Authors: Ryan Flavelle
It is not the instruction or the instructors that turn someone into a soldier. It is the times in between visits from them, when you are forced into a group dynamic that is wholly alien. It is those long minutes spent smoking with one eye out for an instructor coming to jack you up, and the other focusing on a story about how tight a buddy’s first girlfriend was. It’s the choice to give up choice, sitting where you have been told to sit for as long as you have been told to sit there. It is the shared feeling of the injustice of it all, that you have to stand at attention with your beret on in the hot sun while your instructors laugh and joke in the shade, that you have to spend hours making your bed only to see it ripped up in front of your face.
On basic training, the army tries to erase individual identity. It dresses everyone in the same clothing, makes you spend mind-numbing hours cleaning your boots/rooms/running shoes. It makes you stand at attention whenever you speak to someone of a higher rank, which is everybody (civilians are addressed as “sir” or “ma’am,” but you don’t see very many of them). It makes you stand at attention while you wait for your class on standing at attention. Combine this with a perpetual lack of sleep and constant physical
training. Then do it all to a 17-year-old kid, still in high school, whose main goal is to see a naked girl who is not on the Internet.
The army tries its hardest to take away your individual identity, but it usually fails—because you begin to give up your identity freely. Thought processes begin to work along well-established and ancient lines. Soldiers care about food, sleep, booze, women, and smokes. These topics overwhelm almost every conversation, and even people with substantial education find themselves incapable of discussing anything else.
Did the army do this to you? Yes and no. The army tried its best with its rank, classes, and timings, but in the end, the individual is the one who chooses to care almost exclusively about booze, women and smokes. It is the individual who chooses to love the platoon while wanting to kick the teeth out of a few of it members. It is the long periods in between, when soldiers mentally prepare for what is to come, that changes their identity.
Every soldier looks at the same three things when passing another soldier: rank epaulette, cap badge, and beret. All the necessary information is passed in this way. Are they a lower rank or higher rank? Do I have to salute? What trade is the person I’m about to pass? Combat arms, logistics, signals? How is their beret formed? Do they care about their career, or are they apathetic? Every soldier has the same basic identity, but every soldier chooses for that to be the case. You must either change or fail to fit in. If you don’t fit in, you are cut off from the support that is given by the group, the most important and durable aspect of military life. It’s comforting to find such an unambiguous definition of who you are. It’s all in the uniform.
My section commander on basic was a tall, lean LCIS tech from Regina, Master Corporal Jason Bromstad. He was the picture of an ideal signaller. Like me, he was a massive nerd. He was also immensely professional, relatively compassionate (which means
something different when discussing an instructor on basic training), and highly skilled. He had the longest, thinnest fingers I have ever seen, and every day he would inspect our weapons, laid out neatly on our beds, and find black carbon that we had unsuccessfully tried to remove from some inaccessible nook. Every day we would try harder to remove this carbon, and all to no avail. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I have ever had, but it taught me an important lesson: in the army, it is not always possible to succeed (and remove every molecule of carbon), but that doesn’t change the fact that you must still try your hardest.
Overseas, we never had a weapons inspection, as we were trusted to perform this most basic soldiering skill on our own. There was also no real drive to remove every speck of carbon. Instead, we cleaned our weapons to make them functional, and to prevent any jams in the event that we found ourselves in a firefight. The realities of combat led to pragmatism in everything that we did. The mundanity and stupidity of the endless quest for a spotless weapon was replaced by the hard fact that we needed our weapons to function perfectly in the event that we had to pull the trigger.
The day progresses at an almost lackadaisical pace. We will be on the go again tonight, and I know that this will mean exhaustion, aching shoulders, and danger. This reality seems distant while we sit and while away another blistering day in Mushan. Our suffering has become a reality that must be accepted, as you might be forced to accept an odious relative at Christmas dinner. We don’t really want to be doing what we are doing, but it is necessary and important, and there is no point complaining about it. We talk mostly of better times, of leave, what Cyprus is going to be like, the qualities of our wives and girlfriends, the men that they are cheating on us with. We think about home longingly, but it doesn’t seem like a real place.
Like when you try to picture what summer will be like in the middle of a cold winter’s day, to us Canada is an impossible ideal that exists on some unreachable plain. I can’t imagine being cold, or even what cold water tastes like.
I pull out my tin of Danish-made smokes, and have another Prince, the “brand of the House of Prince A/S.” I still have no idea who Prince A/S is, or why he only is referred to by his initials, but the pack conjures up images of Danish royalty enjoying their well-deserved tobacco after a hard day of hunting. The reality of lung cancer and debilitating health doesn’t enter the equation. I enjoy the smoke heartily, ashing onto the blackened sand of Mushan, and think about better times. When I speak, I can hear the gruff quality that the tobacco has given my vocal cords, and it makes me feel like a tougher man. It is 1300, and the temperature is 50 degrees in the shade.
After a while, I get up and start to wander around the camp. There are ANA everywhere, and they go about their daily business just as we do. To us, everything that they do looks strange. They sing Pashto and Farsi songs as they work, they hold hands with their friends as they walk, and they “jingle” (which means “to decorate or ornament”) everything. Jingle trucks (so named for the noise their rattling baubles and chains make) are the standard means of transportation, and the Afghan propensity to decorate knows no bounds. One of the water trucks near our area has a giant mural on the back depicting a white woman with a sword and a tiger roaring beside her. In the background is a depiction of the truck itself, making its way up a mountain with a fighter jet presiding over the scene. The style appears to be an agglomeration of Persian, Chinese, and Indian styles full of pointy arches and Middle Eastern geometric designs.
Everything that can be jingled is jingled. One of the ANA-owned Ford Rangers in our camp has a massive bedazzled picture of Hamid
Karzai hanging off the rear-view mirror. The equivalent would be having a massive picture of Stephen Harper or the Queen hanging from one of our G-Wagons. I know of one ANA soldier who got into trouble for painting his AK-74 bright gold.
The ANA soldiers lounge around in their green combat pants and tan T-shirts. Their supply system is not as zealous as ours, and they need to make do with much less than we carry. Some even wear berets on patrol, and their personal kit is lighter than ours, little more than their weapon, flak vest, a few water bottles, and spare magazines carried in pouches and pockets. The benefit is that the Afghans can run faster and longer then we can, and we use them to catch Taliban who run away from us. One of the Afghans has a prosthetic leg, but he still manages to keep up on all of our patrols. Their uniforms look like castoff American fatigues, but the soldiers are always smiling, and willing to trade some naan bread for a smoke. Most exude kindness and bravery in all of their actions. But they have an unnerving habit of staring unabashedly at us when we pass them. Once when I was working out, an ANA soldier came into the gym and just stared at me for a half-hour. Although I’m willing to grant a certain amount of cultural leeway, that was still creepy.
Rumours abound about the Afghan proclivity for homosexual relationships, a phenomenon known to us as “man-love Thursdays.” Religious and social conventions dictate that women must be hidden, that liquor is forbidden, and that homosexuality is a sin. The reality is considerably more sordid. Although I only once saw a woman without a veil, I did see homemade wine in large glass jars in one of the compounds that we searched.
Later in the tour, we were in Mushan on a routine resupply mission. We stayed the night so that the engineers could have two days to improve and repair the camp, and we had to do a shift of turret watch. The Canadian LAV is armed with a 25mm Bushmaster cannon, and the thermal imaging sights are fantastic. It was about
0200, and I was scanning the turret from side to side slowly, watching for enemy insurgents but seeing little more than cats and dogs. I scanned a little bit too far to the left on one of my sweeps, and saw two men with weapons walking around the razor wire that surrounds Mushan.
Holy fuck, Taliban,
I said to myself. Although I’m not a qualified turret gunner, I understand how the weapon is fired and I prepared to take off the safety. Just as I put my finger on the trigger guard, I saw both men drop their weapons, and then their pants. Soon they were pleasuring each other in a trench that they thought was far from prying eyes. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
A few Afghans stare at me, and smile as I wander around the camp. They seem friendly enough, but I’m afraid that their stares linger longer than is appropriate. I light another smoke, and go back to our sleeping area. As I sit down, we get the word. There is going to be a BIP (blow in place) of the IED components found yesterday. The engineers have been busy digging a pit outside the camp for the last few hours, and they have filled that pit with IED components and illumination carrier shells. When the artillery fires an illumination round, it burns white phosphorous in the air as it descends on a parachute. The carrier shell, the portion that actually carries the white phosphorous, can be scrounged and reused by the Taliban in their IEDs. We found a couple yesterday, and decided to BIP them along with the other components.
The engineers carry a lot of C-4 plastic explosive. Before departing on a patrol, they never really know how many things they are going to need to blow up. C-4 is fairly versatile, and can be used to blow in the doors of compounds or walls, or to create new openings; it can blow IEDs that are found on the patrol or BIP components in a safe location. Engineers always carry too much C-4, as
they don’t want to run out. Unsurprisingly, they are keen to use up as much of the dead weight as possible, as we are halfway through the patrol and they have not had the opportunity to blow anything up. Plus, why make a small explosion when you can make a big explosion? If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.
The engineers finish setting up the IED components for the BIP. They move back behind the HESCO Bastions and pass the word.
“Boys,” we hear, “there is going to be a BIP.” No big deal, we’ve seen enough explosions at this point that they don’t really faze us. “Oh, and boys, you are going to want to put on helmets and get behind cover. This is going to be
big.
” A collective sigh and grumbling can be heard as we find our helmets and flak vests, put them on, and sit behind a row of sandbags. I sit beside Murphy and talk to him about the “bullshit” safety regulations. We’ve all been through enough BIPs.
“Two minutes!” someone shouts. I light a cigarette. “One minute!” Good. Soon I can go back to doing nothing without my body armour on.
“30 seconds … 10 …”
Boom!
The world shakes like I have never felt it shake before. One of the sandbag walls collapses, and the concussion takes the wind out of us for a few seconds. The BIP occurred five seconds before the engineers thought it would, but I guess these things are hard to judge perfectly. We smile and laugh at our own unforeseen fright, and as the dust settles we get back up. As I walk back to my kit, I see Captain Michelson, the FOO, noticeably shaken and staggering forward. He is being helped by two other soldiers. I look more closely at him, and I notice that blood is trickling down his face from the left side of his head. He is pale, and when he first sees me his mouth gapes once or twice as if he’s trying to say words, but he is unable to. His eyes slowly focus, and he looks at me and says loudly, “Damn you, Chimos!” his fist shaking in the air.
During the BIP, a carrier shell flew over the HESCO Bastions, bounced off the top of two separate sea cans, and ricocheted straight into his head. He had been the one who ordered that carrier shell fired in the first place, two nights ago when we were waiting outside the SP. He was almost literally hoisted by his own petard. I’m terrified for the FOO, a tough old bastard through and through. He doesn’t look particularly stable on his feet, and I try to help him walk over to the medic. There are already two people walking with him, however, and he doesn’t want to be carried. He gets to the UMS (unit medical station), and lies on a cot. They apply a bandage to the wound, which is still dripping blood at a blessedly slow pace. I watch as the doc begins to work on him, and decide that I can probably be used best at the CP, passing on the messages. I walk quickly there, but when I arrive they have everything well in hand. The 9 liner (medevac request) is already being sent, and there is nothing I can do. Unfortunately, Mushan has gotten lots of practice with calling in 9 liners. I ask if there is anything that I can do, and I’m told to fuck off. Manners don’t have much of a place during a casualty situation. I’m glad that I double-checked the radios last night, however.
I go back to my kit and sit down. I hear the story being retold for the benefit of those who weren’t nearby. Someone finds the carrier shell and gives it to Captain Michelson. We find the ricochet marks on the sea cans, and feel like detectives for a few minutes. The shell had bounced off the steel frame of the first sea can, and punched a hole through the quarter-inch aluminum above it. It then came off at an angle, struck the frame of another sea can that Captain Michelson was sitting underneath and struck him in the head. He was lucky that the two impacts took so much momentum away from the shell. If it had been going any faster he would have been killed. I guess that he was also extremely unlucky that he was hit in the first place, but I’m a glass-half-full person.