The Patrol (3 page)

The majority of popular accounts about Afghanistan have been written by embedded journalists. Although I can’t challenge their bravery or eloquence, the result is often a story framed by a narrative of heroism. The reality is that heroism is an ethereal element, conspicuous by its absence as often as by its presence. The truth is far dirtier and more mundane than is usually reported. This is the story of one such dirty and mundane patrol, warts and all.

David Bercuson once told me that Afghanistan is becoming
“
Canada’s second forgotten war” (the first being Korea). Recently I noticed that a story about methamphetamine consumption took greater priority on the CBC website than a story about a Canadian soldier killed overseas. I guess that the public has become numb to these fatalities, viewing them as unfortunate circumstances that happen in a faraway country, to be taken in as dinner is prepared. The lives of the soldiers whom the public so conveniently forgets are so much more than a two-minute sound bite. They are worth remembering.

I ONCE READ THAT, due to the affordability and availability of the Walkman during the Gulf War, it was the first conflict ever to have its own soundtrack. Some journalists were even able to predict the outbreak of the ground invasion by the large purchase of batteries that preceded it. Everyone wants to escape into a melody. Reality takes on a whole new reality when it’s punctuated with loud music.

I’m sitting in Sperwan Ghar, Afghanistan, on a warm Monday afternoon, but days of the week no longer hold any significance.
Ghar
is Pashto for “mountain,” and our fortress looks like something out of a cartoon. We have nicknamed it “Castle Grayskull,” and we discuss the feasibility of using dynamite or C-4 to reshape our beloved hill into a skull with glowing eyes. That would give the Taliban something to look at.

Music is blaring from every iPod, and most people are rocking
out to hard metal as they pack their kit (the army word for equipment; especially nice or hard-to-acquire pieces of kit are known as
shiny
or
Gucci
).
Saw III,
a horror movie, plays on our TV as we pull everything that we need together, check it, recheck it, pack it, and repack it. This is no small task, as each of us is carrying nearly 70 kilos of kit. Last-second additions and subtractions are made. Water purification tablets and packs of crystallized Gatorade are added, and radio checks are conducted. All told, packing takes about two hours.

By the time that I start packing, everyone else in my room is putting the finishing touches on their kit. I am one of three company signallers, and as such it is my responsibility to pull an eight-hour radio shift every day that I’m in camp. This basically amounts to sitting in an air-conditioned command post (CP), listening to three speakers and writing down everything that comes out of them.

Today I’m let off shift at 1300, right after lunch. The headquarters section commander issued orders about the patrol in the morning. I missed them. Although I work at the nerve center of the company’s operations, I am less informed than anyone else in headquarters as to what we are going to be doing on this patrol. A paper copy of our orders sits on the table in our room, under the constant supervision of at least one person. I sit down and try to read them, but the data refuses to sink in.

Military operational orders are encrypted by a twofold mechanism. First, they are uniformly printed in 8-point font, so one has to squint to read them: like this. Second, every important aspect contained within the orders is shrouded in a nearly impenetrable veil of acronyms. For example, “Bravo Company will conduct a Cordon and Search of suspected compounds near the village of Zangabad” becomes “IAW SoM, B Coy will conduct a dism C&S of CoI CM1001, CM1002, CM1003, CM1004 and CM1005 IVO Gr 12U QQ 1234 5678.” One of the highlights of my tour was
spending the entire day sending in written reports without using a single acronym. I sometimes had to call people to ask what their acronyms stood for.

Although I’ve learned to translate military newspeak into English, I just don’t seem to have the strength right now. Instead, I chat up a few guys sitting around the picnic table outside, and try to get the actual situation from them. I sit beside our section commander and ask him what’s going on:

“Hey, I missed orders, what’s the deal with this patrol?”

“We’re going to go out dismounted through all the Combat Outposts (COPs) with 4 and 9 Platoon. OC wants you to come along. We’re going to hump to Zangabad, stay the day, and then hump to Mushan. When we’re there, we are going to cordon and search in Mushan, stay overnight, come back to Zangabad and try to find the fuckers who’ve been mortaring them. We might push north of the river from Zangabad. We’re leaving at last light tonight. We should be back in five days, but plan for two weeks.”

And just like that I have the plain pragmatic clarity that I’ve come to expect from infantry non-commissioned members (NCMs). We will be going out with two platoons of infantry, one from our company and one from Charlie Company, attached to us for the length of the mission. My heart sinks a little bit, and I can feel nervousness turn into fear as my section commander talks to me. I work hard to control my expression. I’d heard through the grapevine that a hard patrol was coming up, but this was the first time I’d gotten any details. Now I know that we are going to be embarking on a long dismounted patrol through outposts that have been attacked every day for the last month. Our goal is to root out and destroy anyone who puts up a fight, and to find any and all of the equipment they are using to do it. There are no longer any qualms or quibbles—we are going to fight.

I’ve managed to spend four months in-country patrolling with
the infantry without getting into a major firefight. It looks like that is all about to change. The unspoken implication lies heavy in my heart: there is a good chance some of us won’t come back.

“Oh and, Flavelle, keep your shit muckled up.” I never did find out exactly what
muckle
means.

My first thought is to e-mail my girlfriend, Darcy, tell her what’s going on and that I love her. Unfortunately, the veil of operational security doesn’t allow me to even tell her that I’m going out. I also have more pressing concerns.

It might be useful at this point to outline the situation on the ground in my little corner of Panjway at the time that these events are taking place. We are sitting in one of the southernmost provinces of Afghanistan, Kandahar. The majority of Canadian soldiers deployed to Afghanistan are based there, specifically just north of the province’s capital, Kandahar City, in a base called Kandahar Airfield (KAF). KAF is famed for its numerous creature comforts such as a Tim Hortons, a Burger King, multiple shopping outlets, a weekly bazaar to buy souvenirs, and over five separate kitchens serving everything from burgers and fries to Nepalese-style curry. Everybody who resides on a semi-permanent basis outside of KAF despises it and everyone inside for being good-for-nothing WOGs (not even sure what that stands for; Without Guns? Waste of Groceries?). We band together in our hatred for how easy their lives are, despite the fact that many of the KAFers would willingly trade places with us. The reality is that most soldiers do not choose where they are going to be deployed overseas. Some, like me, could have just as easily spent their tour shopping for the perfect carpet at the weekly bazaar. What we in Sperwan Ghar do not see is the mind-numbing boredom and routine of life on KAF; instead, we focus on the glittering opulence of Burger King and the outdoor
concrete hockey rink. Many in KAF want to be warriors and to test themselves against the Taliban; instead, they have to let their salty tears mingle with their iced cappuccinos.

About 40 kilometres southwest of Kandahar City is Forward Operating Base (FOB) Ma’sum Ghar (MSG). This mountain had been taken by force during a previous rotation, and it was the site of numerous battles involving Canadian soldiers. By the time we deployed, it had calmed down substantially, and basically marked the end of friendly territory. It is home to the Lord Strathcona’s Horse (Royal Canadians), an armoured regiment. They are newly outfitted with Leopard C2 tanks, probably the best tank available in the world. We also hate them, but less than we hate those in KAF.

About 10 kilometres west of MSG is my home sweet home for seven months, Patrol Base Sperwan Ghar (PBSG). When a previous rotation of soldiers (ROTO) took it over from the Taliban, they found it outfitted with a Russian-built concrete compound, left over from the last war. What that means to us is a comfortable room with clean beds sheltered from the dust and sandflies outside. We also have functional shower facilities, and Canadian cooks who work harder than anyone else on camp to ensure that we are fed and our morale is high. There is even a library of books ranging from fantasy to self-help.

Everything to the west of Sperwan Ghar is basically Taliban territory. On TF 3–07, the ROTO before ours, the Van Doos (Royal 22nd Regiment) had established three police substations (PSSs) named after the villages they were situated in: Haji, Zangabad, and Talukan. At the end of the line there is one Afghan National Army strongpoint (SP), Mushan, with a company of ANA soldiers and only three Canadians. When the fighting season started, these outposts had been attacked every day, and the Afghan National Police (ANP) were pulled out and replaced by ANA. At that point we renamed the PSSs as combat outposts (COPs). The result is a line of outposts,
stretching fourteen kilometres west of Sperwan Ghar, are under almost daily attack by the Taliban. Each one of these outposts, with the exception of Mushan, has about 40 Canadian soldiers and a roughly equivalent number of Afghan soldiers. It is along this line that we are to patrol and to try to disrupt the enemy’s activities.

To our south are the Reg Desert and the Dori riverbed. To all intents and purposes, the world ends there, as no one ventures into the Reg except for nomadic tribesmen and camel herders. To our north is the Arghandab riverbed, a mostly dried-out expanse of sand and gravel sown throughout with improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

The villages on the north side of the Arghandab have already earned their place in Canadian military history; they are Taliban Central. Every time we’ve gone near them we’ve been attacked. A large part of the fighting that has taken place over the last five years, including Operation Medusa and the Battle of the White School, was over these tiny villages. This is the situation we find ourselves in on July 14, 2008.

I sit, smoke, and lay out my kit. I drink bottled water and what we call
Squiggle Coke
—Coca-Cola that has Arabic writing on one side. I’m packing an American backpack that I bought the last time I was in KAF over a month ago.

Into this pack I stuff a 117F radio (pronounced “one seventeen foxtrot”), the best man-portable radio available in the world. It has a simple user interface and the ability to conduct short-range very high frequency (VHF) communications as well as air-ground-air (AGA) ultra high frequency (UHF) and satellite comms. What that means in English is that it can communicate with basically anything on the battlefield, so long as a competent operator is using it. This radio is almost impossible to find in Canada, and is a very Gucci
piece of kit indeed. It has a removable faceplate that you can plug a wire into, and I’ve run this wire through my pack and put the faceplate into a pouch attached to a shoulder strap. This way I can program, change, and work on my radio without actually having to take my pack off. It’s the little things that help. The radio comes complete with three antennas and one handset that I can talk into or pass off to the company commander.

The first time most people try to drive a stick shift, they stall. Understanding that the clutch has a sweet spot and exactly how and when to let it out takes practice. The only way to learn is to develop the appropriate muscle memory, to teach one’s leg muscles when exactly the clutch is going to disengage, through mostly unconscious repetition. I find that now the only time that I stall is if I think about how to clutch on a steep hill. If I do it unconsciously, I always succeed.

In the same way as one develops the ability to drive stick, one learns how to perform the duties of a soldier. Basic drill, which teaches a soldier how to march, stand at attention, salute, and fall into formation, can be learned properly only when you’re not focusing on the individual movements. Your conscious brain has to be removed from the equation. On a boiling hot parade square in Dundurn, Saskatchewan (come for the dirt, stay for the cows), I stood bewildered as my instructors desperately and vocally tried to push me into the appropriate position and get our entire platoon to walk in step—a completely foreign concept. Every day for two months, we were marched everywhere, always under the watchful eye of our instructors, who would point out any faults. By the end of my time on that parade square, all of my responses were automatic. When called to attention, I didn’t think, I just put my heels together. By the end of the summer, when two or more people in
our platoon went out, even on our three days off, we would find ourselves walking in step without thinking about it. After the course was over, I was amazed to find that I would try to get into step with my friends in high school. My actions had become completely unconscious, and it took time to reassert my mind’s control over such things as walking speed. The military had imprinted itself on my mind; like a tattoo, or learning to drive a stick shift, once there it can never be fully removed.

The skill set needed to succeed on patrol in Afghanistan is gained in a surprisingly similar fashion. The key is muscle memory and automating one’s responses. By constant repetition, soldiers learn exactly how their kit is organized and laid out, how to quickly tie their boots in the morning, where and how magazines are stored in the tactical (tac) vest, how to access each pouch on their kit without looking at it. All of these movements become mostly unconscious. The habits I learned on a training exercise in Shilo became the habits I perform while walking through a grape field in Afghanistan. By the time that I’m preparing my radio for this patrol, I can program it without looking. I have simply performed the task so many times that it is firmly entrenched in my muscle memory.