The Taliban Don't Wave (13 page)

I was sweating terribly, but at least this time, I wasn't alone. Our little jaunt had taken the wind out of almost everyone's sails. But the heat problem was greatly compounded by the fact that Ramadan, the month of religious fasting for Muslims between dawn and dusk, had begun. The ANA, in accordance with their religious beliefs, were not eating or drinking anything between first and last light. None of them were allowed to drink any water, even in the incredible heat. We felt truly sorry for them, and only snuck a sip of water when we were sure none of them would see us.

They knew that we were Canadians and therefore (in their minds) good Christians one and all, but that our faith didn't require us to fast during this period. But I had said before to my team that in a show of solidarity we would always do our best not to drink or eat in front of them, out of respect for their faith. I asked Ali if the Taliban were observing Ramadan. He said they believed that because they were waging jihad (holy war ordained by God) against the infidel, God did not require them to observe the traditional fasting or abstaining from liquids between dawn and dusk.

Everyone tried to find some shade, but we were exposed, with only a few walls and one tree providing anything that could help block the sun's burning rays. The warrant and Hetsa covered the north end; Fourneau and I were on the south. I radioed the command post to ask when the engineers were coming and was told that the engineers and QRF out of Masum were tasked out, and wouldn't be available to us.

I wanted to ask “Since when?” and “Doing what, exactly?” I could only guess what was happening. It was now close to eleven and the sun was blistering hot.

I knew guys were going to dehydrate quickly in this heat, so I told Longview and Hetsa to come and join us at the base of a large tree. It was the only shade around for two hundred metres. I set us up so we would cover all of the cardinal points, then we sat down and waited for the Canadian engineers to finish up their task and come and help us out. But nothing happened. It was now 1200 hours and we'd been waiting almost an hour and a half. We had told all of our jokes; we'd taken the piss out of each other, as one does; Fourneau and I debated whether or not the three
Star Wars
prequel movies rightfully belonged within the sacred halls of official canon or were merely blasphemous aberrations; but now the waiting was just getting stupid.

I asked over the net about our chances of someone,
anyone
, turning up any time soon, and the sergeant manning the radio in the CP, apparently without any malicious intent, asked me right back if we could requisition the ANA engineers to come and take care of it.
What ANA engineers?
Did he mean the guys who sweep Route Kelowna?
Are they even remotely capable of taking care of something like this?
But at this point, it was worth a shot; the heat had grown almost unbearable and we were sweating the water out faster than we could get it in.

I asked Lieutenant Aziz if he could call in the ANA engineers. He put in the request through his HQ, waited about fifteen minutes, and was then told they were on their way.
Gods of war, may your hammer be mighty! About freakin' time!

I had never (in all of the time I had spent in two different armies) seen or experienced what was about to happen next. It began when the ANA engineers actually turned up.
Hey, that's great!
But they were four hundred metres away, and they began very slowly and methodically minesweeping the road.
Oh, that's bad.
Lieutenant Aziz, who I would quickly realize was not the most patient man in the ANA forces, lost his temper and began shouting at them to “Come over here! The IED is right here!”
Hey that's great! You tell 'em, Aziz. Let's get this cake and ass party over with!

But they rudely ignored him, and continued slowly sweeping Route Brown.
Oh, that's bad; he's not going to like that!
But in all fairness to the engineers, that was probably what they were trained to do. There could have been secondary devices: you can't just rock up to an IED all willy-nilly. But you didn't have to be a cultural expert to understand that Aziz had just lost a serious amount of face and felt incredibly slighted by the fact his engineers had just blanked him completely, and carried on methodically with their minesweeping.

So now he totally lost it, and angrily marched over to the IED haystack.
Crap
, I thought to myself,
he's not really going to climb onto it, is he? That's suicidal!
He leaped on top of the haystack like a man possessed and I shouted, “Take cover!” as we peeked over the wall to watch him as he fired up his best Stompin' Tom impression.
Geeewwww!

He was angrily smashing his feet up and down, on top of an IED, and shouting like an old man who just missed his bus.
It's an IED barn-stormin' hoedown!

I radioed the snipers to let them know, just in case they were wondering, that
yes
, that was my ANA lieutenant jumping up and down on the haystack, and
no,
I would not be joining him any time soon! They laughed and told me to keep my head down.

Now my Dari wasn't that good, but I had always been a keen student of non-verbal cues and subconscious body language, so I think I got the gist of it. As he flailed his arms and violently cursed, I think it went a little something like, “
It's over here, you sons of braying donkeys! I'm standing on it! Quit dicking around and get over here and do your damn job!
” or words to that effect; only, of course, in Dari. Ali kindly translated for me, and I was pretty close. “Yeah, I gathered he's upset, yeah.” We had all taken cover behind the nearest mud wall, rightfully afraid his lack of patience would quickly be the hideous, exploding death of him, and equally afraid his severed head would soon form a flying meat torpedo at over two hundred kilometres an hour!

They say God loves fools and children, but hates the poor, bloody infantry, so I thought for sure Aziz's number was up. But the higher power decided it wasn't his time, and mercifully chose to ignore his apparent death wish. To be fair to Aziz, it was really,
really
hot, and all of our tempers were a bit frayed,
but still!
To date, that was one of the craziest things I'd ever seen. I didn't know it then, but I would soon see worse.

The IED never went off. The engineers casually walked over toward Aziz as he continued his IED hoedown, contested who was stupider, and then Aziz sullenly stomped back over to us, unfazed and unrepentant. The engineers shook their heads, and a young guy with them (who was either the most qualified or, more likely, the bravest) walked over to the haystack, gave it a few passes with his antiquated mine detector, casually brushed the hay aside, and found the IED. We sunk a little lower behind our cover, afraid, as we had been with Aziz, that parts of the engineer's exploding body would make deadly projectiles. I couldn't help but sneak a peek; it was like watching someone's house burn to the ground. You hated yourself for watching, but could easily justify it by saying you had to walk the dog anyway, so there you were.

The engineer calmly tied a long piece of 5/50 parachute cord around the end of the IED, walked ten feet away, and gave it a healthy tug.
GEEEWWWW!

Not on my how-I-wanted-to-die-in-Afghanistan list: by an engineer's lifeless head turning into a meat bowling ball and ripping off mine. But I guess the Force was strong with him because he managed to survive.

He then strolled over to me, as I gently shook my head in reproach, unable to help myself. I knew enough to know that was not
really
how it was supposed to be done, but he was still alive, so what did he care? He stuck his hand out toward me, palm up, and asked for something.

Ali translated and told me he wanted to borrow my Leatherman tool to cut something. Before I knew what I was doing, I reached around my back to my belt, pulled out the tool, and handed it over to him, thinking he needed it to cut off his string. It was good string, and I was sure that stuff wasn't too easy to come by at the Masum bazaar. Besides, it was closed on Fridays.

He marched back to the IED with a sense of divine purpose in his stride, walked right up to it, located the red and yellow detonating wires sticking out the top of the device, and then deftly snipped them—with
my
Leatherman tool!
Gaahaaaa!

“What the fuck?” the warrant shouted. We all looked at each other, in a state of total shock.

What in the hell was going on today? Were we in Bizarro Land? Had the world gone mad? Did the normal rules of IED physics and common sense no longer apply?
The young engineer picked up the heavy IED—it was a forty-pound, brand-new pressure cooker—and removed its lid. Two things were clearly evident: it had a remote-controlled detonator on top of it, and Timothy's local RadioShack had let him down by selling faulty electronics. The detonator had failed to trigger the device.

The engineer, bless his socks, obviously thought I would like a closer look at the device, which he thought he had rendered inert
(was it?),
so he manhandled the IED over to me and loudly dropped it at my feet with a dull, sickening thud.
GAAHAAAA!

I knew it was some sort of weird, tribal acceptance thing, or more like an Afghan man test, so I tried my best not to flinch, quickly looked it over (without moving my feet an inch or even touching it), asked Fourneau to get a picture for the OMLT yearbook, and then calmly said, “Great, well done. Now get it the hell away from me!” Ali translated and the engineer smiled, handed me back my Leatherman tool, picked up the IED, and roughly slung it over his shoulder like a sack of wool.

Even though it was pretty clear he had been trying to slip the surly bonds of earth, I still had to admire his sand. I asked Ali to tell him that the next time I saw him, I would give him a Leatherman tool: with the caveat that he didn't use it to snip anymore detonating wires! The engineer smiled and asked me to promise. I gave him my word and then he strolled away with the IED. I felt bad for the ANA. They wanted to do the job, but they had none of the necessary tools.
Imagine trying to be an engineer without a tool like a Leatherman?
When he was twenty feet away I began to breathe normally again and asked Aziz if he'd like to head back in.

We'd spent nearly five hours in the brutal heat and everyone was done in. We formed up into our standard two columns, and I told Ali to gently ask the still ill-tempered Aziz if he would have done anything on the cordon differently. He wasn't sure what I meant, since we had found the device, saved the children, rendered the IED inert—a job well done, as far as he was concerned. I told him that Allah must love him very much, because he could've been blown up from jumping up and down on top of the IED.

“
Inshallah
[
if Allah wills it
]. If Allah wanted me to die, I would have died,” he said and shrugged.

“I know,” I politely countered. “But you took a helluva chance, climbing on top of it like that.”
Clearly, I'm not getting through to this guy . . .

“
Inshallah
,” he said and shrugged again, still not sure what I was getting at. I felt my blood rising, and even though I'm a pretty even-tempered guy, his laissez-faire attitude was starting to get to me. I wanted to grab him by his ears and shout in his face, “
You put all of us at risk with your little temper tantrum, you stupid idiot!
” but stopped myself, thinking that probably wouldn't be well received. The warrant could see I was losing my patience, so he walked over to me and gently put his hand on my shoulder.

“Let it go, sir. It's done now; we'll know better for next time,” he calmly said, out of earshot of the ANA.

“Numbnuts doesn't even get that the rest of us were danger close and could've been killed too!” I angrily whispered back.

“Next time we'll give him a thousand-metre standoff, now that we know he's suicidal,” the warrant laughed.

I laughed with him and started to cool down. “There won't be a next time. I quit! I've seen enough crazy crap in the last two days to last me a lifetime. I'm tapping out, Warrant!”

Like a patient father he said, “As your life coach, I strongly suggest you breathe in deeply and feel the nice, burning-warm air sting your lungs. Then say
woo-saaaa
five times, and take a nice, long sip of burning-hot water, to heat you up from the
inside.
You'll feel better in no time—you'll see!”

I radioed the CP, wanting to say, “Thanks for nothing!” but instead, took it on the chin and reported our locstat, saying we were done and coming back in. I gave Aziz his space and joked with Fourneau on the way back in.

The ANA engineers took the pressure cooker IED to the UXO/IED sandbag hut next to the watchtower, and I radioed the CP to tell them the ANA had dropped off a TNT gift for them. I thanked Aziz for coming out to play, and told him how impressed I was with his team's fortitude. To be able to do all of that on zero water intake, in that terrible heat, was truly impressive. He seemed to appreciate my comments, and we parted ways, agreeing to meet after supper to discuss tomorrow's patrol.

We cleared our weapons by taking the loaded rounds out of the chambers of the barrels, and I asked Fourneau to get a picture of me. There wasn't a spot on me that wasn't soaked through with sweat. I entered our building and changed my clothes and scrubbed my pits down with baby wet wipes, what we used to call in The Parachute Regiment a “3 Para shower.” I asked if anyone had anything to add to my report, but no one had any comments. We walked over to the OMLT building and immediately raided the fridge for cold drinks and Freezies.

We had all lost pounds of water, and our faces looked drawn and thin. I thought about the ANA as I chugged down water, apple juice, and iced tea and felt incredibly sorry for them, knowing they weren't allowed to drink anything until sundown.
Hardcore.