The Patrol (12 page)

We swallow our pride and anger, and move out of the grape field. We walk the remaining 600 metres down a long, broad stretch of road. I’m soaked with sweat and exhausted. We walk slowly, and I have to force myself not to cradle my weapon against my chest.

It is more comfortable to carry the C7 by crossing your arms over it, but this is frowned upon, as you wouldn’t be able to use it instantly if needed. One of the unspoken rules of the infantry is that, on patrol, you must be prepared to fight with only a moment’s notice. Although this may not be, strictly speaking, completely necessary, those who are not ready to fight are ridiculed behind their backs. In the end it’s all about the LCF (“look cool factor”). The correct way to carry one’s weapon is with the pistol grip grasped by the bottom three fingers and the front hand guards or fighting grip held by the other hand. I find that my right wrist begins to ache after long periods of holding my weapon this way, but there is only one way to get better at doing something. By this point of the tour carrying a weapon has become completely unconscious, and I usually carry it as prescribed, or with the right hand alone on the pistol grip, or by holding it at its centre of gravity, which is just in front of the magazine housing. I can also let go of my weapon and it will hang off my sling beside me.

We are in Mushan by 0430, and I am sitting at the entrance with my helmet off, smoking a cigarette. I feel exhausted and angry. It’s as if the strength and pride that I’d gained on the patrol was stolen from me in that grape field, and for the first time I wish that I had never come on this patrol. I drink another bottle of water and try not to feel sorry for myself. The sergeant-major returns from his coordination meeting and takes the warrant officers with him. Soon enough we are moving to our assigned sleeping areas.

Mushan smells smoky. It has been mortared on and off for the last month. One of these mortars caused a fire that very nearly burned the camp down. Six ANA soldiers were killed in that attack. The ground is covered in black char, and there are considerably fewer tents than there were the last time I was here. We are given one of the few remaining modular tents set up prior to our arrival. The tent encloses the spot where the mortar that started the fire landed, a large crater surrounded by blackened earth. We are told that we are to sleep right on top of the crater. We find a few large pieces of plywood to place over top and lay out our bedding. I feel strangely safer sleeping here, the idea being that mortars are like lightning: they never land in the same place twice. I doubt that this is accurate, but I’ve found that my mind will make whatever logical leaps are necessary for me to feel safe. It’s as if I refuse to accept the reality of being in a dangerous situation.

So far on the tour, I’ve been remarkably lucky. The only dangerous situations that I’ve been in were a relatively minor firefight and an IED exploding 20 metres in front of me. Most of the company hasn’t been as lucky, and we’ve already lost four soldiers and incurred a number of wounded. Photos of Sergeant Jason Boyes, Private Terry Street, Captain Richard Leary, and Private Colin Wilmot hang outside our CP in Sperwan Ghar, and I see them every day before I go on shift. We all carry those faces with us on patrol, and we try to make sure that their sacrifice was not made in vain.

The sky is beginning to turn blue as the sun prepares for its appearance. I am exhausted, and I take off my kit and get into my ranger blanket. My mind is still very active, and I have a hard time getting to sleep. One of the ANA soldiers at the guard tower greets the sun with his morning call to prayer; the foreign language sounds like it is being shouted in my ear.

“We fucking get it! Allah is Akbar! Shut the fuck up!” I yell. The soldier finishes his morning ritual, and I lie back down and fall asleep.

ALL OF THE FOOD THAT THE ARMY PROVIDES IS FREE, and it is pretty good. Since I joined in 2001, there has been a recognizable effort to improve the quality of rations and messes (
mess
is the army word for “cafeteria,” as well as “bar”). When Darcy visits me while I am taking an army course, I even feel comfortable taking her into the mess for a meal; most feel like upscale cafeterias. Regrettably, the improvements in the quality of food seem to coincide with the project to all but eliminate alcohol from official army life. In the 1980s and ‘90s, it was expected that flats of beer would be brought on every exercise, so that each soldier could enjoy two beers a day. Now, almost every exercise I’ve been on has been “officially” dry, and there are huge penalties levied against those bringing so much as a flask into the field.

For the most part I’ve always been impressed by army cooks (with the exception of a few bad apples). They have a difficult and often thankless job that has them waking up at 0430 and keeps them working until at least 1900. In the field, meals are provided on a rigid schedule that often halts training. Troops are served in order of rank, with the lowliest private eating first. This ritual was developed as an exercise in leadership, and to reinforce the idea that a leader must always take care of his or her soldiers first. Usually
there is far more food than the troops can possibly consume, and often much of it is thrown out. Army feeding plans are based on the idea that a fighting soldier needs 1,200 calories per meal, but most soldiers aren’t fighting or training to fight on a daily basis, even in the field. The result is usually far too many calories ingested compared with the amount of effort expended. For example, I spent almost every day of our exercise in Wainwright sitting in the back of a LAV, listening to radios. Although this isn’t always an easy task, I wasn’t burning many calories, and I actually gained weight. I’ve always thought that it was strange that a fighting formation would be so obsessed with food that scarcely a meal is missed. On patrol, we earn every calorie that we intake, and when it comes right down to it, we pay for our meals in sweat.

For the second time in two days, sleep fights a losing battle against the sun. For the second time in three days, I wake up itchy. I slept in the shade, splayed out on the blackened sand, and when I awake tiny black pieces of charred earth are intermingled with the bites of sandflies. I have had happier mornings.

Sandflies are a big problem in Afghanistan. Thankfully, they do not infest your clothing or stay on you for any period of time. If you allow any exposed skin to touch the sand, however, you quickly find out about it. The bites feel like tiny pinpricks, and it seems like there are millions of them. These flies also carry a disease called
leishmaniasis,
which causes sores to break out all over your body and can be deadly. A friend of mine was infected by sandflies, and the symptoms didn’t present themselves until after he returned to Canada. It took the docs some time to figure out what was wrong with him, and the Canadian Forces finally had to fly in medicine from Germany.

I was exhausted last night and basically collapsed into sleep; the
result is that my arms and face are covered in tiny red spots. The pests don’t attack anything that isn’t touching the sand, and when I hide inside my ranger blanket I usually wake up bite-free. But when I sleep, I like to take up the maximum possible amount of room (much to my girlfriend’s chagrin), so I often sprawl outside my blanket.

Even thinking about sleeping in the desert of Afghanistan still makes my skin crawl.

My spot is at the front corner of the mod tent, half on and half off a piece of plywood. A box of rations sits open beside me, so I help myself. Baked beans will be my breakfast. It is 1130, and I yawn in spite of the heat. I finish my ration and go and smoke by the medical station, which is kitty-corner to our tent. I drink a bottle of extremely hot water, which tastes of plastic. I smoke slowly, and try to strike up a conversation with the medic, who is hanging out nearby. I know that he’s had a rough go of it, and he answers all my questions in a brusque manner, as if he wonders who the fuck I am. I give up and smoke another cigarette in silence, but neither the tobacco nor the water holds any joy. I feel hungover and hot.

My section is discussing the best way to cool down water in the heat. The most popular method involves soaking a sock, putting two water bottles into it, then hanging it up in the shade and letting the air cool the bottle as the moisture wicks out of the sock. It brings the water temperature down a few degrees and makes our lives a little bit better.

I work on sorting out my kit, which I dropped haphazardly last night. I pile everything together at the top of my sleeping pad. I go through my basic radio maintenance and change out the batteries. I go over to the CP wearing a T-shirt, underwear, boots, and my weapon. I get new batteries and go back to my kit.

We carry lithium batteries overseas. These are a precious commodity in Canada, and I had never even seen them before my pre-deployment training. The ones that we are usually issued are nickel-cadmium, and they can be recharged. The white lithium batteries have a considerably longer life (up to 48 consecutive hours), but you cannot recharge them. If you put them in the issued battery charger, an obscenely bulky and heavy abomination that makes you wonder what decade you are living in, they will explode. I once believed this to be another army myth, but it is completely accurate. I watched the venting plug explode into noxious, and probably poisonous, fumes when somebody accidentally put one into the battery charger. The batteries each weigh about one kilo. This may not seem like much, but I carry four, on top of my 14-kilo radio. The weight adds up quickly.

No single army reality is absurd, but when taken together they become tantamount to insanity. We are going to patrol in Afghanistan—
makes sense
; you will be carrying the radio—
makes sense
; you will also be carrying your weapon and 10 magazines of ammunition—
makes sense
; you will wear body armour, a helmet, and a chest rig—
makes sense.
It will be above 50 degrees during the day—
hold on!
—and you will not be allowed to roll up your sleeves—
really?
If you take your helmet off during the patrol you will be jacked up—
well, that just seems unnecessary.
If you wear any non-approved patch you will be jacked up—
I don’t really see a reason for that
… ad infinitum. The army is a series of decisions, made with a soldier’s best interests in mind, that quickly snowball out of control.

If you try to figure out the reason for one strange decision, you are usually confronted with an equally strange decision. For example, when enough people consistently flouted the ban on “non-issued” eyewear (sunglasses), the sergeant-major had to finally explain to us that the rule was in place in case we were injured—the army might
refuse to pay us a pension if we were blinded while wearing Oakleys. This leads to the question, would the army actually deny us a pension if we went blind?

After I’m done my radio maintenance, I go back to the Mushan CP and ask if they have any radio problems I might help them with. The OC and the sergeant-major are in the CP, so I figure it would be prudent to wait outside. I track down a bottle of water, and sit on the homemade wooden chair outside the CP. I smoke another cigarette and, this time, enjoy it greatly. I look around at the transformed SP Mushan. Whereas every other base that I’ve been to has noticeably improved every time I arrived, Mushan is missing the majority of the tents that were present the last time I was here.

SP Mushan is one of the most depressing places I have ever seen. It is located about one kilometre outside the village of Mushan, which consists of about 100 buildings and no more than 200 people (most of whom left when the fighting season began). The strongpoint is a tiny pimple on the otherwise flat face of the desert it inhabits. It is surrounded by about one kilometre of dried-out opium fields separated from the village proper by the deep wadi that I have already described falling into. The architecture amounts to a square wall of HESCO Bastions. Around the HESCOs is razor wire, and the square is dotted by observation and firing positions. It is inhabited by a company of ANA soldiers, and the only Canadians permanently there are a three-to-five-person OMLT team, responsible for training and advising the ANA.

Inside the strongpoint is a well used for drinking water by the ANA. It is the only source of anything cool in the camp. Outside, a large painted plywood sign hangs: “Welcome to Mushan.” In the place of the
o
in
to
is a mortar fin once attached to an enemy munition that landed inside the camp during the attack in which six ANA soldiers were killed or wounded. The ensuing fire almost ignited the stored ammunition, which would have caused an explosion and
taken out the rest of the camp with it. One side of the strongpoint is framed by a makeshift shower (a bucket punctured with holes), and the bathroom (
shitter
is a more appropriate term). The other side houses the headquarters, the OMLT’s RG-31 anti-mine vehicle, and a couple of 10-metre antennas set up by fellow signallers. Three shipping containers (sea cans) make up the strongpoint’s stores, and two modular tents make up its rest area. It is in one of these tents, hastily erected before our arrival to afford us some small amount of shade, that the rest of HQ and I sleep.

The camp smells of dust and burnt garbage. A huge pit outside the camp houses its waste, and once a day a soldier with a can of diesel will set it on fire. As the majority of the garbage is rations, the smell reminds me of summer barbecue. It is insidiously pleasant. Some members of the OMLT will stay in camps like this for upwards of four months, a few for their entire tour. The week that I spent in Mushan over the course of the tour was more then enough for me.

We get the word that we are going to have food and water airdropped in on our location.
Cool
, I think,
this will be different
.

The plan is to have a Canadian Hercules aircraft fly low and slow with the ramp down, and parachute out pallets full of rations and water. As we wait, people pull out digital cameras, a constant fixture of any patrol. I stand on top of a pile of sandbags and hear the drone of the engines from the southeast. I catch a glimpse of the Herc flying low, see it turn, and watch as pallet after parachuted pallet come flying out. The ANA have spooled up a patrol to recover them. Most land in the target area, the opium fields to our southeast. Some land in and amongst the compounds farther south. An ANA Ford Ranger painted desert tan flies out of the SP, heavily laden with Afghan soldiers. The ANA are able to recover about 80 percent of the pallets. We figure that having food and water drop randomly from the sky into an Afghan mud compound can’t be bad for our image with the locals, so we leave the other 20 percent where
they are, a gift from the Canadian air force. We also think that our random parachute drop will give the Taliban something to ponder before they decide to attack us with mortars. The stores that we recover are pretty mangled from their trip, and for the remainder of our time in Mushan we drink from crushed water bottles.

Someone finds a game of Risk, and a few of us sit down to play. Jeff Brazeau, Smitty, a master corporal from 4 Platoon, and I sit around a table and set up our armies. The 4 Platoon guy is a big farm boy from Saskatchewan; like me he is a reservist. He is intensely proud of his upper-class German heritage, and wears his blond hair long on the top and short on the sides, similar to a more famous Austrian corporal. I am forced into a bad position in Europe after the first turn, and my defeat is quick and inglorious. I watch the game from the sidelines and smoke cigarettes. The German shores up his position in North and South America, and uses it as a springboard for his conquest of the world. The game doesn’t even take an hour to complete.

Every soldier in Afghanistan is granted one three-week vacation from the war. Home Leave Travel Assistance (HLTA) allows a soldier to fly out of Afghanistan to any location in the world, and subsidizes some of the travel expenses. Some of my buddies went to Australia, Bali, the Caribbean, or Thailand. I went to Europe with Darcy. We saw seven countries in 24 days (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). Each was a unique adventure, but probably the highlight of the trip was the couple of days that we spent in Dijon, France. We did a winery tour, walked the entire town, and were generally the youngest of the tourists wandering the streets. Dijon has the best food I have ever eaten. One night I asked the waiter what I should have (always ask a French waiter, they know more about their food
and their restaurant than you ever could), and he suggested
Boeuf Bourguignon
with a bottle of strong red wine. It was one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever had.