The Patrol (23 page)

I have no part in this operation, as there is not enough room on the Chinooks to lift everyone back. The call has been made that only 4 Platoon and those who were injured on the march (including Allan) will get on. They are leaving to attend Arnal’s ramp ceremony. 29 Tac will stay and walk the rest of the way back to Sperwan Ghar, a prospect that no one relishes. I watch the men relax in the dirt, leaning back against full packs, talking quietly. I don’t envy them; they all deserve the spot on the chopper more than I do. I wait for the sound of the helicopter blades in the distance, wondering if call sign 2 is going to get a message from call sign 0 that the choppers have been cancelled for some reason. It wouldn’t surprise me.

The sound of the helicopters starts softly, growing louder as the Apache tentatively pushes its way into the vicinity while scanning for targets. The security of the Chinooks is the Brit’s primary concern, so he takes his time attempting to establish whether or not there is a threat. Unfortunately, there are some places that not even the best thermal imaging sights can penetrate. The helicopter hovers well above us, appearing as a dot on the horizon and resolving itself so high that it looks like a toy suspended in the air. We have grown used to close air support by the Americans, who try to fly anywhere the infantry can walk. We are surprised by the seemingly standoffish approach that this chopper is taking. It sounds like a
riding lawn mower outside a building on a spring morning. As the sound’s volume increases, so too does its violence, and the graceful image of the helicopter suspended in the air seems disconnected from the unconscionably loud noise.

I grab my camera and after some violent cajoling I manage to get it working. One of the Chinooks swoops in for a landing, seemingly from nowhere. A coloured smoke grenade is thrown onto the HLS to help guide the pilot and give him an idea of the winds on the ground. I watch it pour its brilliant red fumes upwards over the HESCO that separates the camp. The immense bulk of the aircraft is briefly visible as it swoops toward the ground, the wind from its blades washing over us. A dust cloud envelops it almost instantly, and I manage to get a picture only of that brown plume. The soldiers who moments before had been sitting casually are now running into the swirling inferno of dust. I watch them disappear individually and wonder how they can possibly find the ramp. Within a minute, the pitch of the rotors changes and the Chinook is gone, turning toward KAF and hugging the earth as the soldiers aboard frantically try to find something to hold onto. In the second group, Allan waits for his turn.

We are surprised that the Taliban didn’t take the opportunity to shoot at the first chopper. For the few seconds that it sat there, it must have been an enticing target. We had expected any surviving enemy in the area to at least take a few potshots. Maybe they were killed in that brief firefight, although that seems unlikely. Maybe they left the area, or are stoned on hash. Maybe it’s just too goddamn hot for them. A grizzled 4 Platoon sergeant standing next to Allan has the answer.

“It’ll be the second chopper,” he says, as he looks into the middle distance. “It’s always the second chopper.” Allan looks at him and realizes that he is completely serious.

The second chopper swoops in to land in the dust cloud of the
first. A work party with scarves covering their faces rushes to help offload the rations and water that the Chinook has brought as an afterthought. Allan’s group waits beside the HESCO Bastion, waiting for someone to tell them to move. A loud boom is heard over the din of the rotors. We are being mortared. I look up and see two of the sentry towers pouring machine gun fire toward suspected base plate positions. They appear to be shooting directly over top of the Chinook. The CP is getting reports of a suspicious van approaching the COP, and it is possible that the Taliban are moving something big in, a recoilless rifle or an RPG team. No one knows what is going to happen, and the cacophony makes it hard to hear my own thoughts. I watch the scene while being buffeted by the sand from the Chinook. Another mortar explodes, and it sounds louder this time. Someone starts yelling to get our kit on, and I run toward the sea can. Around me organized chaos reigns again. Another mortar explodes and sounds closer still. The rotors continue to spin. Why hasn’t it taken off?

Allan stands transfixed, convinced that the helicopter is going to explode where it sits, raining debris all over. He is also convinced that, failing to explode, it will take off as soon as it can. Someone from the CP comes running out with no helmet or flak vest, screaming, “Get the fuck on the chopper!” Allan runs into the cloud of dust, and I see the whole line disappear in unison. The pain in his badly sprained ankle does not slow him down as he sprints toward the chopper. The machine guns continue to fire. Before the ramp is closed, the pitch of the rotors changes again, and the Dutch Chinook lifts off. The door gunner doesn’t get a chance to fire a single round. While the soldiers inside scramble for a place to hold onto, the chopper begins its violent ride toward Sperwan Ghar. Another mortar lands; this time it is farther away. It will prove to be the last one of the day.

The memories of this day once evoked in me an overwhelming sensation. I could not think about it without remembering the crash of the mortars around me. My feeling of strange calm as I lived in the moment, and grabbed my helmet. The tactile grit of the shoulder pad of my flak vest as I closed my hand on it. The feeling of my heart pounding in my chest as I looked at those around me and tried to keep my face impassive. The echoing boom of the second mortar, and the strange realization that I hadn’t heard a whine. These images would rush into my brain with almost the same intensity as when they were actually occurring. But over the years they have begun to fade. Today I have to stop and think about which hand I grabbed my flak vest with, and whether I actually had my chest rig with me. My heart no longer pounds as I relive the experience in front of my computer screen. My memories no longer terrify me.

This is probably because the number and quality of the images that I was forced to deal with was, for the most part, limited. I caught only a glimpse into the black maw that is warfare, and unlike some, I recoiled from it. I didn’t have sufficient experience with the reality of warfare for it to retain its power over me. Perhaps this is what separates me from those poor souls who continue to live in their memories after their war is finished. None of my memories were strong enough to survive the influx of newer memories: seeing the look on my bride’s face as she walked down the aisle; training a new puppy to sit; drinking beer in the Black Lounge on my first day of graduate school. My tour will always be with me, will always be part of me, but the memories have lost their power.

Nothing can prepare you for the reality of bloody, concussive warfare. Some excel at it, living for the glorious excitement and clarity of the moment. Others, even the most masculine of men, realize that they are truly afraid of it. Some learn to cope with the fear, but others do not. Those are the ones whose memories will always control them. In the end, you either like war or you don’t. No
one can know until he or she has experienced it first-hand. Those who like war are aptly named
warriors
. They are the brave adventurers of our society. In my experience, they are not often zealots and are quiet in their unshakable convictions. Even when they are loud, they are usually calm in their actions; they’ve learned over time to be deeply restrained. It is they who should rightfully stand guard over our nation, for that task requires warriors to succeed at war. In representing Canada, they embody some of the ideals and ethos of our country. Although the mirror that they hold up to society is somewhat distorted, Canadian soldiers are still Canadian. If a society can trust itself, by and large it can trust its soldiers.

Some, like me, are fated never to be warriors, as we are more afraid of war than fascinated by it. But I have the consolation that I have walked with them and know what kind of men and women they are—what kind of situations they face. I know that danger doesn’t always seem dangerous. I will never be a warrior, but I have known war. Now, as I walk amongst a population who has not, I am separated from them I am happy to say that on that hot, dusty day in Afghanistan, I stood amongst Canadian warriors, ready to do my job.

The excitement fades with the retreat of the Chinooks. Once again the silence is deafening, and I wonder what exactly just happened. The old routine remerges, and I lie down to try to get some rest in the heat. We will be walking all night. I force another bottle of water down my throat and fade in and out of a fitful sleep while people around me talk softly. We will be leading the last leg of this patrol, and that significantly increases our chances of having an encounter with an IED. I sleep in the underwear and T-shirt that I’ve worn all day.

WAKING UP IN A PUDDLE OF MY OWN SWEAT has become a monotonous reality, but I still do not like it. I wake well before the sun dips below the horizon, sit up in my cot and look at the orange light and elongated shadows of the early evening. It is still hot. I look down at my cot and notice the new white salt stains that cover it. Once again, I feel hungover. I pull my boots on, grab a bottle of water, and appreciate the fuzzy dumbness in my brain. As I sit, I let my head hang down and my mouth hang open; I would really rather not walk the rest of the way back to Sperwan Ghar. Oh well, ours is not to question why. Around me people are sorting out their kit for this last leg of the patrol. I guess I should do the same.

I root around in my pack and find a clean pair of socks and my only spare clean pair of pants. Unfortunately, I’m out of T-shirts, so I’m forced to wear the one that got me through the first two days of this patrol. It is still wet with five-day-old sweat. I guess that it will have to do. My pack smells like a hockey bag. I relish the feeling of my last pair of clean socks, and wiggle my toes in them. I finish putting on my T-shirt and pants before blousing my boots. I tuck in my
shirt, do up my belt snugly, and for the first time in days feel clean and happy. I wash my face and notice that the water turns brown. Clean socks go a long way to allowing me to forget the situation that I’m in, and I begin to feel optimistic. As I repack my kit, I whistle “The British Grenadiers.”

Two guys from HQ will lead the last leg of the patrol. They understand the risks involved with being first in the order of march, and unlike much of the company, they don’t have a lot of experience on the ground around Zangabad. That’s real bravery: understanding that one is in a truly dangerous situation but continuing to do one’s job as a professional soldier. This is the quiet unspoken bravery that Hollywood will never portray.

The sun drops quickly, and I hold my fifth cigarette in my mouth as I do up my shirt and put on my flak vest. I then put on my chest rig and sit down against the mortar pit. There is a much more cautious feeling about tonight’s patrol. What for me was a purely intellectual awareness of the life-and-death reality has shifted into a cold understanding that we are discussing real men’s lives, their flesh and their blood. The ravages of IEDs and enemy action had, up until yesterday, been filtered through a radio, little more than a disembodied electric voice calling for help. Today I understand the reality and the risk.

If you could do it all over again, knowing what you know now, would you?
The question rings through my brain as I think about the road ahead.
I don’t know. We’ll see how this thing turns out, I guess
, comes the answer. And then, a little more optimistically:
I guess it is better than sitting at home jerking off. At least it’s something real, so long as I make it back
.

I look around instinctively for a piece of wood to touch. Before I can find one, I see those in front of me standing up. We are off once more into the dark Afghan night and an uncertain future, but it feels different this time. I throw on my pack and helmet, pick up
my weapon, and wrap the sling around my forearm. A lit cigarette glows in my mouth as we start to move, and before we exit the wire, I throw it at the moondust.

Before our shortened patrol can finish leaving the wire, our terp intercepts a communication between the Taliban. They know where we are, and pass on to their friends the route we are taking. They are watching us file orderly out of the camp. In one of the mud compounds surrounding the COP, evil men are plotting to do us harm. We will probably never know which building they are in, and even if we found them, we wouldn’t find any weapons or IED components. The Taliban are too wily for that. We are forced to hope that they haven’t laid any IEDs on the route, and walk out while they watch us with dark eyes and a dark purpose.

Our plan for the final leg of the patrol is to take no route whatsoever. We are going to bush-bash through farmers’ fields, staying off the road unless absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, we are not the only ones who know when it is absolutely necessary. As I take my first step outside of COP Zangabad (this time being careful to walk around the coiled razor wire, as opposed to through it), I feel like I am walking into a minefield that stretches all the way to Sperwan Ghar. In an almost literal sense I am. I have to work hard not to stare at my feet and to keep looking up and scanning my surroundings. In the end, either something bad is going to happen, or it won’t. I can mitigate the risk by the way that I walk, but can’t eliminate it completely.

I look at the ground and sigh; there is nothing that I can do about it, so I try to force these thoughts out of my mind. I’m not entirely successful, and as the weight of my kit begins to once more make itself known, my sweat feels cold and clammy on my skin. I wonder what it would feel like to have an IED explode underneath me. I wonder whether I would understand what had happened. These questions lead my mind down a dark path, so I force them
away from my consciousness. I focus on keeping the proper spacing, watching where I step, and scanning my surroundings. There isn’t too much else I can do.

We walk down a wide mud road, attempting to find a path into a farmer’s field. As the road twists and turns, and as compounds and walls loom around us, we are forced to walk outside of the sight of COP Zangabad’s towers. The Taliban could easily have laid an IED here. My senses are heightened and every sound becomes louder. I flinch when a dog barks from behind the metal door of a compound to my right.

We can’t seem to find a convenient farmer’s field, and eventually choose to skirt a wadi. As we walk along the edge of it, the terrain changes and we find ourselves in the middle of a grassy avenue that runs parallel to the irrigation canal. The grass is green and relatively sparse, but grows high in the moondust. I cannot recall ever having seen grass in Afghanistan, let alone walking through anything like this. The thought dawns on me that there is probably a reason why this grass is uncut—the villagers are most likely afraid to walk here. I focus on walking only where the grass is trampled down.

Ahead of me, I hear the OC having problems with his radio. He cannot reach call sign 2. I walk up behind him and pass him my handset. He still has no luck. I undo the Velcro strap holding my antenna down, and now he meets with limited success. The OC is trying to arrange for us to have eyes in the sky, an unmanned drone that can scan our route and look for any ambushes or triggermen. I pull out the faceplate to the radio and switch the frequency, hoping that our lower backup frequency will reach Sperwan Ghar. This solution works perfectly for a few seconds before the connection cuts out completely. We are standing in a deep depression surrounded by dirt walls, not ideal for communications. The OC glares at me, as if I am somehow personally holding back the necessary photons. There is absolutely nothing I can do to remedy the situation short
of moving to higher ground. I tell him this, but he decides to relay our messages through Zangabad, a more time-consuming but safer approach.

As the OC talks, he continues to walk forward slowly, effectively pulling me on a leash as he does so. I am concerned that we are walking too close together and that he is not fully concentrating on where he is stepping. He is, after all, engaged in a conversation while trying to use a map and GPS simultaneously. By the time the end of the grassy avenue is in sight, the OC is finished with his transmission and hands back my handset. I clip it to my shoulder strap and fall into position. I also change the frequency back to normal, and put the faceplate in its pouch. The patrol continues forward.

The lead elements find a mud wall that is low enough to climb, and we begin to work our way over it. We pause beside the road, moving forward one at a time as those in front scale the wall. As I step on the road, I hold my breath, a wholly ineffective and unreasonable thing to do. I pass off my weapon to Chris, who is waiting on the other side of the wall, jump, kick one leg onto the top, and perform a semi-coordinated roll onto the other side. As my feet touch the ground, the hard weight of my pack catches on the wall and pushes me forward, forcing me to jog out of the fall. I take my weapon back, clip it up to my sling, and let it hang down. I turn around and grab Burhoe’s weapon and watch him navigate the wall. We are now in a grape field that has been flooded for irrigation. The ground is wet, sticky, slippery mud. Sweat pours off me and I breathe hard from the effort of getting here. I manage not to fall down as I take a tentative step forward.

When in bloom, grape fields are lush with leaves and green tendrils that brush against you as you walk. Around the perimeter of these fields is inevitably a mud wall, and a small space that allows the farmer to circumnavigate his field. We are walking in this small space. The wet mud again makes my boots feel like skates,
and I walk unadvisedly fast to try to catch up to Chris, before unintentionally attempting to do the splits. I recover, only to perform my impression of a running man, with both my feet slipping out from under me as I try to move forward in the slippery mud. I fall to one knee, and can stand up only with an effort, like a horse standing up with a rider on its back. Lead elements are again looking for a good place to scale the wall, and we walk around the entire perimeter of the field. Throughout this, my exposed skin (of which there is blessedly little) is scratched by branches and thorny bushes poking out from the ground and walls. I keep my right hand on the pistol grip of my weapon, so I can move branches aside only with my left. The result is that whenever a branch reaches out from the right side, I have to make an awkward decision to either switch hands with my weapon, which is difficult in the closed in terrain, or to let the branch hit me, which I usually do. My uniform is also grabbed at by every plant that we pass, and after a few minutes I begin to feel like the entire landscape disagrees with my presence here.

When we reach the far side of the grape field, the patrol pauses. Sweat is pouring out of me in the warm Afghan night, and I take out a bottle of water. I sit down on top of a thorny bush, and adjust my weight as silently as I can. Looking through one of the rows of grapevines, I see the other end of the patrol, about 20 metres away. We could have simply walked in a straight line to get this point, but instead walked the entire perimeter. The worst part is that to stay in the proper formation, the remainder of the patrol, who can see the front clearly, will have to walk the same distance through slippery mud and angry grapevines. Those in line looking at me realize this, but can only sigh and carry on moving forward. A civilian would walk in a straight line; a soldier understands that maintaining the proper order of march and route discipline is more important than being comfortable. The lead elements of the patrol have realized
that the only way in and out of the walled grape field is through a compound that its owner and his family sleep in. On the other side of the compound is the main road that we are trying so desperately to avoid. It probably wouldn’t help the locals’ perception of us if we sent a large patrol through their house in the middle of the night, especially if women and children were sleeping there. That is just the kind of thing that Taliban propagandists love to blow out of proportion. What would be a simple desire to get outside of a walled-in compound could be turned into an accusation of rape and murder by the Taliban the next day.

After some deliberation, we decide to try to scale the wall. It is not quite three metres tall, higher than I can reach. At one point, there is a walnut tree that grows beside the compound. I watch the lead man on the patrol use it to climb to the top of the wall, rest there for a few seconds, and then drop down into the adjacent field. On the other side is a marijuana field, and the moist stench of drugs is thick in the air. I wait my turn to cross. We have been in the field for almost half an hour.

Now, you might think that the hardest part would be getting to the top of the wall, but this is not the case. With the aid of the tree, I shimmy to the top relatively easily. There is a gap between the wall and the tree, however, and I have to throw myself onto the top. When I look down, I realize that the drop is even farther on the other side. It must be at least 3.5 metres. I spend a couple of seconds trying to figure out a way to lower myself at least some of the way, but unfortunately I am poised pretty precariously with 65 kilos of kit balanced on the top of a wall 30 centimetres wide. I eventually manage to position myself so that my feet will fall first, pass off my weapon and jump, or more accurately drop, to the ground below. As gravity takes hold I have time to briefly register the freefall between the top of the wall and the bottom. I land awkwardly and allow my body to crumple as I hit the ground.
Although my drop is not graceful, I am able to stand up uninjured. I take back my weapon and watch Burhoe perform the same awkward manoeuvre.