News

The First Battalion is a mechanized unit, which means the soldiers travel by light armoured vehicles, or LAVs, as far as the eight-wheeled machines can take them.

But there are places in this inhospitable land where even the mighty LAV cannot go, and at some too-soon point in the game, the troops inevitably dismount, this a reference to the days of old when soldiers got about on horseback, and do their work in the hard and honourable way of the grunt, on foot.

The 1-3, as the platoon is known, was on a search-the-caves and show-the-flag mission that was part of a larger scheme -- Operation Sola Kowel, which in Pashto means "Peacemaker" -- to find out if, as the coalition forces' intelligence suggested, there were hundreds of Taliban remnants gathering in the stony hills, part of the Hindu Kush mountain system of southern Afghanistan.

As embedded journalists, Globe and Mail photographer Louie Palu and I were with them all the way -- in the LAVs that took us through the twin villages of Pada and Lwar Byala west as close as possible to the infamous "Belly Button," the area called Shah-e-Mardan-Ghar where for centuries Afghans have been beating the snot out of all manner of foreigners and invaders; then humping seven kilometres through those remarkable hills, which look like Stonehenge multiplied a million times over, and finally sleeping under the stars in the bitter cold and awakening to rain at dawn for another five-kilometre hump in temperatures that ranged from bone-chilling to desert-hot up to an altitude of 1,900 metres -- all this wearing full body armour and helmet, and carrying between 16 kilograms (for me) and about 35 (for baby-faced Private John O'Neil, hauling the radio gear despite a bad ankle) on our backs.

It was a fascinating experience, not the least for the topography: Those formidable hills have an endearing playful aspect to them. It's as though, centuries ago, a call went out for all the rocks, stones and pebbles of the planet to gather in this part of Afghanistan, and here they continue to strike poses and giggle at the sight of the awkward humans who come to best them.

But more than that, our time with the 1-3, and indeed with the other two Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry platoons based at Gombad, was wonderful because of the intimate glimpse of the men it afforded, and because of the men themselves. It was what educators call a "teachable moment," in this instance for a nation skeptical of Canada's presence here and, in the main, either ignorant or neglectful of its own military history.

And for a woman -- I was one of perhaps four among the 200 or so Canucks living at the Gombad patrol house: one a medic, one a soldier, and Lisa LaFlamme of CTV News and me the ostensible outsiders -- it was a privileged look at the boys' own world that is war, even this not-quite war.

It was also highly amusing at times. When Ms. LaFlamme and I later compared notes, we discovered that we frequently were assigned the seat in our LAVs that is directly beneath and beside the "air sentry," one of two soldiers who stand up in the vehicles open hatches, braced against the jarring bounces of Afghanistan's cratered and ruined roads, rifles at the ready, for hours and hours at a stretch.

The positioning means the passenger's head is roughly level with the sentry's rear quarters. All our sentries, as it happened, were stricken with near-constant flatulence, leading CTV cameraman Jim MacDonald to tag the entire business Brokewind Mountain.

I have a friend who, in regarding the modern urban male, frequently wonders: "How is it they got to be the hunters and gatherers?"

In the lads of the 1-3, in all the Patricias, I found the answer, or an answer anyway: Men weren't always quite the way they are now.

Left to their own devices, largely untouched by the most effete of modern cultural conventions and contemptuous of those few that veer near, and trained to a razor's edge, this lot are by turns ruthlessly and broadly so competent (from making a decent meal out of the good-for-five-years "individual meal packs," or IMPs, to keeping their primitive quarters at Gombad as pristine as a mud hut can be, to clambering over hill and dale and ultimately to soldiering), shockingly cheerful and patient, generous to one another, funny, outrageously tender and, given the times, so patriotic as to appear almost quaint.

As Sergeant Pierre (Pete) Maltais, a military policeman, once described the wider Canadian job here and his own narrower one of training the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army, "You're gentle and nurturing when you can be, and stern and a soldier when you need be. We can't make this place safe just by shaking hands with the locals. . . . We try the soft tact first and if that doesn't work . . . " He added, smiling, "But the soft tact goes a long way. We all have a reasonable side."

And then Sgt. Maltais, born in Chicoutimi, Que., and stationed all over Canada during his first 10 years in the military before he became a policeman, offered this: "My wife is from Chilliwack, and we have two daughters, one born on the West Coast, in British Columbia, the other on the East Coast, in Goose Bay, and we were married on the first of July.

"That tells you how much I love my country."

Who talks like this in 2006 but soldiers and, since I came to Gombad fresh from the Turin Olympics, amateur athletes?

The two groups actually have much in common -- dewy youth, enormous discipline, a longing to test themselves, a hunger for adventure, physical courage in spades. But the soldier loves his country not as a nebulous ideal to be celebrated every four years on the medal podium, but daily, in the course of his ordinary working life, and despite the reality of Canadian society and his own often tremulous place in it.

We left KAF -- Kandahar Air Field, where the bulk of the approximately 2,200 Canadians and about 7,000 other members of the multinational Coalition Forces are stationed -- early on a Thursday morning.

This is called going outside or over the wire -- the enormous security fencing that rings the sprawling base, which is growing as fast as, and with all the graceless fury of, a northern Alberta town in the midst of an oil boom: cement factory running non-stop, construction and choking dust everywhere, no sidewalks, gravel or dirt roads, Sea Can containers and mobile trailers as far as the eye can see and a pervasive frontier mentality, but with the added fillip of an air strip thundering with planes and gunships landing day and night.

In fact, KAF is as safe and secure as it is possible to be in Afghanistan -- it was last attacked in November by a rocket that hurt no one -- and with the military's wonky version of every creature comfort.

There is fresh food in the giant D-FACs (dining facilities in the acronym-ese beloved by armed forces everywhere), showers and flush toilets, a fully equipped gym, a boardwalk with stores and a Burger King, Subway and Pizza Hut, a huge U.S. PX selling everything from military gear to DVDs, two bedecked Starbucks-like cafés called Green Beans, a spa offering pedicures and massages, laundromats and various national post offices.

No one spending his entire six or nine months' tour at KAF -- and many soldiers do -- suffers much, at least not from anything more serious than homesickness.

Thus, those who regularly go outside the wire -- the roughly 450 Canadian infantrymen; the combat engineers and medics who respectively clean up after the "improvised explosive devices" (IEDs) and tend the wounded; the trusty Afghan interpreters, or "terps"; the "sensitive site exploitation" teams that conduct forensic-like examinations of bomb sites and are called "the SEXy guys"; the members of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery who for weeks live in the desert and sleep by their brand-new 155mm M777 howitzers, which fire 100-pound shells 22 to 29 km; the MPs who mentor the local police and the CIMIC (for civilian-military co-operation) officers who conduct the village-leader engagements and who, despite the near-fatal axing in the head of Lieutenant Trevor Greene during one such shura this month, continue to remove their helmets as an expression of trust -- are quick to separate themselves from those who don't.

They loathe KAF for its many rules, all intended to see the soldiers conduct themselves much as they do at home, which for most of the Canadians is Garrison Edmonton. Corporal Jim Sinclair, a rakish 35-year-old reserve member of Alpha's 1 Platoon, some of whose members are now stuck at the main base for a month to act as a quick-reaction force, said of his arrival back at KAF, "I was bored out of my mind within four hours."

We crossed the wire at 8:49 a.m. in a seven-vehicle convoy composed of Romanians, Canadians and Americans, duly warned by the strapping French-Canadian commander that we'd travel no faster than 50 kilometres an hour because of the Romanians' "garbage cans" -- the same Warsaw Pact-era armoured personnel carriers used in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan -- and that, when we stopped for "piss breaks," we were to stay close to our vehicle.

To my delight, travelling in our convoy were Tara and Katja, two lovely explosives-detecting German shepherds, among 30 dogs from Canine Associates International of Chicago working in Afghanistan for the Coalition Forces, and their handlers, Brad Todd and Robert Combs. Tara already had a year in Iraq and nine months in Afghanistan under her collar, but this mission would be so gruelling that her nerves would wholly unravel.

Mr. Palu, who'd begun to "go native," as the British used to say, even before we'd left for Afghanistan by growing a Taliban-esque beard and then completed the process by donning several scarves and a shalwar kameez, the suit worn by most Afghan men -- and I were assigned to a lightly armoured G-Wagon driven by Corporal Jason Sample with Corporal Serge Harvey, the co-driver in the passenger's seat.

For a time, we stayed on Highway 4, the lone beautifully paved road in the area and notoriously ripe for IEDs as a result, and then headed off into the rough country, heading north for Gombad.

It was -- always is -- a nervous-making trip, but as Cpl. Harvey said of the potential dangers lurking all around, "Eventually you have to filter, you have to make sense of it."

Cpl. Sample added, "It's not fear any more; it's apprehension."

Still, they were madly alert, with Cpl. Sample once spotting "a guy tapping his cellphone really quick" along the road and Cpl. Harvey passing on the information immediately to the rest of the convoy, lest the man be signalling a bomber waiting in the weeds.

This is the thing about Afghanistan: Fighting a counter-insurgency is akin to wrestling your grandmother in jelly -- it's hard to lay hands, or eyes, for that matter, on the target. As Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, the dapper commanding officer of the entire Canadian battle group, told the men at Gombad recently, "I know you're frustrated that some of you haven't seen the enemy face to face."

As a result, the necessary, smart precautions sometimes feel silly, such as when, on our return trip to KAF, someone spotted a white kite "being sent up" as we passed through a village. Again, it could have been a signal to a bomber, but it turned out someone was simply flying a kite, and I was reminded of 99 Luftballons, the early 1980s hit by German singer Nena.

The song (the English version was called 99 Red Balloons) tells the story of a couple who buy balloons at a toy shop and set them free, only to set off "panic bells" with the military. The punch line goes like this: "Call the troops out in a hurry, This is what we've waited for, this is it boys, this is war."

The difficulty for the Canadians here is that this is not war, not peacemaking, certainly not peacekeeping, but rather some ill-defined and uneasy mélange of elements from all three, and that there are liable to be hundreds of small, even lethal, alerts and attacks, but never a rousing old-world summons to battle proper.

The trip took about six hours, but to say we arrived "at Gombad" suggests that there is a there there, and there isn't, really.

Gombad is a tiny walled, mud-hut compound so at one with its surroundings that, from a distance, it is virtually indistinguishable from the rolling brown terrain of this part of the Gombad Valley -- where once about a dozen Afghan families lived and which is now rented by coalition forces as a patrol base.

There is no running water, only enough power (when there is any) to run a coffee maker or charge a few cellphones, and only a half-dozen, door-less rooms for the lucky few who bunk in there.

Scattered outside the walls, but within a security perimeter, are the LAVs and soldiers of the three A Company platoons, most of whom sleep on the ground beside their vehicles and never stray far afield, as pups are tied to their mother.

Others, including the embedded press, sleep on stretchers in tents erected on the building's roof.

At the rear of the compound is a long urinal trench, which is set afire a couple of times a day, and the plywood outhouse that functions as the women's loo, and outside which, 24/7, a long line of soldiers wait patiently for their turn in the only place in the joint with a door that locks and a pinch of privacy.

Almost always, perched on the rocks and mounds just outside the gate, is a clutch of Afghan men, squatting comfortably for hours on end in the hot sun, and a gaggle of shy youngsters -- watching as the soldiers in the observation posts watch them. Visible not far away at any given time are farmers working the dry soil with bare hands or primitive instruments and lone figures slowly leading donkeys or goats through the fields.

And as is common in rural Afghanistan, and this is a country where 80 per cent of the people live not in towns but on the land, burqa-clad women are almost never to be seen. They scurry away, hands pulling voluminous cloth even tighter, if there's a Western man within miles. The mice back at the Green Beans café are bolder.

Before the Gombad base was overrun with soldiers for the big Sola Kowal operation, the place belonged utterly to the men of 1 Platoon. Cpl. Sinclair remembers those quiet early days with fondness, particularly the pleasure of hearing, just before dawn, the muezzin making the first of five daily calls to prayer for the faithful.

First, Cpl. Sinclair said, there was the distinct click of the muezzin -- like many now, he uses a loudspeaker -- flipping on the power switch. Then came the raspy cough as he flicked a finger once or twice on his microphone, to see that it was working. And then the sound of the muezzin's sing-song voice, echoing as the sun rose in pinks and yellows over the Gombad Valley.

He relished this moment, I think because, in the "test, test, test" ritual familiar to concert-going Westerners, he could practically feel the world shrinking around him.

It was just an hour or two after we got to Gombad that, suddenly, there were shouts to "stand to," and soldiers began tearing about in a way that seems chaotic only to civilians: An IED had gone off about four kilometres away, smack in the middle of a convoy of the 1-2, led by Capt. John Croucher, that was out to pick up the men of the 1-3, led by Capt. Sean Ivanko, as they were completing a long overnight foot patrol in the hills.

I found myself in a doorway with a soldier guarding against an attack, as members of the Afghan National Army, who were without helmets and flak jackets, flew out of the compound to get in their vehicles -- pickup trucks, in the main -- to race to the aid of the Canadians.

"What they lack in skill," the soldier said admiringly, "they make up in heart -- balls out all the way."

That led him to reminisce about a shura when the village leader, asked what his people needed most, replied: "Cooking oil."

It made sense, the soldier said, "Winter is ending, his crops are gone; that's what they need." But in its plain poverty, the elder's wish left the soldier touched and sad. Without a trace of condescension, he praised the Afghan farmers "and their simple tools honed in a thousand years of experience, and most of all, their work ethic."

That was my first brush with the regard, widespread among the dozens of Canadians I talked to, for both Afghan soldiers and civilians. Only once did I hear a soldier make a disparaging remark (young and stupid, he referred to the undernourished locals as "the skinnies").

It was not until the next night, around the bricked fire pit built by the Canucks in the middle of the compound and called "cave man TV" for the way everyone stares at the flames, that the men of the 1-2 and 1-3 returned from the bomb site and we learned more.

I saw one shaken fellow, grey and weary, being gently asked if his hearing had returned yet; no, he said, it hadn't. I asked if I could talk to him, but he declined. Days later, I found out it was Master Corporal Sam Demopoulos, a combat engineer who was the air sentry in the LAV just ahead of the explosion. Only after reassuring his wife, Delina, back in Edmonton did he feel free to talk to me. "We've been married 12 years," he said unashamedly, "and we're still loving each other madly. She's my heart and soul."

The bomber's timing was just "a blond" off -- meaning a hair, which the boys rate by thickness, "a redhead" being the coarsest and a blond the finest. The device exploded between the fifth and sixth LAVs, missing MCpl. Demopoulos's vehicle, fifth in line, by 20 feet -- or about two seconds.

No one was hurt, but the blast blew the watch off the driver's wrist, tore three tires off the LAV, and left MCpl. Demopoulos half-deaf in his one remaining good ear, the hearing in the other lost in 1992, when his vehicle was hit by an antitank missile in Croatia.

Worthy of note is the fact that he was in the armed forces' reserves when that happened; he joined the regular army the year afterward.

"I got really close to the men," he said by way of explanation. "And I love my country, and I believe we're well off, and that it's time to split the wealth, and that as Canadians, this is what we should do.

"I believe that, with our presence here, it will all sort itself out. It's going to take time, but I believe we're doing the right thing, and that in the end, it will be good."

The bomb left MCpl. Demopoulos virtually deaf, but he didn't miss a beat: With the big cannons on the LAVs giving enough suppressing fire to make it safe to dismount, he was down the ramp in a flash, opening up with his C-7 assault rifle as the men cleared the hills, fired into caves and set up a security perimeter as they searched for the bomber.

"There was a blood trail too," he said. "Blood spots in the hills."

"I hope the bomber rather slowly bled to death," I said.

"So do I," he replied.

Capt. Croucher, a 33-year-old big lug originally from Fredericton who oozes leadership, "guesstimates" that three people did the bombing -- one who ignited the device, one acting as an observer and one providing small-arms fire.

"I saw somebody on the north position," he said, "running away. He disappeared quickly."

The blast left a crater in the narrow valley the convoy was passing through that was about 18 feet wide and 2½ feet deep. "We were four cars away," Capt. Croucher said, "and we felt the percussion, the shock . . . But I showed up with 38 guys; I came home with 38 guys. That's all that matters to me."

It was the men of the Explosives Ordinance Disposal, or EOD, composed in the main of combat engineers with a spattering of navy officers, who later described the ingenuity of these bombers.

The four-man EOD teams, whose members can't be named for security reasons, conduct the initial post-blast investigations, their first job to make sure there are no secondary devices left as a booby trap; at least once, a Canadian team has found such a device.

"They're not sophisticated by our standards," said one member of a team at KAF that has been called to five blast sites in Kandahar City, "but they are effective. It works for them. The trends here follow what happens in Iraq; if it happens there, it will happen here."

Commonly, there are three sorts of device: remote-controlled, which can be activated from afar, sometimes by cellphone; those that have the bomber perched close by, coolly watching as the intended target comes near and then pressing a button, and finally the kind the victim, man or machine, sets off by landing on a pressure plate that sets off the explosion.

In most cases, the devices are made of old ordnance, almost invariably from the Soviet occupation, and detonators so simple they may be nothing more than a hollowed-out ballpoint pen stuffed with explosives -- which is why the soldiers of the 1-3 were aghast when they saw me, at a shura, hand a pen to the swarm of remarkably self-confident children then surrounding me, flawlessly parroting every English phrase I uttered.

Many explosive devices are buried in the softer soil of the wadis or riverbanks, but even the more unyielding Afghan ground gives way to shovels and picks, and the bombers have those.

Often, the EOD men arrive at a blast site and know "the bombers are watching" from safe positions. "It doesn't give you a warm fuzzy feeling," one said.

"Are you scared?" I asked.

"Well," one of the engineers said with a grin, "the navy guy is."

Christie Blatchford is a Globe and Mail writer based in Toronto.

AN ODE TO THE LAV

Canadian infantrymen love their light armoured vehicles. "The LAV is my friend" is a common refrain -- particularly when soldiers are travelling the stretch of road near Kandahar City called IED Alley for the lethal "improvised explosive devices" often buried along it.

Versatile, capable of speeds up to 100 kilometres an hour, and able to manoeuvre both the narrow valleys of the Hindu Kush mountains and Afghanistan's cratered roads, the "cars," as soldiers call them, offer protection with firepower -- each is equipped with a 25mm cannon as well as a machine gun.

Even better, for those who often sleep beside them, the cars have power outlets, allowing the crews of 10 to brew coffee and charge their MP3 players.

And so, with apologies to the 23rd Psalm:

The LAV is my shepherd, I shall not want.

She taketh me through the cruel stony mountains;

She leadeth me beside the still waters and the wadis;

She ruineth my arse but restoreth my faith.

She marcheth me through IED Alley, for her name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

I will fear no evil,

For I am in thee.

Thy big guns and thy air conditioning they comfort me.

Thou preparest a nasty welcome to surprise mine enemies,

Thou anointest my head with diesel,

My cup runneth over.

Surely security and victory shall follow me all the days of this mission,

And I will dwell in the house of the LAV forever.

-- Christie Blatchford