For Your Tomorrow

by Melanie Murray

  “Oh—the garbage kids,” the soldier says, craning his neck. “No, they don’t live anywhere.”

  “How do they survive?”

  “They’re orphans. Most of them don’t.”

  Coffee in hand, he sips and savours the familiar flavour, ready to head over to Canadian headquarters. The penetrating wail of a siren, then “Rocket attack … rocket attack … rocket attack” blares around the square. Everyone around him scrambles for cover, scurrying to one of the concrete bunkers. Jeff vaults the railing and dives beneath the boardwalk onto his belly, his duck-and-cover training reflexively kicking in. He knows it’s an insurgent missile launch from the surrounding mountains, a daily and nightly occurrence at the base. Most rockets miss the airfield and explode in the desert. But some have crashed in laneways, smashed into buildings—white-hot chunks of metal slamming into walls, wounding soldiers and civilians. Face down, inhaling the earthy smell, he hears the distant thud of a dud missile hitting the ground. A long two minutes until the all-clear sounds. He crawls out of the dark recess, brushes the dust off his uniform. He grins at the large black-and-red sign hanging at the far end of the square:

  WELCOME TO KANDAHAR AIRFIELD

  A few days later, Jeff and his Lucky 13 team make their first foray outside the wire, outside the relative security of the KAF compound. Their LAV joins the convoy heading west down Highway 1 into the Panjwaii Peninsula south of the Arghandab River. The paved two-lane road is flowing with taxis, mopeds, bicycles, donkey carts, gaudily painted pickup trucks jingling with sparkling baubles, and pedestrians—children, and men talking on cellphones. On this main artery—“Ambush Alley”—IEDs are common. Perched in the commander’s hatch, Jeff scans the trees, ditches and mud walls, alert for anything suspicious. His cells thrum on redcode alert: This is for real. Someone out there wants to kill me. He watches and waits for the unexpected. Every approaching vehicle and person undergoes threat assessment—a rusty white Toyota Corolla, a burka-clad figure, an innocent-looking boy. They’ve all been suicide bombers.

  The convoy veers south off the highway onto a gravel track. They pass lean-tos, ragged tarps ravaged by the wind. Roaming camels tug on clumps of grass. Carcasses of military vehicles, residue of two decades of futile war with the Soviets, litter the landscape. Black-haired boys shimmy up the gun barrel of a rusted tank and swing off the end. These are children who’ve known only war; the sounds of gunfire and bomb blasts have been as familiar to them as the blazing sun and sifting sand. They shout and wave, and Jeff returns a smiling salute.

  His neck and shoulders are taut with tension, his skin clammy with sweat under his body armour as they wind up a jagged mountain trail and reach the summit of Ma’Sum Ghar. Canadians and the Afghan National Army occupy the two-hectare forward observation base (FOB), one of the central posts of Task Force 1-07’s operations. Its commanding view of the villages, roads, and river crossings allows them to monitor the most crucial area of Kandahar province. He dismounts, removes his two-kilogram steel helmet, and empties a canteen of water over his dust-smeared face. It’s the longest thirty kilometres he has ever driven.

  At six the next morning, he emerges from the fetid tent—fifty male bodies in a cramped space—inhales the cool mountain air. The rising sun gilds the brown bluffs with a copper sheen. The cloudless cobalt sky unfurls like the wide prairie skies back in Manitoba. Outside the front entrance of the compound, turban-wearing men with shaggy beards wait to begin work for the day—filling sandbags, emptying outhouses and packing garbage. A mangy feral cat slinks around the Dumpster by the gate. It’s calm, even peaceful; just as its Pashtu name denotes—Ma’Sum, “quiet,” and Ghar, “mountain.” Then the chopping of a helicopter slices the silence and reminds him why he’s here. Today they’ll patrol in a nearby village to establish their military presence and secure the area so the provincial reconstruction team and international aid agencies can do their work. He has already observed the results of their efforts—repairs to roads, bridges, schools and irrigation systems.

  Jeff and his team march through mud-walled villages that could harbour Taliban cells—most of them do. They tramp down maze-like alleys, their combat boots raising dust along the narrow footpaths. Striding in single file, eyes wary, slowly sweeping a wide arc, they inspect the dirt for wires or signs of tampering, look over the earthen walls, check to the rear, and scan the distance. It’s like being in a time warp, Jeff thinks, like stepping back hundreds of years. The low flat-roofed houses made of mud bricks have no electricity or running water. He’s reminded of the mud huts his Scottish ancestors lived in three centuries ago.

  Old men with brown ancient faces—moulded by sun, wind and war—lean against the sandy walls of the compounds. The bright inquisitive eyes of children stare at him. But there’s an eerie absence of women. Sometimes he glimpses one through a small window, a shadowy figure peeking through the screened mesh of a black veil. For them, he knows, it’s more like the Dark Ages—forbidden to appear in public without a male relative, routinely physically abused. He thinks about academics with their “cultural relativism” rhetoric, claiming that all social beliefs and customs are equally valid and dependent on the cultural environment. Beam them down from their ivory towers, he thinks, to walk a mile across the scorching sand in a burka.

  A month later, in mid-March, Jeff and his crew transfer six kilometres west to Forward Observation Base Sperwan Ghar, a sandy outcrop at the base of the Panjwaii Peninsula. Pashtu for “dusty mountain,” Sperwan Ghar was created by the Russians, who trucked in thousands of loads of sand from the southern Registan Desert. Here in the Taliban heartland, their forward observation team will provide artillery support to Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. As they twist up the gravel road to the FOB, Jeff thinks they could be entering a fort in the Wild West. Thick walls of mud and sandbags, topped with barbed wire, fortify the border. Soldiers keep watch in a lookout tower that flies the red Maple Leaf alongside the black-red-green-striped flag of Afghanistan.

  The Lucky 13 team are manning the observation post isolated on the steep summit of the mountain. They settle into their sleeping quarters beneath the OP, a bunk room built into a round concrete reservoir once used for collecting rainwater. They spread their sleeping bags on the green canvas cots lined along the plywood walls. A large Canadian flag hangs on the end wall; a calendar tacked to another—X’s marking off the days. A corner table holds a kettle, tea bags, coffee grinder, coffee beans, bottled water; above it a wooden sign—SPER BUCKS. With electricity and air conditioning, it’s deluxe by outpost standards. They call it “the Hotel.” Outside the entrance, Jeff nails up a plywood shingle: HOME OF LUCKY 13.

  The morning after they arrive, Jeff is loading equipment in the LAV for their patrol to checkpoint five; a vaguely familiar voice calls out, “Oh my god, you look like your father!”

  He glances up into the smiling face of a soldier with chestnut hair, the same colour that his was—when he had hair. The years fall away. He’s back in a tree fort in the Oromocto woods playing with his two cousins. “Jason?”

  “Hey, Jeff, good to see you,” he says, extending his hand. “I was wondering when we’d run into each other.” Their dads are cousins, both soldiers stationed at CFB Gagetown in the seventies.

  “Dad told me that you and Stephen were over here—somewhere,” Jeff says, grinning. “It’s been a long time. Maybe … twenty years?”

  “Hard to believe.” Jason shakes his head. “Seems like only yesterday we were lining up toy soldiers on the basement floor, eh?” He chuckles. “Now here we are,” he says, spreading his arms, “trying to stay alive in this godforsaken desert.”

  Jeff knows that as a combat engineer, in the most heavily mined country in the world, Jason has one of the toughest jobs in the army. “I don’t even want to know how many IEDs you’ve found.”

  “This whole fuckin’ desert is a junkyard of old Soviet anti-tank mines and artillery shells,” Jason says. “And those bastards are rigging them t
ogether to make bombs that get bigger and bigger.” He looks down at his grimy combat boots. “The really sobering part is cleaning up after a strike.”

  Jeff appraises his own seventeen-tonne armoured vehicle, then meets his cousin’s hazel eyes. “It’s good to know that you and Stephen are here. And we’ll be on operations together,” he says, clapping Jason on the shoulder. “Nothing better than family covering your back.”

  In the saffron light of dawn, the faint tones of the Muslim call to prayer drift up into the lookout tower where Jeff stands guard duty—Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. Surrounded by radar and thermal imaging detectors, he peers through high-powered binoculars at the brown cliffs pocked with caves. But for the eroding force of the wind, the inhospitable mountain terrain has changed little since Alexander the Great crossed it two thousand years ago, and—local legend says—stopped nearby to wash his hair in the Arghandab River. A stone’s throw away stretches the Zharey District, the site of fierce battles with the Taliban last summer that killed twelve Canadian soldiers.

  Just beyond the outpost’s battlements, smoke plumes from a peat fire in the village of Sperwan Ghar. Farmers amble along dirt tracks trodden by centuries of camel trains, on their way to work in fields striped with mud walls and canals from the river. A variegated green patchwork of orchards and vineyards, splotched with squat brown grape-drying huts. The improved security and reconstruction have allowed displaced villagers to re-occupy their homes; children are again attending school. He smiles. The number of Afghan girls being educated has risen from 12,000 under the Taliban to 1.2 million. He imagines young girls in headscarves opening a book, holding a pencil for the very first time.

  Some days he attends shuras with village elders—the jirga—a council of men with great grey beards and pagray, Pashtun turbans wound with ends dangling to their shoulders. In the shade of some mulberry trees, he sits cross-legged with them on the sand and sips hot sweet tea. “Dersi, very good,” he says, nodding, “mananna, thank you.” Brown ankles creased with white cracks peek from beneath their loose frayed kameez. He looks into their lined, weathered faces and explains why the Canadian military is here—to help them get on with their lives without Taliban interference. As the translator talks, Jeff wishes he’d spent those eight months of language training in Saint-Jean learning something useful—like Pashtu. The only phrase he understands with any certainty is one that’s peppered throughout the Afghan soldiers’ conversations: Insh’Allah, “God willing,” they say, palms turned up towards the sky.

  With dark, penetrating eyes, the elders listen to Jeff, and then to his translator, as if they are reading him. Then they talk about the needs of their village: blankets, cooking pots, tarps, a new well for clean drinking water. In heated tones, they complain about the corrupt Afghan National Police, say they don’t know who they can trust. “The Canadian military is not here to control or occupy your country,” Jeff says, pointing to the flag on his sleeve. “We are here to help you rebuild your village and to keep the Taliban away so you can live in peace. But to do that, we need your help. You need to tell us where they’re hiding and where they are planting their bombs.”

  The men exchange glances, talk amongst themselves; they’ve heard that the soldiers who wear the red leaf are not like the Russians, or the Americans. “We want your help,” the head elder says, “but if you come here too often, the Taliban will make war on our village. They have spies everywhere. In the next village, they killed many men for talking to foreign soldiers and hung their headless bodies from the trees as a warning.”

  As they explain Pashtu clans and Pashtunwali—their code of honour and fealty to tribal chiefs, their proud warrior tradition—Jeff is again struck with déjà vu. They are so like the stories he’s read about his own Murray ancestors and the feuding clans in the Scottish Highlands centuries ago.

  One evening in late March, Jeff is lounging against their sandbagged outpost, enraptured by the big blue eyes and toothless smile of his son, photos that arrived today with his mom’s letter. He’s lost in that other world—Ry’s baby bubbles of sound, his soft plump cheeks—when a distressed voice disturbs his reverie: “Just got a call on the radio from the CO at Ma’Sum Ghar,” says his sergeant, Clay Cochrane. “They need a LAV over there—pronto.”

  “Let’s wait a bit—see if the call comes in again,” Jeff says, tucking the photos into the book on his knee—Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban.

  “How are we going to get it there?” Clay asks, starting to figure out the logistics of their route.

  “Never mind, Clay. We’re not going.”

  “What do you mean? Aren’t you going to call?”

  “No. Just ignore it. It’ll go away.” Ma’Sum Ghar is no more than six kilometres away, but in southern Afghanistan that’s an odyssey. The dirt road between the two FOBs, Route Foster, is known as “IED Alley”—the second most dangerous road in the world. In the last twenty-six days, thirteen IED strikes in a five-kilometre stretch of road. Don’t volunteer for anything. “No point risking the drive unless we have to.”

  Clay regards him, then sinks down onto a sandbag. “You’re right,” he sighs.

  “Today we drove over an IED that didn’t go off,” Jeff says, folding his arms across his chest. “One of the engineers told me it was big enough to blast us all into the next world.”

  “What the fuck …,” Clay says with an uncertain smile. “Maybe there is something to this Lucky 13 stuff.”

  BACK IN EASTERN PASSAGE, Marion and Russ live on a precipice. They too survive one day at a time, one hour at a time, until the next news report or phone call from Jeff. Marion tries to imagine him “standing on guard”—even though ten Canadian soldiers have been killed since he’s been there, eight from IEDs. Her days and many sleepless nights are consumed with worry over the dangers her son might be facing. With every hourly lead-in to the CBC radio news, her body stiffens with apprehension. She doesn’t want to hear, but needs to hear, and wears her radio-MP3 player—a gift from Jeff—whenever she’s away from home. One day she is lined up at the checkout in Superstore—“this just in from Afghanistan; two Canadian soldiers killed.” Names aren’t released. She abandons her shopping cart, rushes home to check further reports on television and the internet, and to call Jeff’s base in Shilo. She paces, on the brink of hope and despair, until identities are confirmed.

  She spends her days writing letters and collecting items for parcels to send to Jeff and his comrades: boxes of Jeff’s favourite nutritional Cliff Bars; beef jerky to tuck in his pockets when he goes on patrol; trail mix, chips, crackers, rice cakes, vacuum-packed dips and salsa; flavoured Crystal-Lite powder to mask the taste of the water; Starbucks coffee beans and a coffee grinder; magazines—Men’s Health, MacLean’s, Military History Quarterly; sunscreen with the highest SPF; room deodorizers for the sleeping quarters; deodorant, shaving cream, razors, moisturizers, hand sanitizers, skipping ropes; and mini-photo albums of the latest pictures of Ry.

  They wait for Jeff’s calls by satellite phone from his desert observation post. They scrutinize the tone of his voice and every word for clues. What is happening? How is he coping? He doesn’t talk about the details of his work or the dangers; doesn’t mention his black, swollen eye from falling into a hole during night patrol and getting smacked by his night-vision goggles. He reassures them that he’s stationed in a secure area where peace has been restored. They save all his messages from calls they’ve missed, replay them over and over when they haven’t heard from him for a few days: “Hi guys. It’s me, just calling to say hi. Everything’s good here, couldn’t be better. I’ll try to call again soon. Love you.” The sound of his voice, though fuzzy and faraway, comforts them—Yes, he has the training, intelligence and endurance to sustain him.

  Darkness hangs over the days—storm clouds of discontent, impatience, foreboding. Especially since Easter Sunday—six Canadian soldiers killed when their LAV struck an IED. Since then, Russ h
as a harder time convincing Marion, and himself, that their son is out of harm’s way. “As a FOO, Jeff stays mainly in his observation post,” Russ repeats. “He isn’t travelling the roads as much as infantry soldiers.” But six soldiers—all from the Maritimes—in a LAV. It hits too close to home. They live each day merely to get through to the next, to cross another one off the calendar; determined to push through, to think positively. Of course Jeff will come home safely; he has to return to raise his baby son.

  In her small condo in Toronto, Sylvie adjusts to a double dose of new reality: a first-time mother with her spouse eleven thousand kilometres away in a country at war. By giving birth, she has been initiated into the powers of life and death; just as Jeff has, soldiering in a combat zone. In the mythic realm of the Aztecs, warriors killed in battle shared a special heaven—the house of the sun—with mothers who died in childbirth. And the journey of becoming a mother parallels that of a soldier; it also demands the giving over of oneself to the life of another. Now that baby Ry is safely here, Sylvie faces all the trials of new motherhood, alone. She learns how to care for her infant son; suffers sleep deprivation; soothes a colicky baby, a teething baby, a feverish baby—while longing for Jeff. A static undercurrent of anxiety disturbs her hours, days, weeks and months.

  She rocks her nursing son, enfolded in white flannelette; inhales his just-bathed sweetness and finger-curls his feathery wisps of hair. On the table beside them, a bouquet of yellow roses shines in the sinking sun, twelve rose candles. They arrived today, as they do in the middle of every month—All My Love, Jeff. Like a pendulum, the rocker glides back and forth, back and forth, marking time, as she waits—again—for her warrior’s return.

  Fais dodo, colas mon p’tit frère

  Fais dodo, t’auras du lolo

  Si tu fais dodo

  Maman vient bientôt

  Si tu ne dors pas

  Papa s’en ira.