by Ray Wiss
The most important element here is respecting the Afghans’ zan (women). Under no circumstances must the search party see the women of the family. Each entry into a compound is therefore preceded by an elaborate request to please ask the zan to remove themselves to the women’s quarters.
It is frustrating to think of what might be going on behind the compound walls while we wait outside. Anyone with something to hide has ample time to conceal potentially incriminating evidence.
Searching suspect compound
We could avoid this by crashing into every compound unannounced, but this would only guarantee that we would get some of the weapons and lose all of the people. This is a war of ideas. We have to act each time as if the Afghan we are dealing with is a potential ally, to be treated with respect, not a potential enemy, to be treated like a criminal. This holds true even if we are very suspicious that the individual’s allegiances lie with our enemies.
This attitude on the part of Canadians goes a long way with most of the rural folk here in the Panjwayi. At every compound we visited on this patrol, we were greeted warmly and invited in quickly. At every one . . . except the last one we called on. The reception here was the polar opposite. The owner of the compound was totally uncooperative, not even attempting to answer our questions.
For whatever reason, he did not like us. After multiple requests to be invited into the compound were ignored, we proceeded with the search, something the Afghan security forces and their Coalition partners are legally entitled to do without a warrant.
Patrol’s end
We did not find any weapons or other “smoking gun,” but we did notice a number of radios that had been taken apart. The wiring and receivers could be used for remote-controlled triggering mechanisms. We also found a large number of the plastic jugs that the IED makers stuff with homemade explosive.
This guy was obviously “wrong,” but there was nothing definitive that proved he was aiding the Taliban. So we documented what we found and moved on. This compound will be watched more closely from now on. Eventually, the owner will slip up. They always do. The only questions are whether he will be killed or captured and whether he will take any of us down with him. Statistically speaking, the odds are against him.
The men of 5-1 Charlie (a well-decorated bunch, at least in the dermatological sense)
With the compound searches done, the patrol had achieved its objectives. We headed back to the FOB, arriving a little after 1000.
I was glad to have done my infantry part in this war. And I hope I never have to do anything like that again.
You have just read the description of a single, short patrol. The men in the above photograph will do this almost every day for six months. What more can I say about them?
AUGUST 4, AFTERNOON | Back to the Beginning
After returning from the patrol, I went back to my bunker, gathered up my gear, and said my farewells to Bed, Red and the Bison crews. I had greatly enjoyed my time with them and I hoped we would stay in touch. I then reported to the convoy assembly area.
Even with the road partly paved, the trip from FOB Ma’Sum Ghar to FOB Sperwan Ghar exposed me to significant risk. But everything is relative. Going on a convoy seemed like a walk in the park compared with the dangers I had faced this morning. As I sat in my vehicle I was exhausted, but elated.
We left a bit before noon. I was so baffed that I passed out before we even got to the front gate of Ma’Sum Ghar. My next memory is of someone shaking my shoulder at FOB Sperwan Ghar. As I climbed out of the vehicle, I could see that the FOB had changed quite a bit since my last visit. Canadian soldiers have worked hard to improve their living conditions here, as they have at all our FOBs.
A far greater change had taken place inside me. I first came here on November 20, 2007, arriving by helicopter after midnight. I had been in Afghanistan less than a week. I was disoriented and more than a little miserable. I was apprehensive as I wondered if I would react effectively under fire.
I soon found out: we were attacked on my fourth day here, and I had to deal with a MasCal situation. My combat reflexes reappeared and the emergency medicine machine did its thing. Over the next month, I got into the rhythm of the war and of the FOB.
This time, I am a veteran. Arriving at FOB Sperwan Ghar feels like coming back to the old family cottage. The living will be rough, the amenities will be minimal and savage animals will be lurking about.
And yet it almost feels . . . comfortable.
AUGUST 5 | They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait
The day started at 0200, with the arrival of an Afghan soldier at the UMS. He’d had abdominal pain for a couple of hours. He had no nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or fever, and his vital signs were normal. He indicated that the pain was around his belly button, but when I examined his abdomen he was much more tender in the right lower quadrant, the classic sign of early appendicitis. Once again, I benefited from our wonderful medevac system. One phone call and a helicopter came within minutes to whisk this man to surgery.
The physician assistant I am replacing here is Chief Petty Officer Second Class Gaétan Poulin. He jokes that he is ill at ease in his land army uniform . . . but he allowed me to take a “hero shot” as we waited for the helicopter that would take him back to KAF. That is the photograph shown here.
Chief Petty Officer Second Class Gaétan Poulin
Age forty-eight, CPO 2 Poulin is one of those rock-solid individuals who holds the CF together. He has had two deployments prior to this one, a relatively benign one in Cyprus in the 1980s and a horrible one in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. He still talks about that experience in hushed tones and admits that it took the better part of a year after he returned home to process what he had been through and get back to normal.
He still retains the enthusiasm for our job that I have seen in the younger medics. As we discussed the practice profile of the patient load here at FOB Sperwan Ghar, he peppered me with questions about my approach to this or that clinical scenario. It was an enjoyable conversation with a fellow senior health professional of long experience.
CPO 2 Poulin is also quite modest. Since he is the last of the FOB docs I am replacing, he has spent four months on the FOB, much longer than anyone else has had to endure on this tour. I mentioned this to him, but he laughed it off and said it was no big deal. Many would disagree.
After he left I met with Corporal Sabrina Paquet, the Bison medic, to go over the UMS files. That Bison and all but one of the combat team medics are going out on an operation tomorrow, leaving me almost alone to run the UMS. As we went over the statistics, it emerged that Sperwan Ghar is the quietest of our three FOB UMSs. Corporal Paquet commented on that, saying it was still important that we be here in case anything happened. I could tell that she felt that her contribution was somehow less than that of the staff at the other two FOBs because she had not been knee-deep in blood, as we were at FOB Wilson and FOB Ma’Sum Ghar. I think it is important to correct that impression.
Napoleon said that “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” In other words, the psychological well-being of an army is three times more important than its physical state. I told Corporal Paquet that our role, as medical personnel, was only partly the medical care of the casualties. It is equally important for us to convince our warriors that we will deliver the finest medical care to them if they are wounded. First-rate medical care such as we can provide here acts as a “force multiplier,” enabling soldiers to fight harder and to face more danger because they know we are here to back them up. Busy or not, we are a big part of what makes our army fight well.
Addendum: “They also serve who only stand and wait” is the last line of a poem, “On His Blindness,” by John Milton. The poem is an incomprehensible paean in which Milton describes how best to serve God. During World War Two, the phrase was adopted by those who stayed in Canada to guard the nation while others went to fight in Europe and the Pacific. The service of these people who did nothing b
ut “stand and wait” was not exciting and garnered no honours. It was often derided by the combat troops, but it was a vital service nonetheless.
AUGUST 6 | The Moderating Effect
An army is a reflection of the society from which it is drawn. Women are now ubiquitous in our army, on the FOBs and even in the combat teams, just as they can be found in all walks of civilian life.
Our ability to wage war has neither improved nor deteriorated as a result of this. Warriors are defined by the skill set they bring to the battlefield. This skill set can be mastered by a certain proportion of women, subject only to the same physical limitations that apply to men their size. And vice versa. Corporal Bouthillier (the Ma’Sum Ghar Bison medic) has shoulders and arms that are bigger and stronger than mine. She has a much easier time opening and closing the heavy armoured door on the back of her ambulance than I do.
That being said, it would be foolish to claim that sexism no longer exists in the CF. It would be accurate, however, to state that expressions of sexism are now only quietly muttered. Individuals who say such things aloud in a men-only group are often confronted by other men.
While it may not surprise you that the women in the CF train and fight side-by-side with men, I think only the youngest readers will not at least raise an eyebrow when learning that we all sleep in the same room or tent or bunker. We have no more privacy than that provided by a thin sheet hung from the ceiling, sometimes not even that.
While the constant presence of women on the front lines has in no way altered our combat efficiency, their effect has nonetheless been dramatic. Left to their own devices, guys with time on their hands degenerate pretty rapidly into a bunch of slobs who talk about nothing but sex. It is a lot of fun, but it can be a tad one-dimensional. To be honest, part of me misses the wall-to-wall porn that was an integral part of settings like a FOB twenty-five years ago. But it seems a small price to pay for the broader and more intellectual discussions that take place around me now.
Well . . . let’s say it’s a fair price.
AUGUST 7 | Too Quiet
With the combat team away, the FOB is empty. To use an apt, although in the current context unfortunate, expression: you could shoot a cannon through here and not hit anybody.
It is almost eerie. I am writing this after dinner, and no one has come by the UMS all day. I have dropped into the command post a couple of times to see how the operation is going. Things seem quiet on that side as well. But the day wasn’t a complete write-off: I had the time to wander around and get reacquainted with the FOB.
Sperwan Ghar means “dusty mountain” (they got that right)
When I first arrived here in 2007, I looked at this big pile of sand in the middle of this flat desert and thought: That’s weird. We are below the southernmost latitude the glaciers ever reached, so there is no geological reason for this formation to exist. One of the first things I did was climb to the top of the hill to have a look around. I even shot a video in which I described what I was seeing: the view in all cardinal directions and . . . look at that . . . trenches. Very old trenches. Trenches dug . . . in the Russian style.
There being so many more things to occupy my mind at the time, I failed to pursue the obvious connection between the Russian trenches and the geological anomaly that is Sperwan Ghar. This time, I did a bit of research and my suspicions were confirmed. The Russians created this hill by piling thousands of truckloads of sand from the nearby Registan Desert. They needed a base in this area with good lines of sight in all directions, so they built one. You have to hand it to the communists: they are not afraid of the Big Projects.
We are in the boonies here. FOB Wilson has the highway that connects it to the outside world, and FOB Ma’Sum Ghar is right beside the bustling city of Bazaar-e-Panjwayi. FOB Sperwan Ghar, in contrast, is surrounded by desert and “rural sprawl.” Although a few of the buildings nearby are family compounds and there is the occasional mosque (the call to prayers can be faintly heard), most are agricultural structures. Among these are many “grape huts,” used to dry the grape harvest, thereby converting it into raisins, which are a much more portable and therefore much more valuable crop than grapes per unit of weight. When the means of transportation are at a premium (there are very few vehicles this far in the hinterland), this is a major consideration.
Looking southwest from Hilltop OP towards the Registan Desert (the greenery stops at the mountains and dunes in the distance)
The flags of Sperwan Ghar
The military implications of this are obvious. The Taliban, by wearing civilian clothing and carrying farm implements, blend into the civilian population. They can get close to the FOB and conceal themselves in one of these nearby buildings. The FOB is within effective range of all the weapons in their arsenal at that point.
FOB Sperwan Ghar is the only one of our FOBs that has been obliged to repel a ground assault, not once but twice. These attacks have only been a serious attempt at harassment, with good reason. An attack launched by ground troops would have to cross a few hundred metres of open terrain and get through a couple of layers of barbed wire before it reached our outer walls. Given the firepower that we can lay down on that area with our direct-fire weapons (rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers), I doubt that even a force of several hundred attackers could breach our defences. I will try to focus on that and not on the way our enemies often cross over the line that separates bravery from insanity.
The FOB is home to a combat team centred on a company of the Royal Vingt-deuxième Régiment, abbreviated R22eR, the French Canadian infantry regiment more commonly known as the Van Doos. The flag in the centre of the photograph on the previous page is the flag of Afghanistan. The one on the left is the flag of the Van Doos. The symbol at the base of the Afghan flag is a stylized cobra (don’t worry if it is not obvious to you; someone had to explain it to me as well). “C” company, based here, has chosen this as its emblem.
The FOB Sperwan Ghar UMS
As with all the other FOBs, the UMS has recently been upgraded. It is now housed in the modular affair shown in the above photograph. It is roomy inside and impossibly clean—that won’t last!
One final anecdote.
As I was wandering around the FOB I met the ammunition technician, Corporal Audrey Gravel, who showed me around her digs. I can’t show you what that looks like. The Talis would be only too happy to learn where we hide the things that go “Boom!”
She showed me the impressive arsenal we have here, which includes a generous supply of Claymore mines. These are a factory-made version of the “directional IED” described in the July 7 entry. We had Claymores when I was in the infantry. Since that time, a special safety feature has been added: a warning on the back of the mine that states:
Warning—Explosive is poisonous if eaten
Do not burn—produces toxic fumes
I can think of many non-traditional uses for a Claymore. Paperweight, doorstop and aquarium decoration all come to mind. But no matter how desperate a situation I try to conjure up, “lunch” and “firewood” do not appear on my list. Product safety warnings being what they are, this admonition would have appeared after someone tried to do both of these things. Let us hope that it was a single person who tried to cook and eat the thing and that one of these methods removed him from the gene pool.
Corporal Gravel also showed me one of the echoes of wars past that infest this land: a Russian artillery shell, now more than twenty years old. This weapon and countless others like it lie strewn about the Afghan countryside, waiting to kill the innocent or to be picked up by the Taliban for use in their IEDs. We are slowly gathering these up and destroying them, but it is like cleaning the Augean stables.*
MINES
In an earlier entry I explained why I thought mines were the worst byproduct of war. Strewn indiscriminately across a large number of developing world nations, these weapons destroy lives and damage economies out of all proportion to the military benefit they provide. This destruc
tion and damage carries on long after the end of the conflict during which the mines were laid because the minefields are almost never deactivated, or even marked, by the groups that laid them.
Canada led the way in banning these weapons. Our role was so instrumental in this process that the accord is commonly called the “Ottawa Treaty,” which rolls off the tongue more easily than “Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction.” As of May 2009, 156 countries have signed the treaty. Thirty-seven countries have not, including the People’s Republic of China, Russia and the United States.
A survey done in 2006 revealed that there were 160 million antipersonnel mines in the stockpiles of all the world’s armies. Armies being less than forthcoming with information like this, the true total is likely even higher. The good news is that, as of 2009, seventy-four countries have destroyed all their stocks of anti-personnel mines, totalling some forty million mines. Not a bad start.
The provisions of the Ottawa Treaty are strict. Signatories undertake “never under any circumstances to use, develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, anti-personnel mines.”
Never. Under any circumstances. Pretty clear, eh? So why do we have Claymore “mines” here—devices with explosive and shrapnel, designed to be placed in a precise location ahead of time and detonated there later. Are we breaking the rules?
No. We are following both the letter and the spirit of the Ottawa Treaty. Although popularly referred to as the “Mine Ban Treaty,” the formal title makes it plain that only anti-personnel mines are prohibited. These are defined in the treaty as mines “designed to be exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person . . .”
These mines are the most serious problem. They make up the vast majority of the mines laid in modern conflicts, and they are the ones that will kill and maim peasants, farmers and other rural folk for decades to come.