AUGUST 22 | Ramadan

This is the first day of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Muslim lunar calendar. Over the next twenty-nine or thirty days, depending on the behaviour of the moon, Muslims must refrain from eating, drinking, sex, smoking or “anything that is in excess or ill-natured” from dawn till dusk. The fasting in particular is meant to give Muslims a chance to cleanse themselves, to appreciate what they have and to recognize that others may have less. The two most important themes seem to be connecting with family and caring for the poor.

During this month Muslims get up before dawn to eat. Even though they gorge themselves then, the grumpiness level starts to rise around midafternoon. This is alleviated by another large meal after sundown. Between lack of sleep, post-meal torpor and late-afternoon grumpiness, there are only a couple of hours each day when everyone is firing on all cylinders.

Some Muslims take their fasting so seriously that they carry around a little cup into which they spit their saliva. This prompts the obvious question: if the Taliban see themselves as good Muslims, will they take this month off to fast? Or will they accept a decrease in their operational effectiveness as their soldiers go around hungry and tired during the afternoons, when most of the fighting takes place?

The answer is no. The Taliban have given their troops a pass on this one, just as they have played fast and loose with most other parts of the Quran as well. That has been the case in years past. Summer is traditionally the “fighting season” in Afghanistan and there has been no decrease in combat activity during Ramadan for the past three years. The most intense fighting Canadians ever experienced in Zhari-Panjwayi occurred when they arrived here in 2006. The Taliban massed their troops to try to prevent Canadian troops from entering these districts. The fighting continued for several weeks, well past the date Ramadan began that year. If things remain as quiet as they have for the past two days, it will be because the Taliban shot their bolt on election day.

Ramadan ends on the first day of the next new moon. This is the holiday of Eid ul-Fitr, “The Festival of the Breaking of the Fast,” a daylong party during which there is supposed to be a lot of eating, praying and donating to the poor. Human nature being what it is, I am willing to bet that the order I listed for those items is the order in which they are given priority.

I dropped in on the ANA officers late this afternoon, happy to see that they were none the worse for wear for their twelve foodless hours. They invited me to join them for dinner, and I readily agreed. They told me to drop by at 1900, which is the same time that they had told me to arrive every other time I had had dinner with them. On each occasion, dinner had started at 1930 or a little later. This is no different from what goes on elsewhere in developing world environments, and I have no trouble with it. Either I wait and chat with the officers until dinner starts, or I factor this in and arrive late myself.

On this day, I knew they could not start eating until after sunset, so I waited until about ten minutes after dark to wander over. As I was walking towards their barracks, it dawned on me that I was displaying, if not cultural, then at least culinary, insensitivity. This was confirmed when I arrived.

After fasting for twelve hours, no one had been in the mood to wait a minute longer for dinner. They have made sure that everything was ready to go the second the sun dipped below the horizon. By the time I got there, everyone had finished eating. This didn’t stop them from welcoming me warmly and sitting me down to a large dish of some kind of vegetable I’ve never eaten before, supplemented by the usual huge piece of naan.

 

AUGUST 23 | The Warrior Princes

When I described the role of Major Tim Arsenault, the combat team commander at FOB Wilson, I spoke mostly in terms of his responsibilities. Let’s look at the other side of that coin and consider the power of Major Steve Jourdain, the combat team commander here. I compared Major Jourdain earlier to the warrior kings of antiquity. This is not an exaggeration.

Just as Major Arsenault’s responsibilities dwarf anything encountered in the civilian world, the destructive force Major Jourdain has at his disposal is almost beyond comprehension for someone outside the military.

There are very few officers the CF trusts this much. There is no one looking over Major Jourdain’s shoulder here, and his word is law. We have to be sure that he will never abuse his position. If that were to happen, the damage he could inflict on innocent Afghan civilians, on our mission’s goals and even on his own troops would be incalculable. In Major Jourdain’s case, the trust is entirely merited.

So how does Major Jourdain exercise a good portion of his power? The combat team contains a large number of “supporting arms.” I have already introduced several of these groups, including the engineers, tankers, artillerymen and reconnaissance soldiers. But no matter how many members of the supporting arms might be in a combat team, by far the largest group of soldiers belongs to the “arm” that is being supported: the infantry. Since more than one hundred men are in the company based at the FOB, Major Jourdain could not possibly control them all on the battlefield. Rather, he guides the three men who are most responsible for turning his orders into reality.

These are the platoon commanders, each one of whom is in charge of thirty to forty soldiers, divided into three infantry sections with ten soldiers each and a fourth “headquarters/heavy weapons” section. This last section contains the platoon commander, platoon second-in-command and other specialized soldiers such as radio operators and the soldiers who man the rocket launchers.

I admit that I have a fondness for the platoon commanders. When I graduated from the Infantry School of the Combat Training Centre in 1979, this is the job I did for the next three years. I learned a great deal about leadership as a platoon commander, and this was one of the key formative experiences of my life.

I was a competent platoon commander: my platoon was regularly chosen to take on the more challenging assignments, and I had good success in field exercises. But after observing the three platoon commanders of Combat Team Cobra for a few weeks, I can see that I was not in the same league as they are. The war has made them develop as commanders, but they had to have been quite sharp to begin with. I sat down with each of these extraordinary young men separately to conduct the only formal interviews I did for this book.

Captain Vincent “Vince” Lussier, like me a Franco-Ontarian, is the oldest of the three. He shares many of my beliefs about the value of the mission and has a sophisticated understanding of who we are fighting and why. During our interview, he astounded me by describing the effect of Taliban rule on infant mortality— the single best measure of a population’s health. This is something very few non-medical people would do.

Major Steve Jourdain, the warrior king

Captain Vincent “Vince” Lussier, commander, First Platoon

Almost twenty-seven years old, he has been a platoon commander for three years. All that time has been spent with the same platoon. Many of the men he has taken to war were wet-behind-the-ears seventeen-year-old recruits when they joined him. He has watched them grow up not only as soldiers but also as individuals.

The affection he feels for his men is intense. He expresses this in familial terms: “I feel more like their older brother than their commander.” It is a cliché to refer to an infantry platoon as a “band of brothers,” but it is very apt.

Even stronger than this affection is Captain Lussier’s pride in his platoon’s troopers. This pride has not blinded him to their failings. On the contrary, Captain Lussier spontaneously volunteers that “the other platoons have men who are better shooters, better patrollers or better tacticians than mine.” But he insists that his men have the most heart: “We may not be the best soldiers, but we are definitely the best team.”

Captain Lussier told me that he moulded this team in the best but also the most tiring way possible. He was present for all their training exercises, even the physical training that he was not required to attend. During this time, he was able to assess how well various individuals worked together. If they are the best team today, it is because Captain Lussier specifically chose them for that role.

This devotion to his men has been returned to Captain Lussier in powerful ways, at both the platoon and the personal levels. As a platoon, his men accept the tasks they are assigned, no matter how dangerous or onerous. As individuals, several of them have already saved his life. He describes a poignant example of a trooper whose soldier-skills were marginal when in training back in Canada but who had guts and drive. So Captain Lussier brought him along. On one mission, the trooper placed himself with a mine detector in a position of maximum danger and discovered an IED on a path Captain Lussier was about to take. “If he had not been there that day, I’d probably be dead,” Captain Lussier says. There are many similar stories in his platoon, connecting each man to several others. It is those connections that Vince tells me are what he will treasure most about his experiences here.

Lieutenant Alex Bolduc-Leblanc, twenty-four years old, was encouraged to join the army by his uncles, both of whom were infantry officers. He graduated from the Royal Military College in 2007 and joined his battalion in September that year. He was assigned to a platoon and, a few months later, began work-up training to go to Afghanistan.

Lieutenant Bolduc-Leblanc’s motivation for coming to Afghanistan mirrors my own: he sees this conflict as a war of good against evil. His upbringing gave him a strong moral code and, in a way, he looked forward to being able to do his part here. His view on the strategy we must pursue to achieve victory is also similar to mine: protecting the population until they are educated and trained enough to defend themselves militarily against the Taliban and to reject their extremist ideology.

Lieutenant Bolduc-Leblanc had all the normal anxieties one would expect prior to deployment: “Would I be able to function under fire? Would I be frightened?” But if anyone was born to be a warrior, it is this guy. “Being in combat is a rush!” he says, with a bit more enthusiasm than most civilians would find proper. But he is only being honest. Combat hyperstimulated all his senses and he “felt more alive than ever before.”

He has not killed anyone yet, but his men have. “Even though this is a war, that was hard on them,” he told me. “I had to counsel a number of them afterwards.” It is reassuring to me that Canadian soldiers do not take killing lightly. And it is comforting to know that, when they have to take a human life, Lieutenant Bolduc-Leblanc is there to help them come to terms with what they have done.

Lieutenant Alex Bolduc-Leblanc, commander, Second Platoon
( © Louie Palu/ZUMA Press, reprinted with permission)

Lieutenant Bolduc-Leblanc admitted that he has been “scared, really scared” three times since arriving in the Panjwayi. Those were the occasions when vehicles containing some of his men hit an IED. Each time, the vehicle disappeared in a cloud of dust. “Each time, it took a full minute for the crew commander of the vehicle to get on the radio to tell me that everyone was all right.” The way Lieutenant Bolduc-Leblanc described his emotions during those three one-minute eternities was so vivid that the intensity of the anxiety he felt was physically palpable to me as a listener.

In some ways, Lieutenant Bolduc-Leblanc is still a very young man. This is his first time in the developing world, and he admits he was shocked at the backwardness of the people around the FOB. “It’s ‘Jesus time’ out there,” he says with disbelief. The absence of any modern amenities (cars, electricity, running water, health clinics, etc.) is something he had not believed existed.

He also cannot understand the persistence of the Taliban. After a battle in which his platoon killed several of them, he overheard the Taliban leader congratulating his group on their radios because they had been able to inflict a minor wound on a single Canadian. “I don’t get it! Why don’t they care about their men the same way I care about mine?” he asks.

In other ways, Lieutenant Bolduc-Leblanc displays more maturity and professionalism than someone twice his age. He routinely goes out on patrols in which he engages the local population in conversation. Often he holds shuras with the local elders. During his time here, he estimates that he has spoken and shaken hands with at least a few dozen Taliban. “These guys will shoot at me, then hide their weapons and share a cup of tea with me.” I asked if he found this intensely frustrating. The same situation has led many soldiers in many armies to abuse and even murder civilians, often with far less suspicion than Lieutenant Bolduc-Leblanc has had. But he describes these events as barely annoying.

“My rules of engagement are clear. We cannot open fire unless directly threatened, and we cannot arrest a civilian without clear evidence of wrongdoing. Until one of those conditions is met, I will extend my hand in friendship to anyone and everyone I meet here.”

That is counterinsurgency at its best.

Twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Josh Makuch could be a poster boy for the benefits of multiculturalism. Although he is nominally an anglophone Ontarian, I lost track of the number of ethnic groups represented in his DNA. These have given him a broad and sophisticated world view as well as almost flawless French.

When unilingual anglophone infantry officers graduate from the Combat Training Centre, they must choose to serve in one of two anglophone regiments. For Lieutenant Makuch, this would have meant being posted to Shilo, Manitoba, or Gagetown, New Brunswick. His French-language skills gave him a third option: by joining the Van Doos, he could be posted to Quebec City and stay close to Montreal, where he had done his undergraduate degree.

Shilo, Gagetown or close to Montreal? It was an easy choice to make. Lieutenant Makuch arrived in Quebec and joined the combat team in August of 2008. There were only nine months left before deployment, and he had to work hard to integrate himself into the platoon’s leadership team and to be accepted by the men. By the time they went to war together, he had achieved that.

He describes his time here as being “seven months spent at Maslow’s fifth level.” For those of you unfamiliar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the fifth level is “self-actualization,” in which one is achieving one’s full potential as a human being. It is a profoundly rewarding experience to be at this level, but it is something few people ever attain.

Lieutenant Makuch’s self-actualization has come as a result of the heavy responsibility he has been given at such a young age. “I matured more in the first five months of this tour than in the previous five years,” he states. “I have to stand in front of forty men and explain to them what we are going to do and how we are going to do it. And we all know that our lives depend on my plan being sound.”

Hearing him express these feelings, I was reminded of the way young doctors will describe their first night on-call by themselves. The sacred trust, the awesome responsibility and the feeling of being extraordinarily privileged to be in this position are similar, but much more intense for infantry officers. And like a young doctor, Lieutenant Makuch has learned that even the best decisions sometimes lead to the worst possible outcome—Master Corporal Charles-Philippe

Lieutenant Josh Makuch, commander, Third Platoon

“Chuck” Michaud was one of his men.

Of the three, Lieutenant Makuch is the one who was interested in going to war for “the experience,” and he sees the mission in more abstract philosophical terms than I do. “I agree with our goals here and they may well be worth my life. But I am not ready to die for the cause. This is not because I am scared of dying. I am just so curious about what the rest of this life has in store for me.”

Lieutenant Makuch is unsure about his future. Being chosen for this job marks him as an up-and-comer in the CF, but he has yet to decide whether or not he will stick it out for twenty years. “I have already

Lieutenant Josh Makuch, commander, Third Platoon had the best job the army could ever give me: commanding a platoon in combat. No matter what happens next, I will never be called to do this task again.”

A few years from now, you might bump into the young man pictured here. He might have somewhat longer hair and be living a bohemian lifestyle as he decides what he is going to do next. If you recognize him, take the time to talk to him and listen closely to what he has to say.

He was a warrior prince once; he led Canadians in battle. You could learn a lot from him.

Addendum, August 25—A close call: I have not spoken much about the other medical types at this FOB because my contact with them has been limited. There has been no medic assigned to the UMS for weeks. A Bison ambulance crew was here when I arrived, but they left after four days. Another Bison dropped by for a few days, then they were reassigned as well. One of the four combat team medics left on leave right after I got here, and another one left a week ago on a two-weeklong mission. The gang here is just as impressive as their colleagues, as this brief entry will demonstrate.

At 2100, one of our patrols left to set up an ambush in an area where we suspected the Taliban might be transiting. Things were going well till around midnight when a trooper came to tell me that a member of the patrol had fallen into a well. My heart stopped. On June 7, 2008, Captain Jonathan Snyder had been participating in a nighttime combat patrol. Somewhere in Zhari district he fell into a kariz, a kind of open-pit well used by Afghan farmers. Weighed down by nearly a hundred pounds of gear, Captain Snyder drowned. I had the sick feeling that in this case the result would be the same.

Things ended differently this time. One of the reasons for this was the rapid reaction of Master Seaman Charles Cloutier, the senior medic of the combat team. Although he was some distance away from the well when our soldier fell into it, MS Cloutier immediately recognized what had occurred and started shoving people out of the way to get closer to the victim. When he got to the side of the well, he quickly organized the other members of the patrol. They fished out a somewhat banged-up, but very much alive, Lieutenant Josh Makuch. MS Cloutier checked the lieutenant and, detecting no major injuries or bleeding, organized the evacuation back to the FOB.

Master Seaman Charles Cloutier, senior combat medic (after lifeguard duty)

Corporal Alex Cloutier-Dupont, combat medic

Once they arrived at the UMS, MS Cloutier and I carried out a thorough assessment of his patient. After an hour of observation, we discharged the lieutenant in good condition. Later, when MS Cloutier described his terrible anxiety as he ran towards the well, I could see that he felt as strongly about any wounded Canadian as platoon commanders feel about their men.

Anytime Canadian soldiers go down, for any reason, they can be sure that Master Seaman Cloutier will come for them. Or die trying. That is his commitment to them. He is their “doc.”

The only other member of the Sperwan Ghar medical crew here now is Corporal Alex Cloutier-Dupont. I could go on about him at length, but it would sound boringly similar to what I have written about the other combat medics: he is very good at his job, in excellent physical condition, always good humoured and keen to help out wherever and whenever he can. I will therefore limit myself to a single observation. Take a close look at the following photograph of him. Does anything seem unusual?

Military readers may notice that Corporal Cloutier-Dupont is not wearing the standard Canadian Army tactical vest. Instead, he is wearing a modular vest that is far more functional for a combat medic than the one the army issues.

As with the special medic pack, which he has also bought, this piece of equipment cost him six hundred dollars. A week’s pay, so that he can do his job better. Do his government job better.

AUGUST 24 | The Internal Contradiction of the Taliban

A quiet day. This gives me a chance to write about something which happened a few weeks ago.

It was my last day at FOB Ma’Sum Ghar. The combat team based there had been out on a mission for a few days. They had been in a heavy firefight on the second-last day of the operation, not far from the FOB.

On their way back to Ma’Sum Ghar, they were flagged down by a wounded Afghan. He was lying beside the road, propped up against a rock. He stated he had been a bystander during the fighting the day before and had been hit during the exchange of fire. He had a number of bullet wounds, some of them large and gaping. None of them were bleeding, and all appeared to be several hours old.

Master Corporal Turcotte’s ambulance crew picked him up and treated him. As they packed and dressed his wounds, they noticed something bizarre: the wounds appeared to have been cleaned and . . . he had an IV catheter in place on one of his arms. What the hell? He had received medical care of some kind after being wounded. So what was he doing on the side of the road?

When the Canadian medics began to question him about this, he fell silent. That made everybody suspicious. These suspicions were confirmed when we checked his skin for gunpowder residue: the test was strongly positive. He was evacuated to the KAF hospital in good condition . . . but with a military police escort.

As mentioned earlier, we treat Taliban prisoners the same as anyone else, and I make sure these prisoners know that it was the Canadians who took good care of them. It seems that our enemies have finally understood this. Although I have heard of similar incidents before, this is the first time I have had direct knowledge of a wounded Taliban being deliberately placed in the path of our troops so that we will pick him up and treat him. I’ve discussed this with other senior officers, and apparently this is not a rare occurrence.

You cannot help but wonder what effect this will have on the ordinary Taliban trooper. He is told that we are infidels who should be tortured to death if we are captured. Then he is told to leave his wounded comrade-in-arms in the path of one of our convoys because he will be well treated. At some point, the contradiction of those two statements has to make all but the most fanatical ideologue question the legitimacy of the first declaration.

AUGUST 25 | The Observer Observed

After three months of observing everything around me, I have spent the last forty-eight hours being observed myself. A Canadian journalist has joined us on the FOB and has spent a fair bit of time with me. He has interviewed me about the upcoming release of FOB Doc, and we have had a number of informal conversations.

This being his fourth visit to Afghanistan, he has learned a lot about the country. He is familiar with the geography, understands the politics and knows something about half of the presidential candidates (forty-one people—some of them women—ran for the position in last week’s elections). As he is the first “journo” I have spent any time with, I thought I would read his articles and write an entry explaining whether I agreed with him or not. But something happened this evening that is more newsworthy.

I have been spending a fair bit of time with the Afghan soldiers. I regretted not having done this previously and was determined to make up for it before I left. While I feel that my readings have given me a clear sense of Afghanistan as a country, I was hungry for more personal contact with its people.

This is not a common thing for Canadian soldiers to want to do. By and large, they prefer to keep to their own when not on operations with the ANA. The Afghan soldiers are not shy about making remarks about this. The frequency of my visits is something they seem to appreciate.

The journalist became aware of the relationship I had with the Afghan officers and asked if he could come along the next time I had dinner with them. I was happy to arrange that, and got the best interpreter on the camp to facilitate our discussions.

A few minutes before the evening prayer call (which defines the end of the day’s fast during the month of Ramadan) I went to collect the journalist. As we walked over to the ANA barracks, I commented on the tastiness of the meal we were about to receive. What he said next stunned me: he had no intention of eating anything because he was afraid the Afghan food would make him sick.

I should have stopped right there and flatly refused to bring him to dinner with people I consider my friends. I did not, and the result was predictable. The Afghans sat us down on the thickest cushions, served us first and provided us with a series of courses. My countryman rejected everything that was offered to him, with the exception of a few bites of bread. He gave the excuse of having a “bad belly,” which fooled no one. The Afghans commented that “only the Doc likes our food.” The protestations of the journalist to the contrary were unconvincing.

This refusal to participate in a social event he was there to document did not stop him from taking numerous pictures and writing an article about his meeting. I was left with the feeling that I had facilitated something that was at least mildly exploitive.

AUGUST 26 | The Bomb

At least forty-one dead. A number that is sure to rise because many of the wounded, who currently number sixty-six, are critical.

The Taliban set off a massive bomb last night in Kandahar City. They packed five cars full of explosives and detonated them. A city block was wrecked, and more than forty shops were destroyed, many of them the only source of a family’s livelihood.

The story on the CBC website about this event gives us the total of Coalition deaths for the year to date. The story emphasizes that this is the most in a single year since the beginning of the war. It does not explain that this is due to the massive influx of American soldiers into Afghanistan and that, with these additional troops, we are challenging the Taliban far more than we used to. As in all these stories, the total number of civilians killed by the Taliban this year is not mentioned. The fact that most of the people the Taliban kill are civilians is also omitted.*

Data without context, again.

Addendum, August 27—Inside the Blast Radius: The second Bison ambulance crew to spend time with me at this FOB had been quickly reassigned to Kandahar City for the election. They were to be the medical element of an additional QRF (quick reaction force) located at Camp Nathan Smith (CNS). This is a base on the outskirts of Kan-dahar, separate from KAF. CNS is the home of the Provincial Reconstruction Team. Units located here have rapid access to the eastern half of Kandahar City.

The medic of that Bison is Corporal Marie Gionet, a remarkable thirty-one-year-old woman who earned an anthropology degree before joining the CF Health Services five years ago. She was attracted by Egyptology but realized that not many people can earn their livelihood doing this. She describes joining the CF as a wise career move. In Afghanistan, you could argue that she has the best of both worlds: a secure career in the military and a job where an attractive lady still gets to wear shapeless clothing, live cheek-by-jowl with a bunch of smelly guys and work in a hot, sandy environment.

On the evening of August 25, Corporal Gionet heard a blast so loud that she thought it had taken place right outside the camp walls. She rushed to get her gear on and she reported to the sergeant in command of the QRF. He told her to stand by until they had a clearer idea of what was going on. She went back to her Bison and got ready to head out.

The order to deploy into Kandahar City came thirty minutes later. Corporal Gionet was shocked to learn that they would be going to a blast site over four kilometres away. This was her first inkling of how massive the bomb had been. Basing the ambulance at CNS proved to be a prescient move: this supplementary QRF was the first Coalition force to arrive at the scene of the blast.

Corporal Marie Gionet, Bison medic

When the QRF arrived, Corporal Gionet was faced with a scene of unbelievable destruction. An area the size of three football fields had been blasted and blackened. Many fires were burning, the air was thick with smoke and it was getting dark.

Contrary to what the media had first reported, a single vehicle was involved in the attack—a tanker truck filled with explosives. It had more destructive power than anything we drop from our planes. The priority was to secure the scene and light it. The QRF vehicles formed a circle around the blast area, guns pointing out and headlights pointing in.

Corporal Gionet relates that two events marked her strongly during this incident. The first occurred once the perimeter had been secured and she rushed out of her ambulance to render aid to the wounded.

There weren’t any.

Further information confirms that there were forty-one dead after the blast, but that the total number of wounded was seventy-six, not sixty-six as written above. Six of wounded died, bringing the total deaths to forty-seven. But not one of these seventy-six people was still on the scene when Corporal Gionet arrived. The Afghan civilian medical personnel had, in her words, done a spectacular job. They had secured the scene—ensuring that no secondary explosions (whether intentional or accidental) or any other hazard threatened the rescuers—triaged the patients effectively and organized an efficient entry-exit system for the many ambulances to come in, pick up a patient and depart. The job of saving lives had been done as well as it could have been done. By the Afghans themselves. Without anybody’s help.

This had quite an impact on Corporal Gionet. As a medical professional, she grasped the sophistication required to accomplish what the Afghans had done. “This was the first time I have seen a non-military branch of the Afghan government functioning at a high level without any outside assistance,” she told me. “I had been unsure about the mission’s chances of success until I saw that, but I’m more optimistic now.”

This reminded me of how distorted our perception of Afghanistan can become because we spend all our time fighting the Taliban in Zhari-Panjwayi. Not too far from here is a city of a half-million people that works reasonably well, by developing world standards.

These people dealt quickly and efficiently with the biggest mass casualty event Afghanistan has seen in two years. All that was left was to pick up the pieces of those who could not be saved. Corporal Gionet went through her entire supply of body bags. She then started to use baggies, and ran out of those as well. One of the baggies was being requested by a soldier who called on the radio to say that he had found a hand, but that it was not an adult hand. He kept repeating he needed a small bag for the small hand. I wonder if he was not saying that it was a child’s hand in order to avoid confronting what had happened to the child.

There were no Afghan or Coalition military personnel or installations in the vicinity of the blast—only civilians. And how did our enemies, the authors of this atrocity, choose to follow up on their actions? Did they express any regret? Did they say it had been a mistake? No. A few of them opened fire on the QRF. The ANA soldiers present quickly drove them off.

For the next four and a half hours, the Canadian QRF kept the site secure while Canadian infantry searched through the rubble with digging equipment, search dogs and their bare hands. They found only more body parts.

Sometime after midnight, an American unit arrived to take over from the Canadians. As Corporal Gionet was getting ready to leave, she had her second head-spinning experience of the evening.

Although the Afghans had conducted the evacuation of the wounded from the blast site efficiently, they had brought all these patients to hospitals with limited resources. Some of the walking wounded were therefore given first aid and told to return in the morning for definitive treatment, such as suturing or casting. One of these partially treated patients was brought to Corporal Gionet.

The patient in question was an eleven-year-old girl who had been brought to the Bison on her father’s back. The parents asked if it were possible for their child to be seen by a female medic, but Corporal Gionet got the impression that this consideration took a back seat to getting their child well treated. She invited the patient and her parents into the ambulance. Then, her world shifted.

The mother sat down across from Corporal Gionet, promptly removed her burka and fairly threw it at her husband. She then began speaking in fluent English, describing her child’s injury and thanking Corporal Gionet for agreeing to see her.

As a Bison medic assigned to a combat team, Corporal Gionet’s contact with Afghan civilians has almost exclusively been in the context of a combat operation. The connection she was able to achieve by caring for the child would have been remarkable in and of itself. But she was also able to connect directly, without interpreters, to another woman. “This was the first woman I have met here that I didn’t have to search,” she said. She found the experience extremely rewarding.

I wish every Canadian could have heard the conversation between Corporal Gionet and the mother. This Afghan woman could not comprehend why Corporal Gionet would have come all the way from Canada to help the Afghans. She emphasized to Corporal Gionet that this was very dangerous, as if she was unsure whether the corporal fully understood the risks Coalition soldiers face here. But as difficult as it was for this Afghan to grasp that Canadians would come here and risk their lives to help her, she and her husband were nonetheless deeply appreciative.

She then said something that should be juxtaposed with the media reports about the election. She said that there had been far less violence on election day than she had feared there would be. The Tal-iban attacks, other than in Zhari-Panjwayi, had been pinpricks, in her opinion. The media had made it sound like the roof was caving in.

Corporal Gionet finished taking care of the child. The girl had a nasty laceration on her knee, which was closed and bandaged. Throughout the treatment, the child remained calm and stoic. Once Corporal Gionet was done, the daughter reattached herself to her father’s back and the family headed off.

In talking to the mother, Corporal Gionet had discovered that the young girl was going to school. The mother felt very strongly about this—in a city where the Taliban will throw acid in the faces of girls who try to get an education. If they do not kill them. This family is fighting the Taliban as much as we are.

AUGUST 27 | Quick Draw

Earlier I introduced the “Battle Captain” of the armoured squadron. The equivalent in the infantry is the “LAV Captain” (“Capitaine d’assaut” in francophone units), an individual who plans operations and missions. The LAV captain of Combat Team Cobra is Captain Sacha Bois-vert-Novak. From my trips to the command post and the card table, I have gotten to know him and have enjoyed his company.

Captain Boisvert-Novak knew he wanted to be a soldier from childhood and joined up when he was only seventeen. He had his university education paid for by the CF, earning a degree in political science. Given the complex nature of international conflict in the twenty-first century, this will no doubt serve him well.

Captain Sacha Boisvert-Novak, battle captain*

After graduation, Captain Boisver t-Novak completed his infantry officer training as well as paratrooper training. He then reported to his infantry battalion and began work-up training to come to Afghanistan on Roto 4. He spent most of his time on his first tour as a liaison officer with the British Gur-khas. Returning to Canada after Roto 4 , he immediately volunteered to return to Afghanistan. His wish was granted, and he was given that most coveted of positions for a young officer: infantry platoon commander in a combat team. But halfway through the year-long work-up training for Roto 7, his assignment was changed.

Captain Boisvert-Novak’s other assignment on Roto 4 had been to oversee the digitization of many of our command and control systems. As a combat officer he was not thrilled to be surrounded by techies and computers instead of infantrymen, but he did a fantastic job. Maybe a little too good—when Major Jourdain, the combat team commander, was rounding out his leadership team, he came looking for Captain Boisvert-Novak. As battle captain, he has made the command post “100 per cent more efficient” (in the words of Major Jourdain) because of his intimate knowledge of all the new technology.

Captain Boisvert-Novak, however, was bitterly disappointed. The accelerated promotion (coming two years sooner than it normally would) and the esteem of his superiors could not fully erase the frustration of no longer commanding men “at the sharp end of the stick.” But he is a soldier first and foremost; he took up his new post without complaint and with considerable energy. He is the only veteran among the officers of the combat team. As battle captain, he draws on his experience to advise the commander and to counsel the junior officers.

Joined the army at seventeen. Paratrooper. Volunteered for a combat tour, then a second one. Has already volunteered for a third. Civilians reading that curriculum vitae may decide that Captain Boisvert-Novak enjoys war, for some deranged reason. The motivation for such a career path is best explained by David Grossman in On Combat:

Everyone has been given a gift in life. Warriors have been given the gift of aggression. They would no more misuse this gift than a doctor would misuse his healing arts, but they yearn for the opportunity to use their gift to help others. These people, the ones who have been blessed with the gift of aggression and a love for others, are our warriors.*

Here’s how a warrior like Captain Boisvert-Novak puts these words into action. If you look in the dictionary under “phlegmatic,” you will see a picture of Captain Boisvert-Novak. Whether he is helping to coordinate the defence of the FOB while we are under attack or winning (or losing) a gigantic pile of poker chips, his face remains inscrutable. I had formed an impression of him as being unshakably calm in any situation. That impression was dramatically confirmed at supper yesterday.

Captain Boisvert-Novak and I, along with a couple of the combat team’s senior NCOs, were dining together at the same table. The discussion was lighthearted and jovial, mostly centring on how best to ingest massive quantities of alcohol while on leave. Everyone was enjoying themselves, things were quiet and the day’s work was done. So we lingered, remaining seated at the table long after our meals were eaten and the rest of the soldiers had left the mess tent. We were comparing stories of earlier excessive alcohol intake when the unmistakable sound of an automatic rifle on “full auto” was heard coming from much too close.

In unison, everyone seated at the table dove onto the concrete tent pad. The firing continued, but no holes were appearing in the canvas wall of the mess tent. Either the shooter’s aim was off or he was hitting some of the concrete barriers surrounding our tent. He could also have been shooting at something other than the mess tent.

I must explain that whenever we leave the FOB, we wear all our protective clothing. We are heavily armed and ready for anything. But when we go to dinner, we are only wearing our combat uniforms or gym clothing. The only weapon we carry is a 9 mm pistol.

With that background in mind, we return to the three senior soldiers and me as we land on the mess tent’s concrete floor. There was gunfire outside. Without leaving the tent, we had no way of knowing what was going on. Everybody was thinking about the worst-case scenario: Afghan soldiers who had never shown signs of disloyalty suddenly turn on their Coalition allies. Had a Taliban infiltrator made his way into the FOB?

Civilian readers might think that staying close to the floor inside the tent would be a reasonable option here. We could aim our weapons at the doors and challenge anybody who tried to come inside. This group of Canadian soldiers felt differently. Anyone attacking our FOB would have to fight their way in. In unison, we stood up and started running to the door.

In the few seconds it took us to get to the other side of the mess tent, we all had our pistols out of our holsters. I was so focused on the door that I experienced a classic case of tunnel vision.* But while I could not see my comrades, I could clearly hear the metallic chick-kachick of all our pistols chambering around. We did not have rifles, frag vests or helmets, but we were ready to fight if necessary.

FOB Sperwan Ghar mess tent (letters A and B indicate positions relevant to the story)

Because of where I had been sitting, I reached the door first. I went outside, turned to my right (the direction the firing had come from) and took cover behind a concrete barrier (position A in the photograph). That was far enough for me, but not for Captain Boisvert-Novak. I watched in amazement as he went running across the open ground in front of me to the next good position of cover some ten metres away. No frag vest, no protective gear, just a desire to protect his comrades.

From position A, I could not see very far at all. Captain Boisvert-Novak had sized that up in a heartbeat and gone to position B, from where he had an excellent view of the nearest side of the ANA barracks. I heard him call out to someone, asking where the firing had come from. In a few seconds, he had determined that the enemy shooters were still outside the FOB walls. The loud gunfire we had heard was likely someone on our side shooting from inside the FOB. Only then did Captain Boisvert-Novak turn and lead us back to the shelter of the command post.

As we headed inside, the heavy machine guns on the hilltop opened fire. Combined with the fire from the defensive positions on the FOB perimeter, this quickly drove the attackers away. Throughout this episode, Captain Boisvert-Novak looked like he was out for a Sunday stroll. As I said, phlegmatic.

AUGUST 28 | Doctor in an Undoctored Land

I have made a conscious effort to get to know the ANA soldiers at this FOB. Effort is perhaps too strong a word. All I have done is sit down to dinner with them two or three times a week and dropped by occasionally during the daytime for a conversation. But these regular visits have marked me as someone with a sincere desire to connect with the Afghans. This affection has been returned several times over.

I also warmly welcome the Afghan soldiers who come to the UMS and I try to make them feel at ease with my rudimentary Pashto. This has led to an increase in visits by Afghan soldiers to the UMS. This exposure to patients from another culture prompts me to make two observations.

In these parts of the world, modern Western medicine represents something of great value, something the people here could never afford. When they can access such medicine for free, they come to see the Western doctor with a minor ailment: a stuffed-up nose, a sore back or, my favourite, “total body pain” (a complaint I have now heard from at least five distinct cultural groups). They do not really think the problem will go away. They only want to have the experience of being seen by someone who appears to them to be a miracle worker.

A lot of Westerners fail to appreciate this and go down one of two erroneous paths. The first mistake is to assume that the patient has a serious condition. This may lead doctors to provide treatments that are unnecessary and sometimes harmful.

The second mistake lies at the other end of spectrum. This occurs when Westerners assume that the patient is malingering. In these instances, the doctors often get angry and rudely show the patient the door.

The best way to deal with these situations is to respond as you would during any other patient encounter. Sit down, give the patient your full attention, take a thorough history and perform a careful physical exam. These patients want the same thing that patients in our emergency departments want: to be listened to, and to have the feeling that someone cares about them.

Beyond that, they often want a taste of high-tech medicine, and frequently ask for IV medication. But these people are not all that different from us. By giving them a sympathetic ear, I can achieve as much or more healing as I could by shooting them full of antibiotics. I have been here nearly four weeks now, and I have not given a single injection or intravenous drug to an Afghan soldier. And yet they seem very pleased with the service they receive.

The second observation has to do with a subset of patients who are unlike any I have ever had to deal with in emergency medicine in Canada or anywhere else in the world. At least once every three or four days, one of the Afghans on the base will come to me with a complaint having to do with sexual function. Not sexual dysfunction, but sexual function: things are going too well.

Usually, this takes the form of wet dreams. As observant Muslims, the patients are disturbed by nocturnal emissions because they are “unclean.” The first time I heard that one, I recommended the patient masturbate before going to sleep. I was informed that, because of the Islamic religion, this was not going to happen.

Talk about irony! Theologically enforced sexual abstinence causing a desire that theologically enforced rejection of masturbation renders one unable to relieve. I was left to recommend that fallback of the British boarding school, the cold shower.

At the other end of the masturbation spectrum, a member of the interpreter staff arrived with a complaint that he was initially reluctant to describe. After some beating around the bush, he came out with it: he was masturbating so often and so vigorously that he had developed arm and back pain.

The physical exam was . . . unremarkable, as we say. The patient was discharged with anti-inflammatory medication and reassurance that this was normal behaviour for a nineteen-year-old male.

The things that bind us together as human beings: parents love their offspring, children need lots of fresh air, the elderly are smarter than anyone thinks and adolescent males will jerk off until their dick and/or hand drops off.

Addendum, September 6, 2009: As if to prove the above observation, a Canadian soldier came in today with the following complaint: “Every time I masturbate, I see little brown specks in my sperm.” And how long has this been happening? “Twice a day for two months.” And this concerns you now because . . . ? “I dunno. I thought it would go away.”

AUGUST 29 | Company Sergeant-Major

Since I have re-enlisted in the CF, I have been gratified to see the esteem that ordinary Canadians have for those who wear the uniform. Even individuals who oppose our mission in Afghanistan make a clear distinction between the mission and those who carry it out. There is none of the vile rejection of soldiers that was seen in the United States when American soldiers returned home from Vietnam. Instead, a common slogan of the anti-mission side is that they support the troops and do not want to see us hurt or killed in a mission they feel is flawed. I disagree with that view, but I respect it.

This affection for the troops, however, does not translate into an understanding of our world. To appreciate this next section requires a basic knowledge of the ranks of the combat team’s leadership. I will provide an abbreviated version of it here.

The army is divided into two distinct groups: officers and enlisted men. An adequate civilian analogy would be that the officers are management whereas the enlisted men are labour. The military reality is much more nuanced. While it is true that the officers lead and make the decisions, they do so in close collaboration with the senior enlisted men. Although the most junior officer has the authority to give an order to the most senior enlisted man, in practice that would never happen. Instead, officers work as partners with enlisted men who have been in the army roughly ten years longer than they have. Like parents, they may have vigorous disagreements behind closed doors, but they will never oppose one another in front of their subordinates.

The most senior enlisted man in the combat team is the company sergeant-major. This position is held by a master warrant officer, the second-highest rank among the enlisted men. When I joined my battalion as a junior infantry platoon commander, there was a sign on the orderly room wall that summarized the various ranks in the company:

MAJOR: Commands the company. Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Walks on water. Raises the dead.

Relationship to higher authority: Has lunch with God every few days.

CAPTAIN: Company second-in-command. As fast as a speeding bullet. Wins tug-of-war against a locomotive two out of three times. Able to leap tall buildings with a running start. Can swim across the ocean. Performs open heart surgery with a bayonet.

Relationship to higher authority: Has weekly meetings with God.

LIEUTENANT: Platoon commander. Pedals a bicycle faster than a speeding bullet. Carries a heavier load than a Mack truck. Can clear a multi-storey building if there is a trampoline to assist him. Able to swim across Lake Ontario. Can perform life-saving CPR for hours.

Relationship to higher authority: Talks to God on the phone.

COMPANY SERGEANT-MAJOR : Catches bullets and eats them. Throws locomotives off the tracks. Lifts tall buildings and walks under them. Freezes water with a single glance. Tells you when you can die. If he does, drop dead immediately. Stay dead.

Relationship to higher authority: IS GOD!

Any questions?

Now that we have clarified the rank structure, we can go on. Because no description of the leadership of a combat team would be complete without describing the man who holds the thing together, the company sergeant-major.

Major Jourdain, like all combat team commanders, has a second-in-command. This post is ably filled by Captain Hugo Dallaire, a senior captain of long experience. He is capable of taking over and running the combat team if anything were to happen to the major, and he did so during the commander’s leave. But if Major Jourdain has a right-hand man, it is his company sergeant-major.

This person is the essential link between the major and the men. It is the sergeant-major that the commander turns to for assistance in dealing with morale and discipline problems, providing invaluable advice when the commander has to make the most difficult decisions.

Earlier I quoted David Grossman’s explanation of the motivation of the warrior. Grossman goes on to explain that a person is not born to be a warrior but can make the choice to become one. If ever there was an exception to that rule, it is Master Warrant Officer Guy Lapierre.

MWO Lapierre can remember wanting to be a member of the CF since he was five years old. He spent his childhood and adolescence dreaming of joining the Canadian Navy. When he turned seventeen, he headed straight for the recruitment centre. The power of the open ocean and the excitement of foreign ports were only days ahead. Then a rather large fly landed in his career ointment. The economy was in recession and the army was having no trouble recruiting. When MWO Lapierre came looking for his long-awaited job as a sailor, he found that they had all been taken. He was told that the waiting time to get a position in the navy would be a year or more.

Seventeen-year-olds are not known for their patience. The recruiting officer must have sensed this. There is no other way to explain what he proposed next: “You can’t get into the navy for at least a year but . . . you can be in the infantry in three weeks!”

Translated into civilianese, that would be: “If you want a career on a clean boat, wearing clean clothes, eating three square, hot meals a day, you have to wait for twelve months. If you want to carry a heavy pack through swamps while eating scraps of freeze-dried crud, you can start working right away.”

As often happens when males are in their teens, testosterone won out over patience and good judgment. MWO Lapierre signed up on the spot and found himself in an army uniform within the month.

MWO Lapierre’s high testosterone levels now put him at a distinct advantage. After his basic infantryman’s course, he was sent to the paratrooper school. He was then assigned to the Airborne Regiment, the most elite formation in the CF. He must have been one hell of an impressive kid; he got into the infantry a year after I got out, and I knew soldiers who had been trying for three years to get into the Airborne. Being accepted into that regiment after basic training would be like being invited to play high school football . . . in Grade 7.

MWO Lapierre, who had so wanted to be a sailor, proceeded to have a career dominated by the most intense infantry experiences imaginable. During a decade as a paratrooper, he made the rounds of the more arduous peacekeeping missions Canada was involved in, including tours in Cyprus in 1986, Bosnia in 1993 and Haiti in 1997.* The most impressive part of his résumé, however, would have to be the two years he spent testing paratrooper equipment.

The conversations during these two years would have gone something like this:

(Note: Before any other old paratroopers out there think I am exaggerating, let me tell you that I have seen the video—not of the conversations—the video of the jumps. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it. But it happened exactly as I am about to describe.)

“Lapierre! We have this new rucksack/piece of gear/whatever. But there’s a chance it will completely screw up the flight characteristics of the free-falling paratrooper, get tangled in his chute and he will crater.

Strap it on, go jump out of a plane and tell us how well it works. Or not.”

“Yes, Sir!”

“Lapierre! That seemed to work when you jumped by yourself, so we want you to do the same jump, but ‘tandem.’ Attached to another paratrooper. That way, we can drop paratroopers more closely together. But there’s a chance it will completely screw up the flight characteristics of the free-falling soldiers. They could get tangled in their chute and crater. Go jump out of a plane and tell us how well it works. Or not.”

“Yes, Sir!”

Even the most determined soldier would be having second thoughts about his career choice at this point. But the main event was still to come.

“Lapierre! We want to see if we could drop a paratrooper with a big bunch of gear at the same time. They could drop food into famine areas or large amounts of ammunition to our forces, with pinpoint accuracy. So we want you to strap this gigantic barrel to your chest harness. It is five feet high and two and a half feet across. It weighs 630 pounds. You will fall much faster than normal paratroopers do, and there’s no telling what might happen. It could get tangled in your chute, and you will crater. With the barrel on top of you. Strap it on, and go jump out of a plane and tell us how well it works. Or not.”

“Yes, Sir!”

There is an old joke about undesirable jobs whose punch line was “parachute tester.” MWO Lapierre did it for real.

He describes his time at the Airborne School as having been the most enjoyable of his career. But he has the warrior’s skills, and he lives by the warrior’s code. There were evil men doing evil things, and his country was at war against them. There was only one place he wanted to be.

He started to angle for a combat posting on Roto 4. Having seen war in Bosnia and misery in Haiti, he had no illusions about what he would be facing. He was nonetheless frustrated when he was not chosen. For the men of Combat Team Cobra, that was a good thing: it meant that he was available to come with them on Roto 7. Major Jourdain knew a good thing when he saw it and snapped him up. This made it easier to staff the rest of the combat team. MWO Lapierre’s reputation was such that soldiers from other companies were asking to transfer into Combat Team Cobra to serve under him.

If I tell you that MWO Lapierre is the very picture of what the ideal sergeant-major should be, most civilians will think back to the tongue-in-cheek description at the beginning of this entry and imagine that he is a fire-breathing terror. But while he can be harsh when the occasion calls for it, that is not his leadership style. On the contrary, this soft-spoken man motivates his troops by being tougher on himself than on anyone else.

He starts off by being in amazing physical shape. He has been in Ironman competitions, and he has come at or near the top of any group physical fitness test that he has ever participated in. In a group as fit as the paratroopers, that would be impressive enough. Call that Airborne tough.

But what does it become when you learn that MWO Lapierre broke his back in 1996? And was told he would never be in the infantry again, much less jump out of airplanes? And then attacked his rehab program with such determination that he was doing parachute jumps again eighteen months later? That is sergeant-major tough.

Master Warrant Officer Guy Lapierre in his element: the field

MWO Lapierre brings the same energy to everything he does. He pushes himself to always be more upbeat, more confident, more “together” in every way a soldier can be than any of the men who serve under him. In private conversation, he is candid about his weaknesses. For instance, he admits that he is not as good a public speaker as other men in his position. He compensates for this by working much harder than they do to get to know his men. When he speaks to them one-on-one, the impact is magnified.

The thing he enjoys least about his job is dealing with the interpersonal conflicts that are inevitable in any large group. This falls to him when it cannot be resolved at a lower level, so he gets to deal with the worst cases. But he knows his men so well that he can see the value in each one. This makes it challenging to resolve their quarrels—he can always see both sides.

When I asked MWO Lapierre to summarize what it meant to be a sergeant-major, he replied without hesitation. He sees himself as a teacher, one who demonstrates for the undisciplined the advantages of superb self-discipline.

Like all Canadians, MWO Lapierre is proud of our role as peacekeepers. But he also describes, with passion, the outstanding performance of Canadian combat soldiers in every war we have ever been involved in. He sees no contradiction in being good peacekeepers and good warriors. The job we have here in Afghanistan calls on the attributes of both.

MWO Lapierre is living the crowning achievement of an outstanding career. He does not enjoy being at war but, like most of the soldiers here, he has been given “the gift of aggression.” He is where he needs to be, not where he wants to be. He is serving his nation to the best of his abilities.

What is he getting out of it? He speaks with remarkable sensitivity and insight about achieving as much personal growth as possible from the experience. He feels that most of this growth will come from having been a member of a team, a team involved in the most valuable work a group can possibly do: bringing hope where there was none before.

AUGUST 31 | RCIED: Radio-Controlled Improvised Explosive Device

Every day, small groups of Canadian soldiers go into some of the most hostile territory on Earth. Reconnaissance patrols seek to obtain information. Ambush patrols lay traps for Taliban infiltrators. Some patrols escort our officers to a shura with a local elder. Others are “presence patrols” that make the point that we can go wherever we like. The territory the media likes to describe as being under Taliban “control” is territory they cannot stop even a few of our soldiers from traversing.

It is during these patrols that the skill of the Canadian soldier becomes overwhelmingly apparent. By day and by night, these men and women will engage in an activity that requires the peak level of the warrior’s craft. Camouflage, tactical movement, silent communication and combat skills must all be of the highest order.

The patrol that left at first light this morning was tasked with an engineering function. Led by Lieutenant Jonathan Martineau of the 5th Combat Engineer Regiment, their goal was to weld grates onto a culvert that passes under the main access route to the FOB. It is easy for the Taliban to sneak an IED into such culverts. They use the cover of darkness, civilian passers-by or even a wandering herd of sheep to gain access to the culvert undetected. Because they do not have to dig, it takes only seconds for them to place their lethal device. This obliges us to clear the road at least once a day, a time-consuming and occasionally dangerous task. The heavy metal grates would make it more difficult to access these culverts.

Accompanying the patrol this morning was Corporal Pascal Girard, the thirty-two-year-old combat medic assigned to Captain Lussier’s First Platoon. This platoon had just come back from two weeks of QRF duty. This was an exhausting time for Corporal Girard. When the QRF was called out, as it could be several times in a single day, it was common for Captain Lussier to assign only a portion of his men to the task. But it was necessary for the platoon medic to go out every time.

With his platoon back at the FOB, the soldiers of First Platoon now had to assume their share of the patrols. Most of these would not involve all the men of the platoon, but a medic has to go every time.

Master Seaman Cloutier, the senior combat medic, tries to even this out between the medics on the FOB. The fact remains that these young people work hard and are exposed to tremendous risk. I have never heard any of them complain about that.

The diagram accompanying this story offers a visual representation of the ground. When the patrol arrived at the culvert, Corporal Girard, the medic (M), took his place in the security cordon. From here he could cover the footpath which headed northeast. With his back against the wall of the abandoned family compound, he was invisible to anyone coming from the south. Because of the position of the sun, anyone coming from that direction would cast a shadow that would alert Corporal Girard to their presence before they came around the corner. Lieutenant Martineau (L) stood close to the culvert, supervising his engineers (E). Sergeant Luc Voyer (S), commanding the infantry, stood between the lieutenant and the medic, with an interpreter, or “terp” (T). Other infantrymen (I) completed the security cordon.

While the engineers were performing their tasks, two children (C) walking down the footpath from the east approached Corporal Girard’s position. Sergeant Voyer went to meet them and began The blast site talking to them through the terp, immediately to the west of the berm of hard earth shown in the diagram. The children, a boy and a girl both about ten years old, offered the soldiers pomegranates. Sergeant Voyer asked them where all the adults were. The children explained that, it being Ramadan, most people were staying inside and not exerting themselves. Corporal Girard saw that the sergeant and the terp were now exposed to anyone coming from the south. The compound to the south of the footpath blocked the view of the infantrymen near the road. He therefore moved further east to better protect his sergeant. Then a massive explosion occurred. The sergeant, the terp and Corporal Girard disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

The blast site

Corporal Girard was hit by some gravel and rocks, but was unhurt. Remembering where the abandoned compound had been, he headed in that direction. When he found it, he turned west and followed the wall until he got out of the smoke. Then he called to his sergeant and the terp, guiding them out of the smoke by his voice. Sergeant Voyer reached him first. Having gotten his bearings, Sergeant Voyer went a short way back into the smoke, found the terp and brought him out.

Lieutenant Martineau could not believe they were all still alive. He had thought they were dead, given the size of the explosion and their proximity to it. His relief would be short-lived. Once out of the smoke and with the terp headed to safety, Sergeant Voyer and Corporal Girard both looked at each other and said, simultaneously: “The fucking kids!” Then they ran back to the blast site, still completely obscured by thick smoke.

It was an extremely brave thing to do. It was also foolhardy. The Taliban routinely plant secondary devices to kill Coalition soldiers who have the life-saving reflexes displayed by Sergeant Voyer and Corporal Girard. Lieutenant Martineau ran after them, screaming at them to stop. Although none were under his command, he has lost three engineer brothers on this tour. He had no intention of losing any more friends. He ordered the men to return to the road. Reluctantly, they obeyed.

As the smoke began to clear, the engineers moved around the south side of the blast site, checking for secondary devices and casualties. Corporal Girard and Sergeant Voyer stood on the edge of the smoke cloud, peering into the haze with their rifle scopes and listening for screams or moans.

Back at the FOB, we had no idea how bad this could get. I ordered all preparations to be made for a MasCal and my team responded superbly: within fifteen minutes we had three medics, ten TCCCs, two terps and a dozen stretcher-bearers standing by in and around the UMS. Our triage and holding areas were ready, and all our resuscitation gear, including our pediatric bag, was ready to go.

The engineers continued to inspect the blast site from the east and then from the north, crossing the stream at a small footbridge. Corporal Girard and the other infantrymen rearranged themselves to cover the perimeter.

As the engineers walked past the east side of the farm building, they noticed that two Afghan men were inside. There was no good reason for these men to be in that spot. They claimed to be working on the grapes, but these were already all hung to dry. The engineers brought the men back to the main body of troops to question them further. Along the way, they found three more Afghan men in another farm building farther south (not shown in the diagram), and they brought these men along as well.

The engineers had not seen any casualties, but Corporal Girard was still not satisfied. He headed down the footpath to stand right on the spot where the children had been when the explosion occurred. This was clearly against the lieutenant’s wishes. Corporal Girard figured he would ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

The explosion had taken place less than ten feet from where they had all been standing. Once there, Corporal Girard realized that their lives had been saved by the berm of hardened earth. It had deflected the force of the blast and most of the shrapnel over their heads. There was nothing on the ground, such as bits of clothing or blood or tissue, to suggest that the children had been wounded. It was evident that they had run away to the east. Only then did Corporal Girard relax.

With the site now secured, the engineers proceeded with what they call “exploitation.” This involves examining the blast site to learn as much as possible about how the enemy makes their weapons, so as to better defeat them.

No one had been standing on the mine when it went off. This ruled out any pressure plate or tripwire mechanism. No wires were leading away from the blast site. This left only one option: it had been an RCIED, a radio-controlled IED. The mine had been deliberately set off by someone who had been watching the place where it had been hidden. There was nothing accidental about this detonation. Someone had watched the Canadian soldiers and the Afghan children together and decided to trigger the blast.

That “someone” had to be close. The two Afghan men hiding in the farm building to the north of the stream were very suspicious. They told contradictory stories to explain what they had been doing in the area and how they had gotten there. They were tested for explosives residue. One of them tested strongly positive for military-grade explosives. Both were taken into custody. Tests on the other three men were negative. They were released.

The men were brought to the FOB, where we followed our standard procedure for detainees. The first step is to examine them medically, to document their state of health and any injuries they may have had prior to entering a Canadian or Afghan detention facility. If anyone mistreats these detainees, the military police and any investigative body will be able to refer to these documents. If injuries are later found that were not noted on the initial exam, then whoever is responsible for the detainee has some serious explaining to do. I had done a few of these “detainee medicals” during my first tour, and this one was no different.

After the two Afghan men had been interviewed, it was the opinion of the officer in charge of the process that the older man had been coerced by the younger one, either to participate in the mine attack or at least to vouch that they were both farmers.

Even if the Taliban had killed both of the children, it is unlikely you would have heard about the incident in Canada. This is incomprehensible to me. The only way we can justify our actions here is that they are occurring in the context of a moral war, and a moral war is defined by the degree to which our enemies are evil. The people we are fighting will not hesitate to kill children if there is a chance that they might wound one of us. So why does the media so rarely report these stories?

I felt no rancour towards this man as I examined him. He was a detainee now, and I would no more have mistreated him than I would have harmed my own daughter. I regretted that his world view was so opposed to mine that we had to struggle against one another with lethal force. And I wondered whether he and I could ever come to an accommodation that satisfied his obedience to his god while respecting my passion for human rights.

Face to face with evil

Addendum—March 27, 2010 About Detainees and Torture: “It’s worse than a crime. It’s a mistake”—attributed to various French diplomats of the Napoleonic era, referring to the execution of the Duke of Enghien.

A number of post-hoc justifications have been advanced through the ages to rationalize the use of torture. These range from the utilitarian—“ We needed to obtain information”—to the theological—“It is God’s will.”

The reason people torture in the first place is much simpler: for those who are capable of it, the act of torturing is enjoyable. If you do not think this is possible, watch a seven-year-old child burning ants. An individual whose ego is not well developed can feel greatly empowered by inflicting pain on another creature. For those who have been brutalized themselves, this can be tremendously gratifying. The gratification comes at the cost of even more long-term psychic damage, but the torturer is unable to appreciate that.

It is this underlying emotional trauma, or childlike immaturity, that renders the torturer incapable of accepting that torture has a dismal track record. But the evidence is overwhelming: quite apart from the fact that it is it utterly immoral, torture is also spectacularly counterproductive.

Prisoners who have valuable information represent a tiny minority of torture victims. There has never been any proof that these individuals are more likely to reveal this information under torture. Meanwhile, the great mass of those who are tortured have no useful information to divulge and will blurt out anything they think the torturer wants to hear. This leaves the side doing the torturing with a mass of misleading and contradictory data. The intelligence services must then expend an inordinate amount of time sorting through this junk, which distracts them and diverts resources that could and should be used more effectively. Even worse, torture guarantees that if the victim was not an enemy before, he or she almost certainly will become one.

I am bringing all this up because, shortly after I returned to Canada, the controversy over our handling of Taliban prisoners of war, a.k.a. detainees, exploded. This debate, like many others about the war in Afghanistan, has been marked by misinformation, a lack of context, political manoeuvring and hyperbole that is way over the top.

Let’s begin with some cultural context: harshness and physical violence are commonplace in Afghan society. Many Afghan men beat their wives, virtually all parents beat their children and superiors in any field occasionally beat their subordinates. I alluded to this earlier when I related that the Afghan officers I met during my first rotation would occasionally throw rocks at underperforming soldiers. Individuals who may have been involved in atrocities against Afghan soldiers, as would be the case with suspected Taliban prisoners, can be in for a rough ride from their Afghan captors.

It does not follow that the Canadian Forces had direct knowledge of systematic abuse. Our CDS, General Walter Natynczyk, has been pilloried for not being aware of a single memo in which a military policeman reported seeing an Afghan policeman hit a Taliban detainee with a shoe. It is a grotesque exaggeration to extrapolate from this that CF commanders had definite knowledge that “100 per cent of detainees” were being viciously tortured and that they ignored this information. We certainly had our suspicions, and those suspicions led to occasions on which we would stop transferring detainees to the Afghans. We even sent officials to monitor conditions in the Afghan jails. Our actions have led to vastly improved conditions for detainees when compared with the situation in 2006, when most of the incidents are said to have occurred.

What was happening to the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan at that time? In the four years leading up to that point, we had been stationed in Kabul. During that period, we had lost eight soldiers, only three—three—to enemy action, less than one per year. Then we moved into Kandahar province and took on the reorganized and reinvigorated Taliban on their home turf. The intensity of the combat we faced was several orders of magnitude greater than anything we had experienced before then, and we started dying at the rate of two a month. On top of that, our infrastructure was still getting organized; things were chaotic. It would have been impossible to track each detainee we turned over to the Afghan security services. It is easy now, in the calm of an Ottawa parliamentary committee room, to criticize the CF for having failed to protect these individuals. None of the persons doing the criticizing, however, have offered much insight into how this oversight should have been implemented.

Finally, nowhere in the detainee debate is there any kind of comparison to what our enemies are doing. Hundreds of Afghan soldiers and policemen have been captured by the Taliban since the beginning of the war. Nearly all of these men were tortured to death within days, if not hours. I described finding the bodies of some of these unlucky men on two occasions in my first book. There is no “detainee issue” on the Taliban side because there are no detainees. This is an important distinction to make. Our Afghan allies are imperfect. Some of them can be brutal, even sadistic at times. But they are nowhere near as bad as those we are fighting.

This is a civil war. We cannot fight it without the Afghans, nor would we want to. What we must do is continue to fight it in as moral manner as possible and, in doing so, show the Afghans a different way of thinking.

Again, education (writ large) is the solution.

“The highest result of education is tolerance”—Helen Keller.

SEPTEMBER 1 | Chuck

Corporal Pierre-Luc Vallières turned twenty-three today.

His best friend in the combat team, Master Corporal Charles-Philippe “Chuck” Michaud, would have turned twenty-nine next March. I would have liked nothing better than to have talked to Chuck myself and to have told you his story, but that is not possible. He was wounded on June 23 and died of his wounds on July 4. So I will tell you

Corporal Pierre-Luc Vallières

the story of his friend instead. Through that, you will get a glimpse of our absent brother. We are known by the company we keep, and Chuck kept very good company.

Corporal Vallières and I got together in a bit of a roundabout way. It is inevitable that a writer who is chronicling the lives of a group of soldiers at war will focus on the leaders. I have tried not to fall into this trap, writing about our front-line troopers in the tanks, artillery, engineers and health services.

I realized, however, that I had not yet included a member of the branch closest to my heart. I asked Sergeant-Major Lapierre to choose a soldier he felt best represented the combat infantryman. He suggested someone to Lieutenant Makuch, and the lieutenant agreed. They both felt Corporal Vallières was one of the best soldiers in the combat team.

Corporal Vallières’s relationship to the army was ambiguous at first. He joined the cadets and knew early on that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his uncle, a career military man. But when he became eligible to sign up at age seventeen, he chose the intermediate step of joining the reserves so that he could remain in his family’s construction business. His loyalty to his family also led him to turn down a chance to go Afghanistan with Roto 4.

It is axiomatic that the younger generation will be criticized by those who came before them. People in their forties and older always feel that people in their twenties are irresponsible, unwilling to work diligently and less good citizens than they were. Nonsense. The youth of today must be as honourable, hard-working and motivated as any generation that has gone before. That is the only way to explain the existence of people like Corporal Vallières.

When I asked this young man why his superiors held him in such high regard, he was not sure what to say. But when I prodded him a bit more, he answered, “Because I always say yes.” You have no doubt heard the cliché about soldiers never volunteering for anything. Here you have one who always will.

Corporal Vallières’s time in Afghanistan has given him the best times of his life. These have been due to the relationships he has had with the men in his section. Like all the best team players, he spontaneously expresses that he is exceedingly proud of these men: “Our sergeant (the section commander) is the best sergeant in the company, and our section is the best section in the combat team.” He says this not with the arrogance of someone wanting to put others down, but with the sheer joy of someone who is very happy to belong to this group.

Chuck was not just a member of that group; he was at its centre. Corporal Vallières describes Chuck as being his best friend. But then he offers that “a lot of people felt the same way about Chuck. When you were with the big guy, he always made you feel great, like best friends do.”

Chuck was the section second-in-command while Corporal Vallières was third-in-command. This was the first time Corporal Vallières had been in a leadership position, and he was a reservist, often seen by regular soldiers as being less competent or capable. It is not uncommon in these situations for the senior regular soldier to keep a tight rein on the junior reservist.

Corporal Vallières on patrol in a Panjwayi village

The way Chuck treated Corporal Vallières reveals the kind of man he was. Rather than constantly looking over his shoulder, Chuck gave his young subordinate a lot of trust and independence. Corporal Vallières was given many tasks to complete independently, particularly with regard to navigation. He found this very rewarding.

But was he really all that independent? Corporal Vallières also had the impression that, whenever the situation became more than he could handle, Chuck would somehow magically appear at his side. He would then smoothly intervene in a way that recognized all the good decisions Corporal Vallières had made up to that point.

This was most apparent when the men were under fire. At those times, Chuck was as calm as he would have been in his own backyard. He would give orders or advice, depending on the circumstances, in a manner that demonstrated he was in complete control of himself and the situation. This was what defined Chuck: he took care of his people, in combat and back at the base. Corporal Vallières insisted that was what Chuck did better than anyone else.

But if Afghanistan has given Corporal Vallières the tremendous highs of leadership in combat, it has also given him devastating lows. Trained as a TCCC, Corporal Vallières was one of two soldiers who gave first aid when Chuck was hit last June. His friend had devastating injuries that were life-threatening, and Corporal Vallières, assisted by Private Pierre-Luc Rossignol (the other TCCC in their section), had to work quickly to stop him from bleeding to death. They soon received assistance from Corporal Sébastien Aziz-Beaulieu, a TCCC who is also the company’s sharpshooter, and Master Seaman Charles Cloutier, the senior medic of the combat team (see addendum, August 23 entry).

And how did Chuck behave through all that? He was terribly wounded, but his frag vest had prevented the mine from tearing out his heart and killing him on the spot. His helmet had protected him from serious brain injury. He was fully conscious. And so Chuck acted as he had always acted: he looked after his men. He encouraged Corporal Vallières and Private Rossignol, telling them they were doing a great job. When he saw tears welling up in Corporal Vallières’s eyes, he comforted him. Every moment that he was with them, right up until the helicopter came, he never stopped being Chuck.

It was a sad, sad day for Corporal Vallières. His friend and mentor would be permanently handicapped. Despite the fact that Major Jourdain and others praised him for helping to save Chuck’s life, Corporal Vallières brooded about the future. How would Chuck adjust? How would his wife react? How would he earn his living? How would he pass the time?

But if Corporal Vallières felt sad on June 23, what he felt on July 4 was pure rage. When he learned that Chuck had died, nothing made sense anymore. For a month, he could not think of a single good reason for Canadians to be in Afghanistan.

Then one day, while the patrol was passing through a small Afghan village, he came upon a young child with a badly infected wound on his forehead. Opening up his TCCC kit, Corporal Vallières debrided and cleansed the wound and gave the child a proper bandage. Shortly afterwards, his unit secured another village, one that had not been visited by Coalition forces for some time. There they found a child whose broken leg had not been set properly because the Taliban had prevented the parents from seeking medical attention at the government hospital. As a result, what should have been a minor orthopedic problem, solved by a few weeks of casting, had become a lifelong handicap. The Taliban do this because, in their bizarre way of thinking, visiting the hospital expresses support for the government.

Corporal Vallières struggled for a few moments as he tried to express how the encounters with these children had made him feel.

He finally summed them up by saying: “These kids did not ask to be born here.” But, in their way, these kids asked for him to be here. And that was a call he was happy to answer, a call he felt he had to answer.

There it is again. The gift of aggression, combined with empathy. The way of the warrior. The way of Chuck.

Addendum—The Picture: One of the enduring regrets Corporal Vallières has of this tour is that he did not manage to take a single photograph of all the men in his section before Chuck was wounded. Looking through all the pictures the section has, there are only three that show their lost brother. In one of these his face is turned; in the other he sits in darkness. The only one that shows him well is the top photograph on the next page. Chuck is in the middle. Someone who kept everybody under his wing would not stand anywhere else.

Addendum—The Ghost: Within days of returning to Canada, Corporal Vallières will travel to Edmundston, New Brunswick, to visit Chuck’s family. The tears will flow then, and the pain will take his breath away. Corporal Vallières will look around, still wishing that someone got it all wrong, a small part of him still convinced that Chuck will walk through the door, if only he waits for him just a second longer.

But Chuck won’t be coming. Only Chuck’s ghost will be there with him. Eventually, Corporal Vallières will make friends with the ghost, as he made friends with the man. The pain will come less often then.

But it will never go away.

Addendum—Remembrance Day: Nearly every member of Third Platoon went to Edmundston on November 11 to pay tribute to Chuck, a gesture that was greatly appreciated by Chuck’s family.

The only good picture we have of Chuck in Afghanistan. Left to right: Warrant Officer Jean-François Bastien, Private François Larose, Private Steve Bernier, Private Pierre-Luc Rossignol, Chuck, an unidentified American visitor, Private Michael Brisson-Hovington, Corporal Pierre-Luc Vallières

Section 3-Charlie and their ghost. Standing, left to right: Private Guillaume Dubuc, Private Michael Brisson-Hovington, Private Mathieu Grégoire, Private Pierre-Luc Rossignol, Private Mathieu Rivard-Lemieux; Kneeling, left to right: Sergeant Jim Auger, Corporal Pierre-Luc Vallières

SEPTEMBER 2 | The Mobile Unit Light Logistics Element

In the August 29 entry, I briefly introduced the final member of the Combat Team Cobra leadership group, Captain Hugo Dallaire. As second-in-command, Captain Dallaire must be ready at any time to replace Major Jourdain. This happens for a predictable amount of time during the major’s leave. But this is war; the unpleasant reality is that Captain Dallaire must be physically, intellectually and emotionally ready to step in as combat team commander for the remainder of the tour at a moment’s notice.

After his seventeen years in the army, there is little doubt that he can do this. He entered military college at sixteen and went into the infantry after that. He served as a platoon commander for several years, and then was posted as an instructor to the Infantry School of the Combat Training Centre, CFB Gagetown.

After spending a couple of years teaching the next generation of infantry officers, Captain Dallaire was ready for a break. He had always wanted to live out west, so he took up a post in a recruitment centre in Vancouver. His existence there must have been as distinct from what he had lived at the Infantry School as it was possible to be while remaining in uniform. It was a good time . . . but it did not take long before he started looking for a way to get back into a front-line infantry battalion.

As Company Sergeant-Major Lapierre had done, Captain Dallaire tried unsuccessfully to come to Afghanistan with Roto 4. And as with the sergeant-major, the men of Roto 7 are fortunate he had to wait.

It has worked out for Captain Dallaire as well. He led the combat team for a full month during Major Jourdain’s absence, conducting two major operations. Both of these operations were helicopter-borne attacks. Helicopters are a pleasure to ride in, but they disgorge a combat team over a large battlefield in a matter of seconds. The problems of command and control are far more arduous than those encountered in a land operation.

Captain Hugo Dallaire, combat team second-in-command

As a warrior, Captain Dallaire has also benefited from the major’s “everybody fights” policy. Captain Dallaire routinely goes on combat operations and has been in more than his fair share of firefights. Tragicomically, the bullets that have come closest to him (missing by a few centimetres) have been fired at him by confused ANA soldiers. This has left Captain Dallaire with a little less tolerance for the failings and foibles of our allies.

When he is not fighting, Captain Dallaire’s job is an administrative one. Hearing him talk about the joys of these tasks is reminiscent of John Nance Garner, who, as vice-president under U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, famously described the office he held as “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”

For men of action like Captain Dallaire, administrative tasks are barely tolerable. One of these tasks, however, at least had the benefit of comic relief. This occurred when Captain Dallaire was put in charge of the Mobile Unit Light Logistics Element, or MULLE program. In an army filled with arcane acronyms, this one at least had the benefit of being wonderfully and accurately evocative.

There are few things more terrifying to a front-line soldier than to hear that somebody higher up has an “idea” that will improve things in their combat unit. The probability that the idea will involve extra work or increased danger for little or no benefit is over 99 per cent. The MULLE program would not prove to be an exception to the rule.

“Logistics” is another term for “supply”: the provision of all the items needed by a unit in the field. The “mobile unit” in question was an infantry platoon of the combat team. Once dismounted from their L AVs, these men would revert to being “light infantry.” Much of the fighting in Zhari-Panjwayi needs to be done in this mode: the underdeveloped and agricultural nature of the terrain makes it impossible to reach most areas by road.

Obliged to carry all their weapons, supplies and ammunition on their backs, foot-borne infantry can only cover a limited distance. This is particularly true in summer, when the men have to carry a phenomenal amount of water as well. If there was a way to lighten their loads, they could patrol further and pursue the insurgents more effectively.

What to do? Well, someone with a historical bent remembered that during the Afghan resistance against the Russian invasion, the CIA had provided the mujahedeen with several thousand Tennessee mules. These were used to ferry supplies over mountain passes from Pakistan into Afghanistan. Could the same thing not be done again?

Well, no. The CIA mules had been used along well-worn mountain trails that had existed since the time of Alexander the Great. The terrain in Zhari-Panjwayi could not be more different. Our patrols must negotiate horribly broken terrain, vine-choked grape fields and deep, narrow irrigation ditches. Whoever came up with this idea had never tried to patrol Zhari-Panjwayi on foot. At times the terrain can be impassable for even two-legged animals, much less four-legged ones. But the idea had come down from on high, and it was up to Captain Dallaire to implement it.

In all his infantry training, nothing had prepared Captain Dal-laire for the job at hand. In short order, he was required to learn about horseshoes, saddles and mule medicine, among other things. One of the company’s NCOs, Sergeant Martin Germain, had experience with horses and took over much of the preparation and training of the animals. There was much to do, because six of the ten mules deployed to the FOB were so malnourished that they were not healthy enough to carry a load.

The only redeeming feature of having so many tasks added to his workload was that Captain Dallaire was able to send a message to KAF asking for an emergency resupply of mule food. The consternation this caused in the chain of command was almost worth the aggravation. Almost.

Being soldiers, the members of Combat Team Cobra gave it their best shot and took the mules out on two patrols. The mules had no trouble . . . until they got into broken terrain.

To describe what happened next, I quote from Major Jourdain’s formal assessment: “Mules are well known for their stubbornness, and our experience with them proved that a mule that decided it would not move could not be moved.”

It wasn’t that they didn’t try; Major Jourdain’s report goes on to say: “The six infantrymen that were in charge of them tried all feasible means to move the animals.”

I doubt that any other phrase composed in any other report written during this war conjures up a funnier image than that one.

On both patrols, the mules ended up as gifts to the nearest local farmer. You can imagine the scene: “Excuse me, sir, can I interest you in a used mule? We only need to unload the machine gun ammunition on his back and he is yours. Please note that this item is non-returnable.”

Major Jourdain concluded his assessment by writing: “Mules are not a viable logistical option for Canadian soldiers operating in our present settings.”

“You’re fired!”

The MULLE Program. March 2009–June 2009. R.I.P.

Addendum, September 3: Scooped! Although I wrote this yesterday, I’ve been beaten to the publication punch. The story of the Panjwayi mules appeared in a Canadian Press story today, albeit with fewer colourful details.

SEPTEMBER 3 | First Day of School

This was Michelle’s first day of school. Yet another milestone in her life that I will have missed. At times like this, I cannot help but ruminate on the cost my family is paying to prosecute this war.

I have done my best to minimize the impact of my absence on my daughter. With three exceptions, I have kept my promise to call Michelle every day. This was true even on those days she refused to speak to me. I would ask Claude or whoever was looking after Michelle to put the phone to her ear so that she could hear me say that I loved her. That seems to have helped. Since I always call at the same time of day, Michelle will either answer the call herself (when did she learn to do that?) or yell “Daddy!” when her mother picks up the phone.

The videos I had mentioned in the first entry have also been a big hit. These have been augmented by videos I have made here. She seems to like these best of all. Claude thinks that is because these videos give Michelle a sense of where I am and what I am doing. Michelle now knows the difference between Ma’Sum Ghar and Sperwan Ghar. And she knows Sperwan Ghar is my last stop before coming home.

Her language skills have skyrocketed during my absence, and she now describes her actions and emotions quite eloquently. Her development in this area has filled me with pride and happiness. This has only made the pain of not being able to be there to witness it even more heart-wrenching.

Her mathematical ability has also improved. When I left, counting from twelve to twenty was a bit of a haphazard affair. Now she rattles the numbers off with confidence. So much so that, when I told her yesterday that I would be home in “twenty days,” she corrected me. “No, Daddy. It will be twenty-three days.”

More pride, more pain.

SEPTEMBER 4 | Pit Bull

To get the full impact of this entry, it is essential that the reader not look ahead at the next photograph.

One of the real characters on my various medical teams has been Master Corporal Sylvain “Pops” Vilandré, the crew commander of one of the Bison ambulances at FOB Ma’Sum Ghar.

“Pops” would put himself through a punishing workout every day. Many of us cannot find the discipline to do that in the kind of heat we have been subjected to. I go running every morning, but I am barely on speaking terms with the weight room.

While we were together, Pops had come to me to put his affairs in order. If a soldier wishes, he or she can pre-select their pallbearers and also one special individual who will accompany the remains back to Canada. This is a job one gives to the closest friend one has in the theatre of operations. Given the importance of physical exercise in his life, “Pops” chose the person who had been his workout partner during pre-deployment training, a woman serving in the artillery.

Pops told me that this woman was one of the few people he had ever seen who pushed themselves as hard as he did. He had enormous respect for her, and she was one of his best friends. A few days ago, I bumped into her.

Twenty-one-year-old Bombardier Kina Lord is someone you can’t help but like as soon as you meet her. Her thousand-megawatt smile is permanently turned on, making everyone around her happier. She has only been in the reserves for three years, although she was in the cadets for six years before that. She thinks she has found her niche in the artillery, to the point that she will likely join the regular force at the end of this tour. She enjoys pushing herself physically, and the army has given her the kind of challenging work she wanted.

While this tour is Bombardier Lord’s first trip out of Canada, her return will not be her first trip into Canada. Like Michelle, she was adopted, in her case at age five, from Bulgaria. It is heartening to hear her speak perfect Québécois French. She has been a Canadian, in every sense of the word, for some time now.

I spoke to her sergeant, who confirmed what was blatantly obvious: Bombardier Lord is the hardest-working member of her unit. She has a job that requires her to get up earlier than anyone else, and she does this without objection. The only problem her sergeant has ever had with her has been to convince her to take it easy when she is hurt.

I have no trouble believing that. I was watching her gun crew fire some practice rounds into the desert two days ago. She had sprained her back and was banned from lifting the shells. When a call came from the command post for someone to help with a routine task, the sergeant assigned Bombardier Lord to the duty. She sprinted off to the post. The sergeant told her to take it easy, but it was pointless. She was gone.

Although she regularly helps carry the heavy artillery shells, her official job is to drive an armoured vehicle. The vehicle in question is a variant of the M113 armoured personnel carrier. I think we can all agree there is something sexy about a woman who can control twelve tonnes of weaponized heavy machinery.

Then Bombardier Lord steps out of her vehicle, and you can see how hard she has had to work to earn the respect she has gained in this masculine world of war. This kid has so much heart, it must take up all the space in her chest.

Bombardier Kina Lord, 4’ 11” (“and a half!”)

SEPTEMBER 5 | RIP Out (Relief in Place—Out)

I learned today that in another twelve days, I will be out of the FOB. A few days after that, I will be on my way to Third Location Decompression, the mandatory “cooling off” period for Canadian soldiers coming back from the war zone. And then I will be on a plane home. It is getting close enough to taste.

The same is true of everybody here. The first troopers to go home from this tour will leave ten days after me. A couple of factors are at play here. The first has to do with what the troops see when they look back at what they have already been through. The lion’s share of their tour is over. Having survived so much danger already, the troops have “downregulated” (see the June 17 entry) their perception of risk. Getting shot at no longer gets much of a rise out of them, unless the fire is very close or accompanied by high-explosive projectiles. Machine gun fire within a kilometre of the FOB but aimed in another direction will barely elicit a comment; in the middle of a poker game, a couple of heads will turn towards the sound, and an eyebrow may be lifted. Life, as they have come to know it, goes on.

The demeanour of the troops is very different from what it was a few months ago. Much of the fear and uncertainty they felt at the beginning of the tour has been replaced by confidence. This is partly the self-assurance of the seasoned combat veteran, which is well earned. The rest is the feeling of immortality that is the birthright of the young. This feeling asserts itself even when confronted with undeniable evidence to the contrary, as has been the case here.

The members of the combat team have already come through more than four-fifths of the dangerous missions they will be asked to execute. To them, it seems reasonable to deduce that they will come through the remaining operations unscathed. Reasonable, but erroneous. The danger of dying on any particular day in Zhari-Panjwayi is always the same. Statistically speaking, the last day is as dangerous as the first.

Those of us who have been here before must convince the younger soldiers of this. This brings the second factor to the fore: what comes “after.” For all the camaraderie and excitement of life here, very few soldiers are not eager to go home. For most, home means family, friends and familiar surroundings—all the things that give us pleasure, all the things that give our lives meaning. To paraphrase Yoda, we are all thinking much more about where we are going and much less about where we are.

This is a dangerous time. Sergeant-Major Lapierre is more aware of this than most. We had a meeting for the various section commanders last night at which he emphasized the need to remain vigilant. The threat level is unchanged; the enemy is still out there; this is not the time to let our guard down.

One way to keep soldiers focused on the present is to require the routines of military life to be performed in an exemplary fashion. The sergeant-major directed that all section commanders not allow “dress and deportment” to slip. This starts with the small things: shaving, haircuts and the cleanliness of quarters. It goes on with the not-so-small things: making sure our weapons are clean and our equipment is fully operational.

The sergeant-major had just the thing to kick-start the process. Time for some armoured-vehicle spring cleaning! LAVs are the “home away from home” of the troops when they leave the FOB. It takes a full day to thoroughly clean one out because there seems to be no limit to what can be stuffed into the various nooks and crannies of these conveyances.

This also prepares the vehicles for the transfer to the incoming roto. On a couple of occasions, Major Jourdain has emphasized to his troops that the FOB and its equipment was in tip-top shape when they took over. He has made it a point of pride for his soldiers to match or exceed this for their replacements.

Keep the troops happy. Keep the troops busy. Keep the troops focused.

Keep the troops alive.

SEPTEMBER 6, MORNING | The Way We Will Win This War . . .

A day of bitter disappointments.

It began with Captain Dallaire dropping by the UMS to ask me to inspect another detainee. While passing through a village early this morning, some of our patrollers thought they recognized one of the area’s main Taliban commanders. He was in the company of three other men, so all four were brought to the FOB for questioning. Before the inquiry could start, I would have to examine them, as per our standard operating procedures. I began with the presumed “high value” detainee. To my dismay, none of the distinctive marks we had been told to look for to identify the Taliban commander were present.

I continued with my examinations, including that of one man who had lost his right leg. He walked using a crude prosthesis. When I asked him how he had been wounded he answered, as so many Afghans will: “It happened during the Russian time.”*. I will always remember this man. He interacted with me in a friendly manner . . . until the time came to examine his skin for identifying scars. To fully appreciate what happened next, I need to give you a bit of back story.

The first time I had examined a detainee was during Roto 4, on my second day in the country. I was still getting the feel of the place, so I followed the lead of the military police. When it came time to inspect the skin, they had the patient undress completely. I had worked in jails when I was younger and had participated in a number of strip searches. This seemed no different. The man was a confirmed Taliban soldier, and the military police were being very cautious. As I performed my examination, the two officers watching the man had their hands on their holsters.

During that first tour, I learned how private Afghan men consider the genital area to be. Since returning, I have tried to accommodate this as much as possible. I explain to the detainees that my exam is for their protection, to document that they have no injuries at present. When the time comes to examine the skin of the buttocks and genital area, I have the soldiers escorting me turn their backs. Then I tell the detainees to loosen the sash holding their baggy trousers on their waists. Rural Afghans never wear underwear, so I can then do a visual inspection of the buttocks and genitals without touching the detainee and without having them lower their trousers. They only have to hold the garment away from their body.

Until today, that had seemed to satisfy the detainees I had examined. But not this man. Standing on his good leg, he stated clearly although still respectfully that he would not let me look at his groin. He was in a room with three armed Canadian soldiers, and yet he insisted that his limits be respected. He said that he was not a Taliban and that although he could accept that we needed to arrest individuals who appeared suspicious, he felt there was “no reason you need to look at my ass.”

I had not run into this situation before and wondered what the best course of action would be. My instinct as a physician was to respect the man’s wishes, but there was the small matter of the war to consider. So I conferred with Captain Dallaire, who told me that I could dispense with that part of the exam. Perhaps if the first man I had examined had been our high-priority target, he would have felt differently. Since that had not been the case, I think Captain Dallaire made the right move. I therefore completed the exam with a pat-down.

In the end, we found no hard evidence of wrongdoing on the part of these men. Having disrupted their day, albeit for sound reasons, we would now do our best to make it up to them. They were given food and something to drink, then they were loaded into our L AVs and taken back to their village. One of our senior NCOs even gave them a case of fruit for the road.

One of our interpreters overheard the (now former) detainees as they spoke among themselves while they ate the meal we had provided. He said that they had much praise for our treatment of them. They understood why we had arrested them, and they recognized we had treated them fairly. This compares quite favourably with what these men have grown to expect from foreign invaders, including al Qaeda. This is why the Taliban leave behind their wounded soldiers for us to treat. I can only hope that, eventually, our way of thinking will win out. A world where the opposite is true is too awful to contemplate.

 

SEPTEMBER 6, AFTERNOON | . . . and the Price We Have to Pay to Do So

I did not sleep well last night and so, after finishing my medical exam of the detainees, I had a nap. When I woke up, I went to the command post to find out what had happened to the detainees. It was then that I learned how these men had been treated after I had left. Although I was proud of the way we had behaved towards them, I was still very disappointed that we had failed to capture any Taliban leaders.

Far worse news was waiting for me back at the UMS. When I walked in, I saw my medic team huddled around our various communication devices. I did not have to ask what they were watching and listening to. Their grim faces made it clear: we had been hit again. One of our vehicles had struck an IED, and two Canadians were dead. But who were they?

In the June 5 entry, I described the communication network we now have at our disposal. Even out here on the FOB, we are able to maintain excellent “situational awareness” of the combat activity in our area of operations. Although there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding the identity of our dead, we can now seek other clues. It was the search for these clues that was going on when I walked in. As sad as my medics were that Canadians had been killed, they were desperately hoping that their close friends were still alive.

The radio call sign of the unit that had been hit narrowed down the list of medics who could have accompanied them to only two, both good buddies of the crew here. The possibility that one of them might be dead was very upsetting to my people.

We scrutinized the quality and detail of the medical reports coming from the stricken convoy. Most of it was a routine recitation of vital signs and injury descriptions. And then we saw it: the description of a particular therapeutic manoeuvre that only a medic would have done. We focused on that line of disembodied text, telling ourselves it was inconceivable that someone who was not medically trained would have attempted such a manoeuvre. This had to mean our friend was alive.

A few hours later, our suspicions were confirmed. Both of the dead were engineers. How that group has suffered on this tour! I wrote an e-mail to Warrant Officer Comeau to express my condolences . . . again.

In the pantheon of pain, these deaths seem somehow worse because of their timing. For the past week, we have been busy on the administrative side with the preparations for the RIP Out. People have been closely studying the flight manifests to see when they are going from the FOB to KAF, from KAF to decompression and, best of all, from decompression to home. The end of the tour is in sight.

Every Canadian roto to have fought in Kandahar province has lost between ten and twenty soldiers. Until today, we were at the lowest end of that spectrum. I do not know what the other troops may have been thinking, but for the past several days I have been acutely aware that we have gone a month without a death. And this has been during the “fighting season,” the time of year when good weather and drug money from the recent opium harvest give the Taliban mobility and weapons. I had allowed myself to hope that this roto might set a new record for least number of deaths.

Addendum, suppertime: It is in the nature of combat soldiers to hope. Hope for victory. Hope for home. Hope for tomorrow. Maybe only hope for tonight. And so we mourn our dead and go on with our lives.

Captain Vince Lussier turned twenty-seven today. We had a party for him at suppertime, which began with his platoon ambushing him with water-filled condoms. *

Happy Birthday, Vince!

Then the war went on. As we were cutting the captain’s cake, small-arms fire broke out east of the FOB. The machine guns on the hilltop returned fire, and we all rushed to our defensive positions. And our lives went on.

SEPTEMBER 7 | Ramp Ceremony

We held the ramp ceremony for Major Yannick Pépin and Corporal Jean-François Drouin today. This is something the CF does particularly well.

First, these are well-attended affairs. Two-thirds of the 2,800 Canadians serving in Afghanistan at any one time are based at KAF. Almost all of them, nearly two thousand men and women, will be at the ceremony. They will be joined by a similar number of soldiers from other Coalition nations.

But what about the warriors? The ones who go “outside the wire” to do the fighting and the dying? We cannot all leave the combat area on these occasions, but for those closest to the fallen, the CF spares no expense to have them participate. These emotional rituals are an important part of the grieving process, so our helicopter squadron was assigned the task of bringing all the engineers from the various FOBs back to KAF. Despite only having one Chinook available, it took the time to fly to all three FOBs and picked up everybody who wanted to go. Major Arsenault at FOB Wilson was the last one to board. There were over fifty people crammed into the chopper, the most he had ever seen in one bird. He ended up sitting on the ramp next to the gunner! This effort on the part of the Canadian aviators—born of a camaraderie forged in combat—was greatly appreciated by the troops.

Although majors are the highest-ranking officers to lead their troops into combat, there are only seven majors in the task force to whom this applies: the three combat team commanders, the tank squadron commander, the commander of the artillery, the commander of the armoured reconnaissance squadron and the commander of the engineers.

Major Pépin, the engineer commander, was a combat leader. His troops were spread throughout our area of operations, supporting the infantry with their specialized skills. A lesser man might have stayed at KAF getting “sitreps” (situation reports) and sending orders by radio. It would have been a lot safer, but it would have sent a terrible message.

Instead, Major Pépin travelled extensively throughout the combat area. He personally checked on his soldiers, assessing their morale and making sure they had everything they needed to accomplish their tasks. His constant movements gave him an intimate knowledge of the war zone and made it possible for him to advise the battle group commander on the best way to use our engineering resources. It made him a very effective officer, but it exposed him to awful risks.

If it had been desirable, even necessary, for the engineers in the task force to be present at the ramp ceremony, it was all the more so for Major Pépin’s peer group. As many as possible of the six surviving “combat” majors were brought to KAF to act as pallbearers. In the above photograph you will recognize the first man, Major Jourdain, the commander here at Sperwan Ghar; Major Tim Arsenault, the commander at FOB Wilson, is third.

The majors bid farewell to one of their own

These men had trained together for nearly two years as they moulded the battle group into an efficient fighting force. It must have been almost unbearably painful to carry their friend’s body into the waiting Hercules aircraft.

Addendum, September 8: The remembrance process continued the following day at FOB Sperwan Ghar. The Canadian flag and that of the Van Doos will be flown at half-mast till our fallen are buried. This evening, after Major Jourdain returned, we gathered to observe a moment of silence in the memory of our fallen comrades. These moments are important to us. We have lost brothers. We will honour them as we always have, by respecting John McCrae’s admonition, from his poem “In Flanders Fields”:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep . . .

We will keep faith with those who die.

SEPTEMBER 8 | A Moral War

The men we arrested, questioned and released two days ago knew what they were talking about. Anybody who doubts that needed only to witness what has happened here over the past twenty-four hours.

We picked up another suspicious character yesterday. One of our patrols had “probable cause” and tested his hands for explosives. The test was positive, indicating he had recently handled a bomb of some kind. I again performed the detainee medical exam.

Almost everything about this guy was wrong. He claimed to be the mullah of a nearby village. In this culture, elders are revered merely because they are old. All the mullahs any of us had ever seen were at least middle-aged. Their beards were all white or at least shot through with grey. This man’s beard was black.

This was so incongruous that, although it is not required on the detainee medical examination form, I asked him his age. He replied that he was thirty-one. Had he been Canadian, that would have been believable. He looked like a young man in our own society: healthy, vigorous and with the sheen of youth barely faded. But we are not in Canada, we are in the Panjwayi. Life here is almost indescribably hard, so hard it uses people up and ages them long before their time. When estimating the ages of adults who have worked as farmers in this area all their lives, it is wise to subtract a decade or sometimes even two. If this guy was a thirty-one-year-old Panjwayi farmer, he should have looked like a forty- or even fifty-year-old Canadian.

Other aspects of his physical exam were incongruous. His hands were soft and free of calluses. His feet were equally supple, with none of the hard corn at the heels that the inhabitants of this area all have. He also had perfect teeth, something I had never seen in the mouth of any adult resident of the district.

I doubt this individual has spent a single day in the fields around our FOB. It is far more likely that he has spent most of his life, at least since adolescence, in a well-funded madrassa (Islamic religious school) in Pakistan.

When Captain Dallaire reported the results of his questioning to Major Jourdain, the commander decided to send the detainee onward to KAF for a more in-depth investigation. This does not guarantee that this man will be held. On the contrary, many of the individuals we have detained after finding explosive residue on their hands have been released from KAF within a few days. This can be frustrating for the troops in the field, but we follow demanding rules of evidence before depriving someone of their liberty.

It took a full day to organize the evacuation of the detainee. This had to be done by helicopter with a military police escort, resources that cannot always be rustled up at the drop of a hat. During those twenty-four hours, we gave him food and accommodations equal to our own. We respected his beliefs, providing him with meals at times that did not conflict with the Ramadan fast. Captain Dallaire even interrupted his questioning to allow the man to pray. In this war, where the best a captured Coalition soldier can hope for is to be beheaded quickly, we did not mistreat our detainee in any way.

What most impressed me occurred right before he was to be picked up from the FOB. He had been brought to the helipad and placed under the supervision of a couple of junior soldiers. When the helicopter was delayed, they thought to move him out of the sun and into the shade. These two young Canadians, who less than twenty-four hours ago had watched two of their comrades go home for the last time, spontaneously acted to make the detainee more comfortable.

The same respect for the law and for human rights permeates everything that we do in Afghanistan. For instance, there is a family compound not far from here that is routinely used as a staging point for the Taliban to plant their IEDs. The compound prevents our observers on the hilltop from seeing this area. The Taliban know this and use it to their advantage. It has long been Major Jourdain’s desire to flatten this compound, and he has any number of ways to make it happen. In most armies, that desire is all it would take. The compound would be destroyed within minutes, possibly without even warning the inhabitants.

Here in the Canadian area of operations, we clear this kind of demolition with two different levels of legal advisers. Any inhabitants, even if they are no more than squatters, are compensated and cared for. The roof over their heads may be minimal, but it is all they have. We will not destroy it until we are sure that they have at least an equal dwelling to move into.

Canadians have a tremendous amount of pride in the reputation our armed forces have garnered around the world as peacekeepers. Our citizens can feel the same pride about the way we have waged war.

SEPTEMBER 9 | Myna Man

During my visit to the ANA mullah, I had noticed two myna birds running around the room. I knew that Afghans like to tame these birds, but it was incongruous to see two of them in an army barracks. I have met the owner of the mynas several times over the past month.

Abdul Jalala is a twenty-six-year-old Tajik who has been in the ANA for seven years now. He signed a three-year contract and then extended it for a further five years.

Abdul has liked birds since he was a child. He describes the taming process with a fondness for his creatures that is almost parental. It begins when the bird is a hatchling. Abdul will feed it tiny scraps of food by hand and give it water from a dropper. After several weeks Abdul Jalala, myna man of this, the bird bonds to him and recognizes him as its parent. It is something to see the tiny creatures run after him in his barracks and even outside.

Abdul Jalala, myna man

It is even more fascinating to watch Abdul interact with his birds. He is gentle, affectionate and playful. It is obvious that he loves them. This does not make him unusual. He has no trouble finding other soldiers to looKAFter his birds when he is out on operations.

Sometime after this photograph was taken, I returned to find that Abdul now had only one myna. I was afraid to ask what had happened. I did not want to bring back unpleasant memories if the answer involved one of the stray cats we occasionally see around the base. Curiosity got the better of me, though, and I am glad it did. Abdul told me he had sent the second myna to his kid brother in northern Afghanistan.

Afghans often seem so foreign to Canadians. Here we have a young man, surrounded by the ugliness of war, who has tried to bring a bit of beauty and gentleness into his life. Yet he gladly surrendered half of that beauty to cheer up a younger sibling. Sounds Canadian to me.

SEPTEMBER 10 | Team Canada

The chief of the defence staff, General Walter Natynczyk, came back to town today. This time he came with more than his usual military entourage. Over the years, a steady stream of entertainers, professional athletes and other personalities have come to Afghanistan to provide a welcome diversion for our soldiers. Each group is labelled “Team Canada” for the time they are with us. When one of them arrives in Kandahar, the Canadian contingent at KAF will gather together and be treated to a show. This is a tangible way for these famous Canadians to support us.

Most of them do not go to a FOB, because of the danger. I also imagine the CF subtly discourages such visits because getting nonmilitary individuals into the combat zone creates a number of logistical headaches. The transportation people at KAF are already working around the clock to keep the various combat units supplied; allocating resources to something that does not directly support the mission must strike them as a bad use of their assets.

Then there are the cold hard mathematics of the situation. KAF is home to nearly two thousand Canadians. At a FOB, there is a tenth of that number. In the military, we are nothing if not utilitarian: the greatest good for the greatest number. Even though our lives here are far more arduous and dangerous than the lives of those at KAF, it makes sense (on one level) to divert the “morale boosters” to the main base and away from the FOBs.

Logical it may be, but that does not make us feel any better when we see the parade of visitors and dignitaries who stay “inside the wire” and pass us by. This has been the object of some complaints by the combat troops in the past. General Natynczyk heard those complaints the last time he was here and told the troops he would correct that.

To his displeasure, when he arrived in the theatre of operations this time, he found that FOBs had again been left off the itinerary. But when the general makes a promise, he keeps it. This involved much running around at KAF, but the schedule was altered to include us.

The guy does have some pull, after all . . .

Bruce Cockburn’s music takes me back to an earlier war

And so it was that, early this afternoon, one of our Chinook helicopters arrived and disgorged a star-studded lineup of musicians, athletes and media personalities. Among them were Pat Côté, a former member of the Van Doos and now an international-level mixed-martial artist, and Montreal Canadiens hockey legend Guy Lafleur. The troopers were pleased with the overall lineup, but they went wild over these two guys.

There was also a man who seemed to have been chosen specifically to raise my spirits. The music of Bruce Cockburn became important for me when I was in my twenties and remains so to this day. I have always been active in social justice movements, and many of Mr. Cockburn’s songs were anthems for the various struggles in which I have been involved. He travelled extensively in Central America around the same time that I participated in the Nicaraguan Contra War, and many of his songs dealt with the conflicts then occurring in that area of the world. He sang of the dispossessed, dying like ants under the heel of the elephant. Hearing him sing ten feet from me, the first time I had heard him live, brought back all those memories. It was a very powerful moment.

I had the chance to talk to him in the few minutes after his performance and before he boarded the chopper back to KAF. In that short time, he gave me an excellent explanation for a conundrum in the Canadian political scene that had long confused me: why the left wing of Canadian politics harbours so much opposition to our mission here. This is the part of the political spectrum with which I have almost invariably allied myself. I have a lot of trouble understanding why its members disagree with me now.

When the Taliban were in power, feminists across the country and around the world were vociferous in denunciating that regime. They were quite right to do so. Life-saving surgery was denied to women on the grounds that it would be better for them to die than to be seen by a male physician. Women who had been going to work in skirts were now being told to stay at home and never leave unless covered in full burka and escorted by a male relative. Transgressors were beaten and occasionally killed. Even women who were the sole breadwinners for their family—a common occurrence in a country with so many war widows—were forbidden to leave their dwellings.

Since the beginning of the mission, however, Canadian feminists have been either notably silent or noisily opposed. Earlier this year Judy Rebick, former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, stated: “How has the war helped women in Afghanistan? It hasn’t.”* Considering that the number of girls being educated in Afghanistan has gone from 12,000 under the Taliban to 1 .2 million in 2007 and that two women ran for the presidency last month, this statement is breathtaking in its ignorance.

And what about the rest of the left? The people with whom I have stood “on the barricades” are almost uniformly opposed to our intervention in this country. How is that possible? The same ideological Bruce Cockburn finally gets his rocket launcher motivations that led me to support the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua brought me to the Panjwayi.

Bruce Cockburn finally gets his rocket launcher

Mr. Cockburn chose to sing “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” a song he wrote after his first trip to Guatemala. This took place in 1984, when the dictatorship of General Efrain Rios Montt was waging a genocidal war against the indigenous people of that country.* Mr. Cockburn had visited a refugee camp across the border in Mexico that had been attacked twice in one day by helicopter gunships of the Guatemalan Army.

The song, particularly the last line—“If I had a rocket launcher . . . Some son of a bitch would die”—generated a fair bit of controversy.

Left-wingers, for all that they talk about “revolutionary change,” were uncomfortable that one of their favourite bards would sing so openly about killing. Some radio stations even took to playing it with the last line faded out, so as not to offend delicate Canadian sensibilities. It did not offend me. I have never had any problem with the concept of killing for a moral purpose. And I could not have agreed more with Mr. Cockburn. There were many people in Central America around that time who needed killing.

I recognized the song as soon as he began strumming the first few bars, and I immediately felt uncomfortable. This time, the side I am on has the helicopters. Was Bruce Cockburn here to express support for the troops but opposition to the mission?

Mr. Cockburn began by admitting that he had been somewhat anxious the first time he sang the song at KAF. From his stage, he could see numerous helicopters. But the crowd went wild, perhaps sensing what he wanted to get across, and what he said to me today: “The Taliban are identical to those dictatorships we fought against back then.”

I was both relieved and perplexed that he felt the same way I did.

Relieved, because I have enormous respect for the man. It would have been disconcerting to be on the other side of the debate from him. I am not shielded by the fanaticism of our enemies. When people I admire oppose the mission, I listen to them. They often make valid points. And I worry that they might be right.

Perplexed, because he is an icon of the left-wing politics that I identify with and that has so thoroughly rejected my opinions about this mission. I asked him why he thought our usual political home was so at odds with our current position.

His answer made a lot of sense. This time, the balance of power is the opposite of what it was in those Central American conflicts that united us a generation ago: “our side” has all the heavy weapons. The Taliban are the underdog. Mr. Cockburn opined that support for the underdog is such an ingrained habit for the left that its supporters cannot look beyond that.

Corporal Pascal Girard, combat medic (centre), receives CDS coin from General Walter Natynczyk (left)
and Canadian Forces Chief Warrant Officer Greg Lacroix, the most senior NCO in the CF (right)

Mr. Cockburn has at least part of the answer there. Much of the opposition to the war in Canada seems to be driven by an almost reflexive anti-Americanism. This prevents people from judging whether the enemies we face here have gone so far into immorality that it has become moral to wage war to stop them. If that is the case, and I believe it is, then we should accept help from almost anyone to achieve victory. We can disagree with our allies while we fight this war, and go our separate ways once the war is won. But we have to stick together until the job is finished here.

Before General Natynczyk took Mr. Cockburn and the other stars home, he awarded one of his coins (see the June 18 entry) to yet another combat medic. In the August 31 entry I related one of the things Corporal Pascal Girard did to deserve this. He did many more. As warfare has evolved, the concept of “declaration of war” has become almost an anachronism. Was 9/11 al Qaeda’s declaration of war? Hardly. Their operatives had struck at Western targets numerous times before that.

The attacks I found most abhorrent were the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania respectively. These embassies were well protected against suicide bombers, but you can always build a bigger bomb. It is estimated that the trucks used in the attacks each contained something in the neighbourhood of ten tonnes of high explosive. Even though the bombs detonated far from the embassies, a dozen Americans were killed.

But these buildings were in the middle of congested cities! Hundreds of innocent Africans were murdered, and thousands were maimed. I was enraged. Even if you accept the sick al Qaeda notion that American civilians are legitimate targets, how were these fanatics able to justify this atrocity, even to their own followers? But they did. Killing and crippling thousands of the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth was an acceptable means to their ends. Even the fact that a third of the population of Tanzania is Muslim did not give them pause.

On 9/11, al Qaeda brought this war to our homes. I am using the word “homes” in a dual sense. Twenty-five Canadians died on that terrible day, in the second-worst terrorist attack ever suffered by Canadian citizens.* As bad as that was, it is in the metaphorical sense of the word that the attack had the most impact. Al Qaeda’s assault was not only against our people but also against our society’s core values. On every issue that Canadians identify as important—human rights, rule of law, gender equality, education, democracy and many others—al Qaeda and the Taliban extremists stand diametrically opposed to us.

It is essential that we fight these people, and having gotten into the fight, we have to be in it to win.

The comments made by Robert Fowler two days ago stand in contrast to this. He is the Canadian diplomat kidnapped by al Qaeda in Niger in December 2008. Fowler and his assistant, Louis Guay, were held for 130 days. They were released on April 21, 2009.

In his first interview after his return, Mr. Fowler questioned the wisdom of the Afghan mission.* When I saw the headline announcing that, I was nonplussed. When I read the article, however, I found that I agreed with Mr. Fowler on every one of his observations. He referred to the Afghan mission as a “noble objective” to which he “cannot object.” He goes on to describe the mission as “complex, challenging.” This echoes, almost verbatim, statements I have made.

Where we differ is in the conclusions he draws from his evaluation of the mission’s challenges. Mr. Fowler states, “I just don’t think in the West that we are prepared to invest the blood or the treasure to get this done” and that “it strikes me as rather extreme that one goes out and looks for particularly complex misery to fix.” He then goes on to argue, “There’s lots of things to fix that can be done more efficiently and probably more effectively.” This summarizes many of the objections to the Afghan mission eloquently and with an admirable economy of words. But strong counter-arguments can be made.

1. There are “lots of other things to fix.”
True, but irrelevant. There will always be “things to fix.” If we were to have a national debate over which country was “most deserving” of our intervention, it would paralyze our body politic ad infinitum.

2. It is “extreme that one goes out and looks for particularly complex misery to fix.”
Yes, it is. Afghanistan is among the countries where human suffering is at its worst. One can see that as a reason to avoid the mission or a reason to undertake it.

3 . The West is not “prepared to invest the blood or the treasure to get this done.”
Many people agree with this statement. Since it is a statement of political reality rather than personal belief, I hope it is not true. But let us assume that it is. Taken together with the other two objections, the argument Mr. Fowler makes against our mission in Afghanistan can be summarized as: “It is the right thing to do, but it is too expensive.”

Let’s put that statement in context. We have been in Afghanistan rather longer than we were involved in World War Two (eight years versus six years). When that conflict began in 1939, the Canadian population was 11,267,000. In 2009, that number had tripled to 33,763,000. To get a sense of how much we sacrificed to defeat the Nazis, therefore, you have to multiply our losses in that war by three.

In World War Two, Canada suffered 46,250 battle deaths. That would be the equivalent of 138,750 deaths in our country today. To date, we have lost 129 soldiers in Afghanistan. That is less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of what we lost fighting the Nazis.

As soon as we defeated the Nazis, it was necessary to confront communism. We got into one hot war (Korea) and one Cold War. The former cost us 516 lives. The latter cost us hundreds of billions of dollars. Our participation in the Korean conflict helped keep one of the most bizarre totalitarian regimes ever seen out of South Korea. Our contribution to NATO helped bankrupt the Soviet Union and dump communism into “the ash heap of history” (Karl Marx’s reference to capitalism’s “inevitable” demise).

Yes, the Taliban are resilient and tough. Yes, Afghanistan is so backwards and desperately poor that progress here will be agonizingly slow.

But we have been in fights this tough, and a whole lot tougher, before. We stayed in those fights till we won. We had to then; we have to now.

CLARITY IN POLITICAL SPEECH

Further on in the interview, Robert Fowler seems to struggle to express himself. He is quoted as stating that “to get it done, we will have to do some unpleasant things. I mean some deeply hard, this isn’t, this is not a nice war.”

Having been interviewed live on television myself, I am well aware that even the smoothest speaker will stumble at times and come out with clunkers like this. But Mr. Fowler has correctly identified and plainly spoken some key truths. There is no such thing as a “nice war.” To win, we will have to do hard, unpleasant things. I think it is essential that we not shy from this. On the contrary, our government should use language that is unequivocal. I offer a hypothetical example of this here:

The Prime Minister: I rise to address the House about the situation in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda and the Taliban extremists are killing children who want to go to school. There is no excuse, no matter what their religious beliefs are, for such behaviour. People who do such things lie outside of what can be tolerated on this planet.

Beyond that, our enemies subscribe to a world view that is in complete opposition to our own. They have attacked us, and they will continue to attack us. We are as abhorrent to them as they are to us. Our only choices are to fight them now in Afghanistan or elsewhere later.

We have therefore decided to send the hard men and women of the CF to stop them. We will fight in a moral manner. We will not use lethal force unless we are sure that we are engaging an enemy target. Captured enemy soldiers will be treated humanely. We will give our enemies the opportunity to lay down their weapons and participate peacefully in the political process.

But our enemies must never mistake our humanity and our morality for weakness. Those who continue fighting must know that we will hunt them down using every technological means at our disposal.

When we find them, we will kill them as quickly and as efficiently as we can. We will do so reluctantly, because we did not want it to come to this. But we will do so without remorse. We are in this war to win.

SEPTEMBER 12 | 100 Days

This morning, I woke up at a FOB for the one-hundredth day in a row.

When I started writing this book, I set myself a goal: to tell a different story about the lives of Canadian and Afghan soldiers every day. These are extraordinary people, doing extraordinary things. They all deserve to be chronicled. But even with this many entries, many other medical and military events occurred that I wish I had had the time and energy to document. Let me mention two of them.

Petty Officer Martin “Bed” Bedard and the FOB Ma’Sum Ghar team have been particularly busy of late. They have had a number of mass casualty incidents, the worst one two days ago. A suicide bomber struck the police station in Bazaar-e-Panjwayi (the village right beside FOB Ma’Sum Ghar). This is the building beside the Panjwayi Comprehensive Health Centre.

The Taliban soldier really was a “suicide” bomber, as he did not manage to kill anyone other than himself. That his victims all survived, however, is largely due to the efforts of the FOB Ma’Sum Ghar UMS gang. Nine critically wounded patients—four policemen and five civilians—were brought to the FOB all at once. In terms of medical intensity, this is the most serious mass casualty event of the tour. Bed had to intubate three of the victims within minutes. One of them was a child. This is a particularly delicate manoeuvre, and Bed pulled it off like a pro. His performance during these events was so outstanding that he was awarded a CDS coin on the spot by General Natynczyk, who happened to be visiting with Team Canada.

Red Ricard did an exceptional job as well. With so many casualties, they had to call more choppers than they had air evacuation medics to crew. With ten seconds’ notice, Red got his travelling medical gear together and jumped on the last chopper to escort the final batch of wounded back to KAF. The FOB medical team performed so well that they had all the patients stabilized and evacuated in forty-four minutes, an awesome performance.

The combat team here has continued to execute its tasks superlatively as well. Yesterday, Captain Vince Lussier took his platoon out before dawn. By the time they came back for a late breakfast, he and his men had once again asserted our military dominance of the area.

One Talib had been foolish enough to engage Captain Lussier’s light armoured vehicle with an RPG. The shooter had been so inept that Captain Lussier was not sure who the man had been firing at. Not that it mattered. Although he was dressed in civilian clothing, the Talib had clearly identified himself as a combatant. He was cut in half by the LAV’s 25 mm gun.

Another Talib had been merely incompetent. He had been detected by one of our troopers while setting our forces up for an ambush. A single bullet from the soldier’s rifle ended his life. One shot, one kill.

Yet another armed insurgent died because of bad luck. He was detected in an open field. Though still out of range of our personal weapons when he was spotted, he was not beyond the range of our artillery. Captain Lussier radioed his position back to the guns and, within a few minutes, the enemy soldier was torn apart by a storm of high explosive and shrapnel. Then Captain Lussier did what he has done every other time he has taken his men out to fight the Taliban. He brought them all home safely.

None of this will ever make the news back home.

Addendum, midnight: I have to jot down a few things before I go to bed.

First, we had a late-night medevac for an ANA soldier who had suffered a minor gunshot wound. The medical care was routine. All I did was give a bit of guidance to Master Seaman Cloutier; then I let him run the show. Corporal Vallières came by to help out, and I was pleased to see that MS Cloutier let him do various procedures.

“Procedures” are the things we do to patients, such as starting IV lines, packing wounds and putting different kinds of tubes into various body parts. It is emotionally satisfying to do these procedures because you can immediately see the benefits of your actions. Being the kind of leader he is, MS Cloutier saw the case as an opportunity to share knowledge and skills rather than as a chance to “put cold steel into warm bodies” himself. Within minutes, my crew had the patient stabilized. A little while later, the chopper arrived to take him away. Night vision equipment has made life-saving helicopter evacuation available to us 24/7.

I was also happy that my crew was able to handle this case with minimal supervision because of something else that was going on tonight. I was on my way, for the first time, to winning the evening’s poker game. I came back to the UMS, flashing my cash (all of thirty dollars) and telling my people that the honour of the medical section had been restored.

Only that was not true. Major Jourdain had decided to take the night off. Winning the game without him present is like coming first in the hundred-metre dash at the Olympics with Usain Bolt watching from the sidelines.

SEPTEMBER 13 | Unlucky 13

The war in Afghanistan began for Canada in the late fall of 2001. Members of our special operations forces, Joint Task Force-2, were on the ground before the snow fell. Over the next four years, our casualties were light, Then we came to Kandahar. Over the past three years, we have lost more than 120 soldiers here.

To the best of my knowledge, only one infantry company has come through a Kandahar tour without a fatality: the unit commanded by Major Cayle Oberworth and based at FOB Sperwan Ghar during the previous roto. Until today, it looked like one of the companies on this roto might be able to match that. I had served with Bravo Company at FOB Wilson, and Charlie Company here at FOB Sperwan Ghar, but not with Alpha Company.

Alpha Company has been a bit of a vagrant. Lieutenant Colonel Paul, the battle group commander, has given them a number of different tasks. The only one of these tasks that you may have heard of has been the establishment of the “model village” of Deh-e-Bagh (pronounced “Dee-bah”). It has been so successful that it motivated our commanders to implement the change in our tactics that I described in the August 18 entry.

Their other tasks took them hither and yon throughout our area of operations. They did not have a FOB of their own, but rather wandered around the battlefield looking for a job to do or a fight to pick. This obliged them to travel constantly on the roads of Zhari-Panjwayi, which means that the work they do is extremely dangerous. Alpha Company’s luck ran out today. One of their vehicles was caught by our eternal nemesis, the IED. The driver, Private Patrick Lormand, was killed.

This would have been bad enough, but as we were preparing to send our comrade home for the last time, we got word that columnist Margaret Wente had written that “our soldiers don’t get out much. They no longer chase the Taliban. Mostly, they’re trapped behind the wire at the base in Kandahar, where IEDs won’t get them.”* I cannot begin to imagine how that must have made the family of Private Lormand feel, not to mention the families of Major Pépin and Corporal Drouin, who were killed one week ago in the same manner.

This is lazy journalism at its worst. For Ms. Wente to make a statement like this, it would be necessary for her to have ignored all the news coming out of Afghanistan for the past several months. Telling her readers that we are safe from IEDs and are no longer pursuing the enemy is an astounding error. It boggles the mind that a member of the fifth estate could be so out of touch with reality.

If there is one thing the media does a good job of reporting, it is our deaths.† Of the thirteen soldiers we have lost on this rotation, all but two of them have been killed by IEDs. This death rate of approximately two per month is what we have suffered on every rotation since arriving in Kandahar province in 2006. So much for IEDs not “getting” us anymore. As for our offensive operations, this diary has reported on almost daily combat and patrolling activity. Tell me, Ms. Wente, how does that square with your statement that we “no longer chase the Taliban”?

For some reason the CF will not forcefully respond to this distortion. If asked, the CDS will disagree. But there will be no attempt on the part of the Public Affairs people to contact reporters with facts to disprove what Ms. Wente has written. Instead, the CF will take it on the chin and soldier on. I suppose that to do otherwise might be seen as interfering in some way with the political process back home.

As I am speaking only for myself, I am under no such constraints. Ms. Wente, you were way out of line. You owe every member of Task Force Afghanistan an apology.

SEPTEMBER 14, MORNING | Emergency Ultrasound at the FOB

Those who know me professionally are aware of the role that emergency ultrasound has played in my career. When I first launched the EDE (Emergency Department Echo) course in Canada a decade ago, there was already overwhelming proof that this technique benefited patients. But the evidence mattered little: EDE was an incursion into “turf” that radiologists have always considered their preserve. The political battles I have waged to overcome this resistance are legendary in Canadian emergency medicine circles.

Much of the opposition has centred on the ability of emergency physicians to use ultrasound to detect serious injuries. The fear is that essential care will be delayed and the patient will deteriorate, perhaps fatally, if these injuries are missed.* Many emergency physicians also focus on the “positive” scan—one that shows the presence of an injury, especially an unsuspected one—when they begin to explore the use of this modality. The times this happens are marked indelibly in the memory of an emergency physician: a patient arrives at death’s door and is saved only because an ultrasound scan guided therapy within seconds.

As dramatic and memorable as those cases are, they represent a tiny fraction of the ultrasound exams performed by emergency physicians. Today I was able to use EDE in a manner that is far more common and that ultimately has far more impact on emergency medical practice.

An ANA trooper had been struck by shrapnel from an IED and had some moderate lacerations on his face. They would be a challenge to repair, but they were not life-threatening. A far more worrisome injury was a small puncture wound in his right chest, right under his axilla. Even innocuous-appearing shrapnel wounds in the thorax can lead to life-threatening conditions. That could have been the case here. The patient was complaining of pain in his right chest, and there was a peculiar finding when I examined the side of his chest wall: feeling around the wound site, I got the faint impression that there were Rice Krispies beneath the skin.

Even the most junior emergency medicine trainee would have recognized that this was possibly “subcutaneous emphysema,” or air trapped beneath the skin. In the current context, the most plausible explanation for this finding was that a piece of shrapnel had punctured the lung tissue and that air was leaking into the chest wall. If this was the case, a pneumothorax, or “collapsed lung,” was a strong possibility. It would have been reasonable to insert a chest tube and call for helicopter evacuation. But the patient’s vital signs were stable and he was breathing easily, so I elected to do an EDE instead. This test showed conclusively that there was no pneumothorax.

I therefore felt comfortable not subjecting the patient to a surgical procedure (the chest tube) and not risking the lives of one of our helicopter crews to come and get him. I cancelled the medevac, and we spent the next hour repairing the patient’s facial lacerations. During this hour, and for a couple of hours thereafter, I regularly rechecked the patient’s chest with ultrasound. All these examinations were negative. Doing all these exams in a short time allowed me to demonstrate the technique to Corporal Girard. He quickly mastered both the manual ability and the image interpretation skills required to perform this exam.

After three hours of observation, the patient was still utterly stable. It was safe to send him back to his barracks.

Corporal Pascal Girard performs an EDE

Addendum, September 15: The patient has returned for a follow-up visit. Repeat ultrasound scanning of his chest shows that a pneumothorax has not developed. “Negative” scans such as this one—scans that prove that the patient is not injured—have a great impact on the practice of an emergency physician. They represent more than 99 per cent of the EDE scans that we do, accelerating patient flow through our emergency departments and enhancing patient safety. This is where the most “bang for your buck” occurs with EDE.

SEPTEMBER 14, EVENING | My Right-Hand Man

I have not yet recognized the awesome contribution of Master Corporal Sylvie Guay. She is the most important member of my team, my UMS medic. We spent some time together at FOB Wilson when I first arrived, and she rejoined me here a couple of weeks ago.

Master Corporal Sylvie Guay, role model

When I arrived here in early August, the new UMS building had been in place for only a few days. All the gear was piled up in boxes in the corner. When Master Corporal Guay arrived, she worked tirelessly for several days to put everything in order: building shelves and labelling and sorting through a mountain of supplies.

It has been a very enjoyable professional relationship. At the end, she paid me the highest compliment an enlisted person can give an officer: she said she would be willing to come back to Afghanistan if she could be assigned to my UMS. I treasured the compliment, but told her that she was highly unlikely to ever come back here if that was the case.

What do you call a mother of two in her thirties who serves her country in war zone? “Role model” would be apt.

SEPTEMBER 15 | The Listeners

In an earlier entry I described the Taliban’s espionage network. We too spend a lot of time gathering information, making extensive use of Afghan interpreters to eavesdrop on the Taliban. “The listeners” will sit for hours on end with a radio headset, telling us verbatim what they have heard. The Taliban know this and act accordingly. Often their exchanges go something like this:

Taliban A: “Did you get the big thing?”

Taliban B: “Yeah. I got it.”

A: “Can you bring it to the place?”

B: “I have to get two guys to help me carry it. Can you send them?”

A: “Sure. I will send two guys to your house.”

B: “Okay. When they get here, we will bring you the big thing to the place we said.”

We intercept a lot of stuff like this, none of it particularly useful. But we keep listening. By doing so, we limit the enemy’s ability to communicate. They have to use such stilted code that only limited amounts of information can be passed. And there is always the chance they will slip up.

Most of this work is done by our locally hired interpreters. The Taliban routinely try to infiltrate their followers into this group. So we have people who listen to the listeners to detect when someone’s interpretation is intentionally misleading. When that happens, the interpreter is fired or, if we can make a case for espionage, arrested.

But where do we get native Pashto speakers we can absolutely rely on? In Canada. The CF places ads in media outlets that are aimed at the Afghan immigrant community. After a prolonged vetting process, an Afghan-Canadian who answers the ad can be granted a top-secret security clearance and sent to work with our intelligence people. I have met three of these individuals here, all of whom fled Afghanistan ten to fifteen years ago. They are pleased to be helping their country of birth get back on its feet. They would like to do more in the years to come.

Two of them are men with families. They are committed to the same values any other Canadian would be, including their daughters’ education. They are profoundly grateful for what the Canadian Army is doing in their native land.

Even more interesting is a woman in her early thirties. She is happy to be able to help in the struggle against the Taliban, but she also laughingly admits she took the job for that quintessential Canadian reason: to pay off her student loans and start her own small business. She is doing work that is hard (and a bit dangerous) while she is young, to get her life off to a good start.

These people came to Canada from Afghanistan fairly recently, but they have all changed considerably in the interim. The woman, in particular, has gone through a remarkable evolution in a short time. She and I have gotten to be good friends, and she has shared with me her annoyance with an Afghan man who is currently pursuing her. She tells me he is quite attractive. Unfortunately, his exposure to Canadians has not caused much evolution in his attitudes towards women. Like any good friend would, I listened supportively but noncommittally as she talked about this man’s advances. While many of the things she described would be considered very chauvinistic in Canada, I thought it was necessary for her to come to her own conclusions about him.

But then she revealed something that was so off-base that I was unable to hide my reaction. This Lothario has said he wants to marry her and that he will be faithful to her. However, on a number of occasions he has shared with her how much he enjoys the company of “white women.” Seeing my facial expression upon hearing this, my friend came straight out and asked me what I thought about this statement. I replied that, from a Canadian perspective, she would be crazy to marry this guy. She agreed.

And another Canadian is born.

SEPTEMBER 16 | Last Day

LATE AFTERNOON

The sun is going down. I am sitting beside the hilltop observation post, looking out over Panjwayi district. There was a moderate dust storm this morning, and I am concerned that the weather may worsen tomorrow. The combat team is heading out on an operation in a few hours. I hope the weather does not make us “medevac red.”

In twenty-four hours, I will be leaving the combat area. For all the danger and discomfort, the FOB has become so familiar that the thought of leaving is mildly unsettling. I didn’t feel like this the last time. I was sad to leave my friends and worried about their future safety, but I was mostly very happy to be heading home. This time, I am experiencing something I have seen in combat veterans before.

Part of me likes being here. Life is simple. You get up in the morning. You do your job or you pass the time. Then you go to sleep. If you are still alive the next day, you do the same again. This differs markedly from modern life, in some ways you can anticipate and in one you might not. There is the meaningfulness of the work, the intensity of the emotions and the depth of the relationships—all that is to be expected. But the most striking difference, one that many young soldiers do not fully appreciate, is that there is so little choice here. You have one job to do, one place to eat, one group to hang out with. That’s it. You don’t have all the choices modern life in the developed world gives you.

I sometimes wonder if these endless choices have almost paralyzed us. We spend eternities examining various options—for a car, for a house, for a job or an outing—in the hopes of making the perfect decision. And when we finally make a decision, we often look back on it and wonder if it was the best one.

There is none of that here. Despite the risks, I have grown comfortable with the exquisite simplicity of my existence on the FOB. Fortunately, I have very strong bonds with my family and friends, bonds that more than make up for the intricacies of my life in Canada.

DAWN THE NEXT DAY

Major Jourdain is leading the combat team out on an operation. Just a few weeks left on their tour, and they are still going hard. True warriors, they are.

As I have done virtually every time some of our troops have left the FOB, whether for a patrol or for a full-blown operation, I got out of bed to wish the departing soldiers luck. And as always, I shook hands with the medic accompanying them (in this case Corporal Girard), giving him my usual injunction: “Bring them all back.”

I began this practice after arriving here in June, and it has become a bit of a superstition. On my first tour, it seemed that my presence brought misfortune to Canadian soldiers: I was on the scene for the majority of cases in which Canadian soldiers were killed or seriously injured. This time, it has been the opposite. After 106 days on the FOB, I have yet to deal with a single badly wounded Canadian, much less a dead one. I know that my telling the combat medics to “bring them all back” has had no impact on this. But there is no way I am going to change my routine at this point.

The combat team left in two waves. The first wave left on foot around 0130 and the second wave left at 0430 in LAVs. The plan was for the footborne troopers to approach silently and set up an ambush position before first light. The soldiers in the vehicles would then approach noisily and drive the enemy out of their suspected location and into the guns of the ambushers.

I am writing these final words a few minutes after I have said goodbye to the second, vehicle-borne wave of soldiers. Although I had slept only a couple of hours, I forced myself to get up to see them off. In all likelihood, this is the last time in my life that I will watch Canadian soldiers going into battle. I was so proud of them, and so proud of my country for having taken up this struggle.

The sun was coming up as they drove off. I kept watching the road for several minutes after they had disappeared around the corner leading away from the FOB. And I wept at the thought of the terrible risks these young people were taking.

SEPTEMBER 17 | Couturier

Couturier. It means “tailor” in French.

After seeing off the second wave of the combat team’s operation, I was unable to go back to sleep. Despite having slept less than three hours the two previous nights, the thought of my imminent departure had me so excited that I stayed up. I finished packing, then wandered around the FOB. A helicopter was scheduled to take me back to KAFat 1300, and I thought I would sleep when I got there.

Corporal Vallières’s section was heading out for a short patrol to a village close to the FOB. They invited me to come along with them, teasing me that my “inner infantryman” needed to go on one last combat patrol.

I admit that I was sorely tempted. As terrifying as my last combat patrol had been, the feeling of camaraderie that followed it had been intense and very rewarding. A big part of me wanted to experience that feeling again. Paradoxically, the fact that the risk of this patrol was only moderate argued most strongly against my participation. Because our troopers would be so close to the FOB, it was far more likely that a seriously wounded Canadian would be brought back to me rather than helicoptered from the battlefield to KAF. As much as I wanted to show these men that I was willing to assume the same risks they did, I had to consider the worst-case scenario. If I accompanied them, there was the possibility that an attack on the patrol would wound one or more Canadians while leaving me so incapacitated that I would be unable to care for them. Regardless of the physical wounds such an event would leave me with, the guilt I would feel for having failed to be there for these men would be unbearable.

During my other combat patrols, the danger I was exposing myself to was offset by the benefit of liaising with the local Afghan doctors or providing on-scene medical coverage to a patrol that otherwise would have none. No such justification existed here. It was simply a chance to “go out with the boys.” As appealing as that was, I regretfully declined. An hour and a half later, the patrol returned. They had had an uneventful time and Corporal Vallières teased me yet again. It stung a bit, but I was nonetheless happy with my decision.

Major Jourdain arrived back with the first wave around 1100. They had performed a thorough sweep of the target area. Although they had failed to catch the big fish that had been in their sights, they had had a lot of contact with the locals. The major was pleased with the overall result.

After he had shed his weapons, gear and body armour, Major Jourdain went into the command post to monitor the return of the rest of his men. My helicopter was not due for several hours, so I kept him company. He jokingly offered to “buy me lunch” to celebrate my imminent departure as soon as the remainder of his team had arrived.

The members of the combat team still outside the FOB were the platoon commanded by Captain Lussier, accompanied by some combat engineers. They were only a few kilometres away from the FOB and had one last “vulnerable point” to cross before they would be home free. “Vulnerable points” are areas where there is a higher risk of IEDs. They include bridges, culverts and any other feature that can “canalize” our troops (that is, concentrate them in a restricted space).

Captain Lussier ordered most of his men to dismount from their vehicles to perform a VPS (vulnerable point search). They did so, and a thorough examination of the area failed to reveal any signs of enemy activity. The vehicles started to move forward again.

Then the IED went off.

An analysis performed after the blast revealed that the IED had been planted weeks, if not months, before. There was no way any of Captain Lussier’s men could have detected it. The Taliban would have only observed the area from time to time, hoping to catch a Coalition convoy transiting the area. Today, they hit the jackpot. The blast went off under the driver of the leading L AV. It breached the armour, the force of the explosion concentrating itself in the driver’s compartment.

I was chatting with Major Jourdain in the FOB command post when Captain Lussier reported that one of his vehicles had hit an IED. His voice was calm and matter-of-fact. Major Jourdain picked up a radio handset and began communicating with his platoon commander. Everyone else in the command post edged forward, listening intently to Captain Lussier’s voice on the speaker. His tone remained professional and disciplined as he reported on the situation. First, he described the general scene. Then, as he approached the vehicle, he described the emplacement of the IED and the appearance of the vehicle that had been struck. Still entirely under control, he reported that one of his men was dead. Private Jonathan Couturier had been killed instantly.

Captain Lussier then went about organizing the helicopter evacuation of Private Couturier’s body, his voice still unruffled and deliberate. Listening to him on the radio, I was amazed he was able to keep his emotions in check at a time like this. The depth of those emotions became clear less than an hour later when the platoon returned to the FOB. Major Jourdain, accompanied by the senior members of the combat team and me, went out to the vehicle marshalling area to meet them. Their faces were sombre, some of them streaked with tears. The emotions at play on Captain Lussier’s face, however, were on another plane. He had done everything possible to prevent this from happening, but it was obvious that his heart had been torn out of his chest.

As hard as it was to see my friend suffering so badly, an even more difficult moment for me came when my medic, Corporal Girard, got out of his vehicle. With tears in his eyes, he told me: “I’m sorry, Doc. I didn’t bring them all back.” In that moment, I realized that the words I had used to wish my medics well had been poorly chosen.

Corporal Girard and I stepped away from the rest of the soldiers to discuss the case. It was obvious that Private Couturier’s injuries had been so severe that he had been dead before Corporal Girard had gotten anywhere near the wrecked vehicle. I emphasized to Corporal Girard that there was nothing anyone could have done. Nonetheless, I could tell that on one level my medic felt that he had failed me. I had not considered this possibility before, and I regretted that my well-meaning, superstitious routine had had this unforeseen consequence.

I was still struggling with the emotions of the moment when I remembered that I would have to leave soon. I felt terrible at the thought of going home on a day such as this. Fortunately, I would not have to. In what I consider to be the greatest honour I have been paid during my service with the CF, Major Jourdain asked me to delay my return to KAF for twenty-four hours. Given the extent to which I had integrated myself into the combat team, he anticipated that a number of his soldiers would want to speak to me about our loss. I called my medical company commander at KAF, Major Annie Bouchard, and this request was immediately granted.

Chief Petty Officer Poulin returned later that afternoon, on the same helicopter that had been scheduled to take me back. Medical responsibility for the FOB was transferred to him, leaving me free (unless we got into serious trouble) to attend to the emotional needs of the troops.

Addendum, later that evening: Major Jourdain was quite prescient. Various members of the combat team, including some who had not been on the scene when Private Couturier was killed, have sought me out. I was also able to spend more than an hour talking with Captain Lussier.

The visits continued until well after midnight. The things these soldiers discussed with me are too personal and too painful to be discussed here. I hope I was able to mitigate some of the psychic wounds caused by this tragic event.

 

REQUIEM FOR JONATHAN

Of all the men we have lost over my two tours in Afghanistan, Jonathan Couturier was the one I had gotten to know best. Since arriving at FOB Sperwan Ghar, I had played countless hands of poker with him. In the last few weeks, I had taken to always sitting to his left, usually between him and “Beaver” Boisvert. My luck seemed better when I sat between the two of them.

It was amusing to play poker with Jonathan. He was good . . . until he tried to bluff. If he got called, he would get a hurt look on his face that immediately betrayed him. In between hands, I got to learn a bit about his girlfriend and a lot about his Mustang. While he clearly loved the former more, he talked incessantly about the latter. He was a great kid, quiet and thoughtful, unfailingly polite.

He was going home in six days.

SEPTEMBER 18, MORNING | The Elements, Part 4: Air

Before leaving for this tour, I had tried to comfort my wife by telling her that the arrival of Canadian helicopters in Afghanistan would reduce the risks I would face. I told her that I would be flying from FOB to FOB, high above the IEDs that kill so many of us. Things didn’t work out that way. This would be the first and only day I would travel by air.

I woke up this morning still feeling the effects of having spent most of the past forty-eight hours awake. As groggy as I was, I tried to see as many people as possible to say goodbye to them individually.

I also stopped by the front gate of the FOB to see how our latest public relations venture was going. The festival of Eid-al-Fitr, which ends the Ramadan fast, takes place today. The combat team had put together some gift packages (blankets, food, cooking oil and so on) for some of the poorest families living near us, in accordance with Islamic tradition. Local elders were informed of this and had expressed approval at the way we were respecting their customs. It seems, however, that the Taliban do not share this opinion of our generosity. None of the gifts have been picked up, apparently because the Taliban have threatened the families. Coercing the poor so that they do not accept food for their families. Pathetic scumbags.

Around 1000, I dragged my gear over to the helipad. Captain Lussier’s platoon would be flying out with me, along with Major Jourdain and Master Warrant Officer Lapierre. I had not been waiting long when I was joined by some of the members of the platoon. Vince Lussier came along after that and joined me at the front of the line. He asked what I would be doing when I got home and I replied with an off-colour joke. Vince laughed uproariously, evidently releasing some of the tension of the last twenty-four hours.

A Canadian Chinook arrived and we all boarded through the rear ramp. A few minutes later we lifted off. I wanted to imprint as many images in my mind as possible so I tried to look out the gunner’s window at the Afghan landscape. I tried to reflect on what I have been doing for the past four months and what Canadian soldiers have been doing in this area for nearly four years. But I was unable to focus on the terrain. Something much closer kept drawing my eye.

As Vince and I had been at the front of the column when we boarded, we ended up sitting across from each other at the front of the Chinook’s passenger compartment. His face was clouded over and I could see that he was back in a very dark place.

We were met at the airfield by a bus which took us all back to the barracks where the troopers would be spending the night. I was then taken by truck to the headquarters building of my medical company. I walked in and went to Major Bouchard’s office, dusty and rumpled, still carrying my rifle and pistol and wearing my protective gear. Outside of the barracks reserved for the battle group, it is unusual for anybody at KAF to be dressed this way. Major Bouchard did not recognize me at first. When she did, she said: “You look like a combat soldier!”

I had to agree with her. And I felt like one too.

SEPTEMBER 18, AFTERNOON | Saying Goodbye to Jonathan

After reporting to Major Bouchard, I went to the room in which I would be spending the next few nights. It contained two bunk beds and I had it all to myself—it seemed impossibly roomy. Chief Petty Officer Second Class Ray Racine, the sergeant-major of the medical company, had already arranged for my excess baggage to be placed there. These were things I had brought along only for the trip to KAFand back or for use during decompression. I began repacking my things for the trip home. Then the lack of sleep and the excess of emotion of the last three days caught up with me and I collapsed into bed.

At 1630 I returned to the troopers’ barracks. Major Jourdain had asked me to remain with the platoon for the ceremony, and I was very grateful for that. Although I had a lot of respect for the people in my medical company, our relationship had only been an e-mail-and phone-based one. I was much happier remaining with the men of Combat Team Cobra for this ritual.

I had been to ramp ceremonies on my first tour and had always been impressed by how well they were conducted. Although agonizingly painful for the men closest to the fallen, the dignity and professionalism with which these events took place made them powerful mechanisms of emotional healing.

For those closest to the fallen soldier, the process starts an hour before the ceremony on the tarmac. We first went to a chapel, where Jonathan’s casket had already been taken. For an hour, we sat with him in silence. Various senior officers came in, representing the other branches of the task force. They marched up to the casket, stood at attention for a minute, then expressed their condolences quietly to the combat team officers and to our company sergeant-major, who were seated in the first row of pews.

When this was over, we were taken to the airfield. We took our place beside the Hercules aircraft that would take Jonathan home. To our right, and therefore closer to the aircraft, would be the senior officers of the Canadian contingent and our padres. Across from us were the senior officers of all the other Coalition nations. To our left were the nearly two thousand KAF-based members of the Canadian task force. Facing them, and forming a passageway a couple of hundred metres long, were thousands of other Coalition soldiers.

When everyone was in position we were called to attention. The sun had gone down by this time. The night air was still. It was a perfect setting for such an occasion.

After the service, all the members of Combat Team Cobra marched into the Hercules in single file. One by one, we came rigidly to attention, saluted and then touched Jonathan’s casket one last time. We then walked out and gathered together, where Major Jourdain addressed us for a few minutes. It could have been a perfect ramp ceremony. But it wasn’t.

The service was performed by an anglophone padre. As this was for a francophone soldier, she tried to do much of it in French. But the quality of the padre’s French was atrocious. Most of the words were mispronounced, and several French words were pronounced in English. Even the members of Jonathan’s section, who had composed the “personal” part of the eulogy, were unable to recognize the words they had written.

As a French Canadian, I was enraged by this. After the ramp ceremony was dismissed, several members of the combat team angrily 372 muttered about the way the eulogy had been performed. As I stood beside them, I noticed that the padre was standing close by, along with the senior padre of the task force. I walked over and asked to speak to her in private. We went to a point on the tarmac where no one else could hear us.

I proceeded to give this person the most thorough dressing-down I have ever delivered. I didn’t raise my voice or use foul language, but I was as angry as I have ever been and my tone reflected this.

I joined Major Jourdain, and we made our way back to the barracks. He was absolutely livid. There had been four francophone padres lined up on the tarmac beside us. He thought it was unforgivable that the ceremony had not been performed by one of them.

When we arrived at the barracks where the platoon was being housed for the evening, several of the troops were still complaining about the eulogy. I described to the soldiers what I had done. The troops applauded so loudly that Major Jourdain, who had been at the other end of the building, came over to see what could possibly have cheered the boys up so much on such a sombre occasion.

After that, we celebrated Jonathan’s short time with us. The army provided each man with two beers and all the pizza we could eat. As we drank and ate we laughed about Jonathan’s obsession with his Mustang, his poker mannerisms and other quirks of his behaviour. The biggest laugh came when one of the troopers reminded us what the regimental sergeant-major had told us after the ramp ceremony. In a sincere but somewhat misguided attempt to comfort the platoon, he had told us to ask Jonathan to “protect us.” The trooper relating this opined that Jonathan’s reaction to this request on our part would be: “Not another fucking tasking!” That had us all laughing so hard we had beer and pizza coming out of our noses. Seeing the soldiers’ faces as they chortled, I was reassured. I turned to Major Jourdain and said, “Your boys are going to be all right.”

It was a legendary military wake, and it almost made up for the botched ramp ceremony. Almost.

Addendum, September 19: I warned Major Bouchard this morning about the run-in that I’d had with the padre the previous evening. She was as incensed as the rest of the French Canadians had been and told me not to worry about it.

Addendum, November 20: While I was at KAF, Major Jourdain informed me that he had lodged a formal complaint with the battle group about the padre’s performance. In response to this, the senior padre phoned Major Jourdain at FOB Sperwan Ghar. After some discussion, she agreed that the way the ceremony had been handled was regrettable and that the combat team deserved an apology. She said that she would deliver the apology in person when the combat team returned from the FOB a few weeks later. She never did so.

Incredibly, it turns out that this was not a unique event. I have since learned that the ramp ceremony for Corporal Nick Bulger was mishandled in much the same way, only this time it was a near-unilingual francophone trying (and failing) to properly read an English text. True to its Canadian roots, the padre branch has fucked things up in both official languages.

SEPTEMBER 19, MORNING | A Farewell to Arms

Major Jourdain, Captain Lussier and the other Cobras were flying back to the FOB this morning. I went over to bid them farewell a half hour before they left. Once again, they cheered me for what I had said to the padre the night before. We all agreed that Jonathan had deserved as much.

I made one last round of handshakes, spending a little longer with Corporal Girard. After Vince, he was the one I was most concerned about. I was relieved to see that he appeared to be in good spirits. I then had the chance to have a longer conversation with Major Jourdain. I know he feels the loss of his soldier acutely, but when I asked him what came next, he answered with a steady voice and clear eyes: “We will soldier on.” Then they boarded their vehicles and were gone.

I was no longer a member of a combat team. After 107 straight days in the combat area and over 2,500 consecutive hours “on call,” I was no longer a FOB doc. Almost certainly, I will never be one again.

SEPTEMBER 19, AFTERNOON | Logistics

After lunch, I spent a couple of hours tearing through the KAF bazaar, where Afghan merchants come to sell all manner of textiles and handicrafts. I had a long list of people I wanted to buy gifts for, and very little time. My haggling, therefore, was limited and perfunctory. Several Afghan merchants did well today, but I was able to go to the post office this afternoon and ship home several boxes full of souvenirs. These will be distributed to good effect among friends and family. Wandering around KAF, I was reminded of a topic I had meant to write about earlier.

A chasm exists between those who serve at KAF and those who go into combat. There are two reasons for this. The first is the natural bravado of young combat troopers. With considerable justification, they see themselves as the elite. With less justification, they occasionally denigrate those who do not accompany them into the combat area.

The second reason has to do with the inevitable “bad apples” that appear in any group. Life at KAF is much more scheduled and orderly than life at a FOB. The FOB troopers can accept this. But they cannot accept being told that an item they require before they head out on a combat operation cannot be delivered to them because somebody at KAF has “gone home for the day” or is on “Sunday routine.”

I am not making this up. Things slow down on the weekends at KAF. Most of the time, this is of no consequence to the people on the FOB. But the few times that it is, when someone who has never been shot at declines to work overtime to help us out, it provokes intensely negative feelings.

The reality, as in all these types of situations, is that the few bad interactions FOB people have with KAF people get reported and discussed endlessly on the FOB. That is unfortunate, because the soldiers in the “support trades” work hard in an environment where their contribution goes almost unnoticed.

In the June 3 entry’s footnote I describe the way Master Seaman Carole Dubois detected an error in my pay for my previous tour, an error that had occurred more than a year earlier. When she told me I was entitled to these payments, I replied that there was no rush to pay me since I was headed to the FOBs and would have very little use for cash. She contacted me in August to sort through this issue.

This proved to be far trickier than she had anticipated, requiring numerous e-mails back and forth between us. After a few days, I noticed that it did not matter whether I e-mailed her at 0600 or at 2300; she would always reply immediately. This soldier was probably putting in longer hours than anyone else in the theatre of operations. And let no one say her work was not vital. Our soldiers are not rich. They and their families depend on people like MS Dubois to ensure that their pay flows smoothly into their bank accounts, so that there is always money for their families’ mortgages, clothes and groceries. If this does not happen, the combat troopers will be unable to focus on their tasks and the impact on our combat effectiveness will be disastrous.

The same can be said for all the soldiers who serve in the support trades, such as logistics personnel, mechanics, cooks and many, many others. And yet, when these soldiers come home, they often get an almost embarrassed look on their faces when they are asked what they did. When talking to civilians, they will often use a generic term: “I was a supply technician” or “I worked in administration.” Those same civilians will often look at the soldier quizzically. The unspoken message is that their service was less worthy than that of the combat troopers.

This is particularly unfair to those who serve at KAF but who risk their lives daily driving supplies out to the FOBs. They are exposed to a high degree of danger not only from IEDs, suicide bombers and ambushes but also from mundane accidents. A number of Canadian soldiers have been injured and six have been killed in such collisions.

The best contribution of the support elements—great food! (Surf-and-turf night on a FOB? Wow!)

So I would like to take a moment to recognize all those Canadian men and women who served in the essential support roles, without which the war-fighters would not have boots, beans or bullets. You will likely never be “mentioned in dispatches” nor receive any medals for bravery, but we could never win, or even fight, without you.

Addendum: Those wishing to learn more about the unprecedented challenges involved in keeping the CF combat troopers supplied in Afghanistan are encouraged to read Lieutenant Colonel John Conrad’s What the Thunder Said.* Lieutenant Colonel Conrad ran the logistics for the first Canadian battle group deployed to Kandahar province in 2006. The fighting was intense, and the infrastructure was a pale shadow of what it is today. The achievements of the logistics branch during that spring and summer were phenomenal.

SEPTEMBER 20 | Ultrasound, Again

The reward for good work is . . . more work.

I spent the morning dealing with a balky laptop that, after performing flawlessly on the FOB for nearly four months, began crashing every ten minutes. This was a problem because I had been asked to teach a course on advanced emergency ultrasound to the people at the KAF hospital. My presentations on the subject were contained in the malfunctioning computer. If I could not get it working again, the course would have to be cancelled.

It took three hours of intense CPR (computer programmer resuscitation) on the part of the good folks in the IT department, in particular Todd Doucet, to revive my abused laptop. They got me operational in time to supervise the outpatient clinic in the early afternoon, after which I went to the hospital to give my course. There is something admirable about a group of doctors who are so committed to their continuing medical education that they will sit in a dusty tent on the edge of a deafeningly loud airfield to learn new techniques from a visiting expert.

The course went very well. Having taught a course in basic emergency ultrasound at the Multinational Medical Unit (MMU) on my first tour, introducing advanced techniques to the same institution made for a nice continuation of the saga.

SEPTEMBER 21 | Out of Afghanistan

Last day at KAF.

I swung by the medical building to say my last goodbyes. While I had enjoyed my interactions with Major Bouchard, Sergeant-Major Racine and the rest of the medical company, these had been long-distance relationships. There was none of the melancholy I had felt two days earlier when saying goodbye to Major Jourdain and the members of Combat Team Cobra.

I reported to the airfield at the prescribed time and then spent two hours in the waiting area before being called to board the plane. The army likes it when you’re early for things like this.

The flight to Camp Mirage was uneventful and boring. I had forgotten to bring anything to read, so I sat there, trying (and failing) to sleep. Even with high-quality earplugs, a Herc is a very noisy place.

On arrival at Camp Mirage, the first order of business was to hand in my weapons. After my first tour, it had seemed natural to return my rifle and pistol. On this tour, I had been exposed to much more danger; on one occasion I had even been in a straight-up gunfight. As a result, I had grown attached to these firearms. They have been a source of comfort and security, and I was sad to part with them.

That feeling only lasted a few minutes, to be replaced by hunger. If I needed a reminder that I was off the FOB, I got it as I entered the mess hall. I was still wearing the Afghan scarf many of us wear in the combat area to shield our faces from dust. A lieutenant colonel took one look at me and got up from his table to inform me that I was improperly dressed. Considering that I had spent nearly four months wandering around the FOBs with the same scarf, that struck me as humorous. But military discipline asserted itself and I complied.

SEPTEMBER 22 | Mirage

I spent the day at Camp Mirage doing the last bits of out-clearance paperwork and getting my travel documents in order for the trip home. This is called a “buffer day,” which I think serves to protect those leaving KAF from the vagaries of Hercules transports. Should your departure from Afghanistan be delayed by twenty-four hours, you will still be able to go on decompression on time.

It has been an unsettling day. On the one hand, I am extraordinarily happy that I have gotten out of Afghanistan alive and uninjured. But the feeling I had four days ago—the feeling that the FOB had become so familiar it was almost like home—has persisted. I feel disoriented.

I ended up wandering around the base, unsure of what to do with myself.

SEPTEMBER 23 | Decompression

Most Canadian soldiers who go on decompression are sent by plane to Cyprus. They stay together in the same hotel, watched over by counsellors of various stripes. These counsellors hold sessions in the mornings to smooth the reintegration of the soldiers back into Canadian society. They discuss ways of coping with post-battle stress, things to watch out for when reacquainting oneself with one’s family and other challenges a returning soldier might face. The rest of the day is given over to recreational activities. Much of this recreation involves alcohol consumption. The hotel therefore outfits one room with padding to act as a drunk tank, and CF medical personnel are assigned to the local hospital to deal with the inevitable alcohol overdoses and fisticuffs.

By some fluke, no one else who was eligible for decompression left KAF at the same time I did. For a small group or, in this unique case, a singleton, it is not cost-effective to rent a plane. I would therefore be sent by myself in a car to a hotel on the shores of the Indian Ocean.

Well, not entirely by myself. The army feels that soldiers on decompression, particularly those who have been exposed to combat, must always have some kind of mental health person available to them should they wish to discuss anything. When I showed up for my pre-decompression briefing, I learned that I would be escorted on my decompression by . . . a padre.

I politely listened to his pre-departure briefing, an hour-long compendium of bromides about dealing with stress. The emphasis is on drinking less and talking more. There was one other soldier in the room with me for this briefing. He was a member of Combat Team Cobra whose behaviour in Cyprus last time had been so atrocious that he had been banned from the island. He would also be going to the Middle Eastern hotel I was headed for, but for some reason he was not leaving for several days.

Around midmorning, the padre and I got into a minivan and headed for our hotel. It was about a two-hour drive, and I knew the padre would want to try to talk to me. He seemed like a solid individual—cut from the same cloth as Captain Cholette, the “combat padre”—but I was still quite angry about the way the ramp ceremony had been handled and did not want to initiate anything. We therefore spent the first half hour in silence. Finally, the padre couldn’t help himself and asked me how my tour had gone.

I decided to tell him in detail about the ceremony and how the troopers had felt about it. He agreed that the KAF padres had been extraordinarily insensitive. It felt good to hear that, but it did not make me want to spend my time off with him. When we got to the hotel I told him politely that I would see him in three days, when it was time to go.

I went to my room, got a book and settled in for a two-hour soak in the first bathtub I had seen in four months. I then went to a neighbouring hotel, where I spent well over one hundred dollars on an elaborate meal that lasted nearly three hours. And then to sleep, in a room all my own, in a bed twice as big as anything I had slept in since May.

SEPTEMBER 24 | Disconnected

This is weird. I am here by myself, surrounded by rich tourists from Europe and the Middle East. The room is comfortable, the food is amazing and it’s fun to watch North American television again. But I feel cut off from my military family.

I have trouble imagining that anyone would think it would be a good idea to send a guy who has spent four months on a FOB to decompression alone. Almost certainly, my name and my time came up and a clerk booked my hotel reservation automatically. No one noticed I would be going by myself until yesterday morning.

The way I feel right now, I think it was a mistake for me to come. I should have asked the CF to send me home immediately. Barring that, I should have stayed at Camp Mirage. Being around other people in uniform would have been far more comforting.

SEPTEMBER 25 | We That Are Left . . .

I was wrong. Coming here was not a mistake. Something happened today, something that could not have taken place anywhere else, something that had to happen before I went home.

When Jonathan was killed on September 17, I went into “doctor” mode. My concern was for the men around me. I was in a unique and privileged position to be able to help them through this difficult time. My run-in with the padre had accentuated this by making me feel even more protective of these men, if that were possible.

This mindset persisted until I bid Combat Team Cobra farewell on the 19th. This disconnected me from my own grief. In the days that followed, the frenetic pace of my pre-departure activities kept me distracted. It wasn’t until this morning that my own reaction to Jonathan’s death bubbled up to the conscious level.

I didn’t recognize it at first. I was only aware that I had no appetite for breakfast. So I went for a walk on the beach. I spent several minutes looking at the ocean. There was no one around me. In that setting of utter calm, my grief hit me full force. The pain was physical, an awful tearing feeling inside my chest that made it hard to breathe.

I don’t think I’ve ever cried as much as I did this morning. This period of uncontrollable emotion lasted at least ten minutes. Perhaps it was longer. Thinking back on it several hours later as I write this, I cannot accurately gauge the time that passed.

Eventually, the emotional weight of the moment abated, and I began to be able to control the physical manifestations of my grief. As I achieved this control, my mind cleared and I began to look at Jonathan’s death more analytically. What came next was even more unpleasant. It provoked an intense wave of nausea, something I find even more disagreeable than pain.

Survivor guilt.

Jonathan was less than half my age. What right did I have to be going home to my family when he would not? What might he have achieved in his life, if he had had the chance?

The pure grief reaction had caught me by surprise. But my medical training allowed me to anticipate, if only by a few seconds, this next wave of emotion. Like Vince had on the helicopter, I went to a dark, dark place. Thankfully, I was not there all that long.

As soon as I could, I sought out the best remedy for these kinds of situations: hard physical effort. I spent the rest of the day hiking in the mountains inland from the hotel. I pushed myself as hard as I could, revelling in the feeling of the air coming into my lungs, the sun on my face and the sweat on my skin.

Standing on the hilltop, I knew I would grieve Jonathan’s death, and the death of all my fallen comrades, for the rest of my life. I now viscerally relate to the veterans of World War Two who, more than sixty years on, shed tears on Remembrance Day.

But grief does not necessarily imply distress. I regret Jonathan’s death, but I still believe in the cause for which he was fighting. And that makes all the difference.

By the time I came back down, I was famished.

And ready to go home.

SEPTEMBER 26–27 | Home

I spent a good part of the morning talking to the padre who had escorted me here. With part of my grief and anger processed, I was able to open up and have an honest conversation with him about my tour. It was very beneficial. He was an excellent listener and counsellor— the Canadian soldiers who spend time with him will be well cared for.

Mom and Dad and the yellow ribbon

Back at the Mirage base, I reported to the administration office to collect my passport and to complete the out-clearance procedures. I then spent the last few hours sitting quietly by myself, processing what I had been through yesterday.

The connections in Europe and Toronto were good, and it only took a little over twenty-five hours to make it all the way back home to Sudbury. I had flown from the Middle East in civilian clothing, as we must in order not to upset the “host nation.” In Toronto, however, I changed into my combat uniform. I may have left as a civilian but I was coming home as a soldier.

When we landed in Sudbury, I called Claude on my cell phone to confirm that she had already arrived at the airport. A minute later, I was holding my wife and daughter in my arms. This gave me a more profound sense of well-being than I had ever experienced.

On the way home, Michelle could not get enough of me. She said that she’d had “tears of happy” in her eyes when she saw my plane land. She insisted that I sit right beside her in the back seat. I was more than happy to oblige.

The drive home was the reverse of the drive to the airport four months earlier. We stopped at my parents’ home, where the lamppost had been festooned with a gigantic yellow ribbon. Much hugging and handshaking ensued.

Then Claude, Michelle and I continued on to our house, where we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the backyard, talking and playing and laughing.

I have returned from my country’s wars.

I am home.

* Addendum, back home after the tour: Sure enough, Mom came through big time. She wrote to me every day, expressing her support and pride. Those messages kept me going.

* The clerks who took care of my “in-processing” were razor sharp. The fact that they had processed my paperwork in a heartbeat already made them aces in my books. Then one of them, Master Seaman Carole Dubois, noticed that the danger and hardship bonuses I was entitled to in 2007–08 had not been paid. I’ll be getting that on my paycheque next month!

† This is a course on ultrasound for emergency physicians that I designed in 2001. It has been given to over five thousand Canadian physicians since then, and has strongly influenced the way emergency medicine is practised in our country.

* And yet the war has definitely touched KAF. The medical company headquarters was hit by a rocket a few weeks ago. It landed right outside the building, but it broke apart instead of detonating. The fuse flew through the sergeant-major’s window, and the high-explosive warhead crashed through a wall. Far more seriously, another rocket detonated on the camp and seriously wounded two Coalition soldiers.

* Under the Taliban, all manner of entertainment was banned, including television, movies, music, dancing, most sports and even kite flying. This last was particularly cruel, since it is historically the most popular activity among Afghan children, and one that can be done even by the very poor. Ironically, the Taliban now use kites as a means to communicate.

* The equivalent of a private in the combat engineers.

* An area in flat, open terrain where the vehicles of the combat team will set up in a rough circle, with the heavy guns of the vehicles facing outwards, much like the wagon trains of old.

* For example, “Battle for Afghanistan a Fight for Young Minds,” The Globe and Mail, May 25, 2009.

* My work brought me into close daily contact with the CF medical personnel of the FOBs I served at. Since these characters reappear regularly, I’ve placed descriptions of them at the beginning of each section, even though these words were written several weeks later, after I had gotten to know them well.

* Postscript, July 27: Nick has kept up with his antics on this tour. He recently shot the FOB Wilson UMS fridge, mortally wounding a diet Coke, two pineapple yogurts and a litre of milk. The CF takes a pretty dim view of “accidental discharges.” Although the consequences were humorous, they could have been far worse.

* This was essentially a vice-regal position—Paul Bremmer’s authority in Iraq was absolute, and he answered only to President George W. Bush.

* Pervez Musharraf went on to overthrow Nawaz Sharif in a military coup in October 1999 and to serve as the de facto head of state of Pakistan until August 2008.

* Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008).

* Some of these minefields were made up of brightly coloured pieces of plastic, often in the shape of a bird or small animal. They were meant to resemble children’s toys. It was difficult for the Afghans to convince their children not to pick them up. The small explosive charge on these weapons would not kill the child outright, but it was more than enough to blow off a hand or mutilate a face. It was a barbaric but effective way of driving people off their land, to make it more difficult for the resistance to continue. This is the kind of thing the Afghans have been going through for a generation— something to keep in mind when you hear about how difficult it is for Afghans to trust outsiders.

* I have to give the general his due here. The word is that a group of soldiers had been assembled to speak to him at KAF yesterday. For some reason, these soldiers spent nearly an hour waiting in the sun while the general listened to yet another briefing. When he finally joined them and learned how long they had been waiting, the general tore a strip off the officer in charge of his schedule.

*The UMS medic would go on to make the same mistake a week later, assessing a patient by looking only at the front of the body and then telling me, “He’s fine. He’s got nothing.” The patient was lying on a stretcher and seemed uncomfortable, so I ran my hands along his back. This is called a “wet check” and is used to look for any external bleeding. The “wet check” was positive: my hands were covered in blood when I pulled them away. When I looked at the patient’s back, I noted two large shrapnel wounds. For the UMS medic to make this mistake once was bad enough. It was inexcusable for him to make it twice. I had spoken to him quietly after the first incident. Now, I had no choice but to discipline him, speaking to him rather harshly and documenting the incident for my superiors. As I have commented on many times before, the training the medics receive makes them almost universally superb. But “almost” is not “always” and commanders must recognize when a corrective needs to be applied. Errors like this can kill, and that is unacceptable.

* Taliban is the plural. Talib is the singular. It means “seeker of truth.”

* Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006).

† Even in societies run by Islamic fundamentalists, the appeal of martyrdom drops off sharply after one reaches maturity. Osama bin Laden said that “only fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds are useful for Jihad” (by which he meant suicide missions). Once you have a family, the consequences of suicide are much more severe. Once you have children, you have a stake in the future.

* The national celebration of Quebecers. It is equivalent to the July 1 celebration in the rest of Canada. Quebec celebrates both holidays, but St-Jean-Baptiste Day has the bigger parties.

* For the non-medical types: I am engaging here in the lowest form of humour, the pun. Photophobia is a medical term meaning that the patient finds bright lights painful. It does not mean a dislike of having your picture taken, which is the way I am using the term here.

* After we got home, Major Tim Arsenault told me that he had run into Haji Baran several weeks after this encounter. He was still pain-free and very happy with the care he had received.

* These deaths are important in the story of Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Sergeant Short and Corporal Beerenfenger were the first Canadians killed by enemy action. Four Canadians had been killed in April 2002, but that had been at the hands of an American F-16 bomber pilot who proved to be as callous and devoid of remorse as he was incompetent. Corporal Murphy would be the last Canadian to be killed in combat for over two years, until the CF came to Kandahar to challenge the Taliban on their home turf.

* This was a battle group centred on a battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment and commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Omer Lavoie. The battle group had only recently arrived in Afghanistan, taking over from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry battle group commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ian Hope. After having only a couple of weeks to get acclimatized, its members found themselves in the fight of their lives. Readers interested in learning more about the events leading up to Op Medusa are encouraged to read Chris Wattie’s book Contact Charlie: The Canadian Army, the Taliban and the Battle that Saved Afghanistan (Toronto: Key Porter, 2008), which details the incredible accomplishments of Task Force Orion, the first Canadians to fight in Kandahar province in 2006.

* This was the very well planned and executed attack on the Sarposa jail in Kandahar City in June 2008. Taliban suicide bombers rushed the jail, destroying the gates and killing several guards when they detonated themselves. Other Taliban then entered the jail and freed several hundred of their comrades. It was a masterstroke, arguably the most successful Taliban military accomplishment of the war. But even that had to be done under cover of darkness and with a rapid retreat, or else they would have been massacred.

* The most recent edition of this book is David Grossman and Loren W. Christensen, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, 3rd ed. (Warrior Science Publications, 2008); the Bigger Bang Theory is described on pages 69–70.

* I could not have written this section without the gracious and patient help of Captain Sandy Cooper, “Battle Captain” of the tank squadron, whose knowledge of the tank world in general and of the Afghan mission in particular is encyclopedic.

* This is less than the Latinos get. The company uses a pay formula based on the gross domestic product of the employee’s home country. The theory is that all employees will enjoy a similar standard of living when they return home. That strikes me as logical and exploitive at the same time.

* This is an important distinction to make. Armies that go to war from time to time get to “practise.” It is a lot harder to keep your warrior edge in peacetime.

* Readers interested in learning more about the Medak incident are encouraged to read Carol Off’s book The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: The Story of Canada’s Secret War (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2004).

* The engineer equivalent of a platoon.

* A horrifying but valuable eyewitness account of the after-effects of war is Donovan Webster’s booKAFtermath: The Remnants of War: From Landmines to Chemical Warfare— The Devastating Effects of Modern Combat (New York: Vintage, 1998).

* For history buffs: a claymore was a heavy Scottish broadsword. Wielded by an angry Highlander stoked on single-malt scotch, it could cut a person in half.

* Ironically, on the day the news of this law broke, one of Karzai’s main campaign stops was with a women’s organization: 2,500 women, none of them in burka, were there to meet him. I wonder how that went.

† “Afghanada” is an informal name for the Canadian area of operations: Zhari-Pan-jwayi and, until recently, Arghandab district. Also a CBC radio show of the same name.

‡ Having just written that, I cannot believe how completely my perception of risk has changed over the past three months. Someone has just fired two bullets at the football-field-sized area I live in, and I consider it “minor harassment.”

* There is a perfectly good abbreviation in French for FOB—BOA: Base opérationelle avancée. Considering we are Combat Team Cobra, you would think “BOA” would have caught on, to keep the serpentine theme going. But no.

* In his Remembrance Day House of Commons Speech, November 11, 1947.

† “Afghan Election Victory Claimed by Rivals,” CBC.ca, August 21, 2009, www.cbc.ca/ world/story/2009/08/21/afghanistan-election-results021.html?ref=rss.

* “Afghan Voter Turnout Low, Officials Say,” CBC.ca, August 20, 2009, www.cbc.ca/ crossroads-afghanistan/story/2009/08/20/afghanistan-election-polling-president.html.

* “Kandahar Blast Kills Dozens,” CBC .ca, August 25, 2009, www.cbc.ca/world/ story/2009/08/25/afghanistan-violence025.html.

* Who wishes it known that he quit smoking shortly after this picture was taken.

* David Grossman and Loren W. Christensen, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, 3rd ed. (Warrior Science Publications, 2008) at 181.

* This occurs when stress overloads the nervous system and the body starts to exclude certain stimuli. Soldiers in combat will think that their rifles are making barely audible popping sounds. Others will feel no pain from severe wounds. What I experienced is common: the loss of peripheral vision. If you recognize this when it happens, it can be compensated for by scanning right to left. In my case, I got myself together (and my normal vision came back) a few seconds after I left the mess tent.

* He missed the disastrous mission to Somalia because it occurred during one of the few times he was posted to a “straight leg” infantry battalion. (“Straight leg” is a slightly derogatory term used by paratroopers to denote non-parachute infantry. The term evokes the need to bend one’s legs when doing a parachute landing.)

* Although it does not lessen the tragic nature of what is going on today, it is worth remembering that the sum total of all the casualties caused by the war since the Coalition invaded in 2001 is only a small percentage of the number of Afghans who died in the same length of time during the Russian occupation: possibly as many as a million people.

* Which we keep on the FOB to issue to young soldiers of both genders before they go on HLTA. What did you think?

* Quoted by Sandra Martin in “Plight of Afghan Women Prompts Fresh Debate,” The Globe and Mail, April 17, 2009, http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAMRTGAM.20090417.wafghan-martin17/BNStory/International/homeBNStory/International/home.

* Although the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador garnered more international attention, Guatemala’s was the bloodiest. The best estimates are that 200,000 people, most of them indigenous Mayans, were killed by the army and government-supported death squads.

* The worst was the bombing of Air India Flight 182 on June 23, 1985, where 280 of the 329 people killed were Canadian citizens. It is dismaying that many Canadians do not consider this a uniquely Canadian tragedy because these victims were “hyphenated Canadians” of Indian descent. For a moving portrayal of the bombing as a Canadian tragedy, see Anita Rau Badami’s novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2006).

* Robert Fowler, interviewed by Peter Mansbridge, CBC.ca, September 9, 2009, www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/09/09/f-robert-fowler-transcript2.html.

* Margaret Wente, “The Tragedy of Good Intentions,” The Globe and Mail, September 1 6 , 2 0 0 9 , w w w.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-tragedy-of-good-intentions/article1290304/.

† From our point of view on the FOB s, they do a poor job of reporting everything else. Major Arsenault and the “Bastards” at FOB Wilson were not visited by a reporter until August, when their tour was two-thirds over.

* To my knowledge, this has never happened in the decade we have been using ultrasound in emergency medicine in Canada. The organization formed to supervise the use of ultrasound in emergency medicine in Canada, the Canadian Emergency Ultrasound Society, has by far the most demanding requirements for certification of any such national body in the world.

* Lieutenant Colonel John Conrad, What the Thunder Said: Reflections of a Canadian Officer in Kandahar (Toronto: Dundurn, 2009).