Authors: Ryan Flavelle
The field that we stand in front of is blessedly dry. The plants have not yet grown to their full height, and they reach to only about our waists. There are no obstacles to human movement inside the field, and we walk by crushing the plants in a line for others to follow. Unfortunately, we are as trapped in this compound as we were in the last one. It is also bordered on all sides, allowing entry only through locked metal doors that lead to the road and a compound where the locals reside. Luckily, at one corner there is a low wall. Piled up below are dried sticks that are probably used for cooking fires. When we get to the corner of the field, we walk over these sticks to reach the wall. The snap of breaking wood echoes throughout the landscape, and it occurs to me that I have never heard a louder sound in my life. If proper patrolling can be likened to a delicate ballet, what we are doing approaches
Stomp.
It has been two hours since we departed COP Zangabad, and although we have walked three kilometres (as someone’s GPS informs us), we have progressed only 600 metres as the crow flies. By this point it is almost 2300, and we won’t reach Sper for another seven hours. For the next hour we bash through Afghan fields, constantly harassed by the sound of barking dogs that can hear and smell that something is amiss. When necessary, engineers use sledgehammers to break down the walls. The packed mud proves to be almost impossible to knock over, however, and we usually scale the walls at their lowest point. By the time I get over the last wall, I am cut up from the grape vines, bruised from falling over the walls, covered in mud from slipping in the wet fields, and drenched in my own sweat. What had been, at the beginning of the night, my last clean uniform has become soiled and ripped from my exertions. Eventually, I tumble over a wall and
find that there is not another field, only a wide open space with the Arghandab riverbed behind it. Between us and the riverbed spreads a graveyard.
Afghan graveyards are usually not marked or delineated in any particular way. Bodies are buried under piles of stone that are taller or shorter depending on the importance of the person who lies underneath them. Above some piles, brightly coloured prayer flags wave softly. They are tied to long, thin branches that are driven into the ground at the head of the grave. Some say that these flags are reserved for those Taliban who died fighting against us, but I can’t say if this is true. One thing that Afghanistan has no shortage of is death. The graveyard stretches on for almost a kilometre before reaching the depression of the Arghandab riverbed. It is almost impossible to walk without stepping on someone’s final resting place.
The patrol continues through the open space, and it feels good just to be able to walk without hitting an obstacle. As we go, we pass a short mud hut. Someone notices legs sticking out. We cannot be sure if the people are dead or alive, so we throw pebbles at them. To our surprise, the bodies begin to move, and an angry Afghan man and his son arise from the hut in the middle of the graveyard. They claim to be gravekeepers, but we cannot be sure they are not Taliban taking a nap while waiting in ambush for us. We search them and their hut and find nothing. Turns out they probably really are gravekeepers. Something is strange about the whole exchange, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. Finally, I come to the conclusion that talking to Afghans at midnight in a graveyard is a strange thing for anyone to do.
I think that they are almost as upset with the group of soldiers from the other side of the world waking them up as I am to be walking through a graveyard in Afghanistan. We carry on, our boots treading over the final resting places of Afghans who may have been
killed by us. It is the only way back onto the riverbed that doesn’t involve bashing more holes in walls.
We reach the wadi system that runs parallel to the Arghandab, and cross it by walking down one side and up the other. I manage not to get my boots wet and smile at my tiny victory. My whole body aches from our exertions to get to this point. The wadi system falls off steeply to the riverbed and we are forced to walk past the same smashed compound that we passed on the first day of the patrol. It is about a metre high, and a few slits in the mud walls indicate that it may once have been a house. It is illuminated by the moonlight and is strangely beautiful. The Arghandab spreads out around us as I push past the compound.
Again, the flash of the IED hits me first, followed quickly by its shockwave and the sound of the explosion. Again, I think that it is a mortar, hoping against hope. Again, I feel sick to my stomach. I take a knee and begin scanning, knowing that this is my only responsibility. I look south toward the compounds on the other side of the wadi, but they are as black as night. I pull down my NVG, but it fails to give me any more information. The green light glows as I wait for the radio to begin spewing out information.
“29er, this is 29W, IED contact, wait out.”
It is the call sign of our weapons detachment commanded by Jeff Brazeau. I hold my breath; I have lived in the same room with everyone in that call sign since I got to Afghanistan. I know them better than I know almost any other group of people, and like almost all of them. I set up and programmed the radio he is currently talking on. For the second time in five days, I pray, this time that everyone is okay. Maybe it was the ANA that got hit. I try hard not to wish for that, but do anyway.
An ominous quiet weighs us down while we wait for information. I can feel my heart pound in my chest. The weight on my knee begins to throb, but I force myself to continue to scan our surroundings.
“29er, this is 29W, be advised, all okay. I say again, all okay. Request Echo assets push up to help exploit the blast seat, over.” The IED must have been remotely detonated. Everyone is okay. I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“29, roger, 2, E21, acknowledge.”
“2, roger.” We have good comms with Sper over the open space of the Arghandab.
“E21, acknowledged, on our way, over.” The engineers begin to push up to the line, walking carefully to avoid any secondary devices. The sergeant-major and the doc push up behind them, just in case. I concentrate on ignoring the pain in my knee.
I move to the OC’s side and pass him my handset. My more powerful radio can reach both Zangabad and Sper, and the OC uses it to coordinate an aerial sweep of the area. The engineers quickly determine that it was a command-wire IED, initiated from the north side of the river. Somehow, in the last few days, the Taliban had both dug in the IED and run out a long, thin wire over the intervening space. I immediately start scanning the north side of the river. All that is visible is a group of compounds. Whoever detonated the IED must have used the destroyed compound as an aiming marker, waiting for us to appear from behind it, and timing our passing. Luckily the triggerman had missed the timing slightly. It had exploded in between an ANA soldier and Jeff Brazeau, missing him by only a few metres and knocking him back. Somewhere, on the other side of the river, less than a kilometre away from us, someone had tried to kill my friends and failed.
“Another roll of the dice,” is a saying I heard often on tour. “I’ve rolled the dice enough times,” was another common phrase when people talked about getting out of the military. The engineers painted flaming dice on a piece of wood with their call sign below it, E21. It wasn’t until this patrol that I realized how literally this phrase was meant to be taken. The simple fact is that there is no safe way to
patrol in this country, but it has to be done. Every step is a roll of the dice—every bullet fired more dice being thrown. The good news is that we have extremely good odds. The bad news is that those odds will hold for only so long. Take enough steps and eventually the odds start to turn against you. The house always wins.
About a week after this patrol, I was sitting in the CP on radio shift. Another IED had struck a vehicle, on the major highway north of the riverbed. The same scene had played out so many times by that point that it almost didn’t faze me. I didn’t recognize their call sign, E21B; they were engineers, not infantry, so I probably didn’t know them. And they were operating on another radio net, so I didn’t hear the calls for help, calm but intense. I just watched the silent information scroll onto a computer screen to see if there were casualties. North of the river was someone else’s problem, so although I logged the incident, and told the duty officer, I didn’t need to do anything. The impersonal information about people’s lives and deaths scrolled across the screen—three people killed and a few more wounded.
That must have been some big IED
, was all that I thought.
The next day I saw Allan, and his face was crestfallen. He had been close friends with all three of the engineers who had been killed. We were leaving on the largest operation thus far on the tour, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to him before I loaded up into my LAV to go to the staging area at Ma’sum Ghar. While we were there, we got word that the LAV that the engineers had been killed in had been towed to MSG, and I went to look at it. What I saw wasn’t really a LAV; it was a blackened, charred wreck that hardly resembled an armoured vehicle. The turret had been completely shorn off, and the vehicle had rolled, instantly killing the occupants. It was a lot harder to be dispassionate when I stood looking at the vehicle that had once held Canadian soldiers. I couldn’t look away, but I felt nauseous. The following
morning we rolled down the same road, second in the order of march. If the engineers hadn’t gone the day before, it could very well have been our LAV being towed to MSG, a charred, blackened mess. After that IED, the engineers no longer used dice as their good luck symbol.
About a year after the patrol, Allan came to visit me at home in Calgary. We drank beer and wine, and talked about old times. The conversation wandered, and we eventually started talking about the field exercise in Wainwright and the training we’d done there prior to deployment. I remembered running out of cigarettes with four days left on the ex and how I had almost lost my mind. At one point, I was helping sort out some communications problems in the engineers’ LAV and was sitting enjoying a bottle of water and a bummed cigarette in the back of their vehicle. We weren’t really talking about much of anything at all, and it came up that I was out of smokes. One of the engineers fished around in his pack and pulled out a pack of Export A Gold, my brand. “Here, take ‘em, I’ve got lots.”
I couldn’t believe this guy’s generosity. I’d never even met him, it was just a random act of kindness. I smiled and accepted the pack, walking away with my faith in humanity somewhat restored. I described the guy who gave me the smokes to Allan.
“Oh, yeah, that was Sergeant Eades.”
“Yeah, I think he was a sergeant. Hey, if you ever see him again, give him a pack of smokes for me.”
“I can’t. He was in E21B’s LAV.”
The engineers finish “exploiting” the blast seat, and determine what type of device was used. They fall back to their position, and we continue with the patrol. Soon we receive reports from Haji that they have eyes on our position. This is good news. I instantly feel safer. The patrol as a whole hunkers down and moves more quickly
toward the COP. The distance to Sper no longer seems insurmountable. We walk quickly in the Afghan night, expecting to see the razor wire of Haji any moment. After a half-hour, I become annoyed that we are not yet there. After 45 minutes I begin to think that we will never see Haji, and that it does not actually exist, except in my mind. Even though I can see the man in front of me clearly, I feel completely alone, slogging through the work and effort of walking. After one of the longest hours in my life, I finally see the diminutive COP on the horizon. The south tower looks squat and square, and I can clearly make out the columnar shape of the HESCO Bastions crowned with razor wire. I breathe a sigh of relief and am soon walking up the steep hill that separates the riverbed from the COP. We have made it halfway back.
I get to the area just outside the COP where Chris had yelled at me for throwing away my water bottle a few days before. So much has changed since then. I succumb to gravity and relax for 15 wonderful minutes with no pack and no helmet. Someone passes me a bottle of water that the COP provides, and I smoke a cigarette. I close my eyes and relax every muscle. Near me I hear Jeff quietly tell the story of the IED strike. I let my head lie back and soak in the few minutes of doing nothing. When I finish the water, I throw the bottle away.
“Kit up.” The dreaded word is passed, and I put my pack on and stand up. Again I experience the amazingly disgusting feeling of my own cold sweat dripping down my face after I put on my helmet. The pain in my shoulders is gone, and I try to focus on enjoying that for as long as it lasts.
We move out of Haji onto a wide open road and soon lose sight of the COP. Again, the ground looms up in my mind. We are close to Sper now, only about three kilometres away, but it feels like it is much farther. We walk through the village of Haji, and the mud walls and compounds rise on either side of us. We reach a clearing
bordering a wadi, and I look for Sper in the distance, but see only the dark mountains around it. I continue to look for it when we stop, and eventually I notice a tiny dot on the horizon with a single light on the top. This is my home, and it suddenly feels like I will not be physically capable of getting there. Every step is a challenge, and the weight of my kit is unrelenting, digging into my shoulders. As we stand up from our short halt, I have difficulty straightening my legs.
In the summer of 2005, I went through what is called the Primary Leadership Qualification (PLQ). This course is designed to teach soldiers how to lead troops in the field. It starts of with instruction on how to instruct, before moving on to military writing, ethics, and physical fitness. Before deploying to the field on our confirmation exercise, we were instructed on what is known as
fieldcraft
. One of the lectures that stood out for me dealt with the “patrolling spirit.” The idea is that a person can be physically fit, capable as a soldier, a good shot, and a good friend—but if he or she does not have the patrolling spirit, that person will eventually fail. At the time, I dismissed this class, as I did the vast majority of military classes; this was an outmoded Second World War idea that no longer applied. Looking back now at this patrol, I know what the patrolling spirit is. It can not be taught in a classroom, it can only be lived.