The Patrol (15 page)

The mosque in Mushan is different from the simple mud buildings I am used to seeing. Painted white, it gleams in the noonday Afghan sun. Its windows are framed in blue, and it is riddled with bullet holes. After weeks without seeing any colour but brown, I find that the white seems very out of place, and strangely beautiful. When the enemy fled from 4 Platoon, they used the mosque as a firing position during their retreat. The Koran’s injunction to “not fight them within the precincts of the holy mosque” (Surah 2:192) seemed to play no role in their decision to fire from the second floor. This didn’t last long, however, and they soon fled, hastily taking potshots from nearby grape huts.

When we enter the centre of the village, it is already strongly held by Canadian soldiers, who are drinking water and forming a defensive ring. The OC finds the commander of 4 Platoon, and they sit down to begin discussing the situation. I see a couple of soldiers crowded
around the well, pouring water into their helmets and putting them on, so I get in line. The water is cool and refreshing, and I feel it drain down underneath my flak vest. Searching out some shade, I sit down on a strange horizontal metal pole about 30 centimetres in diameter. (I think it may be an animal hitch for the mosque, but I’m not sure. I’ve never seen anything like it before in Afghanistan.) I light a cigarette and relax for the first time all day. As I pull out a bag of honey-flavoured almonds, I reflect that this patrol isn’t turning out that badly after all. We are given five minutes to drink water in this oddly tranquil oasis, and some people even take off their helmets to revel in the shade, until a glower from the sergeant-major ends such ideas. At length, the OC comes to sit beside us. As he sits down, the weight from his backpack shifts him, and he falls awkwardly backwards, like Humpty Dumpty, almost rolling into the wadi. The sight of his boots flashing before us and the tiny squeal he makes as he hits the ground gets to all of us, and we start laughing. The more he struggles, the more ridiculous he looks, and our rattled nerves succumb completely to mirth. Somebody helps him up, and we finish our water bottles, zip up our kit, and prepare to move on. The respite was short and we are once again on our feet, preparing to lurch back the way we came and meet up with the ANA 600 metres to the south. The day patrol is far from over.

On the way, we pass the remainder of 4 Platoon, who have extended into a holding position to look out at the fields we know the enemy has fled into. I’m surprised at how many of the faces are familiar, and how many people I exchange a quick word, joke, or look with. It’s now about 1300, and the sun begins to beat down with a new intensity. I’ve finished my last bottle of easily accessible water, and I am down to my 4.5 litres of reserve. My kit feels substantially lighter without the water, and my shoulders ache noticeably less. I have to wait until the next stop before I can pull off my pack to drink more. As I walk, laden down underneath my kit, the
heat seems to be absorbed into my every pore. The sun becomes an iron that presses onto my helmet and body armour, warming my core temperature as I fight to keep lurching, one foot in front the other. I have to make a conscious effort to maintain the basics of patrolling: stay five to 10 metres back from the person in front of you, look over walls and around corners, cover doorways until the person behind you can cover them, keep your head up, above all else. By the time we link up with the OMLT commander, a pounding headache has begun to make itself known, and I feel as if I could fry eggs on my shoulders. We sit down, and I take off my backpack, escaping into pure bliss. As I root around for my spare water, heated to just below boiling point by proximity to my radio, I hear the familiar words of the sergeant-major: “Flavelle, what the fuck! The OC needs the fucking radio!”

I sigh internally, scramble to haul the weight of my pack once more onto my shoulders, and hurry to the OC’s side. I sit, extend my antenna, and try to stomach the hot water I’ve just pulled out. Although I know that I may be entering the first stages of heat exhaustion, it has become a chore to swallow the plastic-flavoured water. At this point I would give almost anything for an ice-cold glass of Coke. The OC has decided to forgo the shade of the trees that grow beside the wadi, and instead is sitting in the harsh sunlight. There is nothing that I can do but sit and sweat, and wonder why he isn’t going into the shade. I contemplate saying something, but this would constitute a breach of military etiquette, and I don’t really feel up to being glared at by the sergeant-major again.

Heat exhaustion starts as a pounding headache, and then an uncomfortable feeling of warmth spreads throughout your body. Spots appear in front of your eyes and your ears ring. It gets harder and harder to put one foot in front of the other; eventually darkness
obscures your vision, and you pass out. Heat exhaustion, like a myriad of other military maladies, is something that you hear about, and train to deal with, but that you never really expect to experience. This all changed in Afghanistan. For once, all the military’s talk about the importance of pre-training, physical fitness, and hydration turned out to be legitimate.

When we arrived in February, the average high was about 35 degrees Celsius. Over the course of the next few months the temperature began to rise, and by July highs averaged around 42 degrees. Often, it would get even hotter, and the hottest day recorded on our tour was 59 degrees (we were all a little disappointed that it didn’t reach 60, a nice round number).

In Mushan, the temperature is now fast approaching 50 degrees. Despite the pre-training and the focus on hydration, people begin to pass out on other patrols with increasing frequency. This could create a massive problem, as casualties may require a helicopter evac. Infanteers are accustomed to suffering in silence; the infantry piles derision onto soldiers who can’t complete a patrol. Although extenuating circumstances are taken into account, for the most part those who succumb to heat exhaustion are shunned openly or derided privately. (If you have recently returned from leave, allowances are made for the amount of alcohol consumed and the resulting damage to your liver.) When my friend and fellow signaller collapsed on a particularly brutal patrol, he was, for all intents and purposes, forbidden from going out again. I quickly became known as “that signaller who didn’t pass out,” and I was forced into an awkward position between a friend and a group of people who simply no longer wanted him around. I don’t think that any but the fittest are immune to heat exhaustion and, as is so often the case, I think the hostility of those who shunned him stemmed from their own insecurities.

On one patrol through the village of Zangabad, we were checking out a school to see if reports that the Taliban had taken it over
were accurate. After walking all day, I promised myself a rest when we reached the school. The second-in-command (2iC), Captain Troy Leifso, who had taken over while the OC was on leave, had other plans. He wandered the grounds, cheerfully surveying the overturned desks and the children’s strewn papers. My ears began to ring, and it took all my self-control to keep forcing one foot in front of the other. My vision was closing in, and just when I thought I couldn’t take it any more, we sat down in the shade and I took my helmet off. I gluttonously swallowed a bottle of water and a granola bar before I began to feel up to patrolling again.

Sweating underneath the Mushan sun after covering some five kilometres in the heat of the day, I begin to feel the onset of the headache that will lead eventually to heat exhaustion unless I manage to cool myself down. I decide to just quietly stand up from my radio and leave it beside the OC while I walk over to Chris beside the wadi. We smoke a cigarette underneath the flowing branches of a mulberry tree, and I plan how to dash the 10 metres to my radio if the Taliban attack. It’s 1430 and, despite my best efforts, I begin to wish that I had stayed back at Mushan, drinking warm water and sitting on radio shift.

A love of being badass lives inside every soldier, and there isn’t anything more hardcore than patrolling through an Afghan village when the Taliban are out. A spot on these patrols is much sought after, and we all know that we can hold our heads as high as anyone else in the country (except the Special Forces, and possibly fighter pilots). Deep down, I am proud that I am here, and proud that I can make it and keep up. But there’s still a tiny voice in the back of my head that wishes that I could have stayed in Mushan, or better yet Sperwan Ghar—or even better, Canada. When we are relaxing and at our ease after a patrol, this voice is a distant memory; but here
with the sun beating into my brain and the future uncertain at best, the worm of fear grows stronger, to paraphrase Farley Mowat.

As if my silent prayer were being answered, I hear the OC begin to coordinate our movement out of the village and back to SP Mushan. The Taliban have fled, and all of our objectives have been cleared. While we were wandering around the village, the ANA and 4 Platoon, with help from the engineers, have cleared all of their objectives, the majority of the buildings in Mushan. Their search has yielded a number of components used to make the IEDs that hamper our progress every day, and although we hoped for more, we are satisfied with the small victories the day has brought. We have forced the Taliban to flee, and may have even killed or injured some of them (they drag their dead with them, making it impossible to be sure). Now, for the first time in that long uncertain day, the end is in sight. It’s just a simple matter of waiting for the ANA and Canadian platoons to link up on either side of us, and push the two kilometres back to SP Mushan. Then it’s cool well water, rations, and sleep for all of us.

I never expected that I could become positively gleeful over the thought of rations but, other than a few handfuls of almonds and a couple of granola bars, I haven’t eaten all day. A fervent desire for rations is proof positive of the insidious power of the army to warp all that is good and just inside you. I guess I haven’t been out long enough to truly hate rations from the depths of my soul like so many others.

When we first arrived in Sperwan Ghar by way of a flight on an American Black Hawk, I was amazed at the quantity and quality of food available. We arrived just before lunch, and the cooks (the hardest-working and most underrated group in the military) had put on soup and sandwiches for us; one of three meals that they
would provide six days a week for the remainder of the tour. On top of that, there were boxes and boxes of cereal, granola bars, fruit, instant noodles, and Pop-Tarts. A friend of mine (who for propriety’s sake will remain unnamed) walked into the mess tent with me. He took one look at the blueberry Pop-Tart that someone was eating and promptly ran out to vomit in the porta-potty (his actual words were something like “Is that a …
retch
… Pop-Tart …
retch?
”). On his previous tour, TF 1–06, he had been reduced to rations for so long that they had lost all appeal. After that, he would eat anything that wasn’t a ration, and for days subsisted on a diet of Pop-Tarts. Obviously he hadn’t given them a second thought the entire time he had been in Canada, but when he saw someone eating one overseas, the associations must have been too powerful. From that day forward, every time that we went head to head playing poker, I would take out a blueberry Pop-Tart and eat it in front of him to break his concentration (I’m not entirely sure if his ensuing threats to kick me “in the cock” were in earnest, but they may well have been).

As we wait for the elements to link up around us, I have an opportunity to sit and reflect on the day so far. All that we have been through is a simple shoot and scoot. This is the type of thing that other platoons in COPs or strongpoints encountered almost every day. However, it was my first sustained contact with the enemy and, more specifically, it was the first time I had ever personally been shot at. Part of me thinks the whole thing is kind of unfair. Why does some Afghan want to shoot at me? I’ve never done anything to him. In fact, I give Afghan children candy and toys every opportunity I get. Once, on an earlier patrol I had given my last ration to an obviously starving little girl. She had looked at me like it was manna from heaven, and had run away, gleefully and as fast as her emaciated legs could carry her. I was pissed at these people who went
to the trouble to shoot at us when all we wanted to do was make sure that their children didn’t starve. It was that moment when all the reasoning and intellectualizing I’d done about our role in Afghanistan left me. I wanted to help these people.
Fuck the Taliban.

I continue to try to stomach water that has lost its appeal and think about the way I’d reacted to combat. It dawns on me that there are two types of soldiers: those who like getting into firefights and those who don’t. The surge of adrenalin and the promise of action is a strong motivator for many. During the firefight I had felt it too, and after all the suffering I’d been through, all the training I had conducted, I was finally in a situation where everything mattered, a situation where everything was real. I guess that’s why soldiers keep coming back to Afghanistan; once you’ve been in combat, everything else seems relatively uninteresting. However, the overwhelming emotion that I felt during that firefight was fear. Not a fear strong enough to prevent me from doing my duty—I still wanted to see what was going on, and fire my weapon and protect my friends. It was a different kind of fear, not paralyzing but intelligent, a voice that said very strongly: “You should not be here, and if you’d made better decisions you wouldn’t be.” I think that this was the hardest thing to stomach: that fundamentally, deep down, when I was in a tough situation, I wanted out. It takes a special type of person to want to be there and, as it turned out, I wasn’t that type.

The arrival of 4 Platoon pulls me out of my reverie. I see Lagonia, the platoon sig, following right behind Lieutenant Chang, 4 Platoon’s officer. They stop to talk to the OC, and I ask Lagonia how the day is going. He is a skinny infanteer. He smokes heavily, and always manages to keep that combative amicability that is unique to the infantry. He often hung out in my office in Shilo before we deployed, and I tried to get him out of as much work as I could.