The Taliban Don't Wave (3 page)

“Here we are,” Mike said. “Go inside to the first floor; your names are on the doors, the rooms are unlocked, keys are on the desks.” He pointed down the street. “Walk down this road for about fifteen minutes, follow the curve, that'll lead you to the American DFAC. It's open from zero-six hundred. Break down your rifles and lock 'em in your army boxes. Just carry your pistols. Then come back for briefings at building Zulu-3 at zero-eight-thirty.”

“Cool, but where's Zulu-3?” I asked, having never been to KAF before.

“Can't miss it, you'll walk by it on your way to the DFAC. After your briefings, we'll come and grab you guys and get you squared away for kit.”

“Okay, thanks for the pickup and the rooms. Just one more question—what's a DFAC?”

“Whats'a matter?” Mike smirked, “Not up on your TLAs?”

“Apparently not,” I said, not really sure what he was talking about.

“TLAs: three-letter acronyms! The army's full of 'em, and you'd better figure 'em out most ricky-tick if you wanna survive here! DFAC stands for dining facility. There's like seven of 'em, but the American one's the best.”

“Cool, thanks,” I said, wondering if DFAC really qualified as a
three
-letter acronym.

Mike hopped back into the front seat, slammed the door, and shouted, “Fuhgeddaboudit!” The trucks flew off into the night just as quickly as they had arrived, again leaving us to choke on their dust.

“Sir, who were those guys?” Fourneau asked me.

“Mark my words, young man, that'll be us in seven to eight months.” Then I thought to myself,
If
we're still alive.

The next couple of days passed very quickly. One of the boys got his hands on a map of KAF, and that helped us out considerably. KAF was absolutely massive. It harboured at least forty thousand soldiers—more soldiers than my hometown back in Saskatchewan had people. KAF had several runways, thousands of barracks to accommodate all the soldiers, several huge chow halls (apparently also called DFACs), two major hospitals (which I hoped I'd never get to see from the inside), two water purification plants, and a sewage treatment plant that, no matter where you were on the base, always seemed to assault your nose with a delightful bouquet of airborne stench.

To keep morale up, KAF also had the famous boardwalk—a big square in the middle of the base with shops all around it, including a Tim Hortons coffee shop, a Chechen massage parlour (filled with signs that said IF you ask for a ‘HAPPY ENDING,' you will be subjected to the full punishment under military law!), a Subway restaurant, a Burger King, and some other tastes of home.

There were also a dozen shops run by Afghan locals, selling pretty much anything and everything imaginable. The boardwalk formed a large square with the shops and restaurants on the outside, and a football field and floor-hockey rink in the middle. On the dirt rink, the Canadian team routinely destroyed all comers. Literally every country in NATO had tried to beat them, but as far as I know, it never happened.

But for all its amenities, KAF was by no means an easy place to live; the Taliban mortared and rocketed it almost daily. There were signs all over the place saying KAF HAS BEEN ROCKET-FREE FOR ‘0' days! And on top of the fear of getting rocketed and killed, the troops stationed there had to face the maddening, perpetual boredom that inevitably sets in when you're trapped in the same place for long periods of time with no respite. You can only watch the same movies, read the same papers and magazines, go to the same PX (post exchange—a US army base store), walk up and down the same boardwalk, and jog the same route so many times. Troops who couldn't entertain themselves or come up with a way to alleviate the terrible boredom had a very hard time there. And no one could blame them.

The suicide rate in KAF was rumoured to be astronomical, much higher and out of all proportion to the civilian populations of cities that size back home in North America. I was only there for a few days, and by the time I left, I was happy to be going. There was just something depressing about it, nothing I could put my finger on, but I was happy to
not
be spending an eight-month tour only in KAF. The place had a way of dragging you down. Bad mojo, bad chi—the dark side of the Force was very strong there.

Rich woke me up early our first morning there (we were still nicely jet-lagged), so we grabbed our teams and trudged off to find the American DFAC. It was like all things American in a war zone: absolutely huge! It seemed every NATO country had troops stationed in KAF, and all of them chose the American DFAC as their favourite eatery. The line was out the door and around the block.

We looked around and noticed that almost every EU nation had some troops in KAF, and we saw several African nations represented as well. We finally got inside the building and swiped the meal cards the other OMLT boys had left for us on our desks, and then performed the mandatory hand-washing ritual before we entered the scoff house. I saw a young American soldier standing next to the sinks, looking thoroughly bored. I leaned over to him and asked, “You the hand-washing Nazi?”

He looked at me and yawned. “
Jawohl.
Now move along.”

We quickly grabbed some scoff, which was better than anything I'd ever had in Canada, but I figured their food budget was larger than our national defence budget, so they could afford some good growlies. We ate quickly and then marched back to our little neck of the woods in KAF to find Z-3.

We were going to grab a coffee at Tim Hortons, but the line went around the block. I asked Rich if Canadians could butt into the front of the line, but he thought not, since Hortons was, at the time, an American company. Evidently the company's insidious marketing schemes had worked on me, because my sense of national pride was violently assaulted by his uncouth comment, and we angrily debated the ownership of the Tim Hortons coffee and donut empire as we walked through the dust. Armoured vehicles, Jeeps, and tanks were kicking up enough dirt to make us choke, as choppers screamed overhead.

Even at seven-thirty in the morning you could feel the heat building up, and by the time we found building Z-3, another large tent, I was covered in sweat.
As per.

Being the cool kids in town, we obviously sat in the back row for the briefings. At the appointed time, a captain took the podium and gave us a quick overview of the briefings we'd be subjected to that morning. Then the fire marshal, with a completely straight face, told us we couldn't set up a BBQ pit
just anywhere
outside of KAF. He told us we needed to get a special permit from his office if we wanted to set up a barbecue on the bases we'd be going to.
Wow. Um, okay.
I guessed that somebody must have set up a BBQ next to an ammo bunker and set it on fire, once upon a time.

Then we listened to the mandatory OPSEC (operational security) briefing, a modern take on the old “loose lips sink ships” classic.

Then the intelligence officer (Int O) for the battle group took the podium and started speaking in a loud, nasal voice. “This is the map of our current AO [area of operations]. As you can see by the little explosion symbols plastered all over the map, we've had a busy week.” He pointed over his shoulder at the PowerPoint presentation on the screen.
A week? All that happened in a week?
This wasn't a map of the whole country—it was just Kandahar Province, where we'd be fighting. The provincial map had at least three dozen explosion symbols on it.

My throat went dry as it dawned on me that a lot of the explosions happened on Ring Road South, the road we'd be taking from KAF to our bases at Masum Ghar and Sperwhan Ghar, off to the west. There had been at least three explosions on Route Brown, the only road we could take to get to our base at Sperwhan Ghar. Rich looked at me knowingly; obviously he'd caught that too. We weren't laughing anymore.

According to the map, we were about to find ourselves right in the middle of the worst sector for shootings and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. An IED is basically a homemade bomb; the parts and pieces of the bomb could come from actual explosives like artillery shells, army mines, or homemade fertilizer explosives. The electrical detonators or receivers to make it go BOOM could come from pieces of radios, remote-controlled devices, or whatever else the bomb maker could get his hands on. These explosives were ingeniously made and incredibly well hidden, with their size, style, components, and lethality limited only by the imagination of their creator. IEDs were responsible for the greatest number of coalition casualties.

Then the Int O asked the ultimate question: “How many people here are going outside the wire?” By that he meant how many people were leaving the protective wire of their base to go out into bandit country on a patrol.
Outside the wire . . .
there it was! Finally. I had wondered when somebody (who had probably never been
outside the wire
in his entire frickin' military career) was going to ask us if we were going outside the wire.

In the Canadian Forces, there were people who really got off on asking that question—at very inappropriate times—and because of them, it was causing a good deal of friction between those who
had
and those who had
not.

There was another stereotype, a deep-seated belief that had been creeping up and taking hold in the CF; it started right around the time we began deploying soldiers to Afghanistan in 2002. The belief was this: it didn't matter where you had deployed to before in the world, if you hadn't been to Afghanistan yet, you were nothing, and all of your experiences counted for nothing.

That's why guys with a lot of experience, like Warrant Longview, didn't take too well to being asked by some rear-echelon type if they'd been outside the wire before. Guys like Longview had been in the shit on several different continents, but they hadn't been to the Stan before, so obviously, some idiots thought their experience counted for nothing. I got along great with Warrant Longview, but I couldn't help but take the piss out of him because he hadn't been to the Stan yet, and unfortunately for him, I had.

I'd say crap like, “Yeah that's all well and good, Warrant, and maybe that's how you did it against the Russians in Germany, but that's not how it works in Afghanistan.” He knew I was only joking, so he graciously refrained from giving me a mouth full of Chiclets.

Back in the briefing tent, it was only the OMLT guys in the back rows who raised their arms to the Int O's question about who would be going outside the wire. The Int O said the next slide was for us, and then went into a detailed point-by-point analysis of the SIGACTS (significant activities) the enemy had attacked us with over the previous month. I hadn't heard about most of these incidents back home—it seemed that a lot more enemy activity was going on than we'd been told about.

It wasn't looking good. They were hitting us at several different places, all at the same time, and with different attack patterns, as though their efforts were being coordinated by a higher headquarters. The Taliban were a lot more organized than we'd been led to believe back home in Canada.

After the briefings were finished, and with the wind thoroughly taken out of our sails, we left the briefing tent and walked back to our rooms. Nobody said too much. I think we were all in a state of mild shock after what we'd just heard. We knew the war wasn't going well, but I don't think anyone realized it was
that
bad. But I didn't have any illusions. We weren't sent to Afghanistan to keep the peace, because there was literally no peace to keep! We were there to
make
the peace, and that meant putting ourselves in harm's way.

The next morning we ate quickly and then went to the OMLT stores to collect our gear. The store man issued us 9mm bullets and two magazines for our Browning pistols, and I was given twelve mags for my C8 assault rifle (a smaller version of the M-16, with lots of modifications). We also got a laser sight for our C8s, box magazines for the C9 (Minimi) machine gunners, two fragmentation grenades, four smoke grenades, a CamelBak water carrier, a Leatherman tool, a TCCC (tactical combat casualty care) first-aid kit, a one-piece eye monocle night-vision sight with helmet connectors, a compass, an army GPS, and about twenty other odds and sods that you could hook up, connect, or just dangle off your person like a one-man pawn shop. I asked the store man for my issued “stick with protruding nail,” but he didn't find that funny.