“Bang, bang, Canada!”
It was as sweltering hot as it always is in Afghanistan. Sweltering hot, dusty, and extremely uncomfortable under a layer of Kevlar. Three months into a tour of duty, complacency starts to set in. As I drove my jeep through the bustling, overcrowded, traffic-congested market of downtown Kabul, I tried to keep my eyes open, but found my mind wandering. I thought about home, and family and milk that wasn’t irradiated and stuffed into tetra-paks for six months. Black is all I remember—it’s as if the whole world suddenly went into slow motion. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but the sight of a barrel pointed directly at my left eyeball looked to me like a giant yawning chasm ready to swallow me whole.
I can’t remember telling my hand to reach for my pistol, but I could already feel the familiar caress of the cold steel grip in my palm, my thumb instinctively breaking the catch on my shoulder holster. Incoherent nothing spilled out of my mouth. If I died here at least my co-driver might have time to react. It was too close, there was no way I could draw my pistol in time. My legs were already coiled, launching me out of the vehicle towards my assailant—who was nothing more than a young boy holding a toy gun. I was hanging halfway out the side of the jeep as he turned and ran to hide behind a laughing friend. He was just a child looking to play cops and robbers. I still haven’t figured out which one he thought I was.
I slid back into my seat and closed the clasp on my holster. From the passenger seat, my friend points to the gear selector and says, “You stalled it, Jason.” Heart still in my throat, I try my best to look cool and carry on with our patrol. Brave little guy, I think to myself.
It seems like war used to be an absolute business. It was Us versus Them in the World Wars. Even Vietnam had a shadowy, Communist antagonist that some portion of the American population could rally against. The wars fought today in this new age of terrorism aren’t as clearly defined.
It’s easy to discuss war using concrete sums like body counts and dollar figures, less so to talk about soldiers coming back with post-traumatic stress disorder or serious injuries. All we get are gloomy snippets of gossip, spoken in hushed tones, about so-and-so who couldn’t readjust after coming back from Afghanistan.
In this pile of data—treated by the media as entertainment more than cold, uncomfortable fact—the most important number of all is ignored: one. Why don’t we talk about the individual soldier? What is the human cost of this war that some of us have so much stake in?
Across the board, news outlets have done a poor job of relaying what it’s like to be a soldier. Only when Rick Mercer or a group of retired hockey players visit the troops do we seem to get a sense of the men and women on the ground in Afghanistan. Even then, the look is a superficial one at best and cannot speak to the depth of the experience.
Sadly, it feels as if Don Cherry on Hockey Night In Canada is the best source for an understanding of the individual soldier—he’s the only talking head humanizing what feels like a distant, endless war. Cherry seems like the only person on TV who cares when a soldier dies, compared to the standard news anchor relaying the facts deadpan with no further explanation: age, regiment, hometown, “You were a hero and Canada thanks you.”
My close friend Jason was a soldier. He was part of the first rotation of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. When “roto zero” deployed, there was much uncertainty about the mission and the risks involved. As a member of the armored corps, it was his job to thread his Bison tank through the taxis and pedestrians clogging the streets of Kabul. While he was only gone for six months—a far cry from the 12 to 16-month rotations of some American soldiers in Iraq—it was still a stressful time. I had never paid such close attention to the news, reading and re-reading every dispatch regarding the war. Jason came back to us in one piece, albeit with some new grey hairs. He had some close calls.
Traffic again—typical in the Kabul market area. I sit, looking alert, trying not to let my mind wander again. My partner in the passenger seat is a rookie with no common sense. I catch him looking at a commotion on my side of the vehicle and snap at him to pay attention to his own area of responsibility should someone use the distraction to attack us. A soldier had been killed with a zip gun in this zone just a week before. My partner looks back. “Is that yours?” he asks, pointing to a plastic bag lying next to his foot. It definitely wasn’t there when we started our patrol. Inside are a dozen hand grenades. Duds. Probably dug up from some little old lady’s garden.
If the risks are so great, why did he go to Afghanistan? His answer was unexpectedly straightforward.
I went to Afghanistan because I truly believed I could make a difference. I stood by and watched comrades give their lives for a mission that they believed in. Afghanistan is a country full of people who need help, and if we’re not there to fight, the bad guys will pick on those who have no way of defending themselves. If we just walk away from this mission, the ones who will suffer are the Afghan people. The Afghanis want to be free, but have no way of achieving that against an enemy who will kill anyone who doesn’t fit into their ideology.
It was an unwelcome bout of déjà vu when Thomas, a friend of mine from high school, deployed to Afghanistan a few months ago. At his going-away party, I wondered about his reasons for engaging in the war.
I decided to go because I wanted to put my training to good use, and it seemed like an exciting challenge to go to another part of the world. It’s been a huge eye-opener seeing all the things we take for granted back home, like daily showers, air-conditioned houses, even a change of clothes. Most of the locals wear the same man jammies pretty well all their lives.
Jason described Afghanistan as a hot, unforgiving country. In his words, “Everything gets filled with sand and everything smells really bad.” Decades of instability, a booming drug trade that no one seems able (or willing) to control, and a government seen as anemic and unable to establish democracy have made it a difficult part of the world to live in. Nonetheless, Thomas says that many of the locals are appreciative of the work our soldiers are doing.
To be honest, it’s a bit of a shock being there, not just with the higher altitude and extreme heat, but seeing the local people. I’ve been working Entry Control Point 3 at Kandahar Airfield, which is where all the locals come in when they’re working on the base. They do a lot of the clean-up jobs and even some of the construction.
Some of these people have been around since the Russians invaded, so they’ve gone through some rough times, but they still manage to plod on one day at a time. The average worker makes only a few dollars a day, but it can go quite a ways to keep them and their family fed. We employ a fair amount as interpreters; they tend to make more money but they’re also trusted with more responsibility. I know of a handful of them that have more than one job. One of the interpreters is actually a practicing doctor who uses his pay from us to fund his hospital.
On a recent overcast weekday morning, I witnessed what at first appeared to be an accident on a Highway 401 overpass in Whitby. A fire truck was parked on the curb, with lights flickering and sirens silent. I then noticed about a dozen people holding Canadian flags, standing close to the railings facing east. They were awaiting the body of a Canadian soldier killed in action, being transported along the Highway of Heroes from Trenton to Toronto.
I had a similar feeling then as I did a couple years ago when I saw a friend of mine from grade school on the front page of the Toronto Star. He was sitting on the bumper of a vehicle in Afghanistan with two other soldiers. The look on their faces was one of pure sorrow—just before the picture was snapped, they had learned that some fellow soldiers had been killed.
From everything I’ve seen and heard, things are getting a lot better there for them. They have schools to send their children to, cleaner water to drink, and for the most part, places to earn some money. They are very much willing to work, and whenever there are tussles in the lines into the base they sort themselves out quickly to avoid being held up. The majority understand English. They don’t speak it very well, but it’s not hard to get a message across. Locals have approached us several times to report caches of rockets or IEDs. A lot of them are willing to help us help them.
Some activists talk about the war in blanket terms, painting our soldiers as child-murderers and villains. They don’t agree with the mission and refuse to support our troops. It is easy to draw lines in the sand and say their point of view is unpatriotic, but this probably isn’t the case. Can we really say this is a “just war?” Are we doing more harm than good? Should we be pressuring our government to pull our troops out of harm’s way? None of this matters as much as the person on the ground.
Why don’t we talk about the human cost?
