by Ray Wiss
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 wer
e 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.