The Patrol (10 page)

Within each platoon, one infanteer is assigned the role of signaller, responsible for all the radios within the platoon. He or she usually carries the heavy radio on patrol, unless the platoon commander wants to do it himself. Platoon signaller is the most dreaded job in any infantry platoon, because it means long hours of fixing temperamental radios, instead of playing with weapons and kit or relaxing. As the company signaller, I work directly with platoon signallers, instructing them how to account for all their radio stores, and teaching them the tricks of the trade. By the end of our tour, I would confidently put any of the platoon signallers at the same level with any soldier in my unit. Although they learn the signaller’s skill set grudgingly, the fact of the matter is that the army needs to communicate with itself. It just takes some longer than others to accept this reality and learn the basics of how to fix a radio.

My king falls again, and Kevin has to go on tower shift. He shows me his new living space, a cot on top of plywood in a room framed by HESCO Bastions, boxes of water and tarps. It lacks air conditioning. The air is stifling, and the smell of human bodies in tight proximity closes in on me. On the cots, soldiers are lying down, willing sleep to come. Some listen to iPods, some play video games on portable screens. Kevin’s space consists of a cot, with his rucksack slowly exploding out into the environs. Packages of M&Ms and empty water bottles litter the area under his cot, and pieces of kit hang off the walls. A crate serves as an end table, and power cords
zigzag at random over the plywood floor. Kevin pulls on a pair of pants (a formality necessitated by the unaccustomed presence of a sergeant-major in Zangabad), his body armour and his helmet. He leaves to watch for Taliban on one of the guard towers.

I go back to my patch of shade, lie down, and try to nap. It’s about 1400 and the heat is almost unbearable. My radio needs maintenance, so I change the batteries, double-check the frequencies, and conduct a radio check. The day has been very quiet, and none of us really knows why. I head over to the CP to see if they are having any radio problems I can help with. Luckily, Nick keeps everything in good order; there isn’t much to do. I double-check a few cables and make sure the antennas are seated properly. Their satellite Internet terminal, used solely for morale purposes, hasn’t worked in almost a month. I climb up onto the HESCO Bastion, clean the dust off the radiating element, and recheck the signal strength. I can’t find any problems. I go back inside the CP, and check the connections. I reboot the computer and try again: success. I tell the duty operator that he now has working civilian Internet and I see joy in his eyes.

I don’t know what I did to fix the problem, but throughout the tour technology has just succumbed to my will. It’s a good feeling. I’ve spent about an hour screwing around, and I go back to my sleeping pad and try again to take a nap. Mostly I smoke, think, and listen to the conversation ebb and flow around me. People are discussing the merits of various motorcycles, the tricks they’ve pulled on dirt bikes, and the parties they’ve had back in Canada. I don’t really have much to add, so I lie down and nap intermittently.

We all try to sleep as much as we can, because sleep is nature’s fast-forward button. By the end of the tour, some of us sleep for up to 12 hours a day if there’s no patrolling, effectively cutting in half the time that we have to remain in theatre. On patrol, we don’t expect any more than three hours a night, often less. Sleep becomes a commodity, much like food and water. Once I trained myself to
stay awake under any circumstances, I found that I craved sleep more wistfully than I craved anything else.

Last light. I wake up in the fading orange twilight of the day. We will be stepping off soon. I feel exhausted and almost sick. My nap did little more than speed me to this point. I repack my kit and double-check it. I sit on the sandbags that encircle the mortar pit, pull out a package of nuts, and eat a few. There is still time to get in one more bottle of piss-warm water, so I smoke and drink and think about the patrol.

As I wait to step off, I pull up my soiled knee pad. It rests over my right knee, and has to be adjusted as I walk. I wear only one to remind myself to take up a proper firing position with my right knee down, so that I can rest my elbow on my left knee. The pad was sent to me from home by my reserve unit, along with a few porn mags, a copy of Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations,
and a signed unit photo. The porn mags were in an envelope marked “tax info,” and for a few seconds I thought it actually did contain paperwork. I recognized hardly anyone in the unit photo, and for the first time I felt like an old guy.

My shoulders ache as I put my pack on. I sit again and wait for the patrol to step off. There is a bet on how many times I’m going to fall tonight, and Chris asks me what I think. “Not once, man, no more falls from here all the way back to Sper.”

Tonight is darker than yesterday. We start moving. As we clear the outer cordon, I stop to make sure that the man behind me is moving. When I turn back I trip on the coils of razor wire that are spread out in front of the entrance to the COP. I fall on my face, and my pants get tangled in the razor wire. I can hear stifled laughter as about 10 hands help me up and brush me off. So much for “all the way back to Sper.” I begin to feel increasingly disenchanted with this patrol. The beginning of this leg is the most dangerous, and we
dodge the routes we believe to be IEDed by jumping walls and bashing through grape fields. I’m sweating heavily before 20 minutes are up. I can’t see the ground in front of me and am walking primarily by feel. The ground is covered in roots and similar impediments, and I silently curse the dark, the country, my eyesight, the infantry, and the situation in general. My whole body begins to ache under the strain of my pack, and my legs feel tired.

When I stepped off on this patrol, I was in the greatest shape of my life, but constant patrolling puts an incredible strain on even the fittest bodies. I had been working out at least once and usually twice a day. (Army workout routines are usually tailored to increasing combat ability, as opposed to bulking up, although I have witnessed exceptions to this rule.) After I finished my shift I would run around the hill of Sperwan Ghar, at first just in shorts, but working up to running with all of my body armour and fighting kit on. Eventually I could run up and down the kilometre of incline to the observation point at the top of the hill with all of my heavy kit strapped to my body, including a radio. Now, after a mere 24 hours of patrolling, my body is in pain.

Not even the fittest soldier in the world would say that patrolling in Afghanistan is easy, and some of the older, seasoned combat vets eat anti-inflammatories like candy. The strain of walking, running and fighting under the press of kit is exceptionally demanding. Most fighting troops lose considerable weight overseas (I lost over 15 kilos). Although some are better at patrolling than others, we all feel the strain. The trick is not to let anyone see how much it hurts. To be ostracized from the group is the secret fear of all combat soldiers. In the end, all you can truly rely on is the group, and you can’t allow others to see you as weak. If they do, there are thousands of overt and covert means they will use to shun you, removing your only support structure. So we grit our teeth against the pain and pretend that it doesn’t hurt. This is how we all keep putting one foot in front of the other.

We reach a shallow wadi separating two grape fields, and have to jump. I watch those in front of me, and listen to the
crump
as they hit the ground on the other side. Some make their footing, some don’t. I can’t see the ground on the other side, no matter how closely I look. I pull down my NVG and scan the ground. This doesn’t help, as I can’t distinguish what green line and what black line constitutes the ground. I push my NVG back up, and realize that I just lost a good part of my night vision. Now the wadi looks like a black maw waiting to swallow me whole. I take a few steps back and attempt a running jump into the darkness. Both feet miss the landing, and I slam my face into the hardened mud on the other side. An explosion of stars flash in front of my eyes; a lot of weight just carried my face into the ground. The mud has been compressed by Afghan farmers over the centuries and it feels like concrete. My nose begins to bleed. Luckily, instead of being sucked into the innards of the earth, I find myself standing about shin level in water. It would have been easier to just step down and walk through the wadi.

I pull my weight awkwardly up to the other side. The OC has continued walking, and I don’t know what direction he went in. My glasses have almost completely fogged over, and they are now covered in dirt. I take them off and try to find a clean piece of shirt to wipe them on. I flip my NVG down, but I don’t see any of the IR (infrared) lights on the helmets of those in front of me. Panic begins to set in. I know that I will find the remainder of the patrol, but I’m afraid of what will be said if I have to come on the radio. “29er, this is 29er pronto. I need you to stop as I have lost eyes-on, over.” I’d never hear the end of it. Captain Michelson, the artillery forward observation officer (FOO) comes up behind me, and points me in the right direction. He looks at me and sees the state that I’m in.

“You all right, Flavelle?”

“I’m just great, sir, thanks for the help.”

Part of me wants to sit on the ground and cry; most of me is determined never to give up. I stand up and ignore the pain, and push as hard as I can to catch up to the patrol. As I walk I clean my glasses on a sock that I brought specifically for this purpose. When I put them back on I feel better. By the time we sit down I am happy and confident. Strength can well out of one’s soul just as easily as pain and sorrow.

The motto of my reserve unit, 746 Communication Squadron, is “Determined.” The greatest compliment I received from the infantry was from my friend Master Corporal Lizette LeBlanc: “Flavelle, you might not be good at everything, but you never give up.” Liz knows a few things about determination; she is the first-ever female regular force infantry master corporal in the history of the CF (after the tour she was promoted to sergeant). She is an Olympic-level athlete, and has taken part in some of the worst fighting on Task Force 1–06. She earned the respect of the soldiers around her, and I am happy to know her. When she called me
determined
, it made me feel like I was. The army experience is made up of many encounters that destroy your morale, and a few that lift it. Good soldiers need to understand and acknowledge their mistakes and capitalize on their strengths.

We walk along a stretch of road framed on either side by walnut trees. We have entered an unnamed village, and the walking is much easier now. I feel calm, confident, and strong. The basics of patrolling are returning to my actions: keep your spacing, cover doors, take a knee. I walk along a flat road with my head upright despite the pain—and
fall on my face. I had completely missed seeing an old crater in the middle of the road. This crater was probably caused by an IED, and I feel a chill down my spine.

Fuck this,
I think, and take off my double-layered ballistic eye-wear, replacing them with my regular, reliable glasses. Instantly the night seems to grow brighter and clearer. I can see the world around me once again. The only problem is that if an explosion occurs, my eyes will have no protection. I force that concern out of my mind, I have to be able to see where I am going.

We have exited the village into dried-out opium fields that stretch out flat as far as the eye can see. A faint sliver of moonlight has emerged from the earth’s shadow, and the grey dust looks white in this faint glow. A long orderly row of soldiers stretches out along the ground in front of me and behind me. I can see the silhouette of each man rising above the dust, walking with upheld head and pride despite the exhaustion and pain. The soldiers in front of me walk erect, scanning as they go and exuding confidence and professionalism. In my experience, that look is unique to the infantry; it is the look of someone who is doing a difficult job and doing it well. Strong legs protrude out of masses of kit as we walk across the field, and I feel as if the shades of Canadian soldiers from battlefields past are walking with us, and are embodied in us. For the first time, I feel part of the long, proud Canadian military tradition that is so often forgotten, misunderstood, or just marginalized.

Soon enough this strange and peaceful interlude is completed, and we breach once more into a pungent marijuana field. We walk through the tall plants, and I think about how easy it would be to take some. On the other hand, what the fuck do I want Afghan weed for? I have developed sufficient distrust for this country to dissuade me from any desire to consume their crops. Moreover, how would I even smoke it? I don’t know of any instance of a soldier smoking weed in Afghanistan (we weren’t even allowed to smoke cigarettes
in front of the locals). I can’t say definitively that it didn’t happen, but I can say that I saw absolutely no evidence of it. I did, however, once see a terp get blazed while we were on patrol.

We were sitting beside our LAV in Mushan at the time, preparing to start the move back to Sperwan Ghar. It was the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, when believers fast from sunup to sundown, abstaining from food, drink, and smokes. The sun had just finished coming up, and I was drinking water and stowing kit. My nostrils perceived the telltale aroma of Afghan weed that brought back memories of my downstairs roommates at university.

“What the fuck, Lucky? You can’t smoke, it’s Ramadan.”

“It’s okay to smoke; if I see God I say, ‘I smoke’ and he say, ‘It’s okay.’”

Whatever, I thought. Soon enough we were mounted up and I was standing in the air sentry hatch, with Chris behind me. After about three hours of scanning the Afghan landscape, I popped my head down to grab a bottle of water. Passed out on the bench seat was Lucky, the terp. Beside him was a pile of empty bags that used to contain all of our cookies and chips. He was snoring with a pile of crumbs on his chest.