by Ray Wiss
The sergeant-major had just the thing to kick-start the process. Time for some armoured-vehicle spring cleaning! LAVs are the “home away from home” of the troops when they leave the FOB. It takes a full day to thoroughly clean one out because there seems to be no limit to what can be stuffed into the various nooks and crannies of these conveyances.
This also prepares the vehicles for the transfer to the incoming roto. On a couple of occasions, Major Jourdain has emphasized to his troops that the FOB and its equipment was in tip-top shape when they took over. He has made it a point of pride for his soldiers to match or exceed this for their replacements.
Keep the troops happy. Keep the troops busy. Keep the troops focused.
Keep the troops alive.
SEPTEMBER 6, MORNING | The Way We Will Win This War . . .
A day of bitter disappointments.
It began with Captain Dallaire dropping by the UMS to ask me to inspect another detainee. While passing through a village early this morning, some of our patrollers thought they recognized one of the area’s main Taliban commanders. He was in the company of three other men, so all four were brought to the FOB for questioning. Before the inquiry could start, I would have to examine them, as per our standard operating procedures. I began with the presumed “high value” detainee. To my dismay, none of the distinctive marks we had been told to look for to identify the Taliban commander were present.
I continued with my examinations, including that of one man who had lost his right leg. He walked using a crude prosthesis. When I asked him how he had been wounded he answered, as so many Afghans will: “It happened during the Russian time.”*. I will always remember this man. He interacted with me in a friendly manner . . . until the time came to examine his skin for identifying scars. To fully appreciate what happened next, I need to give you a bit of back story.
The first time I had examined a detainee was during Roto 4, on my second day in the country. I was still getting the feel of the place, so I followed the lead of the military police. When it came time to inspect the skin, they had the patient undress completely. I had worked in jails when I was younger and had participated in a number of strip searches. This seemed no different. The man was a confirmed Taliban soldier, and the military police were being very cautious. As I performed my examination, the two officers watching the man had their hands on their holsters.
During that first tour, I learned how private Afghan men consider the genital area to be. Since returning, I have tried to accommodate this as much as possible. I explain to the detainees that my exam is for their protection, to document that they have no injuries at present. When the time comes to examine the skin of the buttocks and genital area, I have the soldiers escorting me turn their backs. Then I tell the detainees to loosen the sash holding their baggy trousers on their waists. Rural Afghans never wear underwear, so I can then do a visual inspection of the buttocks and genitals without touching the detainee and without having them lower their trousers. They only have to hold the garment away from their body.
Until today, that had seemed to satisfy the detainees I had examined. But not this man. Standing on his good leg, he stated clearly although still respectfully that he would not let me look at his groin. He was in a room with three armed Canadian soldiers, and yet he insisted that his limits be respected. He said that he was not a Taliban and that although he could accept that we needed to arrest individuals who appeared suspicious, he felt there was “no reason you need to look at my ass.”
I had not run into this situation before and wondered what the best course of action would be. My instinct as a physician was to respect the man’s wishes, but there was the small matter of the war to consider. So I conferred with Captain Dallaire, who told me that I could dispense with that part of the exam. Perhaps if the first man I had examined had been our high-priority target, he would have felt differently. Since that had not been the case, I think Captain Dallaire made the right move. I therefore completed the exam with a pat-down.
In the end, we found no hard evidence of wrongdoing on the part of these men. Having disrupted their day, albeit for sound reasons, we would now do our best to make it up to them. They were given food and something to drink, then they were loaded into our L AVs and taken back to their village. One of our senior NCOs even gave them a case of fruit for the road.
One of our interpreters overheard the (now former) detainees as they spoke among themselves while they ate the meal we had provided. He said that they had much praise for our treatment of them. They understood why we had arrested them, and they recognized we had treated them fairly. This compares quite favourably with what these men have grown to expect from foreign invaders, including al Qaeda. This is why the Taliban leave behind their wounded soldiers for us to treat. I can only hope that, eventually, our way of thinking will win out. A world where the opposite is true is too awful to contemplate.
SEPTEMBER 6, AFTERNOON | . . . and the Price We Have to Pay to Do So
I did not sleep well last night and so, after finishing my medical exam of the detainees, I had a nap. When I woke up, I went to the command post to find out what had happened to the detainees. It was then that I learned how these men had been treated after I had left. Although I was proud of the way we had behaved towards them, I was still very disappointed that we had failed to capture any Taliban leaders.
Far worse news was waiting for me back at the UMS. When I walked in, I saw my medic team huddled around our various communication devices. I did not have to ask what they were watching and listening to. Their grim faces made it clear: we had been hit again. One of our vehicles had struck an IED, and two Canadians were dead. But who were they?
In the June 5 entry, I described the communication network we now have at our disposal. Even out here on the FOB, we are able to maintain excellent “situational awareness” of the combat activity in our area of operations. Although there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding the identity of our dead, we can now seek other clues. It was the search for these clues that was going on when I walked in. As sad as my medics were that Canadians had been killed, they were desperately hoping that their close friends were still alive.
The radio call sign of the unit that had been hit narrowed down the list of medics who could have accompanied them to only two, both good buddies of the crew here. The possibility that one of them might be dead was very upsetting to my people.
We scrutinized the quality and detail of the medical reports coming from the stricken convoy. Most of it was a routine recitation of vital signs and injury descriptions. And then we saw it: the description of a particular therapeutic manoeuvre that only a medic would have done. We focused on that line of disembodied text, telling ourselves it was inconceivable that someone who was not medically trained would have attempted such a manoeuvre. This had to mean our friend was alive.
A few hours later, our suspicions were confirmed. Both of the dead were engineers. How that group has suffered on this tour! I wrote an e-mail to Warrant Officer Comeau to express my condolences . . . again.
In the pantheon of pain, these deaths seem somehow worse because of their timing. For the past week, we have been busy on the administrative side with the preparations for the RIP Out. People have been closely studying the flight manifests to see when they are going from the FOB to KAF, from KAF to decompression and, best of all, from decompression to home. The end of the tour is in sight.
Every Canadian roto to have fought in Kandahar province has lost between ten and twenty soldiers. Until today, we were at the lowest end of that spectrum. I do not know what the other troops may have been thinking, but for the past several days I have been acutely aware that we have gone a month without a death. And this has been during the “fighting season,” the time of year when good weather and drug money from the recent opium harvest give the Taliban mobility and weapons. I had allowed myself to hope that this roto might set a new record for least number of deaths.
Addendum, suppertime: It i
s in the nature of combat soldiers to hope. Hope for victory. Hope for home. Hope for tomorrow. Maybe only hope for tonight. And so we mourn our dead and go on with our lives.
Captain Vince Lussier turned twenty-seven today. We had a party for him at suppertime, which began with his platoon ambushing him with water-filled condoms. *
Happy Birthday, Vince!
Then the war went on. As we were cutting the captain’s cake, small-arms fire broke out east of the FOB. The machine guns on the hilltop returned fire, and we all rushed to our defensive positions. And our lives went on.
SEPTEMBER 7 | Ramp Ceremony
We held the ramp ceremony for Major Yannick Pépin and Corporal Jean-François Drouin today. This is something the CF does particularly well.
First, these are well-attended affairs. Two-thirds of the 2,800 Canadians serving in Afghanistan at any one time are based at KAF. Almost all of them, nearly two thousand men and women, will be at the ceremony. They will be joined by a similar number of soldiers from other Coalition nations.
But what about the warriors? The ones who go “outside the wire” to do the fighting and the dying? We cannot all leave the combat area on these occasions, but for those closest to the fallen, the CF spares no expense to have them participate. These emotional rituals are an important part of the grieving process, so our helicopter squadron was assigned the task of bringing all the engineers from the various FOBs back to KAF. Despite only having one Chinook available, it took the time to fly to all three FOBs and picked up everybody who wanted to go. Major Arsenault at FOB Wilson was the last one to board. There were over fifty people crammed into the chopper, the most he had ever seen in one bird. He ended up sitting on the ramp next to the gunner! This effort on the part of the Canadian aviators—born of a camaraderie forged in combat—was greatly appreciated by the troops.
Although majors are the highest-ranking officers to lead their troops into combat, there are only seven majors in the task force to whom this applies: the three combat team commanders, the tank squadron commander, the commander of the artillery, the commander of the armoured reconnaissance squadron and the commander of the engineers.
Major Pépin, the engineer commander, was a combat leader. His troops were spread throughout our area of operations, supporting the infantry with their specialized skills. A lesser man might have stayed at KAF getting “sitreps” (situation reports) and sending orders by radio. It would have been a lot safer, but it would have sent a terrible message.
Instead, Major Pépin travelled extensively throughout the combat area. He personally checked on his soldiers, assessing their morale and making sure they had everything they needed to accomplish their tasks. His constant movements gave him an intimate knowledge of the war zone and made it possible for him to advise the battle group commander on the best way to use our engineering resources. It made him a very effective officer, but it exposed him to awful risks.
If it had been desirable, even necessary, for the engineers in the task force to be present at the ramp ceremony, it was all the more so for Major Pépin’s peer group. As many as possible of the six surviving “combat” majors were brought to KAF to act as pallbearers. In the above photograph you will recognize the first man, Major Jourdain, the commander here at Sperwan Ghar; Major Tim Arsenault, the commander at FOB Wilson, is third.
The majors bid farewell to one of their own
These men had trained together for nearly two years as they moulded the battle group into an efficient fighting force. It must have been almost unbearably painful to carry their friend’s body into the waiting Hercules aircraft.
Addendum, September 8: The remembrance process continued the following day at FOB Sperwan Ghar. The Canadian flag and that of the Van Doos will be flown at half-mast till our fallen are buried. This evening, after Major Jourdain returned, we gathered to observe a moment of silence in the memory of our fallen comrades. These moments are important to us. We have lost brothers. We will honour them as we always have, by respecting John McCrae’s admonition, from his poem “In Flanders Fields”:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep . . .
We will keep faith with those who die.
SEPTEMBER 8 | A Moral War
The men we arrested, questioned and released two days ago knew what they were talking about. Anybody who doubts that needed only to witness what has happened here over the past twenty-four hours.
We picked up another suspicious character yesterday. One of our patrols had “probable cause” and tested his hands for explosives. The test was positive, indicating he had recently handled a bomb of some kind. I again performed the detainee medical exam.
Almost everything about this guy was wrong. He claimed to be the mullah of a nearby village. In this culture, elders are revered merely because they are old. All the mullahs any of us had ever seen were at least middle-aged. Their beards were all white or at least shot through with grey. This man’s beard was black.
This was so incongruous that, although it is not required on the detainee medical examination form, I asked him his age. He replied that he was thirty-one. Had he been Canadian, that would have been believable. He looked like a young man in our own society: healthy, vigorous and with the sheen of youth barely faded. But we are not in Canada, we are in the Panjwayi. Life here is almost indescribably hard, so hard it uses people up and ages them long before their time. When estimating the ages of adults who have worked as farmers in this area all their lives, it is wise to subtract a decade or sometimes even two. If this guy was a thirty-one-year-old Panjwayi farmer, he should have looked like a forty- or even fifty-year-old Canadian.
Other aspects of his physical exam were incongruous. His hands were soft and free of calluses. His feet were equally supple, with none of the hard corn at the heels that the inhabitants of this area all have. He also had perfect teeth, something I had never seen in the mouth of any adult resident of the district.
I doubt this individual has spent a single day in the fields around our FOB. It is far more likely that he has spent most of his life, at least since adolescence, in a well-funded madrassa (Islamic religious school) in Pakistan.
When Captain Dallaire reported the results of his questioning to Major Jourdain, the commander decided to send the detainee onward to KAF for a more in-depth investigation. This does not guarantee that this man will be held. On the contrary, many of the individuals we have detained after finding explosive residue on their hands have been released from KAF within a few days. This can be frustrating for the troops in the field, but we follow demanding rules of evidence before depriving someone of their liberty.
It took a full day to organize the evacuation of the detainee. This had to be done by helicopter with a military police escort, resources that cannot always be rustled up at the drop of a hat. During those twenty-four hours, we gave him food and accommodations equal to our own. We respected his beliefs, providing him with meals at times that did not conflict with the Ramadan fast. Captain Dallaire even interrupted his questioning to allow the man to pray. In this war, where the best a captured Coalition soldier can hope for is to be beheaded quickly, we did not mistreat our detainee in any way.
What most impressed me occurred right before he was to be picked up from the FOB. He had been brought to the helipad and placed under the supervision of a couple of junior soldiers. When the helicopter was delayed, they thought to move him out of the sun and into the shade. These two young Canadians, who less than twenty-four hours ago had watched two of their comrades go home for the last time, spontaneously acted to make the detainee more comfortable.
The same respect for the law and for human rights permeates everything that we do in Afghanistan. For instance, there is a family compound not far from here that is routinely used as a staging point for the Taliban to plant their IEDs
. The compound prevents our observers on the hilltop from seeing this area. The Taliban know this and use it to their advantage. It has long been Major Jourdain’s desire to flatten this compound, and he has any number of ways to make it happen. In most armies, that desire is all it would take. The compound would be destroyed within minutes, possibly without even warning the inhabitants.
Here in the Canadian area of operations, we clear this kind of demolition with two different levels of legal advisers. Any inhabitants, even if they are no more than squatters, are compensated and cared for. The roof over their heads may be minimal, but it is all they have. We will not destroy it until we are sure that they have at least an equal dwelling to move into.
Canadians have a tremendous amount of pride in the reputation our armed forces have garnered around the world as peacekeepers. Our citizens can feel the same pride about the way we have waged war.
SEPTEMBER 9 | Myna Man
During my visit to the ANA mullah, I had noticed two myna birds running around the room. I knew that Afghans like to tame these birds, but it was incongruous to see two of them in an army barracks. I have met the owner of the mynas several times over the past month.
Abdul Jalala is a twenty-six-year-old Tajik who has been in the ANA for seven years now. He signed a three-year contract and then extended it for a further five years.
Abdul has liked birds since he was a child. He describes the taming process with a fondness for his creatures that is almost parental. It begins when the bird is a hatchling. Abdul will feed it tiny scraps of food by hand and give it water from a dropper. After several weeks Abdul Jalala, myna man of this, the bird bonds to him and recognizes him as its parent. It is something to see the tiny creatures run after him in his barracks and even outside.
Abdul Jalala, myna man