THE AMERICANS launched their attack on Iraq in the spring of 2003. At the time, I was at CFB Wainwright, Alberta, doing more training. A group of other soldiers and I gathered around the TV, watching the U.S. assault as it was broadcast live around the globe. We were all thinking the same thing: it’s only a matter of time.
As it turned out, Canada declined to be involved with that mission in Iraq, but our government decided to increase its presence in Afghanistan. The first set of new troops to deploy was 3rd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, or 3 RCR, categorized as a light infantry battalion. There was quite a rivalry between 3 RCR and my 1st Battalion, or 1 RCR, which was mechanized infantry. When I asked if 3 RCR needed snipers, I was told, “Sorry, we aren’t going to need you in that role. We have enough snipers of our own.”
That was a real punch in the gut, but I wasn’t going to let it stop me from being deployed to Afghanistan. I’d waited long enough. So when the role of a driver and bodyguard came up, I inquired. What they needed were a couple of infantry guys—guys with combat arms experience—who could drive vehicles and get key personnel around Kabul safely. It would be a far cry from being deployed as a sniper, but at least it was something.
Before I took the position, I asked one more time: “Is there any way I can be a sniper?”
“No. There is zero chance,” the deployment officer said. “And this driver role is basically one of the last spots available. So do you want to go over or not?”
“Okay, I’ll go,” I said. My buddy Gord took the other driver post, so at least we’d be together.
The very next day, a call went out for two more snipers. Gord and I quickly went to the deployment officer.
“Those roles are fuckin’ ours!” we said.
“Sorry,” the deployment officer answered, probably because he didn’t want to do the paperwork. “You’ve already accepted your roles as drivers. You can’t change courses now. Besides, we’ve already filled those sniper spots.”
We were hugely disappointed, but the decision was beyond our control. We made the best of it and prepared for our tour in Afghanistan.
We arrived in Kabul in June of 2003 and quickly got the lay of the land. There were two Canadian camps set up in the area. The main one was Camp Julien, on the grounds of the old king and queen’s palace. The other was a smaller base, Camp Warehouse, which was out of the city centre, right next to the airport. That’s where I was stationed, while Gord was sent to TV Tower Hill, at the top of a mountain in the middle of Kabul. His role was to keep this isolated post, which was used as a communications relay station, safe from ambush.
Meanwhile, I was placed in the rover troop inside Camp Warehouse, which meant I was both driver and security for anyone who required it while moving around Kabul. I often escorted liaison officers into the city for meetings they had with the Afghan army and police. Other times, I took officers to foreign embassies. My instructions were received the day of the drive: “Mitic, today you’re taking the colonel to the Turkish embassy.”
After orders were issued, I’d sit through a briefing where we would investigate security threats, the weather and any other factors that could have an impact on the driving route. We travelled in two vehicles, one lead vehicle and one secondary. Each would have a driver and co-driver, as well as passengers. We always travelled wearing our full military uniforms. We were easy to identify as members of the Canadian Armed Forces, so we had to be extra cautious in public spaces. A handful of Canadian soldiers were assigned work in the city in civilian clothes, but those were mainly intelligence operatives doing reconnaissance work.
I quickly learned the easy routes into the city, but I have to admit, getting the hang of Kabul wasn’t easy. I’m notorious for being bad at urban navigation. Put me out in a forest without a compass and I’ll be fine, but if you stick me downtown with a ton of buildings, I have major problems getting my bearings. My brother always makes fun of me. “Jody,” he’ll say when we’re driving around Toronto, “you’re a highly skilled sniper with years of navigation training. How come you can’t go downtown without getting lost?”
The side streets in Kabul were an absolute shit show—in more ways than one. The narrow roads were not paved and were often knee-deep in mud. And because Kabul lacked a sophisticated sewage system, raw sewage leaked out into the streets in a potent and identifiable blend of urine, feces and other muck. There were sheep and goats in the streets, along with bikes, trucks and motorcycles. People were even driving random pieces of construction equipment. There were people pulling carts. There were people pushing carts. There were herds of camels. Also, Afghans are never in a hurry . . . unless they’re behind the wheel of a vehicle, in which case it’s full speed ahead. There were intersections where no one really stopped, and the roads ranged from horse tracks that were about as pitted as the surface of the moon to wide boulevards that were runway smooth.
It would drive me nuts when my fellow drivers would speed through an area where there were kids running around and playing. I would get on my radio. “Slow the fuck down! These kids aren’t raised like the ones back in Canada. They’re not looking both ways before they cross the street. Hit a kid and I will make sure you’re charged and go to fucking jail.”
Our vehicles for this mission were Iltis, which were a lot like small jeeps. They were great for traversing all terrains because they were so light. The doors were made of flimsy vinyl and the windshield of laminated safety glass. The downside was these vehicles weren’t tremendously safe, which I suppose accounts for why security was needed to begin with.
One day, we were sent on a mission with two Iltis vehicles driving together. I drove with a single passenger, and the other car had two passengers, one of whom was a lieutenant who also happened to be an attractive blonde. We made it into the city but lost our way in the narrow streets. We ended up near a big, busy public market. Suddenly the shoppers noticed the lieutenant, who was in full uniform. They started reaching out towards her, pointing at her blond hair and blue eyes. They were desperate for a better glimpse and were banging on the windows hard enough to make us worry they would break. We peeled away from the crowd just in time, but that experience left a bad taste in the mouths of some of our senior staff, who now saw the dangers of driving around in such primitive vehicles.
The Iltis jeeps were not designed to withstand idle curiosity, never mind an attack. This fact became starkly apparent when three 3 RCR guys were driving an Iltis and hit a land mine. Two of them—Sergeant Robert Short and Corporal Rob Beerenfenger—died immediately, and the driver, T.J. Stirling, a friend of mine, survived though he was injured. After the incident, T.J. was brought to the hospital at Camp Warehouse, and me and another one of the guys from the regiment went to see him. This was the first time I’d seen one of our guys hit by a land mine. In fact, it was the first time I’d seen a casualty at all.
T.J. was pretty banged up. A couple of his teeth were broken and he may have had a broken jaw. He had lacerations all over. There’s always a particular odour in hospitals around people who have suffered traumatic injuries. I remember smelling that odour, like blood, or maybe just what I thought blood smelled like. T.J. was on a stretcher with big wheels. We’d used this kind of stretcher before in training. To me, it was a kind of prop, this thing we used for simulations. But this was not a simulation. This was the real thing.
T.J. was still in shock. It had taken a few hours for him to be extracted from the scene of the explosion. “Shorty and Beerenfenger are gone,” he said.
“Yeah, man,” we replied. “We heard.”
“I need a smoke, man. I need a smoke,” T.J. said. The doctors and nurses wouldn’t allow it, but as soon as they were out of the vicinity, we lit a cigarette for T.J. and gave him a couple of drags.
“Ahhhh. That’s way better. Thanks.”
We stayed and chatted with T.J. about inconsequential things, trying to keep a fellow Royal in a good state of mind. For me personally, I was learning from what was happening, facing the reality that when things go wrong you have to get that smell in your nostrils and look those sights right in the eye. Sadly, a few years later, T.J. ended up taking his own life. I was a pall bearer at his funeral, and as I carried his coffin, I wondered if he’d carried guilt for being the lone survivor in that accident.
After this tragic event, new vehicles were dispatched for our use—durable Nissan mini-SUVs. These cars had four-cylinder diesel engines and could handle the crappy and muddy road conditions in Kabul without getting stuck. And they came with air-conditioning, which was a much-appreciated feature in the hot weather. The Nissan also had an interior air-filter system, which helped block out the horrendous stench that hung in the Kabul air.
From sunrise to sunset, Kabul was a bustling city, but outside of those hours it was eerily quiet. The place was not only jammed with other vehicles, it was filled with hundreds of civilians walking the streets, many of whom were beggars in a desperate state. As part of our pre-mission briefings, we were explicitly ordered to avoid giving handouts to beggars and children.
“You need to understand this,” I remember being told. “You create a security concern when you have large groups of kids gathered outside your vehicle or around your military gates looking for spare change. You don’t want them to be targeted if you happen to be attacked, and you don’t want to set the precedent that soldiers are there to give handouts. That’s not our mission. There are times when you’re going to see things that are pretty ugly, but that’s Afghanistan. Remember that.”
One time, I was driving down the road in Kabul when I noticed the cars ahead of me swerving to avoid an obstacle smack-dab in the middle of the road. As I approached, I saw that the obstacle was a woman. She was wearing a white burka, and wrapped in a blanket she held in her arms a tiny newborn baby. She was distraught and begging for money in the middle of the street as cars whizzed past, narrowly missing her. As we drove closer, I got a good look at her and her infant. As she held out the child, the reason for her despair became apparent. The newborn’s mouth was ringed black. The baby looked completely lifeless. Cars honked and swerved around this mother, and not knowing what to do, I did the same. I didn’t even stop to throw any change her way. To this day, it bothers me that I didn’t do something. As the commander of the convoy, I had the authority to address situations like this one. I could have stopped, put her in the car and checked to see if the baby was alive. If it was, I could have rushed her to the hospital. But I drove away.
This sort of thing was common all over Kabul. With each passing day, I grew more desensitized to the poverty and misery that so many of the Afghan people were suffering. One day, I saw this little boy who had a serious birth defect. His elbows were inverted, which made him look like his arms were almost upside down. He had tiny hands that looked like they were not functional at all. This boy came over to me and wrapped his arms around my legs, giving me a big hug. As he did this, he looked up at me with big puppy-dog eyes. “Please, please, please,” he said in broken English, over and over again. I’d trained as a soldier and a sniper for years. I’d learned to put my emotions aside and to concentrate on actions and orders. But in that moment, it was almost impossible not to feel an urgent tug at my heart.
Going against every instinct I felt, I gently pulled the boy off me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t give you money.”
“Please, please, please.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, pushing his deformed arms away. Standing behind him was an older child who looked to be his brother. The older boy grabbed his little brother and led him to another soldier nearby.
“Please, please, please,” I heard as I kept walking, quickly heading to camp.
Some beggars and panhandlers came up with creative ways to get money from NATO soldiers. One day, a Canadian Forces light armoured vehicle hit a Toyota Tercel that was ripping around the roads at about a hundred kilometres per hour while filled floor to roof with passengers. Soon after, one of the men in the car went to the Canadian Forces asking for compensation for his injuries. He said his neck was injured, but more critically, his wife had suffered two broken legs in the accident. He wanted a few thousand dollars to cover medical bills and to compensate for the fact that someone had to look after the kids now that his wife was incapacitated.
The story sounded good—at first. But when our military officers studied photos of the accident scene, they noticed something suspicious.
“This is your wife right here, correct?” they asked the man.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Well,” they said, proffering some other shots, “here she is after the accident walking away from the scene—on two unbroken legs.”
As it turned out, the man had gone home after the accident and broken his wife’s legs himself, thinking he could pin her injuries on the accident and be awarded damages. We arrested him and turned him over to the Afghan authorities. Who knows if he was ever charged or saw jail time. Sadly, things like this were fairly common in Kabul.
When I communicated with my friends and family back home, I didn’t share too many stories like these. I kept them mostly to myself and focused more on hearing news from home instead. I noticed, too, that sometimes when I did bring up some of the harder things I’d witnessed, the subject would get changed pretty quickly.
After about three months in Kabul, I had a much-needed three-week getaway in New Zealand with my girlfriend. We toured the countryside, stayed in beautiful hostels and marvelled at the scenery. The worst danger we encountered was the sheep, which would sometimes amble onto the roadway.
“Sheep!” my girlfriend would yell out, grabbing my arm in panic.
“Don’t worry,” I’d say, laughing. “I saw them coming long ago.” How could I tell her I’d avoided much worse things on the roads in Kabul?
Believe it or not, even though I enjoyed those three weeks away, I was glad to get back to my post. And I think some of the officers were happy to see me back, too. I would often overhear senior officers asking, “Hey, can Mitic and his team take us to the embassy today?” I had a reputation as a hard-ass who would make sure passengers got in and out of Kabul safely.
In fact, I got so good at my job as a driver and bodyguard that my chain of command refused to let me serve as a sniper for a few weeks when the opportunity arose. I was pretty disappointed, because I always felt that a bad day with the sniper section was still going to be better than the best day as a driver. The words of Uncle Billy echoed in my mind. I managed to put a smile on my face and soldier on. I was hitting the gym twice a day and I probably put on about twenty pounds of lean muscle during the tour. By the end of it, I could bench-press about 315 pounds. Some of the guys jokingly referred to me as the Joint Task Force member of the rover troop, but I was never offended. “Look,” I’d answer. “I don’t get behind the wheel like it’s a Sunday drive. I drive like we’re on a mission because we are.”
•
Although we were much safer once we were driving the mini-SUV Nissans, we had major problems with our weapons. We’d been issued C7 rifles to carry with us, but C7s are about a metre long, which makes them very awkward to manoeuvre inside a vehicle. We were forced to put them in the back seat because the front was filled with radios, headsets and a GPS system that allowed the base to track our every move. I didn’t like the fact that we couldn’t easily access our weapons, so I started making some noise to the higher-ups.
I wanted a C8 rifle, which was smaller than its C7 counterpart, and I wanted each driver issued a pistol. The problem was that the chain of command viewed the C8 and pistols as weapons for soldiers classified as officers and above. They didn’t see the need to give such firearms to corporals who were serving as drivers. Meanwhile, back at Camp Warehouse, dozens of officers were walking around with pistols in their holsters, a fantastic status symbol.
Since these firearms were going mostly unused, I would approach officers before a driving mission and ask, “Hey, can I have your pistol for the day if you’re not using it?” This was against protocol, of course, but I’d earned the trust of many officers. “Sure, Mitic. Here you go.”
One day, I had a couple of majors riding in my back seat. Before setting out, I gave them my usual spiel about safety. “Gentlemen, as you know, we have not been issued the appropriate firearms to deal with a close-range conflict. During this trip, I’m asking you to take your pistols out of their holsters and keep them under your legs in case we run into trouble.”
One of the majors said very firmly, “I will not do that, Corporal. That’s an escalation in the rules of engagement.”
“How is that an escalation in the rules of engagement? If there’s no attack, there’s no escalation,” I replied.
“It is absolutely an escalation. And I’m going to report you for this,” he said.
I looked at the major sitting next to him. “Sir, do you feel the same way?”
“Absolutely not, Corporal Mitic. My pistol is already out.” That was the answer I was looking for, and if I hadn’t gotten it, I wouldn’t have taken them out on the mission.
“Thank you, Major,” I said. “I’ll get you safely to wherever you need to go.” Then, to the first major, I said, “Lucky for you, your fellow passenger cares about our safety, so we’ll take you out, too.”
The major wasn’t thrilled, but he never did report me.
In large group meetings, the other drivers and I routinely brought up the issue of inadequate weapons. During one such meeting, I remember the chief warrant officer telling us, “The thing you gotta remember about the C8s is that they might look sexy, but they don’t have the range of a C7.”
I responded by saying, “But if we get into a gunfight, it’s going to be with some rebel across the street. We need close-range weapons we can pull out fast. We can’t be fumbling around in the back seat looking for our weapons. It’s got nothing to do with ‘sexy.’ ”
But it didn’t matter. We just kept hitting a brick wall on this issue. For years, a motto often repeated in the Canadian Armed Forces was “Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.” This was a fancy way of saying we should make do with whatever tools we were given. But there was no way to improvise, adapt and overcome this particular problem, especially when an easy solution was sitting right in front of everyone. I felt if we didn’t turn the heat up, we might be sorry too late.
One night, after our platoon warrant went to bed, I sat down in front of the computer in our tent and I wrote him a lengthy email detailing my concerns. I issued him an ultimatum, telling him that he either needed to stand up for us and tell the chain of command that we needed these weapons, or else maybe we weren’t going to be so willing to drive around the streets of Kabul.
The warrant pulled me aside after receiving the email. “If this is going to be your attitude,” he said, “maybe we should just send you home.”
My jaw nearly hit the floor. “Really? You’re going to send me home because I don’t agree with you? What’s your report going to say?” I asked. “That Jody has to go home because of an email?”
To his credit, the platoon warrant did work out a deal. We were issued two C8 rifles per section, to be carried by the co-driver sitting in the front passenger seat. And we finally got pistols as well—brand-new Brownings, so fresh they were still in their packing grease. I’ll admit that I carried myself with a bit of a swagger after that minor victory. And our drives felt a whole lot safer.
The fact that our drives were safer, though, didn’t mean we always were. We got a small reminder of this one night in Camp Warehouse. My buddy Len and I were playing a video game inside our tent (I was playing a sniper, of course) when we heard a noise that sounded like fireworks—a loud hiss and then a pop followed by a whistle that got louder. We looked at each other.
“Is that incoming?” I asked.
“Sounds like,” Len answered.
Sure enough, about twenty-five metres away from our tent, an enemy rocket landed. Fortunately, all our living areas were protected by defensive barriers called Hesco bastions. Steel mesh squares with burlap liners filled with dirt and gravel, these bastions absorbed a lot of the shrapnel and collateral material from the explosion. As soon as the rocket landed, panic spread through the camp. For a lot of us, this was the first time we had experienced an attack. But we had done drills for this, and so we followed our instructions.
The plan was for us to go up to the main Hesco bastion wall, crouch and lean against it. As I approached the wall, I was greeted by the odd sight of a whole bunch of soldiers awkwardly leaning against the wall as though they were sitting on invisible toilets. I looked at this line of guys and thought, “I’m not doing this.” I headed back to my tent, put on my frag vest, grabbed my rifle, loaded it and headed to the main gate to repel any possible attack. There were a few other guys who were thinking the same thing, but the commanding officer and the sergeant major of the unit were already there. They demanded we return to our spots by the Hesco bastion wall, so we did.
As we were lined up against the wall, a couple of contract civilian workers heard a noise. It sure sounded like a car with bad suspension, but to them it was a rocket about to land on their heads. They panicked and dove on top of me, knocking me to the ground. I was buried at the bottom of a dog pile of these little civilian workers who were scared out of their trees. If another rocket had hit then, we would have all been blown to smithereens.
Fortunately, that was the last incoming rocket we dealt with at our camp, and the only person injured was a civilian contractor who got some debris lodged in his back. That was definitely one of our most exciting moments in Afghanistan.
•
My first tour in Afghanistan ended a few weeks later, and I headed back home to Petawawa. I was happy to see my girlfriend for the first time since our New Zealand getaway, but that happiness didn’t last. I wish somebody had given me this advice before arriving home: a soldier needs about three months, give or take, to clear his head when he returns from active duty. For those first three months back, a soldier is not going to be him or herself.
I was still haunted by all the things I had witnessed in Kabul. Images played over and over in my head, whether it was small children begging for money, a mother holding a dead baby in the streets or my buddy T.J. bloodied up from a roadside bombing. My girlfriend expected me to return as the same guy who had left six months earlier, but I was a different man now, a different Jody.
Everything around me looked different, too. Maybe things hadn’t changed much, but I felt like I was on an alien planet. My girlfriend had redecorated the house, moving some of the furniture around and repainting the bedroom, and I found it upset me. Life had gone on without me, and that fact was hard to take. People around me kept saying, “What’s wrong with you, Jody? You’ve changed,” and that would make me even more upset, not because they were wrong but because I thought I was the kind of soldier who could just walk it off. But few soldiers can. It takes time after a tour of duty for a soldier to readjust to civilian life, and I wish I’d known that earlier. I was expected to continue life just as I had lived it before my tour, but I couldn’t, not right away. I couldn’t simply step back into a normal routine, as if I hadn’t witnessed anything on mission. I couldn’t just hop in the car and go grocery shopping like everything was fine.
That’s what my girlfriend wanted and needed, and I can’t blame her for that. She just wanted to pick up where we’d left off and carry on with our lives. She was starting to plan for our wedding, and shortly after I got back, she told me that the engagement ring she wanted was on sale for half price as a Valentine’s Day promotion. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to talk wedding stuff at that point and l told her I wasn’t interested in buying the ring just then. Actually, I did want to buy one, but I wanted to choose it and at least surprise her a little bit.
A couple of weeks later, I went shopping and did buy the ring she wanted, but I didn’t tell her. I put it in my sock drawer and debated about how and when I would give it to her. One night, we had friends over to our place for dinner. While she was complaining about how I wouldn’t buy her the damn silly ring she wanted, I slipped away from the table and went to the bedroom. I came back out with the ring, got down on one knee in front of my girlfriend (and our guests) and asked, “So, will you marry me?” We all laughed as she accepted my “surprise” proposal.
My new fiancée was over-the-moon excited, but the feeling wouldn’t last too long. As much as soldiers like to think they are hard-core superheroes, invincibility often disappears when we return home from a tour of duty. For me, planning for a wedding was just too much pressure at a moment when what I needed was time to recover. I often think of something Chief of the Defence Staff General Rick Hillier told us when he visited our base during my second tour to Afghanistan. He talked about calling home and talking to his wife, who told him the fridge was broken.
“No problem,” he said to her. “We’ll get a new one once I’m back.”
“Actually, I went ahead and bought one already,” his wife replied.
“Okay, great. I can use the old one as a beer fridge.”
“Actually, I got rid of the old one already,” his wife said.
Hillier used the exchange to demonstrate how soldiers want to play a part in what’s going on at home even when they’re far away. “But whoever’s at home gets to make the home decisions,” he said, stressing that there was no point telling family or anyone else back home how to conduct their daily lives if you weren’t there. It was a great lesson he passed along that day—just one I could have used a bit earlier.
Another stressor on the home front was the fact that I was doing training for my infantry junior leadership course, and this was taking up a lot of my time. After I graduated, I was promoted to master corporal and was able to take a leadership position, which for me was an important step. But for my girlfriend it meant less time with me at a moment when she needed more. Things were getting increasingly tense between us, and they boiled over one night when she and I were out for dinner. She started crying and saying, “Who the fuck are you? Where is my Jody?”
Later, when we got home, I said, “I think it’s in our best interest that we postpone the wedding. I just don’t think we’re in the right spot to get married right now.”
She announced then that she was leaving. I was shocked, because I didn’t want to break things off; I just wanted to postpone the wedding. But for her, this was all just too much. Our relationship was over.
While I wasn’t certain this was the right time to get married, I was certain about one thing. I wanted to go back to Afghanistan—and this time as a sniper.