To keep morale up, KAF also had the famous boardwalk—a big square in the middle of the base with shops all around it, including a Tim Hortons coffee shop, a Chechen massage parlour (filled with signs that said IF you ask for a ‘HAPPY ENDING,’ you will be subjected to the full punishment under military law!), a Subway restaurant, a Burger King, and some other tastes of home.
There were also a dozen shops run by Afghan locals, selling pretty much anything and everything imaginable. The boardwalk formed a large square with the shops and restaurants on the outside, and a football field and floor-hockey rink in the middle. On the dirt rink, the Canadian team routinely destroyed all comers. Literally every country in NATO had tried to beat them, but as far as I know, it never happened.
But for all its amenities, KAF was by no means an easy place to live; the Taliban mortared and rocketed it almost daily. There were signs all over the place saying KAF HAS BEEN ROCKET-FREE FOR ‘0’ days! And on top of the fear of getting rocketed and killed, the troops stationed there had to face the maddening, perpetual boredom that inevitably sets in when you're trapped in the same place for long periods of time with no respite. You can only watch the same movies, read the same papers and magazines, go to the same PX (post exchange—a US army base store), walk up and down the same boardwalk, and jog the same route so many times. Troops who couldn't entertain themselves or come up with a way to alleviate the terrible boredom had a very hard time there. And no one could blame them.
The suicide rate in KAF was rumoured to be astronomical, much higher and out of all proportion to the civilian populations of cities that size back home in North America. I was only there for a few days, and by the time I left, I was happy to be going. There was just something depressing about it, nothing I could put my finger on, but I was happy to not be spending an eight-month tour only in KAF. The place had a way of dragging you down. Bad mojo, bad chi—the dark side of the Force was very strong there.
Rich woke me up early our first morning there (we were still nicely jet-lagged), so we grabbed our teams and trudged off to find the American DFAC. It was like all things American in a war zone: absolutely huge! It seemed every NATO country had troops stationed in KAF, and all of them chose the American DFAC as their favourite eatery. The line was out the door and around the block.
We looked around and noticed that almost every EU nation had some troops in KAF, and we saw several African nations represented as well. We finally got inside the building and swiped the meal cards the other OMLT boys had left for us on our desks, and then performed the mandatory hand-washing ritual before we entered the scoff house. I saw a young American soldier standing next to the sinks, looking thoroughly bored. I leaned over to him and asked, “You the hand-washing Nazi?”
He looked at me and yawned. “Jawohl. Now move along.”
We quickly grabbed some scoff, which was better than anything I'd ever had in Canada, but I figured their food budget was larger than our national defence budget, so they could afford some good growlies. We ate quickly and then marched back to our little neck of the woods in KAF to find Z-3.
We were going to grab a coffee at Tim Hortons, but the line went around the block. I asked Rich if Canadians could butt into the front of the line, but he thought not, since Hortons was, at the time, an American company. Evidently the company's insidious marketing schemes had worked on me, because my sense of national pride was violently assaulted by his uncouth comment, and we angrily debated the ownership of the Tim Hortons coffee and donut empire as we walked through the dust. Armoured vehicles, Jeeps, and tanks were kicking up enough dirt to make us choke, as choppers screamed overhead.
Even at seven-thirty in the morning you could feel the heat building up, and by the time we found building Z-3, another large tent, I was covered in sweat. As per.
Being the cool kids in town, we obviously sat in the back row for the briefings. At the appointed time, a captain took the podium and gave us a quick overview of the briefings we'd be subjected to that morning. Then the fire marshal, with a completely straight face, told us we couldn't set up a BBQ pit just anywhere outside of KAF. He told us we needed to get a special permit from his office if we wanted to set up a barbecue on the bases we'd be going to. Wow. Um, okay. I guessed that somebody must have set up a BBQ next to an ammo bunker and set it on fire, once upon a time.
Then we listened to the mandatory OPSEC (operational security) briefing, a modern take on the old “loose lips sink ships” classic.
Then the intelligence officer (Int O) for the battle group took the podium and started speaking in a loud, nasal voice. “This is the map of our current AO [area of operations]. As you can see by the little explosion symbols plastered all over the map, we've had a busy week.” He pointed over his shoulder at the PowerPoint presentation on the screen. A week? All that happened in a week? This wasn't a map of the whole country—it was just Kandahar Province, where we'd be fighting. The provincial map had at least three dozen explosion symbols on it.
My throat went dry as it dawned on me that a lot of the explosions happened on Ring Road South, the road we'd be taking from KAF to our bases at Masum Ghar and Sperwhan Ghar, off to the west. There had been at least three explosions on Route Brown, the only road we could take to get to our base at Sperwhan Ghar. Rich looked at me knowingly; obviously he'd caught that too. We weren't laughing anymore.
According to the map, we were about to find ourselves right in the middle of the worst sector for shootings and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. An IED is basically a homemade bomb; the parts and pieces of the bomb could come from actual explosives like artillery shells, army mines, or homemade fertilizer explosives. The electrical detonators or receivers to make it go BOOM could come from pieces of radios, remote-controlled devices, or whatever else the bomb maker could get his hands on. These explosives were ingeniously made and incredibly well hidden, with their size, style, components, and lethality limited only by the imagination of their creator. IEDs were responsible for the greatest number of coalition casualties.
Then the Int O asked the ultimate question: “How many people here are going outside the wire?” By that he meant how many people were leaving the protective wire of their base to go out into bandit country on a patrol. Outside the wire . . . there it was! Finally. I had wondered when somebody (who had probably never been outside the wire in his entire frickin' military career) was going to ask us if we were going outside the wire.
In the Canadian Forces, there were people who really got off on asking that question—at very inappropriate times—and because of them, it was causing a good deal of friction between those who had and those who had not.
There was another stereotype, a deep-seated belief that had been creeping up and taking hold in the CF; it started right around the time we began deploying soldiers to Afghanistan in 2002. The belief was this: it didn't matter where you had deployed to before in the world, if you hadn't been to Afghanistan yet, you were nothing, and all of your experiences counted for nothing.
That's why guys with a lot of experience, like Warrant Longview, didn't take too well to being asked by some rear-echelon type if they'd been outside the wire before. Guys like Longview had been in the shit on several different continents, but they hadn't been to the Stan before, so obviously, some idiots thought their experience counted for nothing. I got along great with Warrant Longview, but I couldn't help but take the piss out of him because he hadn't been to the Stan yet, and unfortunately for him, I had.
I'd say crap like, “Yeah that's all well and good, Warrant, and maybe that's how you did it against the Russians in Germany, but that's not how it works in Afghanistan.” He knew I was only joking, so he graciously refrained from giving me a mouth full of Chiclets.
Back in the briefing tent, it was only the OMLT guys in the back rows who raised their arms to the Int O's question about who would be going outside the wire. The Int O said the next slide was for us, and then went into a detailed point-by-point analysis of the SIGA
CTS (significant activities) the enemy had attacked us with over the previous month. I hadn't heard about most of these incidents back home—it seemed that a lot more enemy activity was going on than we'd been told about.
It wasn't looking good. They were hitting us at several different places, all at the same time, and with different attack patterns, as though their efforts were being coordinated by a higher headquarters. The Taliban were a lot more organized than we'd been led to believe back home in Canada.
After the briefings were finished, and with the wind thoroughly taken out of our sails, we left the briefing tent and walked back to our rooms. Nobody said too much. I think we were all in a state of mild shock after what we'd just heard. We knew the war wasn't going well, but I don't think anyone realized it was that bad. But I didn't have any illusions. We weren't sent to Afghanistan to keep the peace, because there was literally no peace to keep! We were there to make the peace, and that meant putting ourselves in harm's way.
The next morning we ate quickly and then went to the OMLT stores to collect our gear. The store man issued us 9mm bullets and two magazines for our Browning pistols, and I was given twelve mags for my C8 assault rifle (a smaller version of the M-16, with lots of modifications). We also got a laser sight for our C8s, box magazines for the C9 (Minimi) machine gunners, two fragmentation grenades, four smoke grenades, a CamelBak water carrier, a Leatherman tool, a TCCC (tactical combat casualty care) first-aid kit, a one-piece eye monocle night-vision sight with helmet connectors, a compass, an army GPS, and about twenty other odds and sods that you could hook up, connect, or just dangle off your person like a one-man pawn shop. I asked the store man for my issued “stick with protruding nail,” but he didn't find that funny.
By the time they were done handing out kit, our total equipment weight—once our mags were bombed up with ammo and we had on our helmet and body armour and some water in our day sack—was close to one hundred pounds. Later in the tour I weighed all of my kit. It totalled ninety-two pounds. Every time I left the wire, I carried ninety-two pounds of kit on my body. I liked to tell the boys that I put the “light” back in “light infantry.” They would immediately snarl back, “Actually, you put the ‘ugly’ back in ‘fuck ugly,’” which I promptly amended to fugly.
And my kit wasn't even the heaviest, not by a long shot. Our light machine gunners, who carried twenty pounds of ammunition all linked together for their guns, could walk around carrying close to 120 pounds. Try and imagine carrying 120 pounds of equipment in fifty-degree-Celsius heat. Then imagine trying to fight in that, for hours on end. That's what we had to look forward to. But, as crazy as it sounds, we had all joined up as volunteers; we weren't conscripted, so we could only blame ourselves and those great recruiting commercials.
Hetsa had told me his recruiter had actually asked him if he liked going camping. When Hetsa responded “yes,” he was told, “Well, son, the infantry's the branch for you!” Sure, I could see how fighting in Afghanistan was eerily similar to going camping—“extreme sports” camping!
Something I discovered back home in Canada was that a lot of civilians didn't understand that soldiers want to go overseas and do their jobs. It would be like a firefighter who goes through months of rigorous training and countless exercises, only to stay behind in the fire station when the alarm sounds. You wanted a chance to actually do the job you were trained for.
The next morning, call signs 72 Alpha (72A) and 72 Bravo were slated to hop into some Bison armoured vehicles and drive through Kandahar city on our way to Masum Ghar, our first stop. From Masum, we'd be going to our individual outposts. Another OMLT captain, named John, and his call sign, 72 Bravo, would be travelling on to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mushan, in the extreme west of Panjway Province. I had found out just a day before we deployed from Canada that my call sign, 72 Alpha, would be going to Sperwhan Ghar.
I wasn't feeling too good about riding in the back of a blacked-out, hermetically sealed Bison armoured vehicle for my ride to Masum Ghar. The Fear had crept up on me, probably in my sleep. I found myself thinking about that long, slow drive down the IED highway, the only road leading to the west, where I had to go. I kept seeing that PowerPoint presentation, the one with all of the explosion symbols on it.
Rich, always an intuitive guy, must've picked up on my “for those about to die” vibe. That or the fact that I was most often the guy running around trying to keep morale up, and now I'd gone deathly quiet. He walked over to me and looked me in the eyes. “Hey, fucknuts. You okay?”
“Listen Tricky Dick, I'm a dismounted warrior, damn it! If I want to coward out and run and hide under a pile of coats, I have that option! I get claustrophobic in a hermetically sealed armoured vehicle that doesn't have quite enough underarmour to protect me from a thousand-pound bomb buried in the middle of the road. And like I've always told ya, I'm allergic to getting blown up!”
Rich cut me off. “Hey, hey, hey. Easy, little camper! Your Uncle Richie's here to tell you somethin'—you're gonna be fine. If you get scared and need a little pick-me-up, you just call your big Uncle Richie, okay?”
Rich leaned back and smiled, then roughly thumped me on the back. “Get a grip of your shit, trooper! You're supposed to be leading your men into combat, not scaring the hell out of them with your doom-and-gloom vibe! You'll be fine. Like you keep telling me, you can't possibly die here, because you've got to pull your thumb out and invent that flux capacitor thingamajig!”
“Thanks, brother,” I said, and pretended to punch him in the groin.
He blocked my punch and smirked. “Now get outta here, and don't forget your rifle and pistolé; you may need them where you're going. Although the way you shoot, you might as well just carry around a twenty-pound paperweight!”
We said, “Strength and honour,” and then clasped forearms like Roman legionnaires. I know we would've made General Maximus Decimus Meridius proud.
Sergeant Donahue, an OMLT hard case, walked over and said, “Remember the unit you came from,” meaning I had been in 2 Para in the Brits. “You weren't in the RAF regiment, you're a Sky God! Don't ever forget that!” Then he slapped me roughly on the back. What the hell was it with people and back slapping today?
I guess everyone knew, deep down, that this might be it . . . our last piss take together before we met up again at the ramp ceremony, to stand at attention and salute as a friend's coffin passed by. I pushed that morbid thought from my mind. We'd all be okay. My second-in-command's first name was actually Merlin, ergo we nicknamed him “The Wizard.” He'd protect us with his level thirty magic!
“Cheers, mucker,” I said to Donahue, and returned his back slap. He was an ex-3 Para soldier from the Brit army, so he knew the drill. We'd been to the same places in Northern Ireland, so he knew what I was going through; no airborne warrior liked being cooped up in an armoured vehicle—it was anathema to our nature.
And with that, I walked over to the warrant, Hetsa, and Fourneau. I told them I'd see them in Masum Ghar, as we were being split up for the ride. I then found my Bison vehicle, hopped into the back, and said a silent prayer and reminded myself that the Lord hates a coward as the heavy metal door was closed shut, blocking out all the light and air from the outside. I reached into the top pouch of my tactical vest and pulled out my good-luck earplugs, knowing how loud the armoured vehicles could be. Those earplugs had gotten me through some hairy moments before, and I was hoping they could do the trick again, as we rumbled out of KAF and into our little part of the war.
Chapter 2
Our vehicle convoy rambled down the road and through the city of Kandahar, the provincial and political capital of Kandahar Province. At one point a soldier in the top turret shouted down to us in the back, “If you look out your left viewport, you can see the prison where the Taliban recently blew up the front gate and fifty guys escaped.” I'd seen the prison on the news, but there was nothing quite like seeing it with your own eyes. One of John's 72 Bravo soldiers held up a phone to the viewp
ort and snapped a picture. War tourism, I thought to myself. Ya gotta love it.
Thankfully, the ride to Masum Ghar was surprisingly uneventful. That was the problem with so many of our training scenarios back in Canada. In every training scenario back home, the pretend enemy who was waiting to get you always threw the kitchen sink at you, in addition to a four-litre jug of two per cent milk and your kid's plastic Dora the Explorer plates. It got you so paranoid that you started thinking, every time you left the wire for real, that you weren't coming back. How could you? When you got rocketed, mortared, snipered, IEDed, and shouted at by an angry mob every time you left the wire?
We arrived and passed through the front gate's cement barriers and watchtower. I thought about what my major had told me back in Canada. I was to get my team to Masum and, once there, find the outgoing OMLT major and get a briefing from him on the OMLT's SOPs (standard operating procedures) and on my AO. As a bonus I was also hoping to meet my counterpart, a captain from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) out of Edmonton, who would start his left-seat, right-seat handover briefings with me. We called it “left-seat, right-seat” because the guy was right there next to you, giving you the heads-up on everything you were meant to be coming up against. Many times we'd actually be fighting side by side; the outgoing guy and the incoming would be covering each other and shooting back at the enemy during handover patrols. Hopefully by the end of play that day I'd have a much better idea of what we'd be getting into and who we'd be up against, and I could pass the info on to my boys.
I used to give them what I called the Rob Semrau Guarantee, which meant that when I knew something, they knew it. I'd had officers in the past who were control freaks; they liked to keep the information (that they were expected to pass on to the troops) to themselves, thinking it put them in an elevated position of power, or some bollocks like that. My current OMLT major was a keen practitioner of retaining any and all information—and then at the last minute finally sharing the next day's plan with us.
The Taliban Don't Wave Page 3