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On July 22, 2006, Task Force Orion, the Canadian battle group that served in southern Afghanistan from February to August that year, was returning from almost a month in the field, far beyond the safety of the large coalition base at Kandahar Air Field.

After weeks of hard fighting in remote parts of the south, the exhausted troops met in a “leaguer,” a traditional circle-the-wagons defensive position, for a pep talk from their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, before heading back to KAF.

Lt.-Col. John Conrad, who was in charge of the National Support Element, the unit responsible for keeping the fighting troops supplied with everything from bullets to fuel, drove out that day with a resupply convoy going to meet the soldiers.

As the NSE commanding officer, there was absolutely no need for Lieutenant-Colonel John Conrad to go out on convoys, but he made a point of doing so at least once a week. “It wasn't about the technical things that I brought to it,” he says. “To me it was about the moral plane: These guys need to see that I am here with them, I trust them, and that my life [has] exactly the same value as yours, we're in this together.”

Like his friend Ian Hope, Conrad knows that, as the boss, “you can't show you're afraid – and I was, every time I went out on a convoy, I was damned afraid.”

The resupply convoy, Conrad aboard, left KAF [Kandahar Air Field] at about 3 a.m. on July 22. They were bringing diesel, rations, water, a low-bed truck for vehicle recovery (it was already full by the time they got to the leaguer; an armoured vehicle called a Coyote had broken down) and a wrecker for towing. “It's just a package of capability,” Conrad says, “like dragging a Canadian Tire store somewhere to where you're working.”

He and Hope had a cigar together. “It was a very long day,” Conrad says. “It's a helluva long drive from KAF to where we needed to be in Helmand, but a great day. Ian's guys were coming back, they'd done battle, everyone was triumphant.”

As the troops were running, buoyant, to get into their trucks, Conrad pulled Hope aside, told him he had a Coyote down, and asked for a light armoured vehicle (LAV), “just so I could have two big cannons. And he said, ‘Yep, no problem. Just stay with us. Just stay with us at the back of the convoy.' ” But it didn't work out as they planned, because one of Conrad's cargo trucks broke down. They had to stop and put it on the wrecker, and suddenly, they were behind the tail end of Hope's convoy.

“Then we cross the Arghendab River,” Conrad says, “and generally when we crossed that river, I usually think, ‘Okay, I'm out of the bad place.' ” But they had to stop again: The brakes on the broken-down truck were grabbing, and the mechanics needed another 10 minutes to back them off. “And that just widened the gap between Ian and me.”

Conrad had gone out in a G-Wagon utility vehicle, but for the trip back had switched places with the crew of a 10-tonne diesel truck because its air conditioner was on the fritz and he wanted to give the poor guys a break. Directly in front of him was a Bison armoured vehicle.

“So we're coming into that urban sprawl that kind of gives way to Kandahar,” Conrad says, “and there's a terraced village over there, like high ground, and on this side there's off in the distance three mountains, but it's kind of like an open field. And we're just moving along, a little bit slower because we've got a couple of vehicle casualties,” he says, when he noticed a small cab-over truck. A Toyota Hiace, he thinks, approaching.

They were then about five kilometres west of the city.

“Right up to the time the thing detonated, you're looking at a car that's white, harmless-looking, right? Yeah, it's kind of winking its way on the left-hand side, but that's because we're taking up the entire road. … We actually saw him in one instant – it's a little truck,” Conrad says, “and the next instant it's BOOM!”

Twenty-five feet in front of him, the Bison was hit, parts of it flying into the cab of Conrad's truck, smoke rising everywhere.

The driver, 44-year-old Frank Gomez, who was in the Canadian Airborne Regiment with Ian Hope, was killed instantly by shrapnel to his head. As the Bison was blown off the road, embedding itself in a culvert, the young air sentry, 29-year-old Jason Patrick Warren, of The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Montreal, was killed too. There were wounded soldiers inside the vehicle – 10 altogether.

“You open the back, it's just a bloody mess,” Conrad says. “The doors were awash in blood. Tony Ross, one of the captains, was vomiting; he had shrapnel in his ear. It was just complete hell gothic.”

It was only Ross's second time out; Conrad had offered him a chance to “go out and see the results of your staff work,” and now he was puking his guts out.

Conrad saw Warren lying on the ground, with “a huge trauma to his shoulder, and quite obviously dead.” The soldiers were enormously upset. “One of the guys says to me, he says, ‘Do you smoke?' I said, ‘No, but I really would love a cigarette right now.' I have no idea who he is, just some young guy.”

Conrad, for a time, believed Warren was Travis Boudreau, one of his own corporals. The two men looked a lot alike. Later, he found out it wasn't Boudreau. “Boudreau is standing there in the flesh, and this is a guy I've known, my soldier, I've known him a long time and he's alive. … In the first nanosecond, ‘I'm so happy to see you, I'm so relieved,' and then immense guilt: My God, how could I feel that way?”

He helped extricate Gomez from the driver's seat, out the back and into a body bag. It was the first time in his 24-year career John Conrad had done that, and “all I could do was give him a pat on the shoulder as they zippered the thing up.”

The next two hours were nightmarish, the Afghan National Police (ANP) trying to keep civilians back, Black Hawks circling in the air, the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF) arriving from the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team office not far away.

“We fumbled our way through it,” Conrad says, “as best we could as soldiers, as human beings.”

Then, taking with them the dead and minor casualties not in need of air evacuation, the IRF pulled out. That's when a man wearing a suicide vest walked into the crowd of civilians and blew himself up.

“There were children,” Conrad says, “and you know, seeing an Afghan father picking up his child, just wrapping up a dead child as if it's part of his everyday life. It's just the ANP, throwing bodies into the back of a pickup truck, and blood pouring down the tailgate. And they just accept it, you know? It's not the way things should be.”

Some Afghans approached Conrad, asking for help, and he had to say, “‘I'm sorry, I can't help you, I can't even help myself right now.' I felt really helpless. I felt I couldn't even get my own soldiers out of there, and I felt guilty afterwards, because, you know, to me it just seemed like the Taliban, they're totally playing with us. It doesn't matter how many books you read, or how you read all about Napoleon. It doesn't matter how smart you are, they're kicking our ass.”

Conrad was furious at the claims, afterward, that Canadian soldiers had been firing into the crowd. Steve Chao for CTV reported the allegation that night, and also that Canadian authorities denied it. The network's “fixer” – a local who can speak the languages and go places Westerners can't or won't – had arrived at the scene quickly, and interviewed purported witnesses, one of whom said on camera that the Canadians had fired at everyone, “including women and children.”

As soon as Conrad arrived at the PRT, “two glorious Apache gunships” in the air above them, he called the Deputy Task Force Commander, Colonel Tom Putt, and said, “Tom, I give you my word: We didn't fire on that crowd. It was ball bearings, it was the metal that the guy was wearing.”

He was also furious at General Dave Fraser, who a day or so later described the aftermath and the extractions as “textbook.”

“Do you want to hear about it, sir?” Conrad says he thought. “Do you really want to hear about it? Of course not. I've always told General Fraser the truth, when he's bothered to ask me. I've always told him the truth.

“Sometimes, the truth is not that great.”

All Conrad, a father of two girls and two boys, could think of on the drive to the PRT, and for much longer, was his oldest son, Aidan, now 11.

“He's kind of a nerd,” Conrad says, “plaid shirts, a bit socially inept. He's a normal child, but who's gonna put up with him like his dad? Or my second one, Morgan, the other boy, who's very, very quiet. You really need to dig to get him to do things, and who's gonna take the time to do that like I will? All I could think of was, I almost checked out there, and it made me very, very sad to think that my son, with his bolo ties – no one wears those any more – he's just gonna get even more weird without me to give him some balance.”

When he phoned his wife, Martha, that night, he burst into tears, and is not embarrassed about it. “We're spending human capital there,” he says, “the very best that this country has to offer, and there's no harm in pausing for reflection and grief when this is being spent. The cause is just. The Afghan people are deserving, but more important, the Canadian people are deserving of national security, and the cause is, I believe, just. But as we're spending these diamonds, it's okay to be human. In fact, it's fucking necessary.”

Ian Hope knew nothing of what had happened until he was pulling into KAF and got the first radio message about the bombing.

He'd been mulling over what his soldiers had accomplished, planning to get the press out to interview the returning troops so they could get some public recognition. Instead, he spent the night in the hospital, writing letters to soldiers' families and thinking, as he says, that “this indeed was ‘the long war.' ”

I was one of a couple of reporters who had walked down to the tactical operations centre to see the convoy come back. I love watching them return from the field, the troops filthy and exhausted but always indomitable.

Hope was the first one I saw. I had some small idea of all that they'd done, and was expecting him to be excited and proud. He was quiet, so subdued. He looked miserable. Only hours later did I learn why.

All that Task Force Orion accomplished that day – defeating the logistics of that unforgiving place; kicking the snot out of the enemy; riding out all the twists and turns and complications; the protracted and painful leave-taking – had come to the same bloodied end so common in that country. “It was,” as Kirk Gallinger says, “a very Afghan day.”

On July 23, John Conrad was back at KAF. The last thing he felt like doing was joking, but he knew he had to show his soldiers what he was made of. “By God,” he says, “they've taken their hits. … That was the first time I had a suicide bomber detonate right in front of me, so I wanted to show that, yeah, I'm good to go.”

He walked into his orderly room on the ground floor, where the task force's administration was. He knew people would be sneaking peeks at him, wondering how he was. The hellos that met him were tentative.

Corporal James Brooks was there, and “I said in a very loud voice to Corporal Brooks, ‘I need a general allowance claim, right?' We have these forms – like when you have a claim against the Crown, like you had to make a phone call or whatever – we have this watershed claim to reimburse soldiers. So I said, ‘Brooksie, I need a CF-152, general allowance claim.'

“Brooks calls it up on his computer, starts typing in the claim: Service number, name, and says, ‘Right, sir. What is it for?' ”

Conrad replied, “One hugely soiled pair of underwear.”

Excerpted from Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death From Inside the New Canadian Army. Copyright © 2007 Houndhead Enterprises Inc. Doubleday Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.