by Ray Wiss
Then along comes al Qaeda. Now, these young men can change history. All they have to do . . . is die†
This eagerness to die can make suicide bombers seem like fearsome enemies. Given their willingness to trade their lives for those of our soldiers, do these individuals represent the ultimate weapon?
There are two answers to this question. The first is that this is a war of ideas, and our ideas are more appealing to human beings than those of our enemies. As education makes our ideas more accessible to societies that breed suicide bombers, the “suicide idea” will lose its appeal.
The second answer requires a longer historical view. Suicide bombers may seem terrifying, but we have already met and defeated this enemy. At the end of World War Two, the Japanese sent thousands of young men on suicide missions. The kamikaze (“divine wind”) were given minimal flight training and then ordered to crash their planes into Allied ships.
The appearance of this new kind of enemy horrified Allied sailors: it was deeply disturbing to know that the attacks were being carried out by men who had given up all hope of survival. But the Allies quickly adapted to this new and desperate enemy tactic, and nearly all of these barely competent pilots were shot down before they reached their targets. The impact of the kamikazes on the overall course of the war was negligible.
The same thing will happen in this war. Liberal democracies have figured out how to beat suicide bombers before. We’ll figure it out again.
Addendum, June 30: It would be a mistake to think that suicide bombers always hit their targets. As with IEDs, Canadians only hear about the ones that manage to kill one of us.
You do not hear about the ones we kill or capture before they can launch their attack. You also do not hear about the times alert soldiers make a split-second decision and open fire on a civilian vehicle. In that instant, the soldier agonizes that he or she may have killed an innocent person. In the next instant, the bomb in the vehicle detonates and the correctness of the soldier’s actions is confirmed. Since the explosion has taken place a safe distance from our convoy, the media could not care less. Superb soldiering is not nearly as newsworthy as the times soldiers kill in error. The latter gets a lot of media coverage, even though it represents a tiny fraction of the times Coalition troops open fire on civilian vehicles.
The suicide bomber’s weapon
The suicide bomber’s target
Being a stickler for grammatical accuracy, I will point out that you only hear about suicide-homicide bombers. You do not hear about the times suicide bombers really are . . . suicide bombers. In the interests of “journalistic balance,” I offer one such example from a few days ago.
The first photograph on the previous page shows the remains of a motorcycle after a suicide bomber detonated himself on it.
We only found shreds of this guy. The bomber had driven his motorcycle behind the ANA vehicle shown in the second photograph on the previous page. The vehicle was shredded by shrapnel. There was no place on the vehicle that anyone could have survived.
When the suicide bomber detonated himself, the truck was empty, making him only a suicide bomber, without the homicide he had been hoping to achieve. He traded his life for a Ford Ranger.
JUNE 27 | The Elements, Part 1: Water
Let’s start with a literary installment, the first verse of “Gunga Din,” by Rudyard Kipling. This poem describes the desperate thirst of a wounded man lying in the heat. The location of the action could well be Afghanistan, since Britain fought a war in this area around the time Kipling was here:
You may talk o’ gin and beer
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
The temperature in Zhari district is reported as having been 47°C today. It felt like 57°C.
I have been in the Caribbean, Central America, Southern Africa and equatorial Indonesia, so these latitudes are familiar to me. Something about this heat is different, perhaps because we are in a desert.
At the risk of sounding like a broken Canadian record, I think the heat affects you more in a desert because . . . it’s a dry heat. In other places I experienced tropical temperatures, I was either in a rain forest or close to an ocean. Here, the heat reflects off the sandy ground with such intensity that you feel it is exerting a physical pressure on you. Direct sunlight is so strong that you feel your exposed skin is being damaged from the moment you step outside.
Our water consumption is therefore a source of constant concern for commanders at all levels. Getting water from KAF to the combat troops occupies the minds of everyone. This starts with the general, who watches over the logistics of delivering over 200,000 litres of water to the FOBs every month. All this water is bottled. As is the case elsewhere in the developing world, it would be foolhardy to drink any locally found water, even that coming from a well.
At the other end of this pipeline, the corporal makes sure the private carries enough water before we head out on an operation. How much is “enough”? Combat infantrymen already carry a lot of weight: body armour, weapons, ammunition, rations and other gear. Most of them will also carry eight litres of water, contained in two large bags called a Camelbak. Counting the bags themselves, that is almost ten kilograms of additional weight to carry. When we resupply troops in the field, one helicopter’s payload might be taken up by water alone.
The goal of all this drinking is to avoid dehydration. In these kinds of temperatures and with that much weight on their backs, the combat troopers can lose several litres of water a day through their skin. At a minimum, water intake must match the amount lost through sweating. If it does not, a person can fall into a condition called heat exhaustion. In its early stages, heat exhaustion is easy to correct, by removing patients from the heat and giving them a lot of water to drink. If the situation deteriorates even further—if individuals get dehydrated and continue to work hard in the heat—they can progress to a much more serious condition called heat stroke.
We sweat to cool off our bodies. People with heat stroke either drank so little or sweated so much that they are out of water completely. The physical characteristic that confirms they are suffering from heat stroke rather than heat exhaustion is that their skin is dry rather than sweaty.
This can be life-threatening. With sweat no longer being produced, the body stops cooling itself. Body temperature, which until then remains roughly normal, rises quickly. Somewhere between 40°C and 42°C, neurological dysfunction occurs: confusion, collapse and coma. Somewhere between 44°C and 46°C, the patient dies.
It is not all that difficult to fall victim to heat stroke. Highly motivated people can push themselves hard enough to do it. I had a case like this recently.
I was getting ready to go to bed when one of our combat troopers came in complaining of a single episode of vomiting, abdominal cramping and a headache. Although his blood pressure was normal, his pulse was worrisomely elevated. He looked, to use the medical term, like shit.
Given that he had vomited only once, it was unlikely that his rapid pulse was due to gastroenteritis. He claimed to have been well until an hour earlier. He had spent the day participating in the St-Jean-Baptiste celebrations.* He mentioned that he had acquired a new camera and had taken 227 pictures that day. Upon hearing that, I asked him how much water he had drunk that day. He thought about it for a few seconds and then said, “One five-hundred-millilitre bottle of water—maybe.”
This guy had been having so much fun that he forgot to drink for twelve hours in 50°C heat. This is more common than you might think, and it demonstrates the degree to which training is contextual. Had this trooper been in the field on a combat operation, he would have remembered to drink constantly. Soldiers who allow themselves to become dehydrated on an operation will be charged with negligence: they w
ill be punished for not looking after themselves properly.
It is a testament to the resilience of the young to see how far this man, in his twenties, was able to drive himself. It took twenty-four hours and nine(!) litres of intravenous fluid before he began to urinate normally. He was off his feet for three more days after that.
JUNE 28 | The Follow-up
The little girl whose facial laceration I had repaired a few days ago returned for her suture removal today. Once again, she was accompanied only by her brother. I noticed she wore the same dress as she had the first time I met her, but the blood stains on it had been carefully removed. It is likely her one good set of clothes. This is something I have often seen in the developing world: individuals who are dirt-poor and living in mud and thatch hovels will meet you dressed in a good shirt and pants or a nice dress. They take exquisite care of that single good set of clothes. The poor take as much pride in their appearance as anyone else.
My patient was a little apprehensive, but no more than any small child confronted by a stranger would be. You will recall that I used ketamine to put her to sleep for the repair. One of the best qualities of this drug is that it erases the patient’s memories starting a few minutes before the injection. Children who have a painful procedure done under ketamine don’t even remember the shot that put them to sleep. They have no negative memories of the hospital and are much less frightened when they come back.
The little girl tolerated the procedure well. She was even feeling confident enough to express her desire for more of the Oreo cookies that we had sent her home with last time. As you can see in the photograph above, these were provided.
Suture removal; under Oreo sedation
JUNE 29 | Operation Tora Arwa II
The past three days have been an anxious time. The combat team has been running a major operation in Siah Choy since before first light two days ago. This is an area of intense Taliban activity southeast of here. I have been closely following their progress on our various communication networks.
This was an airmobile operation, meaning that the troops attacked by helicopter. It was one of the first times an entire combat team had been airlifted directly onto a known Taliban troop concentration. The planning and coordination involved for such an operation is monumentally complex: nearly two hundred people will land, at night, in the middle of terrain crawling with enemy soldiers. They have to be ready to fight from the moment they hit the ground. The amount of detailed information Major Arsenault had to juggle in his mind as the combat team went through its preparations and rehearsals is mind-boggling.
The operation started off on a hilarious note. Major Arsenault was on the first helicopter. He got off and had only taken a few steps when he came upon a rifle, a pistol, a radio, a canteen, some food, various maps and other Taliban documents, some night vision gear, a blanket and . . . a full set of clothing.
Our enemies are not stupid. They know we are trying hard, with some success, to figure out the locations of their main commanders and principal weapons caches. These locations are vulnerable to surprise attack by airmobile troops, and any idiot can figure out which fields are big enough for several helicopters to land on simultaneously. The Taliban place observers throughout the district to warn them of such an attack. It looks like Major Arsenault’s chopper landed almost on top of one of these guys. He must have run off buck naked.
After that, things got more serious. The fighting has been fierce, and contact with the enemy has been constant. The artillery has been firing regularly, and fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters have been conducting frequent strafing and bombing runs.
Whereas the fixed-wing bombers are flown by our Coalition partners, the helicopters supporting this operation are Canadian. The combat team was flown in by our Chinooks, and strafing runs have been executed by our Griffons. The link between the Griffon gunships and the infantry is particularly strong: the door gunners are infantrymen who have taken a special course to learn how to shoot people on the ground from a moving aircraft.
Even those helicopters whose crews are made up of air force types go out of their way to help the Canadian infantry. They routinely take last-minute calls from the field and then cram their birds with whatever the combat troopers need.
One Canadian was wounded yesterday. He took a piece of shrapnel to the head. From the combat medic’s description, the wound did not seem all that serious. There had been some arterial bleeding, but this was now controlled.
Four more Canadians were slightly wounded today. They were helicoptered to KAF but were all discharged within hours with nothing more than a few sutures. The Canadian wounded yesterday was also sent back to us after some minor facial plastic surgery.
The combat team was airlifted out of Siah Choy after last light this evening. I asked to be given a heads-up when they were ten minutes out so that I could go to the helicopter landing site.
They came back to the FOB in three separate waves of Canadian Chinooks. The air was thick with dust as they came in. In the night air, the rotor blades ignited small flecks of dust, creating a twinkling effect. It was a bizarre juxtaposition of delicate beauty and awesome military power.
I shook hands with as many of the guys as I could as they stepped off the birds. I wanted to wish them a hearty welcome home and congratulate them on a job well done. They had gone into the heart of darkness for their country. I wanted to make sure they knew that I appreciated it.
Major Arsenault was the last man to get off the last chopper. The first thing he wanted to know was how his wounded were faring. I could see the relief on his face when I told him they were all fine and already back to active duty.
Addendum, June 30: This morning I had breakfast with Major Arsenault and other leaders of the combat team. As we ate, they relived the high points of the operation. It was fascinating to see the expressions on their faces as they did so. Those expressions brought back memories for me, memories that remain crystal clear even after two decades.
As a young man, Winston Churchill had spent time as a war correspondent during the Boer War in South Africa. One of his most famous lines from that time was that it was thrilling “to be fired upon without any effect.” He was absolutely right. The first time I was shot at was during my time as a medic during the Nicaraguan Contra War. After the battle was over, I experienced a feeling of euphoria more profound than anything I have experienced in my peacetime endeavours. I knew exactly why I felt this way. Several hundred people had tried to kill me, and I was still alive.
Watching the leaders of the combat team discuss the operation, I recognized that same exultation. Part of me wished I had been with them, under fire, so that I could experience that feeling again. This is not a healthy attitude. It is one I have learned to control.
JUNE 30 | Spy IQ
The most famous book on the conduct of warfare is The Art of War, written by the Chinese warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu in the sixth century BCE. His insights into the nature of conflict and leadership were so astute that they continue to be required reading in most military officer schools.
One of the chapters of the book deals with spies. Sun Tzu taught that leaders in war must tend to the development and maintenance of their espionage networks with great care. There were incalculable advantages in knowing the enemy’s strengths, weaknesses and, above all, intentions. Sun Tzu summarized this by saying, “It is better to pay one spy very well than an army cheaply.” In other words, the information gathered by a single spy could have more influence on the course of a war than thousands of soldiers could.
Let me give you two examples of Taliban espionage. Call it the story of two spies, one of them sophisticated and the other one too dumb to pound sand.
The first spy must have spent a lot of time watching our FOB, paying particular attention to the comings and goings of our convoys. After determining a likely route that one of these convoys would take, he crept up to the road one night. He followed a minuscule gully that brought him within range of our
observation posts. What this Taliban spy did took a lot of guts. Had he been detected, he would likely have been killed.
Towards the end of the following day, a convoy carrying one of the senior leaders of the battle group passed right over this spot. Fortunately, the Talib’s courage and skill was offset by his bad timing. The trigger man detonated the IED between the first and second vehicle in the convoy. The explosion shattered the road and sent dust and debris fifty metres into the air and a hundred metres away. Incredibly, no Canadian was injured.
You might come away from this with the feeling that the Taliban are all incredibly clever. Let me show you how false this can be.
During Operation Tora Arwa II (described in yesterday’s entry), the Canadian combat team was accompanied by an ANP unit that was being mentored by some American trainers. During a lull in the battle, the Afghan policemen and their mentors were resting in a field. One of the policemen got up and walked towards a nearby tree line. This was strange, because it was in the direction the Taliban were thought to be. The policeman disappeared into the trees for a couple of minutes, then walked back, taking a position on the edge of his group. No more than a minute later, an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) was launched from the spot in the tree line that the policeman had disappeared into. It exploded more or less in the middle of the combined American and Afghan troops. This was followed by rifle and machine gun fire from several Taliban soldiers in the tree line. The Americans and ANP returned fire until the Taliban broke contact and withdrew. During the firefight, the policeman who had wandered over to the tree line was observed firing his rifle well off to the side of where the enemy was. None of our soldiers were injured during this exchange.