For Your Tomorrow (2 page)

The driver, Master Corporal Colin Bason, stares into the dust trail of the RG a hundred metres ahead. Clammy in his damp sand-coloured uniform, he longs for the temperate August heat of Burnaby, British Columbia—home—where he’ll cradle his five-month-old daughter, Vienna, born just four days before he came here.

In the seat beside him, Captain Matt Dawe gazes dreamily out the tinted front window, envisioning his golden-haired boy, Lucas, blowing out two candles on his birthday cake. He remembers the rush of holding his firstborn child, two years ago on this day; wonders if Lucas will also become a soldier—like his father, uncles and grandfather before him. When he arrives back at the base, he’ll call home, wish his son a happy birthday, tell him that Daddy will be home soon and bring his present.

In the back of the RG, Corporal Jordan Anderson, soothed by the drone of the engine, is half-asleep. He’s imagining the celebrations when he gets back home to Iqaluit, just before his twenty-sixth birthday, and just in time for him and Amanda to celebrate their second wedding anniversary.

Corporal Cole Bartsch, in the gunner’s seat, glimpses the gravelly desert through the slit of a window. He’s reminded of home in northern Alberta. He can’t wait to be back there, and drive his ATV into the prairie wilderness in August, to fish and camp without fear of rocket-propelled grenades, suicide bombers and IEDs.

The youngest of the crew, twenty-year-old Private Lane Watkins, pictures himself scooping up grounders at the field in Clearwater, Manitoba, with the baseball glove he’s
carried in his rucksack halfway around the world. He’ll soon get to meet his three-month-old niece and namesake, Chloe Coleen Lane, named by his brother in honour of Lane’s service to his country.

At age thirty-six the eldest of the crew, Captain Jeff Francis looks around, comparing the RG with the LAV he usually rides in with his forward observation team. It was a couple of kilometres away after the operation wound up, so he’s caught a ride in Matt’s vehicle. The windows are a bonus, he thinks, and it’s the army’s safest vehicle—but it’s lacking the secure homey feeling of his LAV,
Lucky 13
. Through the narrow windows, the parched landscape rolls by. He daydreams about cool, clear water and August at Fanjoy’s Point. He’ll take his son, Ry—nine months old by then—to Grand Lake for the first time. They will sit on the sun-warmed slabs of southern New Brunswick sandstone, and Ry can kick his chubby legs in the water. When he talked with his mom there two days ago, she was repainting the bedroom, setting up a crib, getting everything ready for him, Ry and Sylvie to come to the cottage when he returns. Then they’ll go to Malagash, to his granny’s land on the Northumberland Strait. Ry can splash in the salty waves, dig his dimpled hands into the rippled sandbar.

Out the tinted window he glimpses a patch of green, an oasis-like relief from the monotony of desert brown. The verdant tangle of vines a satisfying sign of why he’s here, of the life that’s returning for the people—like Hamid, the Afghan interpreter dozing beside him, whose real name Jeff will never know. Working for “the infidels,” this man
risks the lives of his entire family. If he were killed, he’d be buried in an unmarked grave, and his family couldn’t claim his body for fear of Taliban reprisal. And the soldiers of the Afghan National Army they’ve been mentoring these past months—comrades in this morning’s operation—are men, like himself, determined to protect their families and live in peace.

Step by small step, he feels they’re making a difference. Water is again sluicing through canals, irrigating this grape-field and bumper crops of melons and wheat. Fewer poppy fields mean less economic fuel for the Taliban’s terroristic machine. Girls are entering schoolhouses. Boys are playing soccer again in fields the Taliban once used for stoning women. He’ll soon be able to kick a soccer ball with his own son, dressed in the red-and-white soccer suit he bought for him in England, just before his deployment.

The thrill of fatherhood surges through him; a warm flush that has sustained him during stifling days and lonely nights; through slices of fear, and ramp ceremonies—his comrades’ flag-draped coffins. He believes that the tomorrow of an Afghan child is inextricably linked to that of his own son’s. Humanity, like terrorism, has no borders.
We are a spark beleaguered by darkness; this twinkle we make in a corner of emptiness
—a line from a poem, an English course at Carleton years ago, resurfaces in his memory. Sunlight beams through the emerald vines, shimmering like the poplar leaves outside his window when he awakens in the bunkhouse at Fanjoy’s Point.

——

The seven men feel the earth quake beneath them.

A thunderous explosion splits the air.

The RG-31 Nyala launches thirty metres up into the dust and smoke-filled sky.

Seven bodies suspend in space. Seven spirits hover by the thin wall.

In the commander’s hatch of the LAV fifty metres behind, Master Corporal Jason Francis is surveying the mud-brick barrier edging the vineyard, a young boy clambering along the top. A flash, as quick and sharp as lightning, pulls his eyes to the road ahead. A deafening boom muffles all sound for several seconds; then his ears are ringing as bullet-like pieces of rock ricochet off the LAV. A blast of fiery heat, the petroleum smell of cordite, as the gunner beside him bellows, “Contact!”

Sergeant Sean Connors hoists the hatch. A columnar cloud of smoke blackens the sky. “Ramp down, Mac!” he shouts. “Let’s go, guys, move! Get the mine detectors!

Franny, call one-niner. Tell the major I’m on my way to the site.”

He rounds the corner of his LAV. The RG’s crew compartment lies upside down, leaning against a mud wall—wheels, axles, engine block blown off. He races to the vehicle. “Hey, is everyone okay?” he calls. “Hey! Hey!”

Not a movement through the splintered windows.

Not a sound from within the steel-encased tomb.

“I can’t get inside,” Sergeant Connors shouts. “Call for the medics. They might still have a chance.”

——

In air acrid with smoke and diesel fumes, opaque with soot and powdery sand, combat engineers gape at the crater in the hard-packed gravel road—three metres wide, two metres deep. They shake their heads in disbelief.

Holy shit. That was one hell of a bomb
.

I’ve never seen anything like it
.

No vehicle could survive that
.

Nor any body. The steel-armoured mine-resistant hull, the specially designed seat belts, the heavy helmets couldn’t cushion the massive impact.

Seven spirits slip through the thin wall that’s only and always a heartbeat away.

The explosion reverberates across Iran, Iraq and Syria; rumbles under the seas of the azure Mediterranean; resounds over the wind-blown deserts of North Africa; rolls over the waves of the blue-grey Atlantic, and crashes onto the rock-bound shores of southern Nova Scotia. On this hot July day in Eastern Passage, sunlight sparkles on windless water, wispy white feathers of clouds. In a beige, red-roofed, three-storey house overlooking the open ocean, a mother of a Canadian soldier has just made herself a sandwich. She’s about to take her lunch out to eat on the sun-warmed deck when she’s halted by the radio, the tones signalling the CBC hourly news. Conditioned in the past five months that her son has been in Afghanistan, she stiffens, her heartbeat quickens.

Six Canadian soldiers killed by an IED
.

She puts the sandwich on the counter, her stomach knotted with fear.

She telephones CFB Shilo, her son’s home base, and probes military officials for details. “We are unable to release any information at this time.” A different response than the three previous calls that she’s made after the deaths of Canadian soldiers have been reported—three times since February when her son began his tour of duty.
This could mean the soldiers are from Shilo
.

She waits for the two-o’clock news, paces back and forth, back and forth, in front of the picture window overlooking the main road and the ocean beyond. A car, dark blue, approaches. A flag flutters from its aerial—a red maple leaf on white, a Canadian flag. It passes her driveway … slows … turns around. She screams. Her high-pitched wail penetrates through the walls into the rooms of the neighbouring house, pierces the windows of the blue sedan pulling into her driveway.

Panting and sobbing, she runs to the phone.

In his fourth floor office at Canadian Blood Services in Halifax, the manager of field logistics, Russ Francis, has just slung his backpack over his shoulder. He’s rushing off to a dentist’s appointment, anticipating a brisk walk through the Public Gardens, a city block of flowers, fragrant with roses and magnolia on this hot afternoon. He doesn’t drive his car to work; he prefers crossing the harbour on the passenger ferry, inhaling the bracing salt air. A walk is just what he needs right now to ease the anxiety curdling in his stomach. A colleague told him, half an hour ago, about the news report.
Good god—six more gone
. He’s about to close his office
door behind him when the phone rings. Should he answer it? He’s running late. He glances at his watch, then back at the phone, ringing, pulling him back to grab it from its cradle.

“Come home!” Marion cries. “People in uniforms are getting out of a car. They’re coming up the stairs.” Her voice clotted with panic and horror.

“Oh my god,” he says. “I’ll have to get a drive. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Disaster has struck
. He has to think, think logically. He can’t feel, yet. He has to find their driver, Joanne. He has to get home and be with Marion. As he hangs up, a co-worker appears at his door with a sheaf of papers, a wide smile on her face.

“Lisa,” he says, calmly. “I need to find Joanne. I need to get home. They just killed Jeff.”

The driver manoeuvres the van through the tourist-crowded streets, speeds across the span of the Murray Mackay Bridge and down the busy four-lane highway. “Joanne, slow down,” Russ says. “Getting there any quicker isn’t going to change anything. Just get me home safely.” He needs the time, the twenty-five minutes, to prepare for what he’s about to face—to deal with the people who are there, to be strong for Marion.
Stay in control, be level-headed, work with the situation. Maybe he’s wounded—not likely
.

Marion stands at the threshold, resolute:
I won’t answer the door. If I don’t answer the door it won’t be possible
. A faint hope arises—
maybe he’s only wounded
. She clutches the doorknob, buoyed by possibility. She bolts out the front door to meet
three soldiers trudging up the stairs—the grim-faced messengers of Death.

“G
ET THOSE GUYS OUT
of there! Get them off the ground!” I shouted at the radio when the news announced the deaths of six Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. By 10 a.m., the identities of four of them were confirmed.

Now, waiting for the next report, I dwell in a limbo of fear, a refrain replaying in my mind:
this couldn’t happen to Jeff … to my sister … we’ve already sacrificed one of our men, our father, to the maw of the military
. Faced with the randomness of roadside bombs, Jeff has survived so far. In only four weeks, he’ll be home—home to begin a whole new phase of his life, as a father to his beautiful son, born just ten weeks before he left for Afghanistan. When he comes back in August, he’ll be posted to Toronto, where Sylvie works for Air Canada. They’ll begin their life together as a family. The map of his future is laid out, just waiting for him to return and step into it.

I try to stave off my trepidation, glad I have my packing to keep me occupied. On this sweltering July morning, I’m in a flurry of washing clothes and organizing suitcases for our trip to Halifax tomorrow. My younger son, Gabriel, and I will spend six weeks in the Maritimes, escape the motorized whirr of the Kelowna suburbs—the lawn mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, power washers, hedge trimmers; trade it all for the rushing waves of the
Northumberland Strait and the undulating call of the loons on Grand Lake.

Just before eleven, the phone rings. The voice on the line sounds at once familiar and strange. “Melanie, it’s Russ,” a timorous tone I’ve never heard from my gregarious brother-in-law.
Is something wrong? He must be calling about picking us up at the airport tomorrow
.

“Jeff was one of the soldiers killed this morning.”

It’s as if I’ve been jolted with thousands of volts of electrical current. Stunned and numbed, I can’t move, or speak.
Not Jeff … please … not Jeff
.

“No!” I want him to take back the words.
This can’t be possible
. In the background, I hear my sister moaning, keening for her son. I need to be there, to hold her.

A former military man himself, Russ can summon the focus of his logistician’s mind, to override the turmoil of the distraught father. “Melanie,” he says in a controlled, level voice, “do you know how we can get in touch with Mica?”

My god, dear Mica
.

Today they begin their trek of the West Coast Trail. Once they’re en route, they’ll be in total isolation. But Mica said they would first have an orientation session at the trailhead. “Maybe we can reach them at the Parks office before they set out,” I say, trying to reassure Russ. I know how much they need their daughter right now, their only living child. “I’ll try to track her down.”