hand signals. One of them carried a C9 light machine gun and the other carried our standard C7 rifle. The C7 is capable of firing a single, well-aimed shot, whereas a single pull of the trigger on the C9 sends several bullets into a rough general area. The soldiers had therefore agreed that any warning shots would be fired by the rifleman to minimize the risk to the civilians.

This time, the hand signals and the raised weapon that followed had no effect on the driver’s behaviour. The motorcyclist kept moving towards the patrol. The rifleman then fired a warning shot into the ground several metres in front of the motorcycle. The motorcyclist turned and fled.

The patrol formed into a perimeter, scanning 360 degrees for any further threats. Then it noticed a body lying on the ground. The soldiers rushed over to see if they could help, but there was nothing to be done.

The bullet had skipped off the ground and hit Mariam in the forehead. The back of her head had exploded, and most of her brain ended up on the ground beside her. She died in the blink of an eye.

“Junior” Cappelli Horth was the medic on the patrol. He bandaged Mariam’s head, picked up her skull and brain matter and put them in a plastic bag, loaded her into a vehicle and rushed back to the FOB. He did not attempt CPR. This was the perfect way to deal with this horrible situation. Junior had treated the patient with dignity and professionalism. Even across cultural divides, families can see that.

The “right thing” to do, however, depends on whether one is in Canada or in the developing world. Back home, I have run a number of resuscitations on children who I knew were long gone. By the time I go to tell their parents the bad news, I can show them all the things we did to try to save their child. Parents in the West accept that even if the doctor does everything right, the resuscitation attempt might fail. They have seen enough T V shows in which that happens that it has become part of their reality. Even when it is obvious their loved one is dead, Canadians are comforted when they believe the doctor “did everything that could be done.”

People in the developing world, on the other hand, are exposed to death much more often than we are. Between 10 and 20 per cent of their children die before age five, and elderly family members often die at home. Because of this, they accept that various diseases and injuries lead inevitably to death. Conversely, they often have an unrealistic view of what modern medicine can do. The things we achieve seem so miraculous to them that they can have trouble accepting the fact that our best efforts are sometimes not enough. The futile resuscitation attempt we undertake in Canada to ease parents into the grieving process is sometimes seen in the developing world as a failure that has at least an element of physician error involved. It is wiser to forgo any such attempt if the conclusion is preordained.

Tracer bullet ricocheting
(Photo courtesy Master Corporal Julien Ricard)

That was what I had in mind when Mariam arrived at the UMS. A quick exam determined that she had no pulse, was not breathing and had fixed and midrange pupils. I loosened her bandage and felt her skull. It felt like picking up a bag of marbles. Although there was only a tiny hole in her forehead, everything behind her face was shattered.

I turned to her grandfather and told him that I was terribly sorry, but there was nothing I could do. I told him I deeply regretted his loss, but it looked like he was past that. He seemed to have already accepted the death of his granddaughter. His questions had to do with the details of getting her body back to his home. Nonetheless, I asked the interpreter to explain to him that Mariam had not suffered. I say the same thing to bereaved families I deal with in Canada. It seems to help.

When Mariam and her grandfather had gone, I turned my attention to the Canadians. I told Junior that he had done an outstanding job. He seemed okay. I spent a long time after that talking to the shooter. He is a sensitive and sophisticated man. By the time we were done talking, I think he had settled into the healthiest and most appropriate emotional reaction to this incident. He was distraught, but he recognized that his actions had been correct under the circumstances. Had he failed to defend the patrol, he might have allowed a suicide bomber to get close enough to kill several of his comrades.

The second motorcyclist, the one who caused all this, was not caught by the Afghan police. He has to have been a Taliban sympathizer, if not an active fighter. He was testing the patrol to see at what range our soldiers would fire warning shots, in an attempt to analyze its defensive procedures. In doing so, he deliberately provoked the patrol into shooting when there were numerous civilians around. He recklessly endangered those civilians and caused Mariam’s death. I doubt he feels as bad about that as the shooter does.

It is now a little after 2100. I am going to call home and talk to Michelle. I will ask her what she is doing, and we will laugh together for a few minutes. Then I will try to fall asleep while thinking about her face and not the one I saw tonight.

Addendum, July 31: The press reports in Canada have been reasonable about this incident, with the exception of one news outlet in Montreal that implied we had fired several rounds at civilians without explaining the threat our troops had faced. There has been a thorough investigation, which I will write more about in a later entry. It goes without saying that the family will be compensated.

Our procedures have been reviewed, and all troops have been ordered to fire warning shots into the air from now on. This is not as effective as firing into the ground. A shot into the air generates only a loud noise, whereas a shot into the ground also produces the visual stimulus of the dust kicking up where the bullet strikes. Firing into the ground is a much more powerful deterrent. It is also awkward and time-consuming to move to a “shoot to kill” position after having fired into the air. Nonetheless, we will use this method to increase the population’s safety.

Now, some context. The UN has issued a report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan over the first six months of 2009. There have been more than a thousand such deaths, over 70 per cent of them caused by the Taliban. These numbers are the opposite of what insurgencies should produce. Look at the civilian casualty rates in Sudan, El Salvador, Rhodesia and many others. Poorly armed rebel forces try to earn the trust and co-operation of the civilian population and cause few casualties among them. Entrenched powers use heavy weapons in sometimes indiscriminate ways and cause a lot of civilian casualties. Here, the proportions are completely inverted.

The report also accuses the Taliban of taking advantage of Pashtun culture, specifically nanawati (see the June 9 entry), to coerce civilians into giving them shelter and then attacking Coalition forces from those same dwellings. According to the report, this sometimes tricks Coalition forces into attacking the area and causing civilian casualties. This is something we are trying very hard to avoid.

Addendum, August 1: This is rich! Within twenty-four hours of the UN report coming out, the Taliban issued a statement saying they would “stop using suicide bombers to avoid harming Afghan civilians.” Eight years of war and thousands of civilian deaths later.

JULY 22 | Rules of Evidence, Rules of War

We had only one war casualty today, a fifteen-year-old who took a bullet to the shoulder. His injuries were not life-threatening, the care was straightforward and the medevac helicopter came quickly. I met his father at the gate after the helicopter had left and assured him his son would be returned to him shortly and in good health.

The most important aspect of the case had nothing to do with the medicine. The boy had been brought in after FOB Zettlemeyer, an ANP outpost a kilometre north of here, had been attacked. He told us he had been catching small crabs in the Arghandab River when he was shot. The problem with his story is that he was discovered north of the outpost whereas the river is to the south, between the FOB and the outpost. For his story to be true, he would have had to have walked close to one kilometre through the bush with his gunshot shoulder. This is very difficult to believe, as this would have meant he had walked away from the FOB, to which he claimed to have requested to come when he was found by the ANP.

Although still a juvenile, the patient fell into the category we call FA M, a fighting-age male (the Taliban make extensive use of child soldiers). We all had a gut feeling that this guy was wrong somehow. That is not enough. He was sent to Kandahar without any restrictions on his future movements. He was not even questioned by our military intelligence people.

We have had people about whom our suspicions of Taliban affiliation were much stronger but who were also released for lack of sufficient evidence. Some soldiers are frustrated when that happens, because it is likely that these individuals will go right back to their Taliban units and be attacking us the next day. Whenever I sense that this might be the case, I tell the aggravated soldier that the ones we let go are living proof that, despite the savagery of our enemies, we continue to fight this war in a clean and honourable way.

I say the same thing when a soldier expresses frustration with our rules of engagement, the criteria we must satisfy before we open fire. The rules are different for different weapons, with the most restrictive criteria being reserved for the heaviest weapons, the ones most at risk of killing innocent bystanders. The combat troopers who are getting shot at from one family compound sometimes resent it when a commander, safe at KAF, denies them an air strike because it might damage a neighbouring compound. It speaks volumes about the discipline and professionalism of these men that they follow these rules.

JULY 23 | Investigations

I spent a good deal of time yesterday describing the circumstances of Mariam’s death with a representative of the CF National Investigation Service (NIS). Any incident of this severity is investigated by NIS. Its members are senior members of the military police and serve as the detectives of that branch.

It is common for emergency physicians to have to discuss cases with police and lawyers, both in and out of court. I have had to do so several times and no longer feel any anxiety during the process. Although I had never met an NIS man before, much less been interviewed by one, this did not feel any different. Once the tape recorder was turned on, I gave my statement in one long speech. The investigator asked a few more questions and we were done. I had to go through the same process again today because of an incident that occurred this morning.

An Afghan policeman had been standing near the front gate of the FOB when one of our armoured vehicles came in. The Canadians indicated their intention to come in and turn to the left. However, it seems that the policeman did not know that tracked vehicles do not turn in the same way a wheeled vehicle does. To turn a tracked vehicle, you make one track go forward while the other one goes backward. As a result, the vehicle pivots, more or less in the same place. Unfortunately, the policeman did not wait for the vehicle to pass but rather walked right into its blind spot, whereupon his head was crushed between the vehicle and a wall. He was rushed to the UMS.

When he arrived, his head was covered with a sheet and he was not moving. One of the policemen accompanying him, perhaps a family relation or close friend, was distraught and screaming. He was controlled by the camp sergeant-major and removed from the premises.

I took half a second to steel myself before removing the sheet. Given the mechanism of injury and the other man’s emotional state, I thought I was going to be looking at a skull that had been squashed like a grape. Somewhat to my surprise and very much to my relief, the patient started talking as soon as I exposed his head. He had multiple facial lacerations and a skull fracture of the right forehead. His right eye socket had caved in and his eye was “extruded”—it went much further forward than it should have. The optic nerve, the thing that connects the eyeball to the brain, had been stretched a considerable distance. His pupil did not react at all when a light was shined into it.

This case gave me a chance to do some on-the-spot teaching. Everyone in the UMS, medics included, was focusing on the facial wounds. These are very distracting for medical personnel because the face is such a big part of who we are as human beings. You can lose a hand or a leg and, once your prosthesis is in place, people will barely notice the difference. A mangled face, however, dramatically changes how people see you.

I therefore took a minute to show my crew that, as bad as these injuries were, none of them was life-threatening. The patient was breathing on his own, he had good air entry into both lungs and his vital signs were stable. You could see that he was protecting his airway because he was spitting up the blood that pooled in his mouth. He also appeared neurologically intact because he was moving all four limbs and was able to speak coherently. He needed maxillofacial and plastic surgery procedures, but these could be safely delayed for hours.

I like to say that these patients are “stable in their instability.” So long as nothing else goes wrong, they are likely to remain stable for quite some time. It would be a terrible mistake, however, to assume that will be the case when a helicopter transfer is imminent. We therefore proceeded with a standard emergency department intubation, giving additional drugs to protect the brain as well as the usual ones to put the patient to sleep and paralyze him. We protected his cervical spine while we did this—always a good habit when the patient has a head trauma. We had barely finished securing the tube when the helicopter arrived to take him to KAF.

No more than an hour had gone by when another helicopter arrived at the FOB. This one carried a different member of the NIS, sent to investigate today’s incident.

I have a number of friends who are senior police officers, and the two NIS men came across the same way my buddies do: professional, very good at their jobs, completely ethical and determined to get to the truth. Both of them are investigating incidents in which the actions of Canadians have injured Afghans. Having spoken to the men involved, I am convinced that both occurrences were tragic accidents. I am equally convinced that the investigators will only reach that conclusion themselves when they have examined all the evidence and interviewed all the witnesses. And re-interviewed them, if necessary: the NIS man in charge of the investigation into Mariam’s death called me back to confirm which side of the forehead the bullet had entered, because there was disagreement among the witnesses. This may seem trivial, but it shows how badly this guy wanted to get the story absolutely right.

JULY 24 | A Righteous Shoot?

Emergency physicians like cops. We see each other a lot in the course of our duties and we have a lot in common. Both our jobs involve some drudgery leavened by regular moments of drama. We both see people when they are at their weakest, angriest and/or most distraught. We both do shift work, that notorious killer of relationships. A lot of emergency nurses end up married to cops.

I like cops more than most people do. For the past five years, I have acted as the medical adviser for the “tactical unit” (a.k.a. SWAT team) of our police department. This relationship proved to be very useful when I re-enrolled in the CF two years ago. By the time I got back in uniform, I had already reacquired many of the infantry reflexes of my youth, thanks to the training I had done with my “tac” buddies.

Emergency physicians and policemen have something else in common: people lie to us regularly, for any number of reasons. For policemen, it only goes one way: people try to hide what they have done or what they know. For emergency physicians, the untruths cover a wider spectrum. Some people exaggerate their symptoms in the hopes of obtaining a particular treatment, commonly narcotics. Others minimize their symptoms, because they are afraid of what the diagnosis might be. Some people go either way, depending on what psychopathology is dominant in their family that particular day. And some people are just nuts.

Having to sort through all these emotions and agendas every time we are on shift gives us an ability, like cops, to “read” people. While I think I do this reasonably well, the skill is situational. It is essential to consider the patient’s social and cultural milieu before drawing any conclusions. Nonetheless, my travels have taught me that there are some universal human behaviours. I may have stumbled on one more.

One of today’s patients was Abdul Rahzak, a man in his forties. He had been shot three times by the ANP. One bullet went through his right ankle, shattering the tibia and leaving his foot hanging limply. One bullet went through his right hand, breaking several bones in his palm and wrist. The last bullet could have been the widow maker, but Allah was watching over Mr. Rahzak. The slug entered below his right armpit and exited halfway up his right shoulder blade, passing outside his chest cavity. Though he was in severe pain Mr. Rahzak was breathing normally, and ultrasound confirmed there was no blood or air leaking into his chest.

The medical management was almost mundane: bandage all the wounds, splint the broken bones, give pain medicine and antibiotics, wait for the chopper. Managing the circumstances in which Mr. Rahzak was wounded proved to be far more ambiguous.

For a guy who had been shot by the police, a couple of details did not add up. After dropping Mr. Rahzak off at the UMS, none of the Afghan policemen stayed behind. Somehow, an individual on whom they had used potentially lethal force half an hour ago was not even worth questioning, much less arresting.

Mr. Rahzak’s behaviour in the UMS was equally unusual. The patients I have treated whom we either knew or suspected to be Taliban have all had one thing in common: they have all been afraid of me well into the patient encounter. They think we are going to torture them, because that is what the Taliban do to their prisoners. It takes a long time to convince these patients that I will treat them properly.

Mr. Rahzak behaved very differently. As soon as I identified myself in Pashto as a physician, he began to relax. When I had determined that no life-threatening injuries were present, I told him: “Tah bah shah kaygee” (“You’re going to be all right”). Although I had not given him any pain medication, I could tell that the patient-doctor connection had been made. Mr. Rahzak looked at me with that mixture of awe and gratitude that is the emergency physician’s reward when patients are convinced they will be well looked after. That struck me as un-Talibanlike.

While we were waiting for a helicopter I shared this observation with the camp’s sergeant-major, Master Warrant Officer Richard Stacey of the “Strats.” He is the senior non-commissioned officer on the base and a man of infinite wisdom. He was sure he had seen the patient a number of times on patrols around the FOB, and he agreed that Mr. Rahzak did not seem “wrong.”

I was still wondering why Mr. Rahzak had been shot when I was called to a meeting a few hours later. Attending the meeting were Mr. Rahzak’s brother, three local elders (two of them “Hajis” and the other a pharmacist) and two representatives of the police training team.

The meeting began with my report about the patient’s injuries. I reassured his brother that the patient’s life was not in danger, but I emphasized that the long-term function of both his right foot and right hand could be affected. Mr. Rahzak’s brother asked if he could go to Kandahar to visit him, and we will try to arrange this tomorrow.

The elders spoke next. The nagging suspicion I’d had that this had not been a “righteous shoot” became much stronger. All three of the elders were emphatic: Mr. Rahzak was in no way associated with the Taliban. He was a farmer, and he had been tending his crops when he was shot. According to the elders, the police had opened fire without any provocation whatsoever.

I have to clarify something here. In looking back over the entries I have made since arriving at Ma’Sum Ghar, I see that I have not spoken much about the constant fighting that goes on outside our perimeter wire. The outposts within a few kilometres of here get attacked on a daily basis. The gunfire and explosions have become so routine that they are not even commented upon by those inside the FOB. If you stand on the hill behind the UMS and use binoculars to watch the walls of the outpost closest to us during one of these attacks, you can see the numerous puffs of dust where bullets are hitting.

The outpost closest to us, on the other side of the Arghandab River, is manned by the ANP. These men are poorly trained, poorly led and often corrupt, and they have a large number of drug addicts in their midst. To make things worse, this particular detachment of police is from a different part of the country. They are primarily Dari speakers who speak Pashto poorly.

This is a recipe for disaster. Barely competent cops spend their days cooped up in an outpost getting shot at by people they do not like and with whom they have trouble communicating. When they come out of their outpost, possibly after one of their mates has been killed or injured, they probably have blood in their eyes and dope in their veins. At that moment, they are about as far from being professional policemen as it is possible to be. It was entirely believable that they had shot Mr. Rahzak on the spur of the moment out of blind rage.

So far, so bad. But then, what I found to be the most fascinating part of the meeting began. The two Canadians with me, Leading Seaman Andy Hewlett of the Civil Military Cooperation, or CIMIC, and Constable Ferris McLean of the RCMP, engaged the Afghans in a discussion that encapsulates how we will win this war.

They began by acknowledging the strong likelihood of wrongdoing by the police and committed themselves to sitting down with the officers involved to get their side of the story. This might sound routine in the Canadian context, but it is a revolutionary concept here.

In Afghanistan, the men with the guns have always made their own rules. Anyone who could not stand up to them has had to accept their behaviour, no matter how abusive.

The idea being put forth here was radically different. This time, other men with guns, in this case Canadians, were willing to take the side of the weak and confront the police. I take it they have done this a number of times in the past, with at least some success, because the elders reacted very positively to this commitment on the part of my fellow Canadians.

Throughout the conversation, however, the Canadians emphasized that the Afghans themselves were responsible for their own future. When the elders asked that the police be transferred out and replaced with a unit of the ANA, Leading Seaman Hewlett replied that he understood that the army was much more honest and effective than the police, but there were not enough of them to man all the outposts. He then stressed that much of the responsibility for improving the situation lay with the Afghans themselves. It was not enough for the elders to complain about the police. They would have to reach out to the police—their fellow Afghans—and try to build bridges between the police and the community.

Constable Ferris McLean, RCMP (left), and Leading Seaman Andy Hewlett, CIMIC

Constable McLean then went further and emphasized that it was unacceptable that the outposts were being attacked every day. Although he did not explicitly state it, he made it crystal clear that he expected the elders to exert their influence to convince at least the more moderate members of the insurgency to leave their area alone. Although they did not reply directly, it was easy to tell that the elders got his message. Constable McLean went on to offer to mediate a face-to-face meeting between the elders and the leaders of the local police, precisely to try to forge some links between the two groups.

As in every civil war, there are a range of motivations on both sides. Although there can never be any compromise with al Qaeda and the more extreme members of the Taliban, there exists within the Taliban movement a spectrum of political opinions. Many people on this spectrum can be convinced to renounce violence. This will be a necessary step in the ending of this war: isolating the truly evil people from those who have legitimate complaints against the government but who have chosen illegitimate means of seeking redress.

THE CIMIC

Most people have never heard of the CIMIC, but when you hear about Canadians soldiers doing reconstruction work, this is what you are hearing about. The civilian agencies, such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Department of Foreign Affairs, do not send their personnel into an area as dangerous as the Panjwayi. So it is up to Leading Seaman Hewlett and the CIMIC team to manage the money we are putting into the reconstruction of this shattered area.

A good chunk of this money goes to pay claims against us from people we have hurt or owners of property we have damaged during our operations. We are guests here, and we pay for any damage to our rented accommodations. It can, however, be tricky to sort out legitimate claims from illegitimate ones. There is an enormous incentive to try to rip off the (by local standards) incredibly rich foreigners.

This goes on in all developing-world countries. Very often, the response of the Westerner is to become angry at the sometimes-blatant fraud without appreciating the human misery that motivates it. Try to think of how far you would go to improve the lives of your children if you were living in conditions such as these.

Leading Seaman Hewlett and the CIMIC team have a much more mature and constructive approach. Realizing when they arrived that a number of claims were suspicious, they changed the process whereby the claims were paid out. They involved the local Afghan leadership and tightened up the documentation process. By making the leaders accountable to their people, they killed two birds with one stone: the people get to see that not only those with connections get their claims processed, and the leadership must be aware of what is going on with the local people.

The claims process is a two-way street. A lot of information flows into the CIMIC during its interactions with the locals, some of it militarily very useful. When the procedure for making a claim was made more arduous, the amount of information being provided to the FOB Ma’Sum Ghar CIMIC decreased. Some CIMIC people concluded that the locals had been angered when the claims process got tougher and had decided to clam up. Then they realized that the amount of information being provided to the FOB Wilson CIMIC remained unchanged, even though it was using the same stricter claims criteria. It turns out the Taliban in the Panjwayi had targeted Afghans who interacted with the CIMIC. Taliban methods can be quite convincing, in the short term.

There is another aspect of the CIMIC’s work that is, for Leading Seaman Hewlett, far more satisfying. This involves reviewing various submissions from the local population for projects to improve their lives. To date, they have spent about three-quarters of their money on “social” programs. These include schools, health clinics and immunization programs. The rest of the money has been spent on economic development, including enhancements in the transportation infrastructure, the creation of a farmers’ market and the purchase of various pieces of machinery that the district can then lend to the farmers, among others. Programs like this give the people hope. And it is hope that keeps them away from the Taliban.

JULY 25 | HLTA

A small group of very happy soldiers left the FOB today. I thought it would be interesting to explain where they were going.

Every Canadian soldier in Afghanistan, during his or her tour of duty, goes on a three-week vacation. Any other organization would call it that: a vacation. The army, being the army, gives it a complicated name, which it then reduces to its initials.

HLTA stands for home leave travel allowance, which is the money given to the soldiers to use on their vacation. Somehow, the term for the funding morphed into the vacation itself, as in: “I am going to Thailand for my HLTA.” I pointed out to a few soldiers that this means they are going to Thailand to get money, when really they are getting money to go to Thailand, but my grammatical brilliance was not appreciated.

Organizing the HLTA generates more institutional angst than any other aspect of our mission. Joe wants to go to Disneyland with his kids during his wife’s holidays while Suzanne has to be the maid of honour at her sister’s wedding. Both events take place at the same time, and each of these people is responsible for covering the other. You can see how this would give our commanders more than a few grey hairs.

Geographically, Afghanistan is a good place to start a vacation. With a pocket of cash and almost a month off, one can reach tourist destinations that are generally hard for Canadians to visit. Many soldiers take advantage of this opportunity to visit Europe, Africa or Asia. This last option is particularly appealing to young single male soldiers and generates a predictable number of visits to the UMS for problems of a “personal” nature, most of which respond well to high doses of antibiotics.

The HLTA is wildly popular, but I can’t help but wonder about its effects on our combat effectiveness. From section to battle group, a unit’s commander and its second-in-command train for well over a year to go to war together. They get to know each other intimately. Then, during the time they most need each other, they both take almost a month off. That has always struck me as a weird way to run a war.

JULY 26 | The Home Front

General Rick Hillier once asked a group of soldiers about to deploy to Afghanistan what their most important mission was. They replied that it was to defeat the Taliban, support the Afghan government, protect civilians and other things of that nature. The general disagreed. He told them that, first and foremost, they had to support their families back home.

I have taken this admonition to heart. Although it is a point of honour that I call my daughter every day, there are very few days in which I do not find a few minutes to make a separate call to my wife. With my global satellite phone and the greatly improved Internet connections of this rotation, I am able to be much more supportive of my wife and daughter’s day-to-day activities than I was during my first tour. Claude and I discuss all family issues as much as we would if I were at home, and I participate in the “administration” of the family’s affairs. So far, I have scheduled medical appointments for both my wife and daughter, booked flights for them, organized child care, sorted out financial issues and resolved various emergencies in our extended family. I even “babysit” long-distance, keeping Michelle entertained on the phone when Claude needs several minutes of uninterrupted time.

But today is Claude’s birthday. Flowers ordered from the FOB and gifts bought before my departure notwithstanding, there is no way for me to make this day what it should be for her. Very few women (and, let’s be honest, even fewer men) would tolerate a relationship like this. But for us, it works.

And for all the uncertainty the war brings to our immediate future, we have decided to take the most life-affirming and forward-facing step possible: we will adopt a second child, this one a little girl with special medical needs from Vietnam. She will be two and a half years old when we get her, which means that the effects of a prolonged stay in a developing-world orphanage will be more severe than they were for Michelle, who came into our family when she was only fifteen months old. We will have our work cut out for us.

JULY 28 | Dogs of War

The expression “dogs of war” refers to mercenaries, people who will be soldiers for whoever will pay them. I described some of them in the June 10 entry (“The Contractor”). There are a couple of guys here for whom this expression could not be more apt. Call them Luis and Alvaro.

Luis and Alvaro come from two countries in Latin America. They live at the opposite end of the FOB from me, and I was unaware of their presence here until recently. Our paths crossed while we were waiting in line for supper one day. I noticed two men wearing Canadian uniforms and speaking Spanish. I speak Spanish fluently, so I struck up a conversation with them, mostly to learn how two Latinos had ended up here.

Luis and Alvaro are the handlers of the FOB’s bomb-sniffing dogs. The CF has contracted an American company to provide these services for our combat teams. The American company hired these gentlemen, who had been police dog handlers in their respective countries. Only in this globalized, semi-privatized war could you find the Canadian Army employing a U.S. company with South American subcontractors to fight in an Asian war.

There are benefits for all involved. The CF gets a bomb-sniffing capability off-the-shelf, with all the no-delay, no-training, no-pension advantages that mercenaries have. The Latin Americans get a higher wage than they could dream of getting at home ($250 USD a day, since you ask). No doubt the American middleman makes a healthy profit.

Luis and Alvaro invited me to watch one of their training sessions. They explained that training a dog to look for any substance is the same, regardless of whether the animal is being trained to look for drugs or dynamite. It was interesting, gratifying and disturbing, all at the same time.

Interesting, because it was amazing to see how quickly the dogs detected the hidden explosives. Gratifying, because seeing the love these men had for their animals provided a welcome respite from the blood and gunfire the day had otherwise been devoted to. Disturbing, because the dogs have no idea how dangerous their job is. To them it is just a game.

Addendum, August 1 4—A Job to Die For: Let’s call this guy Pedro. He is employed by the same company as Luis and Alvaro and is based at FOB Sperwan Ghar.

The patch on his tactical vest (which I have blurred) is the flag of the African country of which he is a citizen. In his homeland, he was trained as a physician assistant and worked as one for three years. He became engaged to his girlfriend and started to consider what the future held for him. As he explained it to me, one can buy a house in his country only for cash. There is no such thing as “20 per cent down and a mortgage.” At the rate he was going, he would be able to buy his house in twenty years. It was rentals or Dad’s house till then. Then he saw an ad for dog handlers in Afghanistan.

Pedro and Donner (as in, “On Donner and Blitzen.” Don’t ask me why. And don’t ask Pedro. He doesn’t know either.)

The company must have been a little desperate because, although Pedro strikes you as a capable young man, he had no experience as a dog handler. Since he was willing to take the job, the company hired him and paid his salary while he went on a training course.

After this course, Pedro arrived at KAF to assume his duties. He received rudimentary firearms training, which consisted of little more than instructions on how to shoot his rifle and his pistol. He had received no military training in his country, and he received nothing resembling infantry training here. Yet he goes out with his dog on combat operations where he is expected to shoot back if the unit he is with comes under enemy fire. He has lost count of the number of times that has happened.

He has been here since March 2006. That is not a typo; he has been here almost continuously for three and a half years, looking for IEDs. He stays in Afghanistan for four to six months, then he goes home for a month. He considers himself fortunate to have found this job. So do the Filipino and the Haitian who are also on staff as dog handlers at the Canadian FOBs.

He is doing all this for the princely sum of three thousand dollars a month.* He has begun construction on his house. This will take one more year to finish. He will then return home and marry his fiancée, having jumpstarted his family life by two decades—if he survives.

JULY 29 | The Brothers

A number of Afghans work on the FOB. Some do routine maintenance and construction, and others help out in the kitchen. This evening, one of the kitchen workers invited me to their tent (ten metres up the hill from the UMS) for a cup of tea.

The Afghan workers on the FOB are supposed to seek their medical care in the neighbouring town. I was aware of this rule but never had any intention of following it. I cannot evacuate Afghans to the tertiary care hospital at KAF, but so long as the patients only need advice, a few stitches or access to some of the medications we have on the FOB, I will do my best for them. This trivial kindness seems to have endeared me to the Afghans in general and the kitchen workers in particular, hence the invitation for tea. I spent a very enjoyable evening with them, and I hope we will have the opportunity to repeat the encounter.

There are four workers in this tent, three brothers and a friend of their family. The story of the three brothers is the story of Afghanistan’s past thirty years in a microcosm: brutal hardship, liberation, economic struggle, terror, the importance of family and, perhaps, a way for the country to heal.

HARDSHIP

The brothers come from a village near Kabul. The war that had devastated their country during the ten years of the Russian occupation left this area untouched. The Russian army, though unable to pacify or even move through the countryside, had kept a grip on the area around the capital. Life there had been almost normal. That ended when the Russians withdrew in 1989.

The brothers are eighteen, twenty and twenty-three years old. The oldest one would have been three when the Russians left; the next two were born during the civil war that followed.

The groups that had been armed by the United States to fight the Russians had never been united. With their common enemy gone, these groups began fighting each other. Because of this it took them three years, until 1992, to overthrow the puppet regime the communists had left in power.

During those three years, Kabul was subjected to sporadic bombardment and street fighting. That had rarely happened in the “Russian time.” As bad as that was, what came next was worse. For the next four years, from 1992 to 1996, the various factions turned on each other with a vengeance.

They tore Kabul apart. Just as hyenas will rip their prey to shreds, the warlords rocketed Kabul in a manner that was both devastating and random. Because of the inaccuracy of these weapons, very few fighters died in the bombardment. Civilian casualties were in the tens of thousands.

Things were so bad that Kabulis welcomed the Taliban when they captured the city in 1996. Although the newcomers were known for their repressive ways, anything seemed better than the anarchy and random death that had been the city’s lot for so long. Almost overnight, the repression became worse than the anarchy had been. By then, it was too late to resist. The Taliban had all the guns.

LIBERATION

The brothers were in Kabul when the Coalition attacked in 2001. The eldest would have been fifteen years old, still too young to have formed a definite political opinion about what was happening in his country. The brothers remember the Taliban fleeing, and they say they were happy about that. Let’s discount that as the thing any Afghan would say in the presence of foreign soldiers.

TAKING SIDES

It is a little harder to discount what the brothers did next. With the Taliban gone, they turned their attention from mere survival to the betterment of their family. One after another, they have come to work for the Canadian Army.

There is a wide range of political opinion in Afghanistan. The fanatical Taliban have equally fanatical opponents. The rest of the population is found along a spectrum between these two groups. This includes those who passively or actively support either side as well as a large number of people who want to be left alone. To work for the Coalition in any capacity clearly puts you to one side of the spectrum. So when the brothers tell me they are happy we are here and they want us to stay, I am inclined to believe them.

THE PRICE OF RESISTANCE

Working for the Canadians carries with it a very great risk. The Taliban consider what these men are doing a crime punishable by death. When they visit their families they must have a well-concocted cover story to explain where and why they are travelling, should the Taliban pull them over. They do this by, among other things, having two names: the real one they use at home and a fake one they use on the FOB.

Even back in their village, the terror persists. Two of their cousins have been murdered by the Taliban, one for helping to build a road through their district, the other one because he was a teacher. Over the past two years, twenty other people in the surrounding area have been killed by the Taliban.

FAMILY

Afghanistan is still a tribal culture. The Arab expression “Me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my cousin against my neighbour. Me and my neighbour against the world” would be readily accepted here.

This degree of familial attachment can also have positive connotations. The family has chosen a woman for the middle brother to marry. Before the marriage can take place, a payment of thirteen thousand dollars (American!) must be made to the prospective bride’s family. The brothers are pooling their money for this purpose. They make a little less than five hundred dollars a month. Between the three of them, they will have finished saving the full amount in less than a year. Do the math—they are keeping very little for themselves. They will then repeat the process for the younger brother. They have already done it for the older one.

This devotion to family goes beyond mere obligation. The middle brother has recently returned from a vacation at home. The thing he most wanted to show us was a video, taken on his small digital camera, of his eight-year-old sister dancing. The pride and love he felt for her were palpable.

THE WAY AHEAD?

I have repeatedly stated that this war will be won in the classroom, by educating the Afghan population. We do not want to kill every last Taliban, nor could we. What we want is for the Afghan population to reject them. The best way to achieve this is to teach Afghans to read and write and to give them economic skills that will enable them to climb out of the misery they are in. Education and economic empowerment are the best ways to defeat extremism.

I made the same point in the June 9 entry about the Stone Age attitudes of some of the people in this country. The solution here is the same. Educate them and let nature take its course. As the world has become more educated, it has become more tolerant, egalitarian and democratic. That is the constant theme of the last four hundred years of global evolution. There is no reason to think the same process will not happen here.

Our presence here, supported by the brothers, has made it possible for most Afghan children to go to school. And have the brothers been educated while working for us? In an informal way, very much so. Like many of our workers, they can now all speak English (the older two are more fluent than many of our translators). In the case of the brothers, that is only a small part of their story.

The brothers’ education has accelerated since March of this year when they had the good fortune to run into a remarkable individual: Corporal Cynthia Bouthillier, one of the Bison medics introduced in the July 5 entry. Far more than any other Canadian here, she has befriended Afghans in general and the brothers in particular. She spends most evenings talking to one of the brothers or her favourite interpreter. This has led to extraordinary exchanges.

The middle brother, for whom the brothers are saving their money, gets married in three months. Corporal Bouthillier was able to create such a relationship of trust with him that he began to ask her the most intimate questions imaginable. He has never been with a woman, and the prospect of his wedding night was provoking a great deal of anxiety. In what must be a vanishingly rare event, a young Canadian woman—whose English has a strong Québécois flavour—taught a young Afghan man—whose English is marginal—about sex. In English. Let the anglo rotos top that!

This is education in its purest sense: showing an individual a different way of looking at the world. In this case, a young man from one of the most patriarchal societies in the world learned to trust and respect a woman enough to learn the facts of life from her.

It is through a myriad of interactions like this that the world becomes a better place. People are changed not by politicians and demagogues. They are changed by the individuals they come into contact with, the people they can touch . . . and who touch them.

Has this contact with us altered the middle brother’s view of the world? I described earlier the obvious love he had for his younger sister. I asked him if he would approve if she were to come and work for the Canadians as well. When he said no, I thought he would tell me the woman’s place was still in the home. I had grossly underestimated him.

He does not want his sister to be a cook for the Canadians. He would rather see her do something that would allow her to help her fellow Afghans, while providing for herself and her family. And he says he will support her financially if she chooses to pursue that goal.

He wants her to be a doctor.

JULY 31 | The Elements, Part 3: Fire

The CF are not like any other government department.

We kill people.

—GENER AL RICK HILLIER

General Hillier was stating a self-evident truth, but it is one that bears repeating. Canadians are reticent to admit that our country is at war. We like to see ourselves as the planet’s “nice guys,” and wars are not nice. The corollary to this is a statement I’ve seen numerous times on Internet discussion boards about our Afghan mission: Canada is a peacekeeping nation. People who oppose the mission will often bring this up, as if to say that fighting wars was somehow un-Canadian.

This is ridiculous. It is true that our country has excelled at peacekeeping for the past fifty years. Partly, this is because we have behaved well on the world stage. We have often acted as honest brokers, earning respect around the globe.

But the main reason we are effective peacekeepers is that, among those countries that have been at peace since the end of the Korean War, Canada has by far the most effective army.* This means we are the best at killing people. Combatants around the world have learned the hard way not to mess with us.

Have you ever heard of the Medak Pocket? If you are like most Canadians, the answer is no. And yet, if there was any justice in the world, this name would be as familiar to every Canadian as Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach are.

In the genocidal hell that was the former Yugoslavia, we sent in “peacekeepers” when there was little peace to keep. We did our best to keep the ethnic cleansers away from the civilians. We failed to do so many times because we were hamstrung by restrictive rules of engagement: the United Nations kept our soldiers on a very short leash. The shining exception to this rule occurred in September 1993, in the area of Croatia called Medak.

Although the Serbs have far more blood on their hands than any other group in the Yugoslavian civil war, they were the victims at Medak. The Croats had launched an offensive into this area that was marked by incredible brutality towards the Serbian civilian population. It took far too long, but someone in the UN chain of command finally said “No more!”

The Canadians, in this case the Second Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (the PPCLI), were given the task of halting the Croat advance. The orders were unambiguous: stand and fight. The Patricias proceeded to engage in the most intense gun battle Canadians had been involved in since the end of the Korean War. They faced down a superior force of Croats, killed twenty-seven of them, wounded many more and did not surrender an inch of ground. Four Canadians were lightly wounded by Croat artillery but stayed in the line. We kicked the Croats’ asses, and they left the area.

It was too late for many Serb civilians. They had already been slaughtered. In the area of the battle, not a single survivor was found. What the Patricias did discover would mark them for the rest of their lives. Horribly burned corpses. Destroyed homes. The Croats had even shot the farm animals they had been unable to carry away.

Most eerily, our soldiers found the area littered with a large number of surgical gloves. The Croats had tried to remove their victims’ bodies, but they had been too squeamish to touch the skin of those they had so readily murdered.

The Patricias’ efforts did have positive results. The Croats were not expecting the UN to allow the Canadians to pummel them. When we did, they did not have enough time to remove all the evidence of their war crimes as they ran away. The proof gathered by Canadian investigators was used to prosecute Croatian war criminals in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The Croats’ offensive—and their “ethnic cleansing”—was stopped, at least temporarily. They now knew the Canadians stood in their way and they had no desire to take us on again.

And how did the Canadian government of the day react to this display of heroism and military prowess? It became apoplectic. This came on the heels of the Somalia debacle (where a Canadian soldier had murdered a teenage civilian), and no one in Ottawa wanted to hear about Canadian soldiers killing anyone, no matter what the circumstances. They tried to bury the news as much as possible and treated the soldiers who had participated in the fighting like shit. The Patricias should have been given medals and a parade down the main street of every major city in Canada. Instead, they were hounded with questions about their actions by Ottawa-bound bureaucrats who were overreacting to the spanking the government had gotten as a result of its poor handling of the Somalia affair.

This was devastating for these men. They had gone into the darkest abyss of human monstrosity, and they had gone there on Canada’s behalf. When they returned, the country did not even acknowledge their efforts. What they had seen would push people into PTSD and depression under the best conditions. Many of them fell prey to these illnesses. You can see why General Hillier called this “the decade of darkness” for the CF.

It was not until December 2002 that the members of Second Battalion, PPCLI, were finally recognized in a ceremony held in Winnipeg. Governor General Adrienne Clarkson presented the unit with the Commander-in-Chief Unit Commendation and a slew of medals were awarded to deserving individuals. We must never let such courage and sacrifice go unrecognized again.*

We must also acknowledge that our soldiers are warriors first. To claim that our status as “good peacekeepers” absolves us from the responsibility of ever going to war again is a moral cop-out. People who hold this view never wade into the ethically challenging debates to determine whether a war is moral. To do that you have to look evil in the face and decide that, painful though it may be, there are some evils that justify the use of armed force.

Protected by two oceans and the most powerful nation on earth, Canadians can go about their lives ignoring what goes on in the rest of the world. We can bury our heads in the sand and refuse to consider the plight of those who are suffering far from our shores. But if every time the subject of whether or not Canada should go to war comes up you say “We should stay out of it,” that does not prove you are moral. It proves you are intellectually lazy.

I bring all this up because I have only occasionally discussed our battlefield successes. By doing so, I have mirrored the Canadian media. The reticence of our news outlets to talk about those times when we wipe out a whole bunch of bad guys is astounding.

Allow me to bring some balance into this story. We are killing a lot more of them than they are of us, and we have been extraordinarily successful recently. At our daily intelligence briefings, which I attend as one of the FOB unit commanders, we review the after-action reports of our combat units. For the past week, we have managed to kill between ten and twenty Taliban every day.

One hit was particularly satisfying. The Taliban brought in “judges” to administer their brutal and bizarre justice in a remote area of the district. We figured out where some of these individuals were, and killed several of them with a well-executed air strike.

This war will not be won by killing Taliban. But it can be lost if we do not hold them at bay and make it very unhealthy for them to congregate. The Canadians of Roto 7 are doing that, following in the warrior footsteps of many who have gone before us.

Addendum, same day, 2130: It seems that the Taliban have taken umbrage at my last entry and at the satisfaction I derive from the demise of so many of their members. They have spent the last half hour attacking our perimeter. I was in the staff lounge when the first rocket hit. By the time I got outside, tracer fire could be seen going from two of our observation posts towards the rocket’s launch site. Shortly afterwards, a second rocket streaked in. It flew right to left across my field of vision. It looked like harmless fireworks until it impacted, less than a hundred metres away. A bright white flash, ten metres in diameter, suddenly appeared near the main entrance to the FOB. Even at that distance, I felt the blast wave in my chest.

For the next half hour, the sky was lit up with tracer rounds going back and forth while flares lit up the sky.

AUGUST 1 | The Road to Sperwan Ghar

My orders came through this morning. “Bed” Bedard comes back tomorrow and I head for my last FOB, Sperwan Ghar, in three days’ time. To get there, I will go by road along Route Hyena. This is the main east-west thoroughfare in Panjwayi district. In 2007, this road was known as Route Foster and was the second-most-dangerous road in the world. We called it “IED Alley.” The most stressful thing I had to do on Roto 4 was to travel along this road. Things are better now. Let me explain why.

Go back and look at the first two photographs in the June 9 entry. The top picture shows Route Hyena as it is now—paved. The top-left corner of the bottom picture shows what it was like in 2007: a dirt road. It is easy to dig in dirt, and it is easy to hide things in dirt. Those simple facts have killed a lot of Canadians.

It has been one of our priorities to pave this road and make it a lot harder for the Taliban to hide their IEDs. The project is some months behind schedule. We could have sent in our own military engineers, and they would have had the road built in a matter of weeks. Instead, we hired a local contractor and four hundred men from nearby villages to work on this project.

So we have a Third World company employing Third World workers. Things are not going to progress as fast as they would if we were in charge, for a number of reasons. But while these men are working for us, they have much less incentive to pick up a gun for the Taliban.

They are also motivated to pressure the Taliban not to attack the project, and the Taliban are not immune to this pressure. The number of IEDs found on Route Foster is lower since the locals started working on it, and the number of ambushes has declined.

In Iraq, the Americans have flat-out bribed various members of the insurgency to switch sides. A large number of these individuals have motivations quite different from those of the religious fanatics of al Qaeda. These Iraqis are not thrilled that the Americans are still in the country, but they are willing to tolerate them in exchange for financial gain. In a remarkable exchange that I saw quoted in a number of different news sources, an American officer asked one of these financially motivated fighters: “Do you still want to kill me?” The fighter smiled and answered: “Yes, but not today.”

It strikes me that what Canada is doing here is similar to what the Americans have done in Iraq. We are doing it less blatantly and with more socially redeeming features. How Canadian!

In this context, it is a lot easier to accept the project’s slow progress. Are the workers getting a full day’s pay for a half day’s work? Often. Is the contractor ripping us off? Certainly. If this keeps a large number of fighting-age males gainfully employed while the children of Zhari-Panjwayi go to school, is it money well spent? Absolutely.

Making it more difficult for the Taliban to plant IEDs not only makes our life here safer, it also makes it easier for us to focus on reconstruction. Canadians hear about IEDs only when one of us dies. They do not hear about the large number of IEDs that miss us or only scratch our vehicles. But any IED blast causes major damage to the roads. This slows or halts traffic, with the inevitable economic impact that you can imagine. Because of this, a lot of our time is spent rebuilding these roads so that the Afghan people can get on with their lives. The Taliban are here to destroy. We are here to build.

Addendum, same day: This being war, the enemy will want to have their say. So as heartwarming as the previous two pages may have been, this was also the day that we received the only casualty to come from Route Hyena since I have been at FOB Ma’Sum Ghar. A private security guard stepped on an anti-personnel mine that blew off his foot. It looks like he has also lost his right eye.

As I had with the Afghan policeman whose head had been crushed by our armoured vehicle, I emphasized to my team the importance of not being distracted by visually impressive wounds, in this case a ruined face and a missing foot. The patient was alert, spoke in articulate sentences and had normal vital signs. His wounds were life-altering, not life-threatening.

Nasty things, anti-personnel mines. They do not contain much explosive; their goal is not to kill, but to maim. Wounding a man removes five soldiers from the battlefield: the casualty and the four men needed to carry him off. The wounded man then needs medical care and rehabilitation. Dead men do not need care, and their evacuation can be delayed. These mines are as much an economic weapon as a military one.

Lucky to be alive (Photo courtesy Master Corporal Julien Ricard)

Addendum, same day, early evening: I mentioned earlier that there are many things I love about being an emergency physician. There are only a few things I dislike. At the top of this short list I would put the fact that we rarely learn what has happened to the patients whose lives we have saved.

It was therefore a particular treat for me to be able to see in follow-up, for the first time on either of my tours, a critically injured patient who had passed through my UMS. The Afghan policeman whose head had been crushed by one of our armoured vehicles on July 23 came to the UMS after supper to have his sutures removed. His numerous facial and skull fractures had been expertly repaired by our maxillofacial surgeon at KAF. As for the eye that was hanging out of its socket, it was not blind! He was counting fingers at one metre already, and there is a good chance that his vision will continue to improve.

He said he remembered me and was grateful for the care I had provided. Emergency physicians almost never get to hear this from the semi-conscious patients for whom we do the most.

It was an ideal way to begin to wind up my stay here at FOB Ma’Sum Ghar.

AUGUST 2, MORNING | None of Your Business

We take patient confidentiality very seriously in modern Canadian medicine. When my father was hospitalized three years ago, the nurses in the intensive care unit (ICU) of my own hospital would not let me look at his chart. Like everybody else, I had to go through the treating physician or talk to my father. For some reason, the media have difficulty accepting that the same standards apply to wounded Canadian soldiers.

We lost two more men yesterday. They were combat engineers based at FOB Wilson. Like Corporal Martin Dubé (see June 14 entry), Corporal Christian Bobbitt and Sapper Mathieu Allard were killed when an IED they were defusing exploded. They never knew what hit them.

In the small world of the combat engineers these losses will be devastating: there are fewer than a hundred of them in the theatre of operations. The losses of this branch of the service exceed all others in proportional terms

I had met both of them at FOB Wilson. They were both TCCCs who had helped out with some of the casualties we treated in June. They impressed me as calm and competent individuals, even though they seemed impossibly young. We were never more than acquaintances. Partly, I regret that very much. Partly, I am relieved—the pain of their passing would have been much worse.

We also had one serious but non-fatal casualty yesterday, someone I did know well. We had seen each other daily, and I enjoyed his company.

The CF will not reveal anything about this man’s injuries. I have read articles in which reporters have been critical of the CF because of this. Various media have intimated that the CF is attempting to cover up the number and severity of wounds suffered by our soldiers.

The CF has never defended itself against these accusations, so I will explain its stance here. Imagine for a moment that you were here with me. Now imagine that you have suffered a devastating, life-changing wound. When you woke up this morning, you were a young, healthy adult—your body did exactly what you wanted it to. In an instant, that has been taken away forever. Would you want to have your name and a description of your injuries on the front page of The Globe and Mail? Our wounded are free to participate in whatever interviews they want. It is normal that they do so only after they have had time to adjust and begin to cope with their injuries.

So I grieve for our fallen and I shudder at the thought of the pain my friend felt when he was injured, is now feeling during his multiple surgeries and will feel through his rehabilitation. I have sent him a single e-mail, telling him my thoughts are with him and letting him know that he can count on me for any assistance he might need.

Now I wait for him to answer. And if I can wait to find out how he is doing, so can the rest of the country.

 

Addendum, August 14: The funeral service for Corporal Bobbitt took place in Quebec City the day Warrant Officer Comeau was to leave Canada. He had been back in Canada on leave when Corporal Bobbitt died. Warrant Officer Comeau requested that his leave be extended by a single day so that he could honour his fallen comrade, a man who had fought by his side for several months. He was turned down.

That struck me and many others as completely heartless, until I learned that the engineer commander had decided that the survivors of the engineer troop* needed Warrant Comeau’s leadership and compassion as soon as possible. Seen from that perspective, I agree it was the right call.

AUGUST 2, AFTERNOON | “Bed” Returns

The sun was setting when one last chopper landed. A few minutes later, my old friend Martin “Bed” Bedard came crashing into the UMS. Our reunion was joyful, but before we could have a proper sit-down to talk about his vacation an Afghan civilian came in with shrapnel wounds to his legs. Not wasting a minute (and showing much less effect from the jet lag than I had) Bed assumed care for the patient. He was pleased to be able to show me how proficient he had become with the ultrasound machine. Given his obvious aptitude for using ultrasound, I had given him additional tips and training by phone and e-mail from FOB Wilson, and during our time together when I came to take over at Ma’Sum Ghar. One of the techniques I had taught him involved using the machine to detect shrapnel fragments buried in the patient’s flesh. He used this to good effect here, locating and retrieving four shrapnel fragments. With ultrasound proving that there were no other injuries, the patient was discharged from the FOB, saving a helicopter evacuation.

“Cut deeper!” (Photo courtesy Master Corporal Julien Ricard)

After that, we got another chance to use ultrasound in an innovative manner. An Afghan soldier came in with what appeared to be a skin infection in his armpit. Ultrasound examination showed that there was a pocket of pus beneath the skin, but it was so deep that it could not be detected by palpation (touching the patient). On ultrasound, however, it showed up as a large black space beside the ribs.

When pockets of pus like this are present, the infection can never be cured with antibiotics alone. You have to cut into the patient and let the pus out, an operation called an “incision and drainage.” Bed had done a number of these, but none of them had ever required him to cut as far as I was telling him to. Just when Bed thought he was going to pierce the patient’s lung, we hit our target and a huge river of pus came streaming out. It was disgusting and satisfying, like so many things in medicine.

Bed handled himself like a pro through this. The Ma’Sum Ghar UMS will be in very good hands when I leave.

Addendum—Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The paving project on Route Hyena I spoke of yesterday has been put on hold indefinitely. There are many reasons for this, the main ones being the ongoing Taliban threat, arguments with the contractor about money and the fact that the focus of our reconstruction efforts is shifting closer to Kanda-har City. Very disappointing. But if you can’t handle disappointment, best not to go to war in Afghanistan (or anywhere else).

AUGUST 3, MORNING | The Panjwayi Comprehensive Health Centre

I formally handed command of the UMS back to Petty Officer “Bed” Bedard yesterday, so today was a day off. As when Captain Lafortune had replaced me at FOB Wilson, I no longer had any direct responsibilities other than to be available in case of a MasCal event. I therefore used some of my free time to help the CIMIC people with a project that is near and dear to their hearts and in which I was happy to become involved: local health care.

The FOB UMS cannot deal with all the health care needs of the local population. The only exceptions to this are injuries caused by the war or those that present an immediate threat to life, limb or eyesight. Our primary mission is to support our warriors, and we must always be ready for a massive influx of casualties. As well, we must not undercut the nascent Afghan health care system.

This means that the villagers around FOB Ma’Sum Ghar will go to the local clinic when they are ill or injured. But the conditions in Zhari district are reproduced here in the Panjwayi: all the other clinics in the district have closed due to security threats. As in Zhari, only the one that lies within range of the machine guns of our FOB observation posts has remained open.

The CIMIC people wanted to know what the clinic’s capabilities were and if there was any way we could help them, but they had not had any contact with the clinic staff. I agreed to try to help them in this regard. My first opportunity to do so came a few days ago. One of the Canadian officers mentoring the ANP had to have a brief meeting with the police chief. Out of courtesy, our officer offered to walk over to the police station, a few hundred metres from our FOB’s outer walls. Since the clinic is built right beside the police station, I asked the mentor officer if I could come along: I could visit the clinic, then he could go next door and meet the police chief. We called ahead, and the director of the clinic said he would be happy to meet me.

That sounds innocent, does it not? A doctor dropping in on a colleague to have a look at his facility. Whenever I am in a foreign city, I try to visit one or more emergency departments. There is always something to be learned during such a visit. It is also a wonderfully human experience to make such a link with another person: no matter how different our respective societies, our practice of the healing arts provides an instant connection.

But while the doctor-to-doctor exchange was quickly agreed upon, putting the two of us in the same room was a major undertaking. Even in broad daylight, the risk of a Taliban attack on Canadian soldiers (or indeed on the police station itself) was so high that it was impossible Combat patrol, well spaced for the mentoring officer and me to simply amble over. The FOB had to put together an escort of several soldiers to take this short walk with us.

Combat patrol, well spaced

Like true professionals, the escorting soldiers left nothing to chance. They treated this like any other patrol: a map was drawn on a whiteboard showing the route we would take; the route was analyzed to estimate where ambushes were most likely to take place; an “order of march” was developed that assigned specific places in the column to each member; timings were worked out and agreed on; the evacuation plan we would use if anyone got wounded was discussed. We also came up with a plan to return me at high speed to the UMS in case the FOB received word that casualties were arriving while I was away.

The same professionalism was on display when we moved out. With only a few hand motions and fewer words, the group started down the road. The correct interval was maintained between all the patrol members: close enough so that we could concentrate our gunfire against any enemy, far enough apart that an explosion would not kill more than one of us. Approaching civilians were waved off to a safe area and, when necessary, were searched in a thorough yet respectful manner. Weapons covered each soldier’s “arc of responsibility” so that there were always eyes on a 360-degree circle around the patrol.

“The Panjwai Comprehensive Health Center” (the sign at top left announces “No Weapons,” in Pashto and English)

When we got to the clinic, the patrol stopped to provide security outside the building while their medic, none other than my good friend “Junior,” came inside to act as my bodyguard.

I was able to meet both of the doctors working at the clinic. The older one is the director of the clinic. He has been practising for thirty years, the last ten here in Bazaar-e-Panjwayi. The younger one is in his second month of practice. I also met the pharmacist and the laboratory technician. We had a very interesting discussion about the general state of the clinic, the prevalence of various diseases and their approach to various clinical scenarios.

They also took the opportunity to ask if there was any way I could help supply them with medicines. I reiterated the standard party line that we were more than willing to assume the care of anyone wounded by the war, but that they would have to be resupplied with medicines through the Afghan ministry of health.

Patients and families at the entrance

As I was leaving, the director asked if I would like to meet the two nurses and two midwives on staff and to visit the female ward. I appreciated his openness, but as I looked around the inner courtyard of the clinic I saw a number of Afghan men. I also noticed that while a few burka-clad women had been visible from the courtyard when I arrived, they had now all disappeared. I decided to address this head-on and asked the director if he thought there was a possibility that some of the Afghan men might object to my visiting the women’s area. He agreed that this was likely. I replied that I would respectfully decline his invitation. We shook hands one last time, and I was on my way.

I rejoined the patrol and we carried on to the police station. The Canadian mentor officer held his meeting with the police chief, and less than half an hour later we were on our way back to the FOB.

Inside, Junior watches my back

I reported back to the CIMIC people and described how the clinic functioned and what it had to offer. Although the Canadian Army will not get involved in the Afghan health care system, the CIMIC people will often facilitate contacts between NGOs and various Afghan projects. When I had finished my report, they asked me if there was a project I could suggest that would have a rapid impact on the population’s health but that did not involve providing medications.

I thought about this for a day or so, then went back to the CIMIC people with an idea. A predictable minority of the visits to the health centre are generated by injuries. These conditions need only minor surgery and minimal follow-up. The health centre staff already had the skills required for these procedures, but they had only a few instruments and very limited suture material.

Colleagues

People in the developing world accept that their loved ones will get sick and die of chronic illnesses such as cancer, because that is the way it has always been. These same people feel differently if their child falls and suffers a laceration: there is a strong incentive to expend a large amount of time and energy to obtain a proper repair. There is often more desire in this population for minor surgery than for medications.

The CIMIC people were enthusiastic about the suggestion, but I thought it was important to get the approval of my Afghan colleagues before we proceeded. I would therefore have to go back to the clinic. This would again require a sizable escort, this time only for me. I would have been reluctant to expose a group of Canadian soldiers to so much risk only for this visit, but the patrol commander reminded me that this was an area where our troops run regular “presence patrols” (see July 21 entry). He offered to make the objective of today’s presence patrol another visit to the clinic.

We left at mid-morning and had an uneventful walk over. Once again, Junior served as my bodyguard inside the clinic. I ran my idea by the director, and he agreed it would be useful to have extra instruments and suture material. I returned to the FOB and handed in a report detailing my suggestion for the CIMIC people. I hope it helps.

My escorts on my return visit (and you thought Angelina Jolie and Stephen Harper had bodyguards!)

AUGUST 3, EVENING | An Afghan Farewell

I mentioned earlier that my willingness to bend or even break the rules regarding treating the “local national” workers at the FOB had made me a lot of friends among the Afghans. I did not appreciate how much these small kindnesses had meant to them until this evening. Late this afternoon, Corporal Bouthillier informed me that “the brothers” and some of the interpreters wanted to throw me a farewell party. I thought we would get together for yet another cup of Afghan tea, shake hands and say goodbye. But when I got to their tent, I was greeted by nearly all members of the Afghan staff. Even more astounding, there was a spread of Afghan food that was more impressive than anything I had seen before, including at any of the shuras I had attended. This could not have been easy, nor cheap, for them to put together.

We talked and ate long into the night. I wished I had spent even more time getting to know these guys. The man most responsible for the evening was Lucky, a sort of camp manager. He supervises the interpreters and the local workers who are not employed by the kitchen. He has been at the FOB for nearly three years, and he remembered me from my first tour!

At the end of the evening, Lucky shocked me even more by presenting me with two sets of traditional Afghan clothing. Again, I was boggled by the generosity of these people. I was leaving in a few hours and we will probably never see one another again, so there was no secondary gain in it for them. It was a pure expression of friendship.

As I walked back to my bunker, I reflected sadly on the difference in our futures. In a couple of months, I will be going home to a warm welcome. The best they can hope for is to live in a country with a fragile peace at some yet-to-be-determined time in the future.

These guys deserve all the help we can give them.

AUGUST 4, MORNING | Infantry. Forever.

Before my going-away party last night, I was hanging around with a group of soldiers as they planned a foot patrol for the next day. A large group was involved, and a fair bit of territory would be covered. For half the time, the patrol would be split in two. There was only one medic, Junior Capelli Horth, on the team. The risk of having a group of soldiers without a medic was obvious to everybody. One of them said, “Hey, Doc, ‘Bed’ Bedard, the PA, is back. He can cover the UMS now. You’re ex-infantry. Why don’t you come along with us?”

He had half-meant it as a joke, but in the silence that followed I could tell that everyone was thinking about the obvious advantages to the patrol of his suggestion. The kinship I felt with these men right at that moment would be impossible for someone who has not been in the combat arms to appreciate.

One other factor influenced me right then, one the other men were not aware of. The PA I was replacing at my next FOB was not going on leave immediately. Instead, he was going to be posted to KAF for two weeks. If anything were to happen to me on this patrol, the army would have two weeks to get my replacement in position.

I said I would come.

In less than twelve hours, I would be going on a Taliban hunt. Claude had predicted I would do this: go on a combat patrol. I had agreed that, under the right conditions, I would. Now it was going to happen.

I went to bed around midnight. “Bed” had reclaimed the lower bunk, and I had slept above him the previous night. That was when I discovered that my good friend snores like a sawmill. Even my top-of-the-line earplugs were no match for the thunder that blasted forth from his nasal passages. If I was to have any chance to have some shuteye I needed to move to a different building. So I went to an overflow tent we have installed for Priority Charlie casualties.

I lay down, but I did not sleep. My mind kept playing over all the various ways my act of soldierly solidarity could go disastrously wrong, and how I would respond to each scenario:

1. Very seriously wounded: paralysis or multiple amputations.
The worst. I will have failed in my promise to Claude and Michelle, not only to take care of them forever but also to return in one piece. My life will be transformed. Activity and productivity will be replaced, at least for an extended period, by pain and the frustration of rehab. I will certainly become depressed. How bad will it get? Will I get over it?

2. Seriously wounded: single amputation or disfigurement.
Very bad. Depending on the location and severity of the wound, how will I get myself back into emergency medicine? What will I still be able to do with my wife and daughter? What will I no longer be able to do? How will people see me?

3 . Wounded: hurt in a way that can be fixed but ends my tour.
Bad. The pain will be nothing compared with the guilt I will feel at being unable to complete my mission. I will have let the health services team down.

4 . Dead.
Emotionally, easier to contemplate than option 1. Better to be killed outright than to be mangled beyond recognition. Intellectually, I know that is not true. Most severely wounded soldiers are grateful to be alive, no matter how much they feared mutilation and disfigurement before.

All that kept me tossing and turning until I gave up around 0330. I got out of bed, ate some cereal and spent a minute in the incredibly bright light of the full moon, collecting my thoughts and focusing on the task at hand. I then got my gear on: helmet, ballistic glasses, frag vest, tac vest, pack with medical gear and eight litres of water, pistol, rifle, full load of ammunition. And I headed out, much earlier than I needed to. I recognized my behaviour from wars gone by: when something bad is coming your way, the worst part is the waiting. Starting, even starting early, gets the process going and reduces the anxiety you feel.

The patrol was assembling on the other side of the FOB. This turned out to be a good thing. After the first few hundred metres, I stopped and readjusted my gear. This was the first time I had worn all my “kit” over anything more than a short distance, and a few things were not as comfortable as they could be. The last thing I wanted for the next several hours was to be distracted by something chafing my skin.

When I arrived at the patrol marshalling area, the other soldiers were pulling themselves together. They had done this a hundred times or more on this tour. Their unhurried, economical movements and their calm, precise interactions with each other made it look like this was just another day at the office. Which, for them, it was. I doubt that any of them had had trouble sleeping.

At 0500 the patrol commander called us together and reviewed the plan for the patrol. Then we sat down and waited. This was to be a joint operation with the ANP. This would give the patrol more guns as we went into a dangerous area. We would also have “Afghan eyes,” eyes that are more attuned to things that are out of place. But the police, far less reliable than the ANA, were late.

At 0600, the police still had not shown up. The sun was cresting the mountains behind Bazaar-e-Panjwayi. Not only were we late getting started, we would now be exposed to the sun from the start. The patrol commander was faced with an awkward choice: go forward with an undermanned patrol or waste a day. I was hoping he would pick the latter, but there was never much doubt he would go forward with the mission.

A few minutes after 0600, we moved out. I took my place in front of the rear guards, telling myself I was in the safest location. That was pure rationalization: every soldier who goes out on patrol is exposed to the same extreme risks.

The point man approached the FOB’s perimeter wall . . . and all the lessons I had learned at the Combat Training Centre so long ago came flooding back.

Just before you get to the wall of the FOB, take the magazine off your rifle. The first bullet is on the right. Put the magazine back on the rifle, rack the action. Take the magazine off. The first bullet is now on the left. No misfeed, you are sure there is a bullet in the breach. Weapon on “safe.” Put the magazine back on the rifle. Give the magazine a firm slap, then shake it to make sure it is securely seated. Index finger on the trigger guard. Thumb on the safety. Flick it to “fire,” flick it back to “safe.” Repeat.

Step outside the FOB wall. Walk slowly and deliberately. Watch your “arc,” the part of the 360-degree circle that is your responsibility. Glance ahead, glance back, glance to the side. Check your spacing, not too close to any other soldier. Do not give the enemy a tempting target.

Watch your arc

Watch your arc. Scan slowly right to left, then look quickly back to the right. Repeat. We are used to reading left to right. If you scan left to right, you can fall into a repetitive rut and become less attentive. Scanning right to left is unnatural. The slight irritation this causes keeps you alert. Scan right to left. Repeat. Watch your arc.

The patrol stops. Move off the road. Look carefully at the ground to see if it has been recently disturbed. Disturbed earth means someone may have been digging there. Digging . . . and leaving something behind. Don’t think about what IEDs do to exposed legs.

Find cover. Mud walls are good; they are like concrete and will stop most rifle bullets and rocket fragments. Check behind the wall—don’t ignore the obvious. Just because it is suicidal to launch an ambush from there doesn’t mean the Talis won’t try it.

Focus on the area right in front of you, where the threat would be greatest: the Talis have started putting directional IEDs in the trees. Look for wires. Then focus on the middle distance. Directional IEDs have to be detonated by someone watching the patrol. Where would the trigger-man be? Then check the far distance. Repeat the process: up close, middle distance, far distance. What could you have missed? What you don’t see can kill you. Watch your arc.

Crosshairs on target

The patrol is moving again. Check behind you. Make sure the rear guards, who had been facing backwards, know that we are moving out. We don’t want to bunch up, but we can’t be too spread out either. We have to be able to return concentrated gunfire if we are attacked.

Start walking. Check your interval. Watch your arc.

Possible threat. Someone watching us from a tree line. Rifle up. Look through the scope, check it out. It is a “fighting-age male.” No obvious weapons. Just watching us. Centre the crosshairs on his chest. About three hundred metres. If I need to, I am sure I can make the shot. We have to keep moving. Note the man’s position. Where will he go if he wants to engage us? Where could he be hiding weapons? Stand up. Start walking. Watch your arc.

Someone coming down the road, from behind us, on a motorcycle. The patrol stops. Same routine as before, only now you also pay attention to the rear guards. They wave the motorcyclist over to the side of the road, indicating that he should disembark and distance himself from his vehicle. One soldier searches him, then moves over to search the motorcycle. The other rear guard covers him. The search uncovers nothing. The man gets waved through. Watch your arc. Watch the motorcyclist as he passes by you.

A family stroll

Stand up. Keep walking. Watch your arc.

After twenty minutes this routine became natural. I would not say I was any less frightened, but I was much less tense.

We continued down Route Hyena. In my more relaxed state, I was able to better appreciate the non-military aspects of what I was seeing. Three things stand out in my memory.

First, we were overtaken by a family of Afghans. They were going at a brisk pace, far faster than we were. After being searched by the rear guards, the family was waved through the patrol. They were led by a man with a child on his back. He was followed by two women, each clad in full burka. The women would be his two wives. The woman closer to him would most likely be the younger second wife. This man probably agreed more with the Taliban than with me.

While the man in the above picture led his family right by me as if I were not there, the other Afghans who crossed our patrol made eye contact with me. I would address them with the traditional Muslim greeting “Salaam aleikum” (“Peace be unto you”). They would smile and reply “Aleikum salaam” (“And peace be unto you as well”). A few of them went further and demonstrated body language that indicated pleasure at our presence. And one group of young men went much, much further than that—into territory that may well mark them for Taliban reprisals.

Holland, 1945: tulips; Afghanistan, 2009: grapes

There were three of them in a small truck loaded with grapes, the driver and the passenger in front and a third man in the back holding on to the produce. They were farmers headed for market. When I greeted them, the one in the back called out to the driver. The truck stopped and the man hopped out . . . and came towards me with a large bunch of grapes. I looked over at the member of the patrol closest to me. I must have had quite a shocked look because he quickly said, “It’s not a problem, Doc. They’re delicious. I’ve had them lots of times.”

The man then said something in Pashto I did not understand, but he smiled even more broadly when I shook his hand and said, “Dera manena” (“Thank you very much”). Then he jumped back into his truck and drove off. I was only too happy to indulge in the grapes as I watched him leave. As advertised, they were delicious.

We stopped for a bit, while the patrol commander spoke to a local elder. The perimeter seemed clear and the patrol relaxed a little. I noticed we had attracted some pediatric attention. The only thing I had to give them was my grapes.

They seemed pleased with that, but mostly they seemed intensely curious about the strangers in their midst. As I always do in these situations, I focused on the little girl. Her name sounded like “Maria,” and she is seven years old. It is sad to think how different her life will be from Michelle’s. It is even sadder to think of what her life will be like if we do not defeat the Taliban.

Curiosity and innocence

We ended up spending nearly a half hour in this position, providing security for the spontaneous mini-shura the patrol commander was holding. It was harder to stand still with all that gear on than it had been to walk. I was sorry to leave the children, but I was physically relieved to get going again.

The patrol then got down to the business of the mission. There were a number of family compounds we wanted to check out. We always wait for an invitation before entering. This was somewhat illusory, the politeness of those who know they cannot be refused. Nonetheless, it did give the Afghans their dignity.

The most important element here is respecting the Afghans’ zan (women). Under no circumstances must the search party see the women of the family. Each entry into a compound is therefore preceded by an elaborate request to please ask the zan to remove themselves to the women’s quarters.

It is frustrating to think of what might be going on behind the compound walls while we wait outside. Anyone with something to hide has ample time to conceal potentially incriminating evidence.

Searching suspect compound

We could avoid this by crashing into every compound unannounced, but this would only guarantee that we would get some of the weapons and lose all of the people. This is a war of ideas. We have to act each time as if the Afghan we are dealing with is a potential ally, to be treated with respect, not a potential enemy, to be treated like a criminal. This holds true even if we are very suspicious that the individual’s allegiances lie with our enemies.

This attitude on the part of Canadians goes a long way with most of the rural folk here in the Panjwayi. At every compound we visited on this patrol, we were greeted warmly and invited in quickly. At every one . . . except the last one we called on. The reception here was the polar opposite. The owner of the compound was totally uncooperative, not even attempting to answer our questions.

For whatever reason, he did not like us. After multiple requests to be invited into the compound were ignored, we proceeded with the search, something the Afghan security forces and their Coalition partners are legally entitled to do without a warrant.

Patrol’s end

We did not find any weapons or other “smoking gun,” but we did notice a number of radios that had been taken apart. The wiring and receivers could be used for remote-controlled triggering mechanisms. We also found a large number of the plastic jugs that the IED makers stuff with homemade explosive.

This guy was obviously “wrong,” but there was nothing definitive that proved he was aiding the Taliban. So we documented what we found and moved on. This compound will be watched more closely from now on. Eventually, the owner will slip up. They always do. The only questions are whether he will be killed or captured and whether he will take any of us down with him. Statistically speaking, the odds are against him.

The men of 5-1 Charlie (a well-decorated bunch, at least in the dermatological sense)

With the compound searches done, the patrol had achieved its objectives. We headed back to the FOB, arriving a little after 1000.

I was glad to have done my infantry part in this war. And I hope I never have to do anything like that again.

You have just read the description of a single, short patrol. The men in the above photograph will do this almost every day for six months. What more can I say about them?

AUGUST 4, AFTERNOON | Back to the Beginning

After returning from the patrol, I went back to my bunker, gathered up my gear, and said my farewells to Bed, Red and the Bison crews. I had greatly enjoyed my time with them and I hoped we would stay in touch. I then reported to the convoy assembly area.

Even with the road partly paved, the trip from FOB Ma’Sum Ghar to FOB Sperwan Ghar exposed me to significant risk. But everything is relative. Going on a convoy seemed like a walk in the park compared with the dangers I had faced this morning. As I sat in my vehicle I was exhausted, but elated.

We left a bit before noon. I was so baffed that I passed out before we even got to the front gate of Ma’Sum Ghar. My next memory is of someone shaking my shoulder at FOB Sperwan Ghar. As I climbed out of the vehicle, I could see that the FOB had changed quite a bit since my last visit. Canadian soldiers have worked hard to improve their living conditions here, as they have at all our FOBs.

A far greater change had taken place inside me. I first came here on November 20, 2007, arriving by helicopter after midnight. I had been in Afghanistan less than a week. I was disoriented and more than a little miserable. I was apprehensive as I wondered if I would react effectively under fire.

I soon found out: we were attacked on my fourth day here, and I had to deal with a MasCal situation. My combat reflexes reappeared and the emergency medicine machine did its thing. Over the next month, I got into the rhythm of the war and of the FOB.

This time, I am a veteran. Arriving at FOB Sperwan Ghar feels like coming back to the old family cottage. The living will be rough, the amenities will be minimal and savage animals will be lurking about.

And yet it almost feels . . . comfortable.

AUGUST 5 | They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

The day started at 0200, with the arrival of an Afghan soldier at the UMS. He’d had abdominal pain for a couple of hours. He had no nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or fever, and his vital signs were normal. He indicated that the pain was around his belly button, but when I examined his abdomen he was much more tender in the right lower quadrant, the classic sign of early appendicitis. Once again, I benefited from our wonderful medevac system. One phone call and a helicopter came within minutes to whisk this man to surgery.

The physician assistant I am replacing here is Chief Petty Officer Second Class Gaétan Poulin. He jokes that he is ill at ease in his land army uniform . . . but he allowed me to take a “hero shot” as we waited for the helicopter that would take him back to KAF. That is the photograph shown here.

Chief Petty Officer Second Class Gaétan Poulin

Age forty-eight, CPO 2 Poulin is one of those rock-solid individuals who holds the CF together. He has had two deployments prior to this one, a relatively benign one in Cyprus in the 1980s and a horrible one in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. He still talks about that experience in hushed tones and admits that it took the better part of a year after he returned home to process what he had been through and get back to normal.

He still retains the enthusiasm for our job that I have seen in the younger medics. As we discussed the practice profile of the patient load here at FOB Sperwan Ghar, he peppered me with questions about my approach to this or that clinical scenario. It was an enjoyable conversation with a fellow senior health professional of long experience.

CPO 2 Poulin is also quite modest. Since he is the last of the FOB docs I am replacing, he has spent four months on the FOB, much longer than anyone else has had to endure on this tour. I mentioned this to him, but he laughed it off and said it was no big deal. Many would disagree.

After he left I met with Corporal Sabrina Paquet, the Bison medic, to go over the UMS files. That Bison and all but one of the combat team medics are going out on an operation tomorrow, leaving me almost alone to run the UMS. As we went over the statistics, it emerged that Sperwan Ghar is the quietest of our three FOB UMSs. Corporal Paquet commented on that, saying it was still important that we be here in case anything happened. I could tell that she felt that her contribution was somehow less than that of the staff at the other two FOBs because she had not been knee-deep in blood, as we were at FOB Wilson and FOB Ma’Sum Ghar. I think it is important to correct that impression.

Napoleon said that “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” In other words, the psychological well-being of an army is three times more important than its physical state. I told Corporal Paquet that our role, as medical personnel, was only partly the medical care of the casualties. It is equally important for us to convince our warriors that we will deliver the finest medical care to them if they are wounded. First-rate medical care such as we can provide here acts as a “force multiplier,” enabling soldiers to fight harder and to face more danger because they know we are here to back them up. Busy or not, we are a big part of what makes our army fight well.

Addendum: “They also serve who only stand and wait” is the last line of a poem, “On His Blindness,” by John Milton. The poem is an incomprehensible paean in which Milton describes how best to serve God. During World War Two, the phrase was adopted by those who stayed in Canada to guard the nation while others went to fight in Europe and the Pacific. The service of these people who did nothing but “stand and wait” was not exciting and garnered no honours. It was often derided by the combat troops, but it was a vital service nonetheless.

AUGUST 6 | The Moderating Effect

An army is a reflection of the society from which it is drawn. Women are now ubiquitous in our army, on the FOBs and even in the combat teams, just as they can be found in all walks of civilian life.

Our ability to wage war has neither improved nor deteriorated as a result of this. Warriors are defined by the skill set they bring to the battlefield. This skill set can be mastered by a certain proportion of women, subject only to the same physical limitations that apply to men their size. And vice versa. Corporal Bouthillier (the Ma’Sum Ghar Bison medic) has shoulders and arms that are bigger and stronger than mine. She has a much easier time opening and closing the heavy armoured door on the back of her ambulance than I do.

That being said, it would be foolish to claim that sexism no longer exists in the CF. It would be accurate, however, to state that expressions of sexism are now only quietly muttered. Individuals who say such things aloud in a men-only group are often confronted by other men.

While it may not surprise you that the women in the CF train and fight side-by-side with men, I think only the youngest readers will not at least raise an eyebrow when learning that we all sleep in the same room or tent or bunker. We have no more privacy than that provided by a thin sheet hung from the ceiling, sometimes not even that.

While the constant presence of women on the front lines has in no way altered our combat efficiency, their effect has nonetheless been dramatic. Left to their own devices, guys with time on their hands degenerate pretty rapidly into a bunch of slobs who talk about nothing but sex. It is a lot of fun, but it can be a tad one-dimensional. To be honest, part of me misses the wall-to-wall porn that was an integral part of settings like a FOB twenty-five years ago. But it seems a small price to pay for the broader and more intellectual discussions that take place around me now.

Well . . . let’s say it’s a fair price.

AUGUST 7 | Too Quiet

With the combat team away, the FOB is empty. To use an apt, although in the current context unfortunate, expression: you could shoot a cannon through here and not hit anybody.

It is almost eerie. I am writing this after dinner, and no one has come by the UMS all day. I have dropped into the command post a couple of times to see how the operation is going. Things seem quiet on that side as well. But the day wasn’t a complete write-off: I had the time to wander around and get reacquainted with the FOB.

Sperwan Ghar means “dusty mountain” (they got that right)

When I first arrived here in 2007, I looked at this big pile of sand in the middle of this flat desert and thought: That’s weird. We are below the southernmost latitude the glaciers ever reached, so there is no geological reason for this formation to exist. One of the first things I did was climb to the top of the hill to have a look around. I even shot a video in which I described what I was seeing: the view in all cardinal directions and . . . look at that . . . trenches. Very old trenches. Trenches dug . . . in the Russian style.

There being so many more things to occupy my mind at the time, I failed to pursue the obvious connection between the Russian trenches and the geological anomaly that is Sperwan Ghar. This time, I did a bit of research and my suspicions were confirmed. The Russians created this hill by piling thousands of truckloads of sand from the nearby Registan Desert. They needed a base in this area with good lines of sight in all directions, so they built one. You have to hand it to the communists: they are not afraid of the Big Projects.

We are in the boonies here. FOB Wilson has the highway that connects it to the outside world, and FOB Ma’Sum Ghar is right beside the bustling city of Bazaar-e-Panjwayi. FOB Sperwan Ghar, in contrast, is surrounded by desert and “rural sprawl.” Although a few of the buildings nearby are family compounds and there is the occasional mosque (the call to prayers can be faintly heard), most are agricultural structures. Among these are many “grape huts,” used to dry the grape harvest, thereby converting it into raisins, which are a much more portable and therefore much more valuable crop than grapes per unit of weight. When the means of transportation are at a premium (there are very few vehicles this far in the hinterland), this is a major consideration.

Looking southwest from Hilltop OP towards the Registan Desert (the greenery stops at the mountains and dunes in the distance)

The flags of Sperwan Ghar

The military implications of this are obvious. The Taliban, by wearing civilian clothing and carrying farm implements, blend into the civilian population. They can get close to the FOB and conceal themselves in one of these nearby buildings. The FOB is within effective range of all the weapons in their arsenal at that point.

FOB Sperwan Ghar is the only one of our FOBs that has been obliged to repel a ground assault, not once but twice. These attacks have only been a serious attempt at harassment, with good reason. An attack launched by ground troops would have to cross a few hundred metres of open terrain and get through a couple of layers of barbed wire before it reached our outer walls. Given the firepower that we can lay down on that area with our direct-fire weapons (rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers), I doubt that even a force of several hundred attackers could breach our defences. I will try to focus on that and not on the way our enemies often cross over the line that separates bravery from insanity.

The FOB is home to a combat team centred on a company of the Royal Vingt-deuxième Régiment, abbreviated R22eR, the French Canadian infantry regiment more commonly known as the Van Doos. The flag in the centre of the photograph on the previous page is the flag of Afghanistan. The one on the left is the flag of the Van Doos. The symbol at the base of the Afghan flag is a stylized cobra (don’t worry if it is not obvious to you; someone had to explain it to me as well). “C” company, based here, has chosen this as its emblem.

The FOB Sperwan Ghar UMS

As with all the other FOBs, the UMS has recently been upgraded. It is now housed in the modular affair shown in the above photograph. It is roomy inside and impossibly clean—that won’t last!

One final anecdote.

As I was wandering around the FOB I met the ammunition technician, Corporal Audrey Gravel, who showed me around her digs. I can’t show you what that looks like. The Talis would be only too happy to learn where we hide the things that go “Boom!”

She showed me the impressive arsenal we have here, which includes a generous supply of Claymore mines. These are a factory-made version of the “directional IED” described in the July 7 entry. We had Claymores when I was in the infantry. Since that time, a special safety feature has been added: a warning on the back of the mine that states:

Warning—Explosive is poisonous if eaten

Do not burn—produces toxic fumes

I can think of many non-traditional uses for a Claymore. Paperweight, doorstop and aquarium decoration all come to mind. But no matter how desperate a situation I try to conjure up, “lunch” and “firewood” do not appear on my list. Product safety warnings being what they are, this admonition would have appeared after someone tried to do both of these things. Let us hope that it was a single person who tried to cook and eat the thing and that one of these methods removed him from the gene pool.

Corporal Gravel also showed me one of the echoes of wars past that infest this land: a Russian artillery shell, now more than twenty years old. This weapon and countless others like it lie strewn about the Afghan countryside, waiting to kill the innocent or to be picked up by the Taliban for use in their IEDs. We are slowly gathering these up and destroying them, but it is like cleaning the Augean stables.*

MINES

In an earlier entry I explained why I thought mines were the worst byproduct of war. Strewn indiscriminately across a large number of developing world nations, these weapons destroy lives and damage economies out of all proportion to the military benefit they provide. This destruction and damage carries on long after the end of the conflict during which the mines were laid because the minefields are almost never deactivated, or even marked, by the groups that laid them.

Canada led the way in banning these weapons. Our role was so instrumental in this process that the accord is commonly called the “Ottawa Treaty,” which rolls off the tongue more easily than “Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction.” As of May 2009, 156 countries have signed the treaty. Thirty-seven countries have not, including the People’s Republic of China, Russia and the United States.

A survey done in 2006 revealed that there were 160 million antipersonnel mines in the stockpiles of all the world’s armies. Armies being less than forthcoming with information like this, the true total is likely even higher. The good news is that, as of 2009, seventy-four countries have destroyed all their stocks of anti-personnel mines, totalling some forty million mines. Not a bad start.

The provisions of the Ottawa Treaty are strict. Signatories undertake “never under any circumstances to use, develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, anti-personnel mines.”

Never. Under any circumstances. Pretty clear, eh? So why do we have Claymore “mines” here—devices with explosive and shrapnel, designed to be placed in a precise location ahead of time and detonated there later. Are we breaking the rules?

No. We are following both the letter and the spirit of the Ottawa Treaty. Although popularly referred to as the “Mine Ban Treaty,” the formal title makes it plain that only anti-personnel mines are prohibited. These are defined in the treaty as mines “designed to be exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person . . .”

These mines are the most serious problem. They make up the vast majority of the mines laid in modern conflicts, and they are the ones that will kill and maim peasants, farmers and other rural folk for decades to come.

Claymore mines are specifically excluded from the treaty. Why?

Our Claymores are placed at strategic sites all around our FOB. These sites can be seen by our OPs. They are not linked to pressure plates, trip wires or any other mechanism that would make them explode if someone walked by or even directly onto them. The Claymores can only be detonated by an intentional electrical signal sent by the FOB’s defenders.

Claymores do not function as mines, but rather as a close-in defensive system for the OP, to be used if we are faced with a ground attack by foot soldiers. In other words, we use a Claymore the same way we would use a shotgun—a very large shotgun. The correct term for these devices is “defensive command detonated weapons.”

We know exactly how many Claymores we have placed around the FOB and we know exactly where they are. When the time comes for us to leave the FOB, we will deactivate them and take them back with us. Nothing harmful will be left behind.*

AUGUST 8 | A Canadian Achievement

I was woken up at 0400, by yet another Afghan soldier with abdominal pain. The history and physical exam this time were much more suggestive of gastroenteritis. We kept the patient in the UMS for several hours, rehydrated him with intravenous fluids and gave him medication for the pain and nausea. By 1200 he was feeling much better and was able to go back to his barracks. The only medic remaining on the FOB, Corporal Martin Pelletier, took care of the patient from beginning to end.

That was the sum total of the visits to the UMS today, so there was not much for me to do. This makes it a good day to discuss something I have wanted to talk about for some time. I have nothing but contempt for Barack Obama’s predecessor, and I totally disagree with the American invasion of Iraq. It follows that I could not agree more with the current president’s decision to wind down the war in Iraq while ramping up American efforts here. I like to say that it is never too late to stop making a mistake, and I think that precisely describes what President Obama is doing in both places.

We are beginning to see the impact of his decision on the ground. Apart from the three main FOBs encountered in this diary, Canada has also built two smaller combat outposts. FOB Frontenac is located northeast of here, in the Shah Wali Khot district; FOB Spin Boldak is to the southeast, almost at the Pakistani border, beside a small town of the same name.

The Shah Wali Khot and Arghandab districts have always been “the other places the Canadians went.” There was less combat activity in those districts, so you may well have never heard of them. They were far from the main focus of our operations in Zhari-Panjwayi, but until this roto there had been no other Coalition troops to cover them. The same could be said about Spin Boldak.

While these FOBs occasionally hosted several dozen Canadian soldiers, we never had enough long-term combat power deployed there to enable us to pacify the area. All that has changed with the increased American presence. We are therefore pulling out of these FOBs and turning them over to much larger groups of U.S. soldiers.

But whereas our withdrawal from FOB Frontenac and FOB Spin Boldak had been announced months ago, we were surprised a couple of weeks ago when it was announced that we would also be turning FOB Wilson over to our allies. Major Tim Arsenault and Bravo Company will be moving into FOB Ma’Sum Ghar. The FOB Wilson UMS staff will go back to KAF.

This makes eminent military sense. FOB Wilson is being dramatically expanded and will house a full American battalion. This is at least six times as many soldiers as we had deployed there. The Americans will concentrate on Zhari district while we focus our efforts in the Panjwayi.

This concentration of firepower will make life very difficult for the Taliban in Zhari-Panjwayi. Until now, we have been able to keep the enemy at bay. Anytime they gathered in groups of any size, we would detect them, pursue them and usually destroy them.

But we were trapped in a quandary in which counterinsurgency forces often find themselves: we could defeat the enemy on the battlefield and chase them out of any particular sector, but we did not have enough “boots on the ground” to prevent them from filtering back in once the fighting was over. Thanks to the vastly increased American presence, Zhari-Panjwayi is about to be inundated with Coalition troops.

As good as that news is, I admit that it leaves me with a twinge of worry. For three long years now, Canada has held the line in Kandahar province. In 2006, we pushed the Taliban out of what had been their homeland and denied them easy access to Kandahar City. Since then, we have kept them on the run in this, their native ground. If the Coalition is victorious in Kandahar province, it will be a victory built on that Canadian achievement. It will be a grave injustice if the histories that will be written about this war do not acknowledge that.

AUGUST 9 | Where Are They Now?

The combat team returned to the FOB early this morning. The place is bustling again and, even if it means that I have to wait in line for my meals and take my turn on the Internet, I like this better.

There was no contact with the enemy. Not a single shot was fired in anger. This is not to say that the mission was not a success. Two noteworthy events took place.

First, a mid- to high-level Taliban leader was captured. He was captured by a conjoined group of Afghan and Canadian soldiers. This particular leader had been in command of a group that had recently captured a number of Afghan soldiers. All the captured soldiers were executed near a village in the area, as a warning to the locals not to cooperate with the government. The Afghan soldiers were in the mood for some serious payback, and for a while it looked like the Taliban leader would be lynched on the spot. But the Canadians strenuously objected, and the Afghan soldiers backed off.

I have heard of other similar situations, where Canadian soldiers make it clear to their Afghan allies that we do not fight dirty wars and that we will not be a party to their fighting one either. This is again education in the purest sense: exposing individuals to different world views and trusting that, overall, groups will make wise and humane decisions.

The other important result of the operation was the discovery of a well-equipped lab for converting marijuana into hashish, along with eight hundred kilograms of the finished product. The ANA blew up the former and burned the latter. Canadian soldiers—quite wisely, I think—do not get involved in drug eradication programs. These programs mostly penalize poor farmers who are trying to feed their families. But destroying the product after the Taliban has bought it is almost as good as destroying an arms cache. The Taliban fund much of their war effort with drug money, so this operation made a big dent in their budget. Beyond that, the results of this operation have left an enormous question mark hanging in the air. In my first month on the FOB during Roto 4, our troops inflicted a couple of stinging defeats on the Taliban, killing over one hundred of them in two battles in December 2007. Then we launched an operation where we encountered no enemy. As I described in the July 31 entry, we hurt them badly for several days in a row at the end of the last month. Again, around a hundred enemy soldiers have been killed in under two weeks. And again, they seem to have ceded the battlefield to our forces.

Are they bringing in new recruits, tending to their wounded and regrouping? Or had they always planned to pull back at this time, to be able to hit the country hard on election day? That will be on August 20, a week and a half from now.

It is vital that these elections take place in a free and fair manner, but the chances of that happening are looking poorer every day. Despite their losses, the Taliban have done a good job of derailing the democratic process in Zhari-Panjwayi. They have murdered so many government representatives that few candidates or party workers have come here. There are not even any election posters on the walls.

Of far more concern is that I have been unable to learn where the people around FOB Sperwan Ghar will be able to vote. Some sources claim there will be a polling station a few hundred metres north of the FOB. Others insist that the people will have to go to Bazaar-e-Panjwayi (the village beside FOB Ma’Sum Ghar) to vote.

The next ten days will be tense.

AUGUST 11 | Election Perception

Just as I did at Ma’Sum Ghar, I run to the top of the hill here three or four times before breakfast to get my blood pumping. I was coming down the hill for the last time this morning when I noticed one of our patrols coming back in. We came into the barracks at the same time, and I asked the patrol leader how things had gone. There has been very little contact with the enemy lately, and the patrols had been able to get into some good conversations with the locals about the upcoming election.

I have read extensively about the tribal nature of Afghan culture, and yet I still have trouble fully grasping the power these bonds have over ordinary Afghan people. The way the local villagers perceive the election is a case in point.

When the villagers are questioned about the election, there seems to be little comprehension of what the exercise is meant to achieve. Democracy is foreign to rural Afghan culture, and the Taliban have made it difficult for the government to educate the people of Zhari-Panjwayi with regards to this. The people have therefore remained attached to what they know well. What they have told our patrols is that they are happy with their leader and that they see no need to vote.

That leader is none other than Haji Baran, the district leader. This is an appointed post, not an elected one. Haji Baran has also presented himself for election to the post of representative of the area (the equivalent of a member of Parliament). This would be like a senior manager in a city running for mayor. Nothing wrong with that; it happens in Canada all the time.

The complication comes when you learn that Haji Baran had told the CIMIC people that he was expecting very little voter turnout in the election—in the order of 10 to 20 per cent. The conflict of interest is evident. If the district turned out in force to elect a representative other than Haji Baran, there could be a real threat to his power base. I can only wonder how enthusiastically he encouraged his people to get involved in the elections. I doubt he threatened anybody, the way the Taliban did; all he would have had to do is tell his people that voting was not necessary and that he would continue to take care of them as he had always done. The people would probably be pleased with that.

They would be somewhat less pleased if they knew that, in 2008, Haji Baran was caught doing something that looked irregular with the pay of the local police. The American police mentoring team that had dropped off the funds in question took the money back. Haji Baran responded by having the building the Americans were in surrounded by gunmen loyal to him. A three-hour standoff ensued. Only the arrival of the Canadian quick reaction force convinced everybody to calm down.

Haji Baran was fired from his post after this incident. Somehow, like politicians all over the world, he has managed to insinuate himself back into the body politic. The CIMIC people tell me that he seems to have turned over a new leaf of late, but you have to wonder . . .

Regardless of his failings, however, Haji Baran supports at least the concept of democracy. And it must be recognized that being part of the local government has marked him for death. Major Patrick Robi-chaud, who was the combat team commander at FOB Sperwan Ghar the last time I was here, remembers the local leader well. He had to deal with him several times at regional shuras. In spite of Haji Baran’s obvious corruption, Major Robichaud felt he genuinely wanted to protect and help the people of the area.

The Taliban, for their part, have made their opposition to the very idea of democracy perfectly clear. Their official position, as stated on their website, is that the election must be boycotted. They are enforcing this position by declaring a twenty-four-hour curfew on election day. Anyone caught outside their home during this period will be killed.

AUGUST 12 | Leadership

Through the ages, leaders have generally been physically imposing individuals. Kings were warriors who led their nations in the most direct manner possible: into battle at the head of their armies. Even today, those who have been genetically blessed with a six-foot-three muscular frame are more likely to be successful, even in fields where size and strength do not matter.

The combat team commander here at FOB Sperwan Ghar, Major Steve Jourdain, breaks this pattern. Nonetheless, he commands the same respect as Major Tim Arsenault (see the June 20 entry).

I can already perceive that there are many things Major Jourdain does well in the military sphere. He is a sound tactician. His knowledge of the weapons and equipment of his combat team is encyclopedic. He has a good appreciation of the enemy’s capabilities and likely intentions. He cares deeply about his men, puts their welfare before his own and is mindful of their safety. Rather than describing his skills as a combat leader, however, I thought it would be more entertaining to show you how his leadership is displayed in a much different setting.

The combat troopers enjoy the occasional bit of gambling. The current popularity of poker in North American society is reflected here: one rarely sees anything else being played. But nowhere is it as organized as it is here at FOB Sperwan Ghar. If the combat team is not out on an operation, a dozen or more of them will congregate every night around two large poker tables for a tournament. Desperate for a new distraction, I have joined them for several evenings.

Major Jourdain is an outstanding poker player. Though soft-spoken, he is very much an alpha male. Yet somehow he manages to suppress his desire to win to give constant tips both to newcomers and to the more experienced players in the group. I fall into the former category. Major Jourdain feels that his wise words are falling on deaf ears, but I can honestly say I have never had so much fun losing money quickly as I have had over the past few nights.

Major Steve Jourdain (and prospective victim)

Major Jourdain’s leadership goes well beyond that. There is not a lot to do on the FOB. It would be easy for troopers to lose inordinate amounts of money while gambling, just to pass the time. Major Jourdain prevents this by imposing a strict $5 limit on the amount anyone can lose in a single night. Even someone as hopeless as I am cannot lose more than a day’s pay over the course of the tour.

Major Jourdain’s understanding of human nature is evident in the way he has structured the tournament. First, he has made the action emotionally satisfying. Your $5 entry fee buys you $12,000 worth of chips. The tough combat trooper who would feel foolish saying “I raise you 35 cents” looks quite satisfied as he tosses a green chip onto the table and says, “Raise you $1,000.” Silly, but it works. Also, depending on the number of players, the games have three or four winners. Each one will go home (well, back to his room) with $10 to $40. No big winners, no big losers. No regrets, no animosity.

But there is more to the nightly poker games than creating an environment in which the troopers can have some fun without losing their shirts. Major Jourdain also uses these games to take the pulse of the company. He is always attuned to who shows up and who doesn’t, what people are talking about, who seems down. He also uses these occasions to dispel (or sometimes confirm) the rumours that are an inevitable part of military life, especially on a FOB. Even when it looks like he is relaxing, he is thinking about his men and how to best looKAFter their interests.

That’s leadership.

Ten minutes into the game, the correct poker term for my position is “a chip and a chair.” There goes Grandma’s chemotherapy money.

Soldiers in a war zone playing poker. A stereotype, but fun!

AUGUST 13 | The Patient Mentor

While our army is mostly composed of men and women in their twenties and thirties, those in the combat arms are drawn from the younger part of that spectrum. The tasks are too physical for most older people. This is borne out by our casualties: as of today, the average age of our dead is twenty-five.

These young Canadians are much better informed about the Afghan mission than their fellow citizens are. Many of them can speak eloquently about the need to confront the Taliban. While they sometimes try to appear cynical (something the young often mistake for maturity), one can see that their motivation comes from a sincere commitment to defend human rights.

For most of them, however, this deployment is their first prolonged exposure to a foreign culture. It is also the first time they have been in contact with this level of poverty. Taken together, these elements make the Afghan villagers around here so different that most of the young troopers have a great deal of trouble relating to them.

I have noticed very little overt racism, but it is clear that most of these kids feel uncomfortable in situations of social interaction with the Afghans. Individuals like Corporal Bouthillier, the FOB Ma’Sum Ghar medic who sought out and indeed treasured her daily contacts with Afghan civilians, are rare and striking exceptions.

The Canadian soldiers who interact most with the Afghans are the ones we have assigned to train the Afghan army. These soldiers serve on Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams (OMLTs), living and working among the Afghan soldiers. Maturity, a broad world view, strong teaching skills and experience with at least one culture other than their own would seem to be the minimum prerequisites for such a task. You would think that the people assigned to this mission would be chosen very carefully. That is not the case. Despite the vital nature of their work, the OMLTs are so small (just a few soldiers per team) that they are not high on the battle group’s priority lists. Teams are sometimes put together on the fly at the last minute.

That is what happened here at Sperwan Ghar. The FOB is home to a company of ANA infantry soldiers who operate under the guidance of a Canadian OMLT team. The team commander is Captain Manuel Pelletier-Bédard.

Captain Pelletier-Bédard came to this posting by an unusual route. He has been in the army a bit more than two years. During that time, he has been posted to the Douzième Régiment Blindé du Canada (the 12th Canadian Armoured Regiment, the Québécois tank regiment). For the better part of a year, he trained on tanks and was scheduled to deploy with the Leopards at Ma’Sum Ghar. A few weeks before he was to leave for Afghanistan, the army decided to transfer him to the infantry. The infantry made him a mentor.

So far, this has all the makings of a spectacular and uniquely military screwup. It turns out to have been an inspired choice. First, Captain Pelletier-Bédard proved to be a very quick study. Building on his basic combat arms training, he quickly sharpened his infantry tactics and is an effective mentor in this regard. Even the veteran infantry officers assigned here respect him and consider him one of their own. But what is far more important is that he has been able to connect with his Afghan charges. How has he been able to achieve this? “My interactions with Afghan civilians were what most helped me understand the Afghan soldiers,” he told me.

Captain Pelletier-Bédard did not intentionally seek out more contact with the local civilians. It happened naturally because the Afghan soldiers, even the ones who are Dari-speaking northerners, will regularly interact on a social basis with the villagers they encounter. They will even share a cup of tea with these people, knowing full well that many of them support the Taliban.

Captain Manuel Pelletier-Bédard

Captain Pelletier-Bédard has benefited professionally from these interactions. He says that his contacts with Afghan civilians have enabled him to be more patient with the Afghan soldiers. It is one thing to know that most of these soldiers are illiterate and innumerate. It is quite another thing to be regularly confronted with villagers who use the word “many” to describe any number higher than two.

I asked Captain Pelletier-Bédard the obvious question: did he think his mentorees had progressed satisfactorily over the four months he had been in Afghanistan? He replied that they had progressed very little . . . because they were already competent when he got here. In a recent evaluation exercise, his company was able to function almost independently.

Captain Pelletier-Bédard has therefore not done much “M,” or mentoring. Rather, he has focused on the “L” and provided liaison between the ANA and the Coalition forces. Primarily, this has meant coordinating artillery attacks and air strikes against the enemy when his troops have been in contact. But mentor or not, Captain Pelletier-Bédard is first and foremost an officer in the CF. His responsibility towards the men he commands (or, in this case, he advises) is sacrosanct. Here’s an anecdote that shows how far he is willing to go to keep faith with that creed.

Captain Pelletier-Bédard’s ANA company was involved in the recent operation around Salavat Ghar. They got into heavy contact and were taking a lot of fire from two sides. An air strike was called in on Taliban positions four hundred metres away.

The bombs that were going to be dropped weigh five hundred pounds. They are highly accurate but they have a gigantic kill radius. It is essential to pull all friendly forces back a few hundred metres from the intended target. When he tried to do so, Captain Pelletier-Bédard realized that radio contact had been lost with a section of Afghan soldiers who had pressed forward to get closer to the enemy. This squad was now within one hundred metres of the Taliban positions, well beyond “danger close.”

The three hundred metres of ground between Captain Pelletier-Bédard and the Afghan squad was a flat sandy field devoid of any cover. Despite this, he did not hesitate: he headed across the open area to warn his men to take cover. He could not have been going very fast. He was wearing his frag vest and tac vest, he was carrying a heavy pack on his back and a rifle in his hands. This is rather more than I was carrying on my combat patrol ten days ago. I am sure Captain Pelletier-Bédard was giving it all he had, but I doubt he achieved anything faster than a slow jog. As soon as he broke cover the insurgents focused their fire on him. As he crossed the open field, bullets were coming from his left and his right, flying by his head and kicking up dirt at his feet. Miraculously, he made it across that field unhurt and got his men behind a mud brick wall in time to shield them from the air strike.

That would have been enough for any soldier, but Captain Pelletier-Bédard was just getting warmed up. Once the air strike was over, he went running back across the same open ground. One of the soldiers he had left behind had been shot in the leg. He had to get back as quickly as possible to give him first aid and to call in a medevac. There were fewer bullets flying past him on the return leg (courtesy the air strike), but he was still dancing with death every step of the way. As he made his way back, he had to cross a deep ditch. He had no recollection of having crossed it on the way over. Combat will do that to people: the brain excludes what it does not deem essential to survival.

Canadian soldier in action with ANA troops
(© Louie Palu/ZUMA Press, reprinted with permission)

Captain Pelletier-Bédard describes all this in much the same way I would describe an unusual case in the emergency department: momentarily intense, but nothing more than another day on the job.

AUGUST 14 | Mentorees, Part 1

I said earlier that Captain Pelletier-Bédard felt that his ANA “mentorees” had not required much guidance from him, since they were already functioning at a high level. I met two of the people most responsible for this state of affairs at lunch today. I had gone to introduce myself, somewhat belatedly, to the commanders of the ANA unit based here.

Captain Ghioz and First Lieutenant Nooragha

The man on the left in the accompanying photograph is Captain Ghioz, the ANA company commander. Beside him is the company second-in-command, First Lieutenant Nooragha. Like many Afghans, they have a single name. Between them, they have nearly fifty years of military experience. This explains, at least in part, the competence of their soldiers.

The way they acquired their knowledge of war is remarkable. As with “the brothers” (see the July 29 entry), the story of these two men sums up the tragedy of the past generation and the hope of the next one.

These men began fighting in the late 1980s. Captain Ghioz is a member of the Tajik tribe, which dominates northern Afghanistan. He joined the mujahedeen resistance to fight the Russian occupation. During the civil war that followed, he remained loyal to his Tajik resistance group. He continued to do so after the Taliban took over. Since 2002, he has served with the ANA.

First Lieutenant Nooragha’s story could not be more different. He began his military career during the Russian occupation as an instructor at the military college in Kabul in the late 1980s. Early in our conversation, he told me that Canadian mentorship compares favourably with what he experienced under the Russians. We assign an officer and two to four soldiers to a company of 150 men; the Russians had one officer advising four thousand Afghans.

When the Russians left in 1989, they left behind a puppet communist government. First Lieutenant Nooragha continued to teach at the military college, which seems logical. When the mujahedeen took Kabul in 1992, they kept him on staff. That was astounding enough; but, incredibly, the Taliban did the same thing when they came to town in 1996. First Lieutenant Nooragha laughs about this now, saying that he had to grow his beard and wear a turban. Otherwise, he had no problems training Taliban recruits.

So what did he do in 2001 when the Coalition invaded? He shaved his beard, lost the turban and reapplied for his old job. Which he got!

To recap: in fifteen years, this guy trained soldiers for the Russians, the Afghan communists, the Islamic mujahedeen, the extremist Taliban and the U.S.-backed Coalition. He is now in a combat infantry company. He spontaneously mentioned that he does not enjoy fighting; he would much rather be back in Kabul in a classroom. But he is loyal to whatever government is in power. They have sent him here, and so he has come.

Anyone reading this description of First Lieutenant Nooragha’s employment record could conclude that he is an amoral mercenary. Having met the man and spoken to him at length, I am convinced that is not the case. He sees himself as a loyal Afghan who follows the orders of the central government. In a country as chaotic as this one, he has chosen to define this as “whoever runs things in Kabul.” For much of Afghanistan’s history (as in many other places in the developing world) having a group capable of running the capital is as close as the country has ever gotten to having a national government. These governments come to power by the bullet instead of the ballot, but they are the government nonetheless. I could see the logic of his position.

I asked him what he would do if the Taliban returned to power. He smiled, laughed and said that he would go back to working for them. Captain Ghioz, on the other hand, made it perfectly clear that he would not. The Taliban were his sworn enemies. He would like nothing better than to kill every last one of them himself. You get the sense that a devastating personal loss underlies the sentiment. It would have been much too forward to ask him to confirm that at our first meeting. Perhaps I will ask him before I go.

And yet . . .

Even Captain Ghioz would be ready to accept members of the Taliban into the government, provided they renounced violence. President Karzai has made this overture to the Taliban on at least three occasions. The Taliban have refused each time.

BREAKING BREAD WITH THE AFGHAN NATIONAL ARMY

The meal we shared consisted of a large dish of delicious rice. The taste suggested that it had been cooked in a kind of beef broth, and there was more than I could finish. The rice was garnished with a couple of pieces of boiled potato and a piece of mutton. This last was a big bone from which one could tear pieces of meat. There were soft drinks, bottled water and a white yogurt drink. A large piece of flatbread, similar to Indian naan bread, rounded out the feast. I asked the Afghans what they called it. They call it naan.

We sat cross-legged on the floor. Captain Ghioz ate his rice with a spoon while First Lieutenant Nooragha ate with his hands. Although it was not truly sticky rice, it was possible to make a ball of the stuff that held together reasonably well on the way to one’s mouth. I chose to emulate First Lieutenant Nooragha.

As superb as the meal was, the story of its preparation was troubling. Even though we are allies, the Afghan soldiers do not eat with the Canadians. No other element influences a soldier’s morale as much as the food he receives. Afghans and Canadians have grown up with different foodstuffs, and we want to provide both groups with food that is not only nutritious and tasty, but also familiar. The last thing we want to do is force the Afghans to eat side-by-side with the Canadians.

While I understand the reasons our allies eat separately from us, I cannot understand why the ANA can be provided with twenty-first-century weapons but only nineteenth-century kitchens. The building itself is a ramshackle structure, food preparation is done right on the ground and cooking is done over a wood fire in a mud-brick fireplace.

The ANA kitchen

The ANA cook

The worst thing about the way the ANA feeds its soldiers is the daily food-buying trip to the market in Bazaar-e-Panjwayi, the city right beside FOB Ma’Sum Ghar. That’s right: daily, and in unarmoured pickup trucks. The Afghans have no refrigeration facilities on the FOB. This forces some of them to risk their lives every morning to purchase the food the company will eat that day. Over the past three years, many Afghan soldiers have been wounded on these grocery shopping trips. Three of them have been killed.

Thankfully, things are about to improve. The Americans have already mapped out where modern kitchen facilities, including refrigeration units, will be built for the ANA. A contractor has been hired, and construction should start within a couple of weeks. But it is disturbing that this did not happen months or even years ago.

AUGUST 15, MORNING | Mentorees, Part 2

In the June 21 entry, I explained that modern armies do most of their killing with artillery. For the ANA to be able to rout the Taliban without our help, it will have to master this skill.

It is impossible, in an insurgency war such as this, to always have numerical superiority over the enemy. The insurgents strike when it suits them, and it suits them only when they are able to concentrate their forces so that they have at least parity with the government forces. Without artillery to back them up, government forces would always be in a fair fight. That is the last thing you want in a war: you always want to be in an unfair fight, one in which you have a crushing superiority.

Canada is helping the ANA develop this kind of firepower superiority: there is a battery of ANA artillery here, with Canadian mentors (a separate OMLT team from that of Captain Pelletier-Bédard’s). These guys are nowhere near being ready to go into combat, but at least the process has begun.

The beginnings of leadership

I went to watch them train this morning. I chose this day because the Canadians were not going to be present, and I wanted to see what the Afghans could do on their own. The drill they were doing involved getting their cannons “into action,” that is, ready to fire. In a combat situation, a gun crew must be able to bring their cannon into action in a matter of seconds. This is something gun crews will rehearse over and over again, until it is instinctive.

After the various crews had been practising for about an hour, a senior NCO arrived. He spoke to the men for a few minutes, and I could tell he was setting up some kind of competition between them. The guns were all placed into their “out of action” position (that is, ready to be moved to a new location). Another command was shouted, and all the crews rushed forward to put their guns into action as quickly as possible.

Even someone who knew nothing about artillery would have been able to appreciate that the gun crews were . . . moderately competent. Occasionally an individual would move in the wrong direction and have to be quickly redirected by the gun crew leader. But for someone with a military eye, there was something far more important to see. It is hinted at in the above photograph.

The first thing a soldier notices is consistency of dress. When I was here on Roto 4, the ANA was still dressed in a hodgepodge of different uniforms. Here, the troops are all wearing the same clothing (with some minor variability in the headdress).

There is something else, something far more important. Did you notice the shadows? The gun crew leader is facing into the sun so that his men do not have to squint as they listen to him. He is putting their welfare above his own. This is an elementary leadership technique— elementary, once you have been told about it.

It is that leadership which is the more impressive aspect of what I saw this morning. It was obvious that the gun crew leaders were confident and capable in their jobs. There was no hesitation in their voices; they spoke with assurance. Even more notably, they spoke in warm and encouraging tones. As they ran their crews through their drills, they were enthusiastic. If one of their men made a mistake, they gently corrected him.

Armies are a reflection of the society from which they are drawn. I have spent a fair amount of time studying the armies of the developing world up close. These armies reflect the struggle for survival that defines life in these countries: discipline is often harsh, even brutal. Any action, once explained, must be performed to perfection. If it is not, the troops receive some kind of punishment, often a beating.

On Roto 4, the Afghan leaders would occasionally throw rocks at their underperforming soldiers. One can imagine the long-term effects of that kind of behaviour on morale. If the ANA is going to meet and defeat the Taliban on its own, its leaders will have to learn to motivate their men the same way Major Arsenault, Major Jourdain and Warrant Officer Comeau do.

AUGUST 15, AFTERNOON | Mentorees, Part 3

The most recent entries may have given you the impression that all the teaching that goes on here is done by Canadians. Allow me to correct that misconception.

What we have to teach: 300-115= ? 454+465 = ?

Where we have to teach it

After the morning training is over, things pretty much shut down for the Afghan army. Many of the Canadian trainers struggle with this. Like many Westerners, they are accustomed to an eight-to-five workday. The “siesta time” concept strikes many Canadians as inefficient and lazy.

Most people in the developing world see things differently. They will maximize their efforts in the morning and late afternoon/early evening to avoid the brutal midday heat. This is the case here. As soon as the troops had finished eating lunch, they all collapsed into their bunks.

The training day was far from over, however. At 1600, the Afghan soldiers remaining in the camp assembled in a burned-out building. There were tables for half of them and chairs or benches for perhaps two-thirds. For the next couple of hours, one of their senior NCOs taught them . . . addition and subtraction.

Anyone who thinks the Afghans are not doing enough to improve their lot in life should spend an hour watching the enthusiasm with which grown men participate in these classes.

AUGUST 16, AFTERNOON | Just another day . . .

For the past three days Major Jourdain has been leading the combat team on an operation into the area of Chalgowr, a village east of here. The objective of the mission was to further disrupt insurgent activity before the elections. There was rather more enemy activity than anticipated, and the combat team got into a couple of prolonged firefights. None of our people got so much as a scratch during these skirmishes, and we inflicted some lethal casualties on the Taliban.

As the combat team was returning to the FOB, the lead vehicle was attacked by a remote-controlled IED. The blast rocked the vehicle slightly, leaving two members of the crew with a very mild neck strain that I treated with cold packs and a couple of days of anti-inflammatories. The trigger man was not nearly so lucky. Major Jourdain, in a vehicle following close behind, figured out almost instantly where he had been hiding. He brought his personal machine gun and his vehicle’s 25 mm cannon to bear and opened fire. The Taliban soldier realized he been detected and tried to make a run for it. The Canadians’ gunfire knocked him down within seconds. He did not move after that.

For my part, I had been enjoying a quiet day at the FOB and looking forward to the return of the combat team when we came under rocket attack. What was unusual was that I heard four distinct explosions: two at a distance, a pause, then two more, only much closer. I recognized that this was the sound of two rockets launching, followed a second later by the sound of their impact on the FOB. This was the first time I had heard both the launch and the impact. It meant the launchers were closer to me than they had ever been before. The rockets had sailed right over the UMS and crashed into the opposite side of the FOB.

I came outside to see if there was any obvious damage. A number of soldiers on the far side of the FOB were running for cover. A few others came out of the building adjacent to mine, asking what had happened. I ordered them back under cover and reported to the command post. This is just a few steps from the UMS and any news about wounded would come there first. Fortunately, there were none.

Just another day on the FOB.

AUGUST 16, EVENING | Perception Shift

It is easy to dislike people who are not like us. “The others” frighten us, sometimes for reasons we cannot even articulate. We usually respond with rejection and anger. The others do not even have to do anything overt for us to reject them. This all has to do with perception: if someone is sufficiently different, we will feel uncomfortable around them. In the August 13 entry, I described the natural tendency of young Canadian soldiers, abroad for the first time, to look upon the Afghans as “the others” and to have difficulty relating to them. I have come to an important realization about the otherness of the local Afghans, one that I will share with my fellow soldiers.

When discussing the situation in Afghanistan with ordinary Canadians, the concept of the “others” often comes up. Many of our countrymen perceive Afghans through the prism of our mission here in rural Kandahar. I have often heard statements that characterize all Afghans as being backwards rural folk with antediluvian attitudes towards women. These Canadians are stunned when you tell them that, before the Taliban, there were women in skirts going to medical school in Kabul and Herat.

Most of our troopers fall into the same trap. They arrive via Hercules aircraft at KAF. A few days later, they travel in a convoy of armoured vehicles to a FOB in Taliban territory. They venture out from the FOB only in large groups, armed to the teeth. The people they interact with are among the most rural, economically depressed and socially conservative in the country. Many of them actively support our enemies. Most of our troops extrapolate what they are seeing to the rest of the country. I wish they could see what I saw last night.

I had gone back to see Captain Ghioz and First Lieutenant Noor-agha. When I got there, they were playing a card game that I soon determined was a variant of bridge. My incompetence at poker notwithstanding, I play a number of other card games quite well. They invited me to sit in, and I eagerly did so. I am happy to report that my partner and I cleaned up, winning a dozen hands in a row before our adversaries threw in the towel and gave up. Afterwards, they invited me for yet another fantastic meal of mutton and potato soup along with a gigantic piece of naan.

Chowing down with the ANA

Although I had a lot of fun playing cards and eating with these men, it would take more than that to get a young Canadian to relate to them. But what was on TV would force all but the most jaded racist to recognize the sameness and the basic humanity of the Afghans. Lieutenant Nooragha engaged in a bit of channel surfing, but three programs stand out in my mind.

The first was an Indian soap opera, in which matriarchs berated idiot men, sexy guys chased after even sexier women and tough guys got into fights with each other. You did not need to understand a word of Pashto to be able to follow the plot. The emotions on display were all too human.

The second was an election ad for Hamid Karzai. The Taliban may have destroyed any chance of a normal election taking place in Zhari-Panjwayi, but they have had little effect in Kabul. This ad showed Karzai addressing a crowd of several thousand men and women, many of the latter uncovered, who were behaving like Canadians do at a large political rally. They were cheering and waving banners, and they seemed enthusiastic about their candidate.

Ads for two other presidential candidates also appeared. The officers in the room were evenly divided between Karzai and one of the other two. Far more importantly, they are all emphatic that, no matter who wins the election, they will remain loyal to the government of the day. The seed of democracy may have fallen on stony ground here in Zhari-Panjwayi, but it seems to be taking root elsewhere in this country.

For pure social connection, however, it was the third program that floored me. It was an episode of Gags from the Just for Laughs organization in Montreal. For those who have not seen this, it is reminiscent of Candid Camera: the comedians set up an outlandish situation on a city street or in a mall and capture people’s reactions. The Afghans got the jokes and laughed as hard as I did.

Yes, these people are different from us. But they are far less different than many would believe.

AUGUST 17 | Men of God

The CF employs “padres” of various denominations. These individuals serve as spiritual advisers to the troops in the broadest possible sense. They are all “cross-trained” in the other major faiths and can bring comfort to any believer. One of these men has followed me around the war zone, arriving at each FOB a little after me and staying a week or so in each one. He has roomed with the medical crew on two occasions, so I have gotten to know him fairly well and quite enjoyed his company.

Forty-six-year-old Captain Normand Cholette is the quintessential combat padre. He is calm and perpetually cheerful, and he has a unique way of connecting with the younger troopers: he plays rock-and-roll on the electric guitar better than anyone in the battle group. At FOB Wilson, he would be in the “Rock House” till well past midnight most evenings. We have had some fascinating conversations, usually about the way he reconciles his role here—to improve morale, thereby making us a more effective fighting force—with the fact that he rejects war as a political option and never carries a weapon.

Captain Normand Cholette, combat padre
(Photo courtesy Master Corporal Julien Ricard)

Another man fulfills the same function for the Afghan infantry company posted here. He is Faisal Hak, the company mullah (the Islamic equivalent of a Catholic priest, Protestant minister or Jewish rabbi). I had the opportunity to sit down and speak to him at length today, with the help of an excellent interpreter.

First, let me give you some basic demographics. Although he looks older, he is only twenty-four years old. He is from the city of Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. His wife and three children live there, in a family compound with his parents and two younger sisters.

He finished his religious training a year ago and volunteered for army service. This is the first time I have had a conversation with an Islamic religious authority of any description since arriving in Afghanistan. My first priority was not to give offence in any way (how Canadian!), so I began by asking “safe” questions about his family, his motivation for joining the army and the places he had served. I should not have worried. Faisal Hak may be a devout Muslim, but he is not afraid to engage in a serious theological debate.

He was the one who kicked things off by asking me to describe my concept of heaven and hell. I told him that I was an agnostic and that, although I believed there was a supreme being, I was not sure about much else. I told him the main reason for my uncertainty was the perfect certainty shown by so many who held diametrically opposed beliefs. We batted that back and forth for a while. He said it would be better to believe in one faith, to have a chance of getting into heaven if it was the right one. I countered with the argument that perhaps an absence of belief would be less offensive to God than the wrong one. Call that one a draw.

Faisal Hak, the company mullah

Faisal Hak had been sent to some isolated outposts. Just getting to these outposts, much less fighting from there, is dangerous. I asked him whether his faith made him somewhat nihilistic. If he believed that God was all-powerful, did he also believe that the time and manner of his death had been preordained? And if the answer was yes, did that make it easier to go forward into danger?

The response I got was carefully nuanced. Faisal Hak said that while the time and place of his death were immutably determined by God, it was his responsibility as a sentient human being to avoid being wounded. He was therefore not to take unreasonable risks to accomplish missions.

I then asked him what he thought of the Taliban and whether they were good Muslims. He replied emphatically that they were not Muslims at all. He buttressed this argument by pointing out all the things they did that are forbidden in the Quran. These included suicide bombing, the killing of innocents, the subjugation of women and the rejection of education.

With the opening he had given me, I asked him about the situation in his own household. He answered that both his mother and his wife had received a high school education (which is more than most women get in this country) and that his two sisters were currently pursuing the same thing. His three daughters are one, two and four years old. When he stated that they would all go to school, I asked him if he would have any objections to one of them becoming a doctor. He replied that he would not.

He then asked me about my profession and about my role here. After I had finished my reply, he told me that the Quran itself could be used to cure various ailments. I fell silent, and my body language was no doubt expressive. He asked me what I thought about what he had said, and I decided to reply honestly. I told him I was not happy to hear such things because it gave people false hope.

When he remonstrated, insisting that the Quran did heal, I asked him if he had ever seen it heal a bullet wound. He allowed that that was different, but then he seized the interpreter’s hand and insisted he could cure him of his warts. I took a look and saw that the interpreter had three warts on his index finger, one on his thumb and one on his middle finger. I suggested we compete: I would treat the warts on the index finger with my methods; he would treat the rest of the hand with the Quran.

Before continuing, I should mention that he had already asked me a couple of times if I wanted to become a Muslim. Both times I answered his question with another question and avoided the subject. But faced with an expression of belief that I consider dangerous—faith healing—I decided to challenge him. I offered him a bet: if by the time I left here (in a month) the index finger was healed, he would become a Christian; if the other two warts were healed and mine were not, I would become a Muslim. He readily agreed. After more discussion, I found out why: he explained to me that it was up to God to heal the warts. If the warts did not heal, it did not prove his method had failed. It only proved that God had not wanted the warts to heal. Ergo, his method had not failed. Indeed, it could not fail. This made it a bet that I could, at best, tie.

I was going to keep arguing about that, but then I remembered that it is a serious crime in Afghanistan to proselytize for any faith other than Islam. What I had done could be construed as attempting to convert a Muslim to Christianity. I began to backpedal furiously. I explained that since I was not a Christian, I had no desire to see him become one either. I suggested we change the terms of the bet. He agreed: if my warts do better than his, one of his daughters must become a doctor. As for me, I am off the hook if I lose.

Addendum, September 10: The index finger looks great, the other warts are unchanged. Paging Dr. Hak!

AUGUST 18 | Strategy and Tactics

When Task Force Orion arrived in Kandahar in early 2006, it was given an area of operations that, in retrospect, seems unimaginably large. The combat teams ranged all the way to the Pakistani border in the south, to the Arghandab and Shah Wali Khot districts in the north and as far west as Helmand province. This is more than ten times the surface area of Zhari-Panjwayi.

Since late 2006, we have focused on Zhari-Panjwayi. Half of this, Zhari district, has now been turned over to the Americans. This was already good news, because it meant we would be concentrating far more firepower in an area the Taliban want to contest.

The battle group commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jocelyn Paul, stopped by the FOB last night to describe our campaign plan for the next year or more. What he had to say was both reassuring and disappointing.

Take another look at the map in the June 4 entry that shows our FOBs dividing Zhari-Panjwayi on a north-south axis. It is to the east that the majority of the population resides.

From here on, we will deploy our forces mainly in the eastern part of the Panjwayi. The line of FOBs, which for so long served as springboards for operations into the Taliban heartland to the west, will now serve as a shield behind which we will operate in a different manner than we have until now.

The plan is to apply the principles of counterinsurgency in the way they were meant to be applied. For the first time, Canadians have the resources to accomplish this. Our troops are going to live right in the villages with the Afghan civilians. They will patrol intensively. In other words, there will be Coalition eyes and ears everywhere between our two remaining FOBs (Ma’Sum Ghar and Sperwan Ghar) and Kandahar City.

Militarily, I think this is a wise move. We are concentrating our forces into a region that represents less than a third of the area for which we were previously responsible. The impact this will have on combat operations can be easily imagined. As for the increased contact with Afghan civilians, I can only applaud this.

Emotionally, it is pretty tough to take. It was the soldiers of my first tour, Roto 4, who fought their way into western Zhari-Panjwayi and established outposts in the far reaches of those districts. On Roto 7, the current tour, we started off with a major operation to dismantle those outposts. Some soldiers were on both operations. You can imagine how they felt.

It is even harder to accept that, while we may be protecting 90 per cent or more of the population by following this new course, we are abandoning a small number of people to Taliban domination for the foreseeable future. Knowing that many of these people are staunch Taliban supporters only slightly lessens my regret.

AUGUST 19 | Anticipation and Anxiety

The elections will be held tomorrow.

Twice in the past three days, Taliban suicide bombers have struck in the capital, Kabul, killing a dozen people and wounding well over one hundred in total. Kabul has multiple medical resources to deal with such disasters. The same is not true in my little corner of the Panjwayi.

It appears there will be a polling station at an ANA observation post a kilometre north of here. No other situation since my arrival in Afghanistan has had so much potential for disaster. If a suicide bomber attacks a polling station while a large number of civilians are gathered, I could be faced with an overwhelming number of casualties. To make things worse, two-thirds of the combat team (and almost all the combat medics) as well as my Bison ambulance crew have been posted away from the FOB on security operations for the elections. The only soldiers with medical training currently on the FOB are a medic and a handful of TCCCs.

I have called a meeting with all of them for 1645. We will review triage concepts, how we will use the various spaces available to us near the UMS and who will be assigned to specific versus general tasks.

But my worries over whatever medical catastrophe may befall us tomorrow is nothing compared with my anxiety over the fate of the Afghan nation. The Coalition countries will be watching this election very closely. Support for the mission is lukewarm in many of these states. If the election is a fiasco, opinion polls could drift even further away from staying the course.

There are any number of ways things could go badly. Taliban intimidation could produce such a low voter turnout that the winner would lack legitimacy. Reports of widespread fraud would do the same even if voter turnout was high. Finally, even a well-attended, reasonably clean election could be fatally undermined in the eyes of the West if it comes at the cost of large numbers of civilian casualties.

To top it all off, incumbent president Hamid Karzai has chosen this week to curry favour with a small group of traditionalists by enacting a law that seems to enshrine a man’s right to deny his wife food if she refuses to have sex with him every four days. Proving himself every bit the able politician and insincere democrat, Karzai snuck the law through the parliamentary process while the legislators were in recess.* The law applies only to the Shia minority and it is unlikely to survive on the books for long, but the damage has been done. Even some people who are staunch supporters of the mission have e-mailed me asking if this country is worth saving.

AUGUST 20 | Election Day in Afghanada†

0630—Go to the command post to see how things are going in the district. There has been a lot of Taliban activity over the last several hours, about ten separate attacks on various Coalition outposts. So far, these have been nothing more than minor harassment attacks, including a couple of sniper rounds fired at us from the cemetery about eight hundred metres north of here.‡ I tell the duty officer I am going to go for my morning run up and down the hill anyway. Even if the shooter is still in place, which is doubtful, I will be a moving target nearly a kilometre away at a different elevation. Only the best snipers in the world can make such a shot. If the Taliban had anybody in that class, we would know about it—the men in the guard towers would be dropping like flies.

0730—I ran to the top of the hill five times instead of my usual four. A quick shower and another stop at the command post. The bad guys put one in their own net: someone planting a bomb in Bazaar-e-Panjwayi blew himself up.

0800—I am at my desk in the UMS. I hear incoming automatic weapons fire, from much closer than I have ever heard it before. I run back to my room to get my gear. First, enhance my survivability: frag vest, ballistic glasses, helmet. Then, get ready to fight. Tactical vest with ten extra magazines for my rifle (my pistol and its extra mags are already on my belt), gun gloves. My hands shake for a moment as I pull my gloves on, then the moment passes. Outside the door, I hear one of the senior NCOs yell, in that inimitable Québécois frenglish: “Let’s go, les boys! La FOB*se fait attaquer!” I grab my rifle, chamber a round, put the weapon on safe and run outside. I am the first one out of the building. I scan the immediate surroundings. The firing sounded so close, I was afraid a Taliban might have infiltrated the FOB. If so, we would be in a close-quarters gun battle. I surprise myself by remaining calm and controlled.

The other soldiers came boiling out of the building and fanned out to their assigned defensive positions. The hilltop observation post located the source of the enemy fire and began hammering back with heavy and medium machine gun fire. Now that I was outside, I could tell that the incoming and outgoing fire was taking place on the west side of the FOB. The UMS is close to the northeast side, and there did not seem to be anything coming from that direction. Nonetheless, Sergeant Dominic Labelle, one of the infantry section commanders, and I went to the perimeter wall to check things out. The other men in his section are on leave, so there was no one else available on this side of the FOB to back him up.

We observed the ground to our front for several minutes through our rifle scopes. Although the people here were only a few hundred metres away from the fire being traded between Taliban and Canadian soldiers, their “pattern of life” seemed unaffected. Women and children were walking around in all directions, farmers were tending their crops. This made it less likely that there were any Taliban on our side of the FOB. When the Taliban attack us, these people know our retaliation will inevitably follow. As we have seen, we sometimes hurt people despite our best efforts. The Taliban, for their part, regularly use civilians as human shields. If at all possible, the civilians clear out before the Taliban launch an attack from their vicinity.

The machine gunners on the hilltop continued firing for a few more minutes, stopping when the enemy had withdrawn. I returned to the UMS and carefully arranged my gear on a chair in case I needed it again.

0830—“Operation Election” is starting in earnest. Despite all the combat activity, some polling stations are opening in Zhari-Panjwayi.

0900—IED strike on Ring Road South against an ANA vehicle. No casualties, no damage. The trigger man is detected and killed.

A lot of shooting is going on but, thus far, no attacks on electoral facilities, voters, candidates or observers. The Taliban are targeting our FOBs and other outposts, but not doing any damage. No casualties on our side.

0930—One of our outposts farther west has called in artillery support. Our cannons are firing over the UMS. The building shakes with every round.

First attack reported on a polling station, a high school on the outskirts of Kandahar City. It seems to have been an RPG. Some shattered windows, one door blown off its hinges. The principal of the high school states that the voting station will reopen shortly.

Taliban mortar attack on FOB Ma’Sum Ghar falls short. A six-year-old child is wounded in his left leg. “Bed” Bedard uses his ultrasound skills to locate a shrapnel fragment. The child is evacuated to KAF.

Nearly all polling stations are open in Zhari-Panjwayi, even in areas with very strong Taliban support. Voter turnout is minimal so far.

1000—Captain Normand Cholette, the padre, brings me one of the infantry troopers. The soldier has learned that his mother is in the ICU. She had been quite ill before he left, but it is still hard to take. The soldier asks me to contact the hospital in Canada because he has received only second-hand information from his girlfriend. I reach out to one of my emergency medicine buddies, who vouches for me to the ICU staff. “Yes, he really is calling from Afghanistan.”

Things are not looking good. No aggressive measures are planned and the patient will be transferred out of the ICU and into a private room within twelve hours, if she has not expired by then. I send a quick e-mail to the battle group commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul, recommending immediate repatriation. He replies within minutes, giving his approval. I hope this lad gets back to Canada in time to talk to his mother at least once more. I am very happy that Captain Cholette will be by his side till he leaves. If anyone can give the trooper comfort at a time like this, it’s him.

Ma’Sum Ghar hit by a rocket. No injuries.

1040—Four Taliban are caught in the open by one of our choppers and killed.

1110—Election employees at a polling centre in Zhari district are caught stuffing ballot boxes. They are arrested.

1130—Two of our guys are on the edge of the FOB when a couple of mortar bombs are fired at us. One of the bombs lands well short, but the other one lands right behind them. They hear the bang, turn around and see the smoke . . . and get the hell out of there. I had been checking in with the command post when they arrived. They are in control, but are almost vibrating from the tension.

Major Jourdain is unruffled. He looks like a maestro conducting an orchestra as he uses various radios and land lines to determine where the mortars were fired from and to organize retaliatory fire. He spins up our own mortars to fire a “counter-battery” mission, our artillery attacking their artillery. Our observers have triangulated the launch site of the enemy mortars. It is out in the open desert. No “collateral damage” is possible, so we will blanket the area with high explosive.

Our mortars are on the verge of firing when one of our observers calls out that . . . what the fuck? . . . women and children have suddenly appeared right beside the launch site we have targeted. These are open fields. There are no buildings or crops anywhere near there. Major Jourdain snatches up one of the radio handsets. “Mortars! This is the commander! Check fire! Check fire!” The mortars, who were about to fire, reply that they are standing down.

If anyone reading this is not convinced of the thoroughly evil nature of the Taliban, let me spell out what just happened. The Taliban forced a group of women and children, who were certainly not members of their own families, to accompany them into the desert. Then they fired at us with a mortar. The launch site of this weapon is something we can easily detect, and the Taliban know this.

For them, there was no downside. If we fired too quickly, they would lambaste us for having killed innocent women and children. If we held our fire, their gunners would get away. Major Jourdain has lived through similar events before.

1200—One of the ANA infantry units based at FOB Ma’Sum Ghar, along with their Canadian mentors, has been in contact with the enemy for half an hour. The enemy has broken off and withdrawn. At least eight Taliban have been killed, the ANA and Canadians are all right.

1230—Multiple Taliban attacks throughout Zhari-Panjwayi over the past three hours. Still no casualties on our side, and only the child mentioned earlier among the civilians.

The Taliban are throwing a lot of stuff at us. They have evidently been husbanding their heavier weapons for some time to be able to mount a major offensive today. I note that about half of the Taliban weapons fail to detonate on impact or miss their targets. This suggests that the Taliban are even using ordnance they know is no longer effective militarily. I don’t think this concerns them. It is effective in scaring the population so that they do not vote. That is the Taliban’s goal.

1240—Spoke too soon. A Taliban rocket in the Arghandab district has killed one child, badly wounded two others.

1 250—Spoke way too soon. Two Afghan policemen have been wounded. One of them has been shot in the head. His pupil on the affected side is fixed and dilated. At best, he will be paralyzed on one side. We evacuate him to KAF.

1300—The FOB is attacked once more, again from the west. Less automatic weapons fire than last time, more RPGs. Once again, Sergeant Labelle and I head for the northeast wall. This time, there is a single woman in one of the fields. She runs into a building and disappears. Otherwise, there is nobody to be seen. As clear a “combat indicator” as you will ever see. Trouble’s coming.

A stray bullet goes through the command post of the engineer troop. It passes right beside Warrant Officer Stéphane “Fuse” Pelletier, the troop warrant officer, and lands beside Lieutenant Jonathan Mar-tineau, the troop commander. They label the entry hole with today’s date and go back to work.

1315—Another successful air strike kills five Taliban in the Arghandab district.

1320—Voting is finished at the Sarposa prison in Kandahar City.

The criminals locked up there have nothing to fear. They all vote.

1 400—Multiple rocket and mortar attacks on various coalition locations. One of them gives an American soldier a concussion.

1 430—A series of mortar rounds impact the west side of the FOB. Then, the “combat indicator” proves its worth: sustained rifle fire comes at us from right outside the FOB walls. And this time it is coming from the east, the side closest to the UMS. Sergeant Labelle and I run over to our previous positions. We peek over the Hesco Bastions . . . and four shots go right over our heads. We eat gravel. For the next several minutes, we move around, always looking over the wall from a different place. We can only look for a few seconds each time before another volley of shots sends us back down. The shooter is zeroed in on our part of the wall. As soon as our heads pop up, we have to assume the sniper has detected the movement and is lining up his gunsight on our helmets.

As long as he stays hidden and does not move, the sniper has the advantage. He knows roughly where we are going to come out, but it is extraordinarily difficult for us to detect where the sniper is firing from. There is a loud “crack” as the supersonic projectile passes over us, then the distant “thump” of the gun firing. The direction of the source can only be guessed at (within an arc of thirty degrees or so). Unless we are looking right at the sniper’s location when he fires, we will not see the puff of smoke from the rifle barrel.

Faced with this, undisciplined soldiers often stick their rifles above the wall and spray bullets downrange. This is out of the question for us. If we do not have a target, we do not shoot.

After about ten minutes of this, Major Jourdain sends one of the few L AVs (light amoured vehicles) remaining on the camp to help us out. It drives into position and starts tracking its 25 mm gun across the eastern side of the FOB. No further shots are fired at us. The LAV’s big gun and its invulnerability to rifle fire have turned the tables. The enemy sniper no longer has the advantage. To open fire from close range now would be suicidal.

Nothing further happens for the next hour and a half, so we assume the sniper has decided to crawl away.

1500—The number of attacks on Afghan, Canadian and other Coalition outposts in Zhari-Panjwayi is unprecedented. The Taliban are doing their best to tie us down close to our FOBs and to intimidate the voters. They are succeeding on both counts. There are several reports of Taliban soldiers threatening potential voters, and two more reports of ballot-box stuffing.

One of the children wounded in the earlier rocket attack in the Arghandab has died.

1530—A Taliban soldier fires an RPG at an American convoy departing FOB Ma’Sum Ghar. He is killed by a single shot from a Canadian Leopard tank.

1540—“Bed” Bedard is busy again! It looks like the tankers fired a bit too quickly. The recoil of that last tank shot has given one of their men a lacerated and possibly broken leg. Off he goes to the KAF.

1630—Voting to the east of our line of FOBs has been going well. To the west, it has been dismal. In Howz-e-Madad, only two people have come to vote. One was an interpreter working with Combat Team Bastard. The other was a Taliban scout, who was arrested by the ANA. I wonder who he voted for?

1800—The polling stations all closed at 1700, but it seems that the Taliban are intent on going out with a flourish. All our FOBs have been attacked again in the last hour: mortars and RPGs here, rockets at Wilson and Ma’Sum Ghar.

There was also a gigantic blast southwest of here a little after 1700. Initial reports indicated that an ANA vehicle had been nearby. We got everything ready for a MasCal: all the TCCCs came to the UMS, we laid out all the gear the way we had discussed yesterday, I assigned specific tasks to some of them (triage assistant, gear quartermaster) and Master Corporal Charles Cloutier, my last remaining medic on the FOB, organized resuscitation gear in the UMS.

I am happy to report that all the Afghan soldiers near the blast were unhurt. It turned out only to have been a good practice run for my team.

1900—The day’s toll. Headquarters has released the total damage for the day in Zhari-Panjwayi:

ANA Killed: 0

ANA Wounded: 6

Police Killed: 0

Police Wounded: 2

Taliban Killed:

22 Taliban Wounded:

Taliban Wounded: 10?

Civilians Killed: 3

Civilians Wounded: 10

Coalition Killed: 0

Coalition Wounded: 1

IEDs found and defused: 14

IEDs detonated:

8 Total rocket/mortar attacks: 112

1915—We get hit three more times. Make that 115 rockets.

With everything that was going on, I missed calling Michelle for the second day in a row. To make things worse, she went to sleep last night saying “I have tears in my eyes because I miss my daddy.” I had sworn to myself I would call her this afternoon (her morning, before she went to daycare). I tried to call her before going to bed, but Claude and I got our wires crossed and were not able to connect.

I know this seems trivial compared with the death and destruction all around me, but I am sick at heart . . .

COMBAT

I had been in war zones before coming to Afghanistan, but always as an unarmed medic. During these missions, I had been in situations where people were trying to kill me.

Today, for the first time in my life, I was trying to kill the person who was trying to kill me. I have reflected on this experience and drawn some conclusions.

1. Winston Churchill was only partly right (see the addendum to my June 29 entry).

Even though I have been “fired upon without any effect,” I do not feel particularly elated. The feeling at the end of my combat patrol on August 4 was a hundred times more powerful, probably due to my anticipation of the event. Before going on patrol, I had spent twelve hours dreading what was coming. As we left the FOB, I was as frightened as I had ever been in my life. When I came back unhurt from that mission, I had the feeling that I had escaped some horrible fate.

    The attacks we were subjected to today started suddenly and ended quickly. Each time, my attention was focused on what to do in response to the attack. I had no time to consider what would happen if I was hit. This was particularly true when I was ducking bullets at the east wall. Someone was shooting up my FOB; I wanted to stop them. All I thought about were angles, distances and hit probabilities. I considered the possibility of getting shot, but only in the sense that that was something to be avoided if I wanted to complete my mission.

    The speed at which events unfolded made it impossible to spend much time being scared. It seems that what Churchill was describing was mostly relief. Since I was not scared for very long today, I am not very relieved this evening.

2. I am capable of killing another human being.

As I tried to detect where the rifle fire was coming from, there was no question that I would fire back if I could locate my target. Although an enemy soldier was likely looking right at me and doing his best to end my life at that moment, I felt no anger towards this individual. He was doing his soldier job, and I was doing mine. But if I had been able to figure out where he was, I would have put a bullet in his brain without hesitation.

    I would have reflected on it afterwards and perhaps felt regret, but only in the sense that it was unfortunate that my enemy’s beliefs were so aberrant that it was necessary to kill him to stop him from doing what he wanted to do. I doubt I would have lost a moment’s sleep over it.

3 . I am a soldier.

It would have been hugely satisfying to shoot back, even without a target, on a number of levels. There is a strong urge to do something proactive when one is under fire, to strike back at the enemy even if the method chosen is not very effective. But that is not what disciplined soldiers do. We fire at clearly identified targets and nothing else.

    My finger was always along the trigger guard, never on the trigger.

Like Muslims, the Vietnamese use a lunar calendar. The celebration of the lunar New Year is a big deal in Vietnam. It is properly called Tet Nguyen Dan (New Year’s Day), but this is commonly shortened to “Tet.”

In 1968, that day fell on January 31. The American forces in South Vietnam at that time were in a relaxed posture. They were therefore caught off guard when the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched their largest offensive of the war in the early morning hours of Tet. In a masterful feat of concealment they managed to place sizable units near every major city and base in the country. These units attacked simultaneously. The Tet Offensive, as it came to be known, was the turning point of the Vietnam War, but in a way that neither of the belligerents could have predicted.

The military and political situation in South Vietnam in early 1968 has numerous parallels with the situation in Afghanistan today. The war had been raging for a generation. A land that had never known democracy was struggling to develop this system. Corruption was rife. The Americans, with a bit of help from a smattering of other countries, were attempting to help the government contain a violent insurgency. While some of the insurgents were ideologically motivated, a large number were nationalists who were often uncomfortable with the dyed-in-the-wool communists among them.

The fighting in South Vietnam before Tet was similar to what is going on in Zhari-Panjwayi. The insurgency relied heavily on booby-traps and small-unit ambushes in which they used rockets and small arms virtually identical to those used by the Taliban. The Americans, who had over half a million soldiers in the country, were supported by the most modern artillery and aircraft available.

The Tet Offensive marked a radical departure in the tactics of the communists. For more than a month, they engaged in conventional warfare with the Americans and the South Vietnamese Army. They attacked in large groups and attempted to hold whatever ground they captured. They had hoped to score major military victories and provoke a large segment of the population of South Vietnam to join them in a general uprising.

The communists got it completely wrong.

By operating in large groups and staying in one place for prolonged periods, they exposed themselves to the overwhelming firepower of the Americans. They were slaughtered. Although the claims seemed outlandish at the time, the Vietnamese have since confirmed that close to 50 per cent of the 100,000 men they sent into battle were killed. It was a catastrophic defeat.

To make things worse, there was no popular uprising against the South Vietnamese regime. If anything, a number of well-documented atrocities on the part of the communists turned the population against them. After Tet, the South Vietnamese were more united than they had ever been. As the communists retreated back to North Vietnam, they thought they had suffered a massive setback.

The Americans, although initially stunned by the scope of the communist offensive, recovered quickly. As the battle progressed, they could not believe their good fortune. The communist units repeatedly stayed in place long enough for American heavy weapons to be brought to bear. By the time the battle ended, they thought they had scored a lopsided victory.

The Americans got it completely wrong.

Over the previous four years, the United States had sent more and more soldiers to South Vietnam, each time reassuring Americans that only a little more effort was required to guarantee victory. Instead, the American people watched on their televisions as the communists showed more strength than they ever had.

What had even more impact were the numbers of American deaths in combat. These deaths spiked during the Tet Offensive. The “kill ratio” was even more in favour of the Americans than before, but that did not matter. The American people had been promised victory, but what they got was a larger number of body bags.

The effect on the American war effort was devastating. Support for the war evaporated. This had not been anticipated by the North Vietnamese. It was only after the American public turned solidly against the war as a result of Tet that the communists began to speak of the offensive as a victory for their side. The U.S. Army was dumbfounded. It had utterly defeated the enemy, yet the world was seeing it the other way.

Within a year, a new president was elected with a mandate to bring the troops home. Four years later, there were no American combat units left in South Vietnam. Two years after that, the communists swept out of the North and invaded.

This series of events can be summed up by an exchange that occurred between two senior officers in this conflict.

American General: “You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.”

Vietnamese General: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

Looking at what happened in Zhari-Panjwayi yesterday, I wonder if other amateur military historians might draw the same conclusion.

If you followed the news on the various Western media outlets, you would have learned that there were a few bomb attacks in Kabul and some incidents in Kandahar City. Several other major cities received a rocket or two. One, Baglan, was attacked by Taliban ground troops who withdrew after destroying the polling stations.

But what is happening today? Nothing.

Since you hear about Afghanistan only when there is something violent going on here, you might get the impression that the violence we experienced yesterday was run-of-the-mill. But this is the most combat activity I have seen in a single day on either of my tours. And this is where the Taliban are strongest.

I think the Taliban threw their Sunday punch at us yesterday—one for which they have been saving men and munitions for a long time. Militarily, they achieved nothing while losing a moderate number of men.

So this is nowhere near what Tet was. During Tet, all of South Vietnam was aflame for a month. Yesterday, on the other hand, was a continuation of what we have lived through for the past three years. The Canadians held the line in Zhari-Panjwayi against the worst the Taliban were able to throw at us. And their worst, concentrated in this twenty-by-forty-kilometre piece of land, failed to kill or injure a single one of us. With the majority of their combat power tied up here, the Taliban were only able to inflict pinprick attacks elsewhere.

But was our military success irrelevant?

The Taliban did succeed in terrorizing the local population and undermining the election. How will voters in the Coalition countries react to this? No doubt there will be many who will say that (a) the democratic experiment has failed in Afghanistan, and (b) we have no business requiring the Afghans to adopt such a system.

To the first point, I would answer that democracy has always taken root slowly, even in countries with good economies and no civil war. In our country, it took half a century of democratic rule before the female half of our population was allowed to vote. But the desire for democratic government seems to be hardwired into the human genome. How else can we explain its inexorable spread over the past three hundred years? Democratic experiments struggle sometimes, but they do not fail. I defy you to name a single country that has started down the road from totalitarianism, be it in the form of a theocracy or a monarchy, and moved towards democracy only to revert back.

As for the second point, I think it has a slight racist tinge. The underlying assumption is either that the majority of Afghans are sheep-like and happy to live in a non-democratic system or that they have not evolved enough for this kind of government. Is it possible that there is a people that is so different from us that they prefer not to be asked their opinions on matters that affect their lives? Is it possible that there is a people that is so different from us that they cannot grasp the concept of democracy?

The argument that democracy cannot take root in a country that has never known democracy is nonsense. It flies in the face of what can only be called overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Every country that is currently a democracy was not one before it was a democracy. Why do we think the Afghans will be any different?

Churchill knew what he was talking about when he said that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”* But here’s the best thing about democracy.

Can you name a single country whose government was elected by universal suffrage that has declared war on another country with the same system? You cannot. Because it has never happened.

It is easy for totalitarian regimes, no matter what their philosophical underpinnings, to send their people to war: once the leadership decides something, the people—the ones who do the fighting and the dying—have no say in the matter.

It is far more difficult for democracies to initiate hostilities, but they can be convinced under special circumstances. Those circumstances have always included an absence of democracy on the other side.

The world will be done with war when the planet embraces democracy. I cannot think of a better reason to encourage the spread of the democratic ideal. I cannot think of a better reason to stay here and fight those who would oppose this process.

Addendum, August 22—Data Without Context: One story about the election on CBC.ca today. The following is from that article: “turnout was weaker than the previous vote in 2004 because of fear, disenchantment and election-related violence, which killed 26 people.”†

That’s it? The violence “killed 26 people,” period? Would it not have given that number a little context to follow it with: “The majority of those killed were Taliban. A minority were civilians killed by the Taliban. There were few deaths among the various armed services of the Afghan government. There were none at all among Coalition forces. No civilians were wounded or killed by Coalition or Afghan government forces.”

In another story, this one written on election day itself, the following comment appears: “While millions went to the polls, Zekria Bara-kzai, a top election official, told The Associated Press he thinks 40 to 50 per cent of the country’s 15 million registered voters cast ballots— a turnout that would be far lower than the 70 per cent who cast ballots for president in 2004.”*

So . . . in a country with a shattered infrastructure and an active civil war, where a violent insurgency has threatened to murder anyone who votes, the turnout may not reach 50 per cent? I think it’s time for . . . a table!

	CANADA	AFGHANISTAN
VOTER REGISTRATION	Comes in the mail.	Have to go to governmentoffice. Could get murdered for doing so.
CAMPAIGN RALLIES	They almost pay you to come.	Could be attacked by suicide bomber.
VOTING	Drive to polling station on way to/from work. Takes five or ten minutes.	Takes five or ten minutes. take one or two hours. Could get murdered on way there. Wait for voting can be several hours. Could get executed while there.
AFTER VOTING	Whine about the guy you elected.	Finger marked with ink;gets you executed by Taliban if found before it wears off.
IF YOU DON’T VOTE	Won’t miss Seinfeld rerun. Whine about the guy someone else elected.	Get castigated by the world as “not ready for democracy.”

The Afghan election saw a voter participation rate “far lower than . . . 70 per cent,” eh? That would be quite low, wouldn’t it? Maybe not.

Looking at voter turnout since Confederation, the percentage of eligible Canadian voters who have voted remained above 70 per cent almost continuously for over 120 years. But the last time we managed that was 1988. Participation percentages in Canadian federal elections has been drifting down to the low 60s over the past twenty years. In the last election (2008), we dipped into the high 50s.

With everything we have going for us, and with everything the Afghans have going against them, there might end up being as little as 10 per cent difference in our participation rates.

I do not hear anyone suggesting that we’re not ready for democracy.