The Taliban Don't Wave (37 page)

The next day we went about our normal routine, and after I'd written a bunch of reports, I found time to wash my clothes in a washbasin with a bar of soap and a washboard. The following day I came in from a patrol to find everyone very serious and quiet. I approached the warrant, who told me we'd just been told a comms lockdown was in effect. My heart dropped into my stomach and I felt sick. Later that night, we found out that Warrant Wilson, Corporal McLaren, and Private Diplaros from the OMLT had been killed by an IED strike on their vehicle.

I had worked with the three soldiers before, in Texas and on a few other exercises, but all three of our fallen brothers were very well known to everyone at Mushan, so their deaths came particularly hard to the guys. After supper, everyone was sitting in a circle on the picnic benches in our CP, so I told the guys I was really sorry, because I knew they had been good friends with the fallen soldiers. I told them I wasn't going to force them to all say something, because even though that's what the manual advised, I didn't believe in that. But if they wanted to talk to me, about this or anything else, I was there for them—any time, day or night. They thanked me and I got up to leave. The officer isn't always wanted or needed to be standing around, making guys feel like they're constantly being watched, so I went to my bed space and told Smith the same thing when I saw him: I was sorry, and if he wanted to talk, I was there for him.

The guys were really upset, and no one could blame them. They'd just lost their best friends. We were too far away to get choppered in for the ramp ceremony, so we honoured their memory the best way we could—by patrolling the next morning.

The warrant and I continued to take turns on patrols, and thankfully things remained calm in our neck of the woods. Smith gave the guys lessons on how to fire a mortar (using the mortar tube Major Obermann had taken from the Taliban), and I gave map and radio lessons, and had the boys act as the CP radio operator when the warrant was on the ground and I could watch over them and give them pointers. Our base hadn't been fired on once since that first mortar attack (unless of course you counted the recent Taliban “surface-to-space” rocket from the previous week), and we had some good hearts-and-minds victories, like the time we paid back a villager right away (out of my Commander's Contingency Fund money) for accidentally smashing his well. As a rule, we needed to stay on good terms with the farmers whose land was within grenade-throwing range. Besides, I always believed a key component in winning the hearts-and-minds campaign in counter-insurgency warfare was to find the farmer and pay for the damages you caused before he even found out you had caused them.

Hearts and minds, boys, that's what it's all about—hearts and minds.

Chapter 19

On December the thirteenth we had another comms lockdown, and everyone had the same stunned look on their faces again. So many things go through a soldier's mind when he hears that. He quickly tries to think which of his friends are on leave, which ones are still in theatre, and which ones were out on an op. Everyone holds his breath and feels sick to his stomach, waiting to find out who had been killed.

We were sent the news over the encrypted e-mail. Private Jones, Corporal Hamilton, and Private Curwin, all from 2 RCR, were killed by an IED as they worked with the PRTs, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. I thought of my friend Mike—he was an officer in 2 RCR, and he was with the PRTs.
They were probably his men.

I looked at the guys sitting on the picnic benches, and I started to feel really angry.
Are you going to tell them you feel
sorry,
again? Are you going to tell them you're “there for them if they want to talk,” again?
I didn't know what to say, so I got up from the computer and left the command post.

I wandered over to the northwest sangar and climbed up. I said hi to the ANA soldier on duty, and stared over the fields and into the village.
When this is all done, and those of us still alive get to go home, will any of this have mattered?
I asked myself. I remembered something Shamsallah had told me, after a few weeks of patrolling with him. He came up to me and said, very seriously, “Thank you for being here. Thanks to all Canadians. If Afghanistan was rich, like Canada, and if
you
were in trouble, we would come to help, like you have come to help us.” No one had ever told me thanks before that moment. An old man in Kabul once thanked me, but no one on this tour had ever done that. “Thanks to
all
Canadians,” Shamsallah had said.

When he'd told me that, I quickly said, “You're welcome,” and we moved on to something else. But thinking about it now, after three more Canadian deaths . . .

Although I valued peace very highly, I also knew that at some point, as soldiers, we could be called to stand and act as a shield and a spear, to protect those who couldn't protect themselves. I firmly believed that the men who died had died acting as a shield, trying to protect the Afghans and to make their lives better at the same time.
And there was honour in that.

I thought of the little kids who were playing on the IED haystack in Sperwhan, and how Hetsa and Longview had run to save their lives.
The parents of those children would say their kids' lives were worth it.

A few days later, I helped Stamps put up a Christmas tree he had cobbled together out of pieces of wood and decorated. He placed it in a little area next to a large sign he'd labelled “Talibucks Coffee Shop.” He was a surprisingly good artist for a grunt, because he'd also drawn a caricature of Osama bin Laden on the sign, and it looked great. Everyone was getting into a festive mood. The Canadians had all received gift parcels from home, as well as tons of small boxes and letters from Canadian civilians wishing us well.

In the current war, Canada had decided to contract out some of its chopper resupply and mail-run missions to a bunch of Russian chopper pilots out of KAF. The way they flew their Mi-8 Hip chopper (erratically), the way they staggered as they walked and slurred their words, and their bloodshot eyes all pointed to severe inebriation. But we were just happy to be getting our mail, so their sins were forgivable. Every time they turned up and dropped off our supplies, we'd have at least forty letters from people back home whom we'd never even met before. It was a great feeling, and we had lots of fun with it. A school in Newfoundland sent us T-shirts from their academy, so we all wore those around when not on duty, although we looked like a bunch of escaped convicts posing as students, because we had been growing out our beards. The beards were just for morale's sake. The Afghans loved it, because a beard to them was a symbol of manliness and honour. We had fun with it because some of our guys weren't even old enough to vote, so their beards would come in wispy and freakish.

We celebrated the Royal Canadian Regiment's birthday on December twenty-first with a shot each of medicinal brandy sent to us from our HQ. We had a fun night and celebrated with steaks on the barby and some episodes of
Dexter.
Before we ate, the warrant read from the regimental catechism. We took a moment to remember our honoured dead, and then raised our Styrofoam cups and toasted the regiment.

I was scheduled to go on one of the last patrols before Christmas Day. So I grabbed Carns and Stamps, we got kitted up, and we went to join the ANA under Shamsallah.

We patrolled out the front gate, headed north, and cut across a few fields. Shamsallah stopped to talk to the farmers and everything seemed fine. The locals had stopped hiding whenever we'd patrol through their neck of the woods, and I had fun acting like a monster as I chased the little kids. Only once did a little guy break out in tears because I scared him, and I felt terrible. Shamsallah had some candy, though, and he cheered the boy right up.

After a few minutes Shamsallah walked over to Max and spoke in a hushed tone. I waited for the translation and wondered what was so secret.

Max walked back over to me and said, “He wants to know if those wrestling fights are real—the ones on TV.”

“You mean where they're always shouting and dressed funny and hitting each other with chairs? Stuff like that?” Max walked back over to Shamsallah to ask him.

Max walked up to me and said, “Yes.”

“Tell him we would all like to
believe
it's real, but—in my secret heart—I am afraid it is not. . . .” Max walked over and told Shamsallah the bad news.

We patrolled to a field just north of the bazaar. The bazaar had been shut down ever since my ANA had refused to keep a constant presence there, and since we'd almost stepped on three IEDs in the middle of it just a few days before, we hadn't been back. A young boy had run out to warn us that we'd just walked over two IEDs and were about to step on a third. On that occasion, we'd all come a little bit too close to shedding mortality's yoke, so we'd given the bazaar a fairly wide berth. But if we never again patrolled the bazaar, then the Taliban had achieved their aim. So we were going back.

Shamsallah split up his patrol, with some ANA going around a long wall by a compound, while some stayed with us. I was talking to Carns and Stamps, who were in a ditch, when I turned to look back at the long compound to our south. I thought I'd heard—

POK POK POK POK POK POK POK!

Someone had just cut loose with a burst from an AK-47, maybe thirty metres away, but is sounded like it had come from the other side of the wall.
But was it incoming or outgoing?

When I heard the rounds go off, I didn't even budge. I had become so inoculated to gunfire that my first reaction was just to look at the compound and try and figure out where it came from. I should have been down in the ditch in some cover, and scanning from there. I had become complacent—and that will get you killed.
That sounded like it came from around the corner, where the ANA had just gone.
Shamsallah had started walking slowly toward the corner where his ANA had disappeared from view.

Maybe they saw someone who turned and burned, so they fired warning shots.

CRACK CRACK CRACK!

Three AK rounds screamed mere inches over my head! “Okay, everyone take cover,” I sheepishly stated the obvious, as I ran back to join Carns and Stamps in the ditch.

I glanced at Stamps. “Well,” I said, “that makes it official. We got ourselves a
contact.
”

Stamps looked back and smiled.

Carns shouted angrily, “Ya fucking think?”
Oh yeah, that's right. Not everyone's been shot at—yet.

I pressed my radio button, “Mushan, 72C, contact, wait, out.”

Shooting continued on the other side of the wall, incoming and outgoing, and Shamsallah took off at a dead sprint across the open field to get to the corner of the wall.

“We gotta go boys, Shamsallah's off and running.” I got up to take off after him and Stamps was right behind me.

I could hear Carns say to Stamps behind my back, “Is he serious?” I guessed he was content to stay in the ditch, but that wasn't our job. You can't mentor someone from four hundred metres away. Sure, if Shamsallah was getting shot at, with dust kicking up all around him, then we would've stayed put, but the firefight had shifted and we had to go and figure out what was happening.

“Right, let's go,” I said as I took off across the field. My feet were churning up the freshly turned earth in the farmer's field and I had that old “I'm not moving fast enough and I'm getting stuck and any second I'm going to get shot” feeling. It felt like the anxiety dreams where your feet are made of cement, but this was worse, because it was a nightmare feeling
and
you were fully awake for it.

We finally made it to the wall, with no more incoming our way, and I snuck a peek around the corner. Against the far wall the ANA were spraying rounds into a compound behind it, but I couldn't see any targets to shoot at. After a few more seconds the ANA stopped firing, so I led my two guys down a low ditch to get to Shamsallah. Some incoming rounds snapped over our heads as we tried to duck and sprint down the ditch at the same time. By the time I got to the end of it, I was huffing like a chain-smoker after taking ten flights of stairs. Sweat was pouring off of my face, and I didn't recall if Shamsallah had ever seen me in full sweat before. It was a disgusting sight, and could turn the stomach of the strongest man, even a combat vet like him.

It had suddenly grown very quiet. Then Smith spoke over the net and said that the guys in Sperwhan wanted us to go firm, right where we were. I asked why. He came back with, “They're trying to get you a UAV!”

“After what happened the last time?” I thought for a second and asked, “What's the ETA on it?”

Smith replied, “Forty-five minutes.”
Holy crap, are they for real?

“Wait a minute—they want us to go firm for forty-five minutes, to wait for a UAV they won't be able to get? And if,
if
, they get it, it'll fly right over us and into Iran?”

“Yep, that's about the size of it.”

“Tell 'em it's nice of them to think of us, but I'm way too scarred from my last experience, so they can poke it! We're moving. Out.”

We followed the wall and joined Shamsallah and some ANA at the other wall where Timothy had been shooting. This wall was really high, at least eight feet up, so we'd have to buddy up to get over it. I jumped and reached the top, and then pulled myself up as Stamps, Carns, and even Max pushed on my feet to help me with my girth.

“You . . . fat . . . bastard . . . sir,” Stamps groaned as he pushed on my feet.

I got my chest on the wall and draped one leg down the friendly side, the other leg down the enemy side. I scanned the alley.
Nothing.
I had a look into the other compound.
Where did you go, Timothy? Why would—

GAAHAAAA!!

The last thing I remembered was that someone on the friendly side had grabbed my leg and shoved me over, and now I was falling through the air, eight feet to the ground, until I landed with a sickening THUD into the hard dirt in the alleyway.

“Aaaggghhh . . .” I groaned.

Damage control: Report! Assessing . . . assessing . . .

I had landed almost squarely on my head, but at the last second was able to swing it out of the way and take the fall on my right shoulder. But I felt pretty messed up; my entire right arm was tingling from my wrist through my shoulder. It felt like my right arm was one big funny bone, and the nerves were firing and screaming like crazy.

Sergeant MacVitty's cruel voice started shouting at me:
You're a sitting duck, you colonial fuckwit! You've gotta get up, you gotta move!

I managed to prop myself up a bit and then spit out a mouthful of gross dust. Stamps was propped up on the wall, shouting down at me, asking if I was okay.
You've gotta warn him!
I tried to shout but I was winded from the fall; I tried to stand up and—