by Ray Wiss
Mom and Dad and the yellow ribbon
Back at the Mirage base, I reported to the administration office to collect my passport and to complete the out-clearance procedures. I then spent the last few hours sitting quietly by myself, processing what I had been through yesterday.
The connections in Europe and Toronto were good, and it only took a little over twenty-five hours to make it all the way back home to Sudbury. I had flown from the Middle East in civilian clothing, as we must in order not to upset the “host nation.” In Toronto, however, I changed into my combat uniform. I may have left as a civilian but I was coming home as a soldier.
When we landed in Sudbury, I called Claude on my cell phone to confirm that she had already arrived at the airport. A minute later, I was holding my wife and daughter in my arms. This gave me a more profound sense of well-being than I had ever experienced.
On the way home, Michelle could not get enough of me. She said that she’d had “tears of happy” in her eyes when she saw my plane land. She insisted that I sit right beside her in the back seat. I was more than happy to oblige.
The drive home was the reverse of the drive to the airport four months earlier. We stopped at my parents’ home, where the lamppost had been festooned with a gigantic yellow ribbon. Much hugging and handshaking ensued.
Then Claude, Michelle and I continued on to our house, where we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the backyard, talking and playing and laughing.
I have returned from my country’s wars.
I am home.
* Addendum, back home after the tour: Sure enough, Mom came through big time. She wrote to me every day, expressing her support and pride. Those messages kept me going.
* The clerks who took care of my “in-processing” were razor sharp. The fact that they had processed my paperwork in a heartbeat already made them aces in my books. Then one of them, Master Seaman Carole Dubois, noticed that the danger and hardship bonuses I was entitled to in 2007–08 had not been paid. I’ll be getting that on my paycheque next month!
† This is a course on ultrasound for emergency physicians that I designed in 2001. It has been given to over five thousand Canadian physicians since then, and has strongly influenced the way emergency medicine is practised in our country.
* And yet the war has definitely touched KAF. The medical company headquarters was hit by a rocket a few weeks ago. It landed right outside the building, but it broke apart instead of detonating. The fuse flew through the sergeant-major’s window, and the high-explosive warhead crashed through a wall. Far more seriously, another rocket detonated on the camp and seriously wounded two Coalition soldiers.
* Under the Taliban, all manner of entertainment was banned, including television, movies, music, dancing, most sports and even kite flying. This last was particularly cruel, since it is historically the most popular activity among Afghan children, and one that can be done even by the very poor. Ironically, the Taliban now use kites as a means to communicate.
* The equivalent of a private in the combat engineers.
* An area in flat, open terrain where the vehicles of the combat team will set up in a rough circle, with the heavy guns of the vehicles facing outwards, much like the wagon trains of old.
* For example, “Battle for Afghanistan a Fight for Young Minds,” The Globe and Mail, May 25, 2009.
* My work brought me into close daily contact with the CF medical personnel of the FOBs I served at. Since these characters reappear regularly, I’ve placed descriptions of them at the beginning of each section, even though these words were written several weeks later, after I had gotten to know them well.
* Postscript, July 27: Nick has kept up with his antics on this tour. He recently shot the FOB Wilson UMS fridge, mortally wounding a diet Coke, two pineapple yogurts and a litre of milk. The CF takes a pretty dim view of “accidental discharges.” Although the consequences were humorous, they could have been far worse.
* This was essentially a vice-regal position—Paul Bremmer’s authority in Iraq was absolute, and he answered only to President George W. Bush.
* Pervez Musharraf went on to overthrow Nawaz Sharif in a military coup in October 1999 and to serve as the de facto head of state of Pakistan until August 2008.
* Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008).
* Some of these minefields were made up of brightly coloured pieces of plastic, often in the shape of a bird or small animal. They were meant to resemble children’s toys. It was difficult for the Afghans to convince their children not to pick them up. The small explosive charge on these weapons would not kill the child outright, but it was more than enough to blow off a hand or mutilate a face. It was a barbaric but effective way of driving people off their land, to make it more difficult for the resistance to continue. This is the kind of thing the Afghans have been going through for a generation— something to keep in mind when you hear about how difficult it is for Afghans to trust outsiders.
* I have to give the general his due here. The word is that a group of soldiers had been assembled to speak to him at KAF yesterday. For some reason, these soldiers spent nearly an hour waiting in the sun while the general listened to yet another briefing. When he finally joined them and learned how long they had been waiting, the general tore a strip off the officer in charge of his schedule.
*The UMS medic would go on to make the same mistake a week later, assessing a patient by looking only at the front of the body and then telling me, “He’s fine. He’s got nothing.” The patient was lying on a stretcher and seemed uncomfortable, so I ran my hands along his back. This is called a “wet check” and is used to look for any external bleeding. The “wet check” was positive: my hands were covered in blood when I pulled them away. When I looked at the patient’s back, I noted two large shrapnel wounds. For the UMS medic to make this mistake once was bad enough. It was inexcusable for him to make it twice. I had spoken to him quietly after the first incident. Now, I had no choice but to discipline him, speaking to him rather harshly and documenting the incident for my superiors. As I have commented on many times before, the training the medics receive makes them almost universally superb. But “almost” is not “always” and commanders must recognize when a corrective needs to be applied. Errors like this can kill, and that is unacceptable.
* Taliban is the plural. Talib is the singular. It means “seeker of truth.”
* Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006).
† Even in societies run by Islamic fundamentalists, the appeal of martyrdom drops off sharply after one reaches maturity. Osama bin Laden said that “only fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds are useful for Jihad” (by which he meant suicide missions). Once you have a family, the consequences of suicide are much more severe. Once you have children, you have a stake in the future.
* The national celebration of Quebecers. It is equivalent to the July 1 celebration in the rest of Canada. Quebec celebrates both holidays, but St-Jean-Baptiste Day has the bigger parties.
* For the non-medical types: I am engaging here in the lowest form of humour, the pun. Photophobia is a medical term meaning that the patient finds bright lights painful. It does not mean a dislike of having your picture taken, which is the way I am using the term here.
* After we got home, Major Tim Arsenault told me that he had run into Haji Baran several weeks after this encounter. He was still pain-free and very happy with the care he had received.
* These deaths are important in the story of Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Sergeant Short and Corporal Beerenfenger were the first Canadians killed by enemy action. Four Canadians had been killed in April 2002, but that had been at the hands of an American F-16 bomber pilot who proved to be as callous and devoid of remorse as he was incompetent. Corporal Murphy would be the last Canadian to be killed in combat for over two years
, until the CF came to Kandahar to challenge the Taliban on their home turf.
* This was a battle group centred on a battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment and commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Omer Lavoie. The battle group had only recently arrived in Afghanistan, taking over from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry battle group commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ian Hope. After having only a couple of weeks to get acclimatized, its members found themselves in the fight of their lives. Readers interested in learning more about the events leading up to Op Medusa are encouraged to read Chris Wattie’s book Contact Charlie: The Canadian Army, the Taliban and the Battle that Saved Afghanistan (Toronto: Key Porter, 2008), which details the incredible accomplishments of Task Force Orion, the first Canadians to fight in Kandahar province in 2006.
* This was the very well planned and executed attack on the Sarposa jail in Kandahar City in June 2008. Taliban suicide bombers rushed the jail, destroying the gates and killing several guards when they detonated themselves. Other Taliban then entered the jail and freed several hundred of their comrades. It was a masterstroke, arguably the most successful Taliban military accomplishment of the war. But even that had to be done under cover of darkness and with a rapid retreat, or else they would have been massacred.
* The most recent edition of this book is David Grossman and Loren W. Christensen, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, 3rd ed. (Warrior Science Publications, 2008); the Bigger Bang Theory is described on pages 69–70.
* I could not have written this section without the gracious and patient help of Captain Sandy Cooper, “Battle Captain” of the tank squadron, whose knowledge of the tank world in general and of the Afghan mission in particular is encyclopedic.
* This is less than the Latinos get. The company uses a pay formula based on the gross domestic product of the employee’s home country. The theory is that all employees will enjoy a similar standard of living when they return home. That strikes me as logical and exploitive at the same time.
* This is an important distinction to make. Armies that go to war from time to time get to “practise.” It is a lot harder to keep your warrior edge in peacetime.
* Readers interested in learning more about the Medak incident are encouraged to read Carol Off’s book The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: The Story of Canada’s Secret War (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2004).
* The engineer equivalent of a platoon.
* A horrifying but valuable eyewitness account of the after-effects of war is Donovan Webster’s booKAFtermath: The Remnants of War: From Landmines to Chemical Warfare— The Devastating Effects of Modern Combat (New York: Vintage, 1998).
* For history buffs: a claymore was a heavy Scottish broadsword. Wielded by an angry Highlander stoked on single-malt scotch, it could cut a person in half.
* Ironically, on the day the news of this law broke, one of Karzai’s main campaign stops was with a women’s organization: 2,500 women, none of them in burka, were there to meet him. I wonder how that went.
† “Afghanada” is an informal name for the Canadian area of operations: Zhari-Pan-jwayi and, until recently, Arghandab district. Also a CBC radio show of the same name.
‡ Having just written that, I cannot believe how completely my perception of risk has changed over the past three months. Someone has just fired two bullets at the football-field-sized area I live in, and I consider it “minor harassment.”
* There is a perfectly good abbreviation in French for FOB—BOA: Base opérationelle avancée. Considering we are Combat Team Cobra, you would think “BOA” would have caught on, to keep the serpentine theme going. But no.
* In his Remembrance Day House of Commons Speech, November 11, 1947.
† “Afghan Election Victory Claimed by Rivals,” CBC.ca, August 21, 2009, www.cbc.ca/ world/story/2009/08/21/afghanistan-election-results021.html?ref=rss.
* “Afghan Voter Turnout Low, Officials Say,” CBC.ca, August 20, 2009, www.cbc.ca/ crossroads-afghanistan/story/2009/08/20/afghanistan-election-polling-president.html.
* “Kandahar Blast Kills Dozens,” CBC .ca, August 25, 2009, www.cbc.ca/world/ story/2009/08/25/afghanistan-violence025.html.
* Who wishes it known that he quit smoking shortly after this picture was taken.
* David Grossman and Loren W. Christensen, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, 3rd ed. (Warrior Science Publications, 2008) at 181.
* This occurs when stress overloads the nervous system and the body starts to exclude certain stimuli. Soldiers in combat will think that their rifles are making barely audible popping sounds. Others will feel no pain from severe wounds. What I experienced is common: the loss of peripheral vision. If you recognize this when it happens, it can be compensated for by scanning right to left. In my case, I got myself together (and my normal vision came back) a few seconds after I left the mess tent.
* He missed the disastrous mission to Somalia because it occurred during one of the few times he was posted to a “straight leg” infantry battalion. (“Straight leg” is a slightly derogatory term used by paratroopers to denote non-parachute infantry. The term evokes the need to bend one’s legs when doing a parachute landing.)
* Although it does not lessen the tragic nature of what is going on today, it is worth remembering that the sum total of all the casualties caused by the war since the Coalition invaded in 2001 is only a small percentage of the number of Afghans who died in the same length of time during the Russian occupation: possibly as many as a million people.
* Which we keep on the FOB to issue to young soldiers of both genders before they go on HLTA. What did you think?
* Quoted by Sandra Martin in “Plight of Afghan Women Prompts Fresh Debate,” The Globe and Mail, April 17, 2009, http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAMRTGAM.20090417.wafghan-martin17/BNStory/International/homeBNStory/International/home.
* Although the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador garnered more international attention, Guatemala’s was the bloodiest. The best estimates are that 200,000 people, most of them indigenous Mayans, were killed by the army and government-supported death squads.
* The worst was the bombing of Air India Flight 182 on June 23, 1985, where 280 of the 329 people killed were Canadian citizens. It is dismaying that many Canadians do not consider this a uniquely Canadian tragedy because these victims were “hyphenated Canadians” of Indian descent. For a moving portrayal of the bombing as a Canadian tragedy, see Anita Rau Badami’s novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2006).
* Robert Fowler, interviewed by Peter Mansbridge, CBC.ca, September 9, 2009, www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/09/09/f-robert-fowler-transcript2.html.
* Margaret Wente, “The Tragedy of Good Intentions,” The Globe and Mail, September 1 6 , 2 0 0 9 , w w w.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-tragedy-of-good-intentions/article1290304/.
† From our point of view on the FOB s, they do a poor job of reporting everything else. Major Arsenault and the “Bastards” at FOB Wilson were not visited by a reporter until August, when their tour was two-thirds over.
* To my knowledge, this has never happened in the decade we have been using ultrasound in emergency medicine in Canada. The organization formed to supervise the use of ultrasound in emergency medicine in Canada, the Canadian Emergency Ultrasound Society, has by far the most demanding requirements for certification of any such national body in the world.
* Lieutenant Colonel John Conrad, What the Thunder Said: Reflections of a Canadian Officer in Kandahar (Toronto: Dundurn, 2009).
Epilogue 2010
APRIL 30 | Looking Ahead
The seven months since my return home have been a roller coaster. The book tour for FOB Doc, combined with the pent-up demand for my ultrasound course, made the fall months exhausting. I had barely recovered from that when, in mid-January, we flew to Vietnam to adopt our second daughter. I am overjoyed to report that she has progressed faster th
an we could have dared hope. It is like watching infancy on fast-forward. At this rate, she will have caught up by the time she is ready to go to junior kindergarten. Best of all, Michelle has proven to be an extraordinary older sister. She is loving, kind, patient and invariably generous with her younger sibling.
Julianne has had quite an introduction to Canada. Six weeks after she arrived here, Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to Sudbury to attend an award ceremony put on for me by the local Rotary Club, in recognition of my service in Afghanistan and in emergency medicine. At the dinner, I could not help but reflect on my little girl’s extraordinary journey. Less than three months earlier, she had been facing dire prospects in a heartbreakingly poor orphanage in the developing world. Now, she was having dinner with the prime minister of Canada. I was extremely proud to be living in one of the very few nations on Earth where something like this can happen. We live in a great country!
My Girlzzz
I follow the news about Afghanistan as closely as possible, and worry a great deal about what the outcome will be. I can understand the emotion behind the desire of so many Canadians to have us withdraw in 2011, but I cannot see the logic of this course of action. If going to war in Afghanistan was the right thing to do in 2001, what will have changed in the intervening ten years to make that no longer the case? The enemy has not changed, and the penalty for failure now includes the nightmare scenario of the re-emergence of a hard-line Taliban theocracy that goes on to destabilize Pakistan, the only nuclear-armed Islamic state. The consequences of a nuclear war, even if it is brief and limited to the Indian subcontinent, are unimaginable. The political consequences of a NATO/UN failure, which would be a failure of the world’s democratic nations, would also be catastrophic.
Julianne, Claude, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Michelle and yours truly—Sudbury, 2010 (Courtesy Deb Ransom, Official Photographer for the Prime Minister)
Much will depend on the effects of the American surge over the next two summers’ fighting seasons, campaigns in which Canada will continue to play a very active role. As this book goes to the printers, the Canadian battle group is gearing up for a major push into the Taliban-infested areas of western Panjwayi. I am certain they will emerge victorious, but at what cost and to what long-term effect? While this war could be lost by a premature withdrawal of Coalition forces from the battlefield, it will not be won by foreign armies. Rather, success in Afghanistan will depend on three things.