The Patrol (8 page)

“2, roger, out.”

As usual, I was to be the harbinger of bad news. I asked Ryan LaFontaine, my fellow signaller, to watch the radio and walked over to the OC with a hangdog expression.

“Sir, I just got a message from 0. There will be no choppers today.”

Major Lane stopped mid-spit and looked at me as if I had two heads. “Are you fucking serious?”

“Yes, sir, sorry, I just got the message.”

That was my first personal contact with Major Lane. He would later become the guy in front of me on most patrols. I had no idea, at the time, of the role he would come to play in my life overseas.

We push on to the Arghandab riverbed, and walk along it. We descend a steep slope and move quickly along the silty terrain of the mostly dried up river. A few times we have to cross the river itself, and I get my boots wet. As we walk, we get a welcome message on the radio: “29er, this is Haji. Be advised we have eyes on your lead elements at this time.”

The guys at the Haji outpost can see us; we are almost done the first leg of our patrol.

I feel stronger as we inch ever closer to COP Haji. The first leg
hasn’t turned out to be so bad. In about 15 minutes, we can all see the HESCO Bastions and razor wire on the horizon. In 30 minutes, we climb a very steep slope and walk the rest of the way into the COP. We are greeted with cases of cool water.

“Twenty minutes, troops,” says the sergeant-major.

I sit beside our section commander, Jeff Brazeau, take off my helmet, and grab a bottle of water. I ask Jeff to take out my tin of smokes from my shirt pocket; I light one and relax. Fatigue is beginning to set in, and I’m covered in sweat. I relish the immense comfort of sitting, smoking, and not having my helmet on. I hear a few guys talk around me, mostly about the OC’s IED.

“It was a fucking twig!”

“Seriously man? You’re fucking me.”

“Nope, actually a twig.”

I smile and continue to relax in silence. There’s still another leg left tonight; we need to push three kilometres farther as the crow flies, to Zangabad.

The first time I saw what later became COP Haji was on a long patrol to clear IEDs from Route Fosters, a dirt road that ran all the way to Mushan. Our job was to provide left-flank security for the patrol, and we walked back and forth in the hot sun while we waited for the engineers to perform their dangerous tasks. At that time Haji was still a police substation (PSS), manned by Afghan police instead of Afghan army. The only Canadians there were a group of POMLT operators (Police Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams, pronounced “pomlette”). When we pulled into location, the PSS had serious radio problems that needed to be solved. After everybody else adjourned to the carrier to eat a ration and sleep, I found myself neck-deep in wiring problems, antennas, and programming failures. It took me almost two hours to sort them out. When I
walked back to our carrier, everyone had finished dinner and was relaxing on the Afghan sand. Master Corporal Lizette LeBlanc, our section commander who was on leave during this patrol, threw me an American ration. No sooner was I halfway into my jalapeno and cheese pouch when a sergeant from 5 Platoon came up to us.

“I need your fucking signaller,” he said in a thick Newfoundland accent.

I sighed, got up, grabbed my helmet and weapon, and went over to his carrier, where I encountered a few problems that I had never seen before. The computer system and user interface that we use for our tactical radio system had been designed in the late 1980s. That radio system doesn’t enjoy heat. The basic user interface into the vehicle’s computer is a small box called a command indicator (CI), which is covered in buttons and has two lines of green text. The CIs in the LAV that I was working on were throwing letters and numbers at me that I’d never seen before. “IBIT FAIL” and “RC FAIL,” the army’s version of the infamous “PC LOAD LETTER” message from the movie
Office Space,
flashed intermittently on the screen. I had to dump everything in the radio system, reset the computer, reload the radios, and climb all through the LAV checking antenna cables—a time-consuming and exhausting procedure. Finally, after about 30 minutes of effort, I heard the reassuring beep of three working radios. As I was conducting my final checks, someone came up to the back of the LAV behind me. “Who’s that?” he asked the sergeant.

“Oh, him? He’s just some fucking sig op.”

I had spent the day patrolling with the infantry, I’d kept up, dodged IEDs, and helped cover the advance of a battalion’s worth of vehicles on foot. I then skipped my well-deserved supper and fixed an epic radio failure, something that the infantry had already tried and failed to do. But in the end I was “just some fucking sig op.” As retired General Roméo Dallaire’s father told him when he enlisted, a soldier “should never expect to be thanked.”

Haji is a tiny enclosure of no more than 50 square metres. It is surrounded with razor wire and HESCO Bastions. These are three-metre-long steel-mesh cylinders with a diameter of five metres, filled with dirt by bulldozers or, in a pinch, soldiers. What they lack in aesthetics, they make up for in their ability to stop bullets, RPGs, and recoilless rifle rounds. We sit outside of the camp itself, inside the wire.

I finish my bottle of water and ask, “Hey, Chris, what did you do with your water bottle?” I don’t want to leave trash lying around, especially after the Haji guys were courteous enough to give us some of their own cool water.

“I just threw it over the wire where those ANA guys are sitting.”

That’s kind of a dick move
, I think, making the ANA clean up our garbage. “Are you sure, dude?”

“Yeah, that’s what I did.”

I sigh and throw my water bottle over the wire.

“Flavelle! What the fuck are you doing? Do you want the ANA to clean up your garbage for you?!” Chris yells this loud enough that everyone can hear him.

“Fuck you, bud.”

Sometimes Chris can be a bastard.

“Kit up!” The word runs through the group as people yell it out. As soon as a few people stand up, we all realize that we should be doing the same. I call this automatic response “sheep senses,” and they are honed from basic training on.

I once again throw my pack over my shoulder, lean over and do up my waist and chest straps. I grab my helmet and put it on as I walk.

Gooshe.
My bliskit pads, which are soaked in sweat, make a disgusting sound as I push my helmet back onto my head. They have cooled off in the night air, and I can feel my own cold, recycled sweat making rivulets through the dust that covers my face. I shudder.

We stand around and wait for the patrol to get on the move. Soon we are once again walking into the dark night of Panjway.

We descend the steep hill that borders Haji to the north. My boots are wet and I have a hard time seeing the ground, as my glasses have begun to fog up. I miss my footing at the bottom of the hill, and perform an “ass over teakettle” manoeuvre. I finish with a combat roll and am back on my feet before anybody knows the difference. The OC turns around and shoots me a look, but I’m off and walking again. This is the first of many falls to come.

We walk along the edge of the riverbed. To our north the Taliban are probably all in bed, sleeping a drug-induced sleep and dreaming about their IEDs and RPGs finding their targets. We continuously scan the north of the riverbed for spotters or ambushes. There is no sign of life. It doesn’t feel like the night for it anyway. Although we have a vast body of objective evidence indicating how dangerous this area is, the cool, quiet midnight carries with it no threat. We walk across the surface of the riverbed as if in a dream. A thin sliver of moonlight illuminates the lunar surface that we tread on, in complete silence, utterly removed from the situation around us. I listen to my own breathing and the quiet beep of my radio, which I’ve turned down to a barely audible level. Every few hundred metres we stop and send in a locstat, the position of our leading and rear elements. I watch the north of the riverbed through my NVG. The world is translated into a green and black television screen that is slightly out of focus. I don’t see any people, but the north side of the river is almost 600 metres away. There could be someone hiding in any one of the mud huts.

When I took my high school Physics 30 diploma exam (one of the standardized tests that all Alberta students must take in order to graduate), one question was how night vision goggles work. I knew the answer, and would like to share it with you. NVGs don’t create light; they merely amplify the light that is already there by means of a two-sided screen inside the NVG. One side of the screen receives the photons (wave/particles of light) that reflect off the ground from ambient light sources such as the stars or the moon. The other side pumps more photons (provided a working AA battery is inserted) toward the eye than entered the goggles. So, in short, all that NVGs do is amplify the number of photons in the environment. In a pitch-black room (with absolutely no ambient light), nothing would be visible.

The eye naturally focuses on whatever range you are looking at, but NVGs do not. To focus them one has to adjust a dial, similar to binoculars. When I look through my NVGs, each wavelength/photon of light enters into its aperture, becomes amplified, is outputted toward my eye, goes through my fogged-up ballistic eye-wear, is bent by the plastic glasses that rest inside, and is finally received by my eye and interpreted by my brain. This all happens at approximately the speed of light. The whole process is the culmination of at least 200 years of scientific endeavour, from the creation of glasses, through the moulding of plastic, to the science behind functioning NVGs. But an understanding of the means by which NVGs operate does not make them any less frustrating. A physicist who gets run over by a bus can intellectually appreciate the forces at play, but that doesn’t help him look both ways.

The biggest problem with NVGs is that they eliminate depth perception, which is the product of the difference in time that it takes each separate eye to receive light. With artificially amplified light, both eyes receive it at the same time and therefore can’t tell how far away the light is coming from. This is why the army has switched
from night vision goggles (two eyepieces) to night vision monocles (one eyepiece). They are lighter and allow users to maintain depth perception with the other eye.

Like everything else in the military, the use of NVGs improves with practice. As a signals reservist, I’d never used them before my pre-deployment training in Shilo.

As I scan the north bank of the riverbed, searching for Taliban, our pace is again increasing. I walk faster, and feel sweat once more pour down from my helmet. I feel very warm, though the air is cool, and I wonder how I will feel in the heat of the day. Walks like this are what the infantry call
humping
. I don’t know why; it feels more like walking very quickly with way too much equipment strapped to my body than humping.

We breach out of the riverbed and back into the fields and villages that comprise our area of operations (AO). We have been out from Haji for almost two hours, and I’m getting tired. We are only a kilometre away from COP Zangabad, but in between lies a mishmash of poppy, grape, and marijuana fields, all of which are surrounded by mud walls between one and three metres high.

We used to walk along the major roads to get to the COPs, but eight days prior to our departure Private Colin Wilmot had been killed by an IED on a similar dismounted patrol between Zangabad and Haji. That patrol had avoided the roads, but had skirted a goat path beside a wadi. Wilmot was second last in the order of march; he was the patrol’s medic. A good friend of mine was on that patrol. He said that he had stuffed his pockets with Gatorade and Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, as they had run out of junk food in Zangabad. When he got back after helping carry Wilmot’s body over a kilometre and a
half, the muffins were covered in his friend’s blood. Private Wilmot was our company’s fourth casualty. Over a year later, I still wear a black “death” bracelet marked “Pte Colin Wilmot C/S 24—KIA July 6 2008 Afghanistan.” It was given to me by my friend right before he left to go back to Canada.

Now we avoid anything that even approximates a goat path.

As we climb out of the riverbed, I see a group of destroyed mud huts. They look like archaeological ruins of a Stone Age dwelling. Only one wall remains standing, and its windows look out to the north. Whether it was us, the Taliban, the Russians, or time that destroyed these buildings I will never know. They imbue the landscape with an even eerier quality. We walk up the hill and soon find ourselves crossing a road and jumping a wall into a grape field.

Weariness begins to encroach. I have all but given up taking a knee. Our stops become longer as those in front of us try to find the safest possible route. This is IED territory, and we know it. Almost all of our casualties have been taken in a three-kilometre radius of where we are standing right now. Every step is becoming a chore, but the priority is to watch where I’m going and step only where someone else has. The days of marked minefields and probing the earth slowly with bayonets are over; we have no choice but to walk through an area that we know to be mined.

Walking in a grape field in France is an enjoyable way to spend a warm summer afternoon. It evokes romantic images of pressed linen shirts and new love. Walking through a grape field in Afghanistan is a somewhat different experience. The grapes are planted in mud furrows whose walls reach to about chest level (see photo on page 215). The rows are spaced evenly to accommodate the average Afghan man working in them. Canadian soldiers are, for the most part, wider than the average Afghan, especially when kitted out like storm troopers. The vines catch on our packs and make an exceptional amount of noise as we trudge and bounce our way through
the narrow rows. Grape fields also make perfect Taliban fighting positions. The mud is thick enough to stop most bullets, and simply by ducking, an enemy fighter can escape through the length of the field, and out the other side unobserved.

The ground is wet with irrigation at this time of year, and my boots become very slippery when wet. I basically skate through the last 20 metres of the grape field before having to climb the wall on the other side. My boots refuse to give me traction as I attempt to jump onto the top of the 1.5-metre wall, and I have to use all my strength to pull myself on top of it. Now my kit and I, together weighing over 135 kilos, are balancing on the top of the wall that is only about 30 centimetres wide. I’m greeted by a nearly three-metre drop on the other side. I try to figure out a way to lower myself down the wall, but after much scuffling and swearing I finally just pass my weapon off to the person waiting below and jump, or rather fall like a sack of potatoes. The tactically quiet portion of the patrol appears to be over, and we sound like a herd of bulls tiptoeing through a china shop.