The Patrol (14 page)

I concentrate on my water consumption and the person in front of me. I talk briefly to the artillery observer behind me, and smoke cigarettes slowly despite the fact that they’ve already lost their appeal. We move a few slow kilometres and jump wadis and ditches. I focus on every footstep I take and try to ensure that I’m walking where someone else has. We continue with our almost lackadaisical pace until we reach a narrow road with a chest-level mud wall on our left and a wadi on our right. In the distance, I hear what I’d been expecting to hear ever since the patrol started.

Incoming gunfire sounds a lot more high-pitched than you would expect and a lot louder. Often
,
you don’t hear it as much as you feel its concussion in your ears. It has become pretty commonplace to hear weapons in the distance; we hear them at night at our patrol base, and I’ve heard a few distant firefights on earlier patrols. But this is different. It is closer and more immediate. The sound is coming from about 300 metres away, a mid-range that I am not used to. We hear only a few machine gun bursts, but they stop us in our tracks. A pause follows—just long enough for me to think that I’ve imagined the whole thing. Then the torrent breaks, and we hear one of the Canadian or ANA platoons start to return fire. They are much closer to us; in fact, I can see a friend in 4 Platoon sprint up into position. Immediately, my radio squawks to life and the contact report begins coming over the air: “29er, this is 21, contact, wait out.”

As we wait for 4 Platoon to get more information on exactly what’s going on I sit down. I don’t really know what to do. The reality of the situation is just beginning to dawn on me. This is not
another exercise to wait out, in the certain knowledge that there isn’t any danger; this is a real live firefight, my first sustained close contact with the enemy. After training for seven years, this is the first time that it all really matters. The first time I have an opportunity to strike back at an invisible enemy that has taken its toll on our company with IEDs buried in the road. The first time I am in a situation where my decisions could become a matter of life and death.

The world seems to close in around me, and I have trouble thinking clearly. I’m not terrified, like I thought I would be; I’m more confused. My training has taught me to take cover and try to get to a good firing position. I kneel below the wall, listening to the fire erupt around me. It sounds like the percussion section of an orchestra; I can hear the staccato drum roll of Taliban machine guns and the response of individual pings of lone rifles, and the bass booms of M203 grenades. I hear on the radio that 4 Platoon and the ANA are both in contact along an approximately one-kilometre line. The fighting elements begin feeding back information: grids of enemy contact, locations of friendly call signs, estimated strength of enemy positions, and so on. The snipers climb onto a roof in an attempt to find a good firing position. It all happens the way it would in Wainwright or Shilo,
but this time it’s for real.

I crouch behind a wall for only a few seconds before I see the OC get up and start walking quickly forward. He wants to further “define the battle space,” and it’s my job to follow him. As I stand up, two or three RPGs sail over the wall to our left in quick succession. They were aimed too high and explode in the abandoned field behind us. I’m not sure exactly how close they are, but I hear the scream as they pass, and see leaves on the tree behind me blow back and forth. I get the idea fixed in my brain that the Taliban are using my antenna, which sticks up almost half a metre above my head, as an aiming marker. They may very well be, as my antenna is probably the only thing visible to the enemy some 200 metres away. The
OC needs my radio, and I can see the sergeant-major running up and down the wall, trying to figure out who fired at us, and whether they are still firing. I harbour a strong desire not to stand up and show my antenna again, so I crawl over to where the OC is sitting, cursing his smaller radio and my inability to fix it (it is working properly; we are simply out of range). I sit down beside the OC and, like a pop-up window in my brain, the words, “I’ve made a series of poor life decisions to get to this point. If I had made better decisions I wouldn’t be here getting shot at” flash in front of my mind’s eye.

I try to decide if what I’m doing is prudent or cowardly. The firefight continues to rage around me. My responsibility shrinks to a small portion of field across the wadi that I cover in case the Taliban try to flank us, and my radio, which provides the OC with the ability to talk to command. Through the fog, I see Chris brush some thorns off a dip in the wall we are hiding behind, and thrust out his C8 while bullets continue to fly over the wall. I’m struck by how cautiously and professionally he pushes his weapon toward the sound of gunfire, and it dawns on me that I should probably do the same. Before this moment, I had expected combat to be reactive, to merely do what I had been trained to do. Although this is, to a certain extent, the way I am responding, I’ve never had to focus my will onto an action like I did at this moment. The rational part of my brain screams out to stay down and wait for it all to go away, but my training demands that I take up a firing position. I remain lost in a decision loop until I see Chris carefully but confidently push his head over the wall. I rally my will and stand up awkwardly.

The first thing I see is two soldiers from our weapons detachment (the guys who carried the C6 machine guns) trying to climb onto the roof of a small grape hut to our left. It’s a simple enough task in most situations, but the combination of a machine gun weighing 18 kilos, 15 kilos of ammunition, and about 45 kilos worth of personal kit (body armour, pistol, helmet, water, etc.) makes the process considerably
more difficult. I look out into the field from which we received the RPG fire. By this point, a line of Canadian soldiers has spread out into firing positions. Section commanders are running around ensuring that everything is covered. The OC frantically takes notes on his map and passes information back to our higher call signs. In the field in front of me, I see flashes of brown combat uniforms, 4 Platoon advancing toward the enemy. For the briefest moment, I also think I see a turbaned head skulk out of sight from one of the mud compounds on the other end of the field. To this day I’m not sure if that head belonged to the Taliban, a civilian, or my imagination.

Looking back from today, the firefight takes on a cinematic quality. It doesn’t seem like I was actually there. I had a feeling of utter detachment that I couldn’t and can’t quite define. For the most part I was numb, responding more than deciding how to act. It was as if I was an intensely interested observer going through the motions of being a soldier without actually being there. There was so much adrenalin going through my body it’s not surprising I felt strange.

The weapons fire begins to die down, as the Taliban flee before the advancing Canadians. It looks like a simple “shoot and scoot,” the normal Taliban response when we probe close to something they want to protect. Their usual plan is to fire long enough to pin down the Canadians while they rush whatever they don’t want us to find out of the area. Most of the time, we usually have a pretty good idea of what the Taliban are hiding, but as they are unfettered by body armour and by the fear of IEDs, they usually escape on some winding path that we can’t easily follow.

The threat now becomes booby traps in the compounds that the enemy have abandoned, and we call up the engineers to assist us in clearing them. After watching for a few minutes I decide that it would be prudent to hydrate while I have the opportunity, so I sit back down and drink half a bottle of water.

Hydration
: the army has a term for everything, even drinking water. I taught a two-month basic training in the summer of 2006 and the consumption of water quickly became our universal palliative. No matter what a recruit’s problems were—too tired, sore feet, bored, marital difficulties—our response was the same: “Get some water into ya.” In Afghanistan, hydration was imperative. At one point, while trying to lose weight for my leave, I was working out two to three times a day, and drinking upwards of six litres of water. I would be up twice a night, frantically pulling on my sandals and trying not to run into anything in a mad dash for the porta-potty, but I never felt so healthy.

On patrol, hydration is especially vital. In the heat of the day it could easily reach over 50 degrees Celsius, and sweat poured from my body. Usually when we finished a daytime patrol my uniform looked like I had been swimming in it; the sweat would drip all the way down past my knees and elbows. A friend of mine with a hairy back sweat more than I could have thought possible, and I know that he gave serious consideration to shaving everything.

The problem was that our body armour was impermeable, so our sweat did not evaporate. On top of that, my radio, which was probably the best personal radio available in the world, had one flaw—it overheated. It would reach temperatures of 60 to 70 degrees, and carrying it was like having a hot plate shoved into my flak vest. It was an absolute necessity to carry, at a minimum, six litres of water, and in Mushan I was carrying nine. It’s easy to forget how much water weighs. To give you an idea, when we stepped off from Mushan I had the equivalent of four and a half two-litre bottles of Coke on top of the rest of my kit. Many of us would find it difficult to carry this much Coke from the grocery store to the car. The water also had to be packed in a very specific manner. I had
two 2.5-litre CamelBaks, as well as four 500-millilitre bottles in my pack, and four in my chest rig. Two of those could be easily accessed from the front zipper pocket (along with my smokes), and two were placed in a side pouch. All told I had easy access to 4.5 litres of water with another 4.5 in reserve.

We had also been issued water purification tablets so that we could drink the plentiful water flowing in the wadis or wells of the villages we passed through, as a last resort. But seeing the locals defecating in a wadi, I ruled this out as a viable option for myself. By this point, all of my Gatorade and Powerade packets were gone, and I was left to drink water that was the same temperature as coffee and tasted distinctly of its plastic container.

I finish gratefully sucking back a bottle. As our other call signs advanced, they were re-engaged, an indication that we might be approaching something very important or something that the Taliban were having a hard time moving. The insurgents had fled to a mosque in the centre of the village, and had kept up a running gunfight the whole way. As friendly call signs advance into compounds or past mud walls, I notice that the OC is having trouble establishing communications with them. Instantly the sergeant-major turns to me and shouts; “Fuck, Flavelle, get over to the OC and give him your fucking radio, what do you think we brought you for?”

Dismissing the crudeness of this comment, this
is
actually what I was brought for. It’s not my immense soldiering skills or witty repartee that the infantry needs me for; I’m basically a walking Very High Frequency (VHF) cell phone.

I stand back up, more cognizant than I have ever been of how high my antenna sticks up over my radio, and walk over to the OC. The gunfire can still be heard, but it is taking place farther and
farther away from us. The OC grabs my handset and immediately begins speaking into it. The sweat pours from under my helmet and down my back. As the OC talks into my radio I sink back down onto the ground and wonder just how much more of this I can handle. I lean back and my antenna touches my neck, giving me an electric shock (I am the shortest path from the radio to the ground). Salty sweat is an excellent conductor, and an antenna-shaped line is quickly burnt into my body. As I unleash a torrent of oaths, the OC looks at me and says mildly, “What the fuck, Flavelle? Why can’t I reach Mushan?”

Once again I have the enjoyable task of explaining basic radio theory to the infantry. I prepare to launch into a “shortest path to the ground” discussion, but before I can speak we are up and on the move again. The sniper team attached to us has spotted a possible Taliban gunman 700 metres away. Before they can get authorization to fire, however, the snipers call back. Apparently after ducking down behind a wall, the man dropped his AK-47 and picked up a shovel. There is no way to be certain that he is an insurgent, so the snipers are not given the authority to fire. He could have been just a guy trying to water his crops, or he could have simply hidden his weapon when he saw ISAF forces.

The landscape of Afghanistan is like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. The long fields of brown and grey dust are spotted with squat mud grape huts and compounds. It all looks like something on Tatooine, and on one patrol I recognized Aunt Beru’s house and could have sworn R2-D2 and C-3PO were somewhere inside. Over the course of millennia, the Afghans have shaped parts of the barrenness into something that approaches lush. With broad irrigation canals, and green crops of grapes, opium, marijuana, and wheat, some locales feel positively inviting. The centre of the village of Mushan, consisting of a mosque at the confluence of two wadis that frame the domed and multi-windowed building, is one such
area. Most of the roads in the village lead to the mosque and the well outside it, creating a focal point where you would expect to find a bustling marketplace. But when we reached it there was no sign of life.

Mosques are ubiquitous throughout Afghanistan, and inside Panjway in particular. I once asked our old terp, Zia (who was replaced by Peter), how one could tell mosques apart from other compounds. “You see that doorway?” (He pointed to a circular indentation in the outside wall of the building from which the imam preached on Fridays.) I did a double-take; I had seen that same indentation on, it seemed, half the buildings I had passed that day. For the remainder of that patrol I’d asked Zia, “Is that a mosque?” Invariably he would reply in the affirmative. I counted 12 on a three-kilometre path. I have no idea how Afghan villagers could possibly require that many places to pray, especially as almost all the villages we passed through had no school, clinic, post office, or any other public service.