HEROES AMONG US
While serving in Afghanistan, Patrick Tower and William Macdonald saved the lives of fellow soldiers during a Taliban assault on Aug. 3, 2006. The Battle of White School has become one of the most recognized actions of military valour and courage under fire in modern Canadian history
`For a moment after the (rocket-propelled grenade) hit, the Taliban fire aimed at the two small buildings occupied by the Canadians slackened, then escalated further until it sounded like a hurricane of metal breaking against the walls. (Willy) Macdonald swore under his breath. He knew the insurgents would love nothing more than to capture a Canadian soldier and would likely try to follow up the successful grenade hit by swarming the soldiers pinned down in the schoolhouse. He decided he wasn't going to wait for them to attack — he was going to attack them,” wrote former National Post reporter Chris Wattie in his 2008 book Contact Charlie: The Canadian Army, the Taliban and the Battle that Saved Afghanistan.
Macdonald, who would be awarded Canada's second-highest military honour for his valour that day, “took a running leap through the doorway and scrambled around the wall and across the open ground between the buildings. As bullets whizzed past from every direction, Macdonald dove headfirst into the second outhouse and landed on (Jon) Hamilton's shattered foot, prompting an outburst of swearing from the captain. The RPG had turned the darkened interior of the hut into a charnel house and Macdonald needed a moment to take it all in.
“(Vaughan) Ingram and (Bryce) Keller were lying dead just outside the building and (Kevin) Dallaire was unconscious and bleeding heavily. The remaining three soldiers were all wounded.”
Meanwhile, their fellow soldier, Patrick Tower, was manning a casualty collection point for this Canadian sneak attack that had swiftly changed to a recovery operation under heavy assault. He heard their distress over the radio. “If you don't get us out of here, we're all going to die.”
So, he set out running, leading two others across 200 metres of open ground through Taliban fire so intense they later found holes in their gear. It only stopped for good after reinforcements arrived and U.S. Air Force bombers flew low overhead, sending Taliban fighters into retreat.
The battle of the White School on Aug. 3, 2006, in southern Afghanistan's Panjwaii district, west of Kandahar, is one of the most recognized instances of military valour and courage under fire in modern Canadian history.
The school, near the village centre of Pashmul, had been built a couple of years previously by the American military, through the U.S. Commander's Emergency Reconstruction Program. It was a classic example of the effort to win hearts and minds.
Right then and there, it became about survival. ... I had to focus on how to make the situation better, so that those of us that were still breathing might get out of it alive.
WARRANT OFFICER WILLIAM “WILLY” MACDONALD, on his actions during the Battle of White School.
But as the NATO mission in Afghanistan evolved from an invasion into a counter-insurgency, control of the school had gone back and forth between local authorities who ran classes, and the Taliban, which used it as an operational base.
For months, villagers reported to Afghan police that Taliban fighters slept in the school and turned students away when they arrived in the morning. Canadians had previously chased them out, but now with students away for longer periods during the summer, the Taliban had again moved in. The windows were boarded up, the furniture gone and the walls covered in graffiti.
The mission was to clear the school and take control of the market just beyond it. To the Canadian soldiers who rolled under cover of darkness toward the school the night before, it seemed, on the face of it, like a familiar plan.
As Patrick Tower, who also received the Star of Military Valour for his actions that day, once told the National Post: “The anticipated threat was from (improvised explosive devices) buried in the road — that's what we saw as the real danger going in. We didn't expect a big contact with the enemy.”
It was an ambush. Intelligence reports that there were about a dozen Taliban in the immediate area turned out to be dramatically wrong. In fact, the White School was part of a major encampment, an operational centre, well equipped, well prepared, with defensive positions and shooting holes cut into walls, and full of committed fighters.
By the time the battle was over, there were seven Canadians injured, and four dead: Pte. Kevin Dallaire, Sgt. Vaughan Ingram, Cpl. Bryce Keller and Cpl. Christopher Reid.
Several people were recognized for their actions that day, but among the various honours, Patrick Tower and William Kenneth Macdonald stood out and both were awarded the Star of Military Valour, putting them in the company of fewer than 20 soldiers thus recognized for service in Afghanistan. It is the second-highest honour in the Canadian system. It is the highest honour ever actually awarded.
Some feel that should change. Canada took charge of its honours system from the British in 1967, but it was not until 1992 that it recreated the top honour, the Victoria Cross.
Canada's Victoria Cross was created along with the Star of Military Valour and the Medal of Military Valour, but for many years after that, it existed only on paper, in theory. As the highest award in the country's honour system, the Victoria Cross is to be awarded “for the most conspicuous bravery, a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice, or extreme devotion to duty, in the presence of the enemy.”
Although it has been minted, the Canadian Victoria Cross has never been awarded.
The star is awarded for “distinguished and valiant service,” and the medal for “valour or devotion to duty.” All require the presence of the enemy, of which Canada takes a broad view, including terrorists, pirates, and mutineers, so as not to exclude cases without a formal declaration of war, such as the Afghanistan campaign.
Macdonald's citation for the Star of Military Valour reads: “On August 3, 2006, amidst chaos and under sustained and intense enemy fire in Afghanistan, Warrant Officer Macdonald, then sergeant, selflessly and repeatedly exposed himself to great peril in order to assist his wounded comrades.”
WHITE SCHOOL MISSION
The Canadian soldiers who fought that day at the White School were in the final two weeks of a seven-month deployment that had seen nothing but increasing hostility and danger.
The war was dragging on and getting worse. Canada had specialized soldiers in Afghanistan before the end of 2001, but regular troops started arriving in large numbers in early 2002. No one anticipated them still being there four years later.
By 2005, however, the United States was also at war in Iraq, and Canada was taking greater responsibility for combat operations in southern Afghanistan, from its base at Kandahar. As the Taliban mounted a large offensive in the spring of 2006, it was frequently Canadians they were fighting, and Canadian casualties had started to climb.
Improvised explosive devices (IEDS), or roadside bombs, were the great scourge, easily concealed in the road, easily detonated remotely, vicious in their effect on the Light Armoured Vehicles, or LAVS, that were the main transport for Canadian troops.
Canadian troops were also seeing escalating contact with the enemy. Battle had become almost constant.
Capt. Nichola Goddard, the first female Canadian soldier killed in frontline duty, died in a firefight in Panjwaii on May 17, 2006. She was standing in an LAV that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Cpl. Anthony Joseph Boneca was shot and killed in July.
Operation Mountain Thrust, which lasted into the summer of 2006, would aim to defeat the Taliban insurgency, with Afghan troops at the front of a NATO-LED operation of British and Canadian troops led by a Canadian. Operation Medusa would begin in September. Neither would mark any sort of a conclusion to the wider war.
But for the soldiers who fought at the White School, an end, of sorts, was in sight. Some members had returned to Canada. Others were scheduled to be done within a few days. They were at a forward operating base in Spin Boldak, near the Pakistan border, some of them resenting that they were away from the action elsewhere. Then came orders that they were going back to the Kandahar Airfield to gear up for another mission. They were going to the White School.
The plan was to approach the school at night from the south, along the Arghandab River.
Just after 4 a.m., a roadside bomb hit a Light Armoured Vehicle in the convoy. Cpl. Chris Reid was killed and another soldier was badly injured.
Then another LAV triggered another IED, with less severe injuries. The convoy stopped. It was about 400 metres from the school, and the soldiers would have to progress in the imperfect cover of a ditch, a wall and a dry river bed known as a wadi.
The heat was oppressive, dangerous, and men were suffering heat stroke, literally collapsing from exhaustion. As the sun rose, the situation became terrifyingly clear. Irrigation ditches were serving as Taliban trenches. Firing points had been established, roadside bombs wired up. The advancing Canadians could be fired upon from 270 degrees, just about every direction but the one they had come from. The mission to retake the White School was an ambush.
Later, there would be recriminations, including for the high-level reluctance to send in heavy artillery to save the trapped soldiers.
The decision to be there at all was also criticized.
Harjit Sajjan, the former minister of national defence, who served in Afghanistan while on leave from Vancouver Police and at the time was a lieutenant-colonel specializing in intelligence, said he had offered information that the Taliban “had built a defensible base, a very large one, in that area with compounds, defensive positions and their sole job was to use that as a staging area to be able to launch attacks into Kandahar City.”
He said his view was that the force being sent to clear the White School was too small, but in the end, his view did not win out.
THE BATTLE FOR RECOVERY
By midday, there were two vehicles down. One man, Reid, was dead, four were injured, and most everyone else was withering under the physical strain of serious exertion in intense heat. The decision was made to advance on foot.
Macdonald was in one group that would follow a canal toward the school. Tower was in another that would follow a parallel ditch. There were 14 Canadians, and about twice as many Afghan troops. Some Afghan troops reached the school and beyond, but retreated under fire.
As the late National Post journalist Christie Blatchford wrote in her book about the Afghanistan War, Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army, which won the 2008 Governor General's Literary Award in non-fiction: “There were now fourteen soldiers, Canadians all, who formed the assault element and were positioned right to a mud wall running along the south side of the road.
“Using the wall for cover, under continuous small-arms and RPG fire, they began making their way to the school, one small section moving as another kept up suppressing fire. With this fire-and-movement technique, the men gained about two hundred metres of ground and hit the wall's end.
“The school was very close, about 150 metres away, but across open, flat terrain,” Blatchford wrote.
One group made the school, under cover of the other group's fire. The second group made their run, and one of them, Pte. Dallaire, was hit in the chest. They got him to cover, but lost contact with the others. A mad dash, and the men were in the cover of the school's outbuildings, two bathrooms separated by a low wall.
Enemy fire was intense and overwhelming. Some of the heatstroke victims were incapacitated. Radio pleas for artillery support were turned down.
Gentlemen, it's time.
It's your turn. Get on with it.
Then came an RPG, a direct hit on one of the bathroom buildings, leaving a hellish blackness and the smell of cordite. Keller and Dallaire were killed, Ingram, the acting platoon commander, was terribly injured. Four others were wounded. One of them yelled for Macdonald, in the other building nearby. Macdonald ran for it.
He told Blatchford: “As I came around the corner, I was assaulted by what I saw. Three soldiers appeared dead, and several more were writhing in agony from their multiple injuries. Those that were not hit by enemy fire were either hysterical or unable to do anything but stare at me in disbelief and shock.”
He dressed a fellow soldier's wounds and applied a tourniquet, and surveyed the others. Macdonald saw Ingram struggling to get a bandage on Keller, who was dead.
Macdonald asked Ingram how he was. The captain had dodged death a few weeks earlier when a rocket-propelled grenade hit his LAV as he was acting as sentry. Normally that involves standing up in the vehicle, exposed, but Ingram had ducked inside to grab his cigarettes at the fateful moment. Rather than being killed instantly, he suffered only some shrapnel wounds. His joke was that smoking saved his life.
But these wounds were too much. Ingram's leg was bent out of shape, his side cut open. “I think I'm slipping, boys,” he said, and his head fell to the side.
“Right then and there, it became about survival,” Macdonald once told National Post writer Joe O'connor. “I knew that there would be time to grieve later and that my chances were pretty slim of getting out of there, anyhow, so I had to focus on how to make the situation better, so that those of us that were still breathing might get out of it alive.”
His impulse was to fight with those who could still fire a gun, to change the momentum of the battle. By then, the mission was not to clear the school anymore. It was recovery. Reinforcements arrived in LAVS, shooting all the way.
Taking control of the market square, the reinforcements encountered a suicide bomber in a car, but were spared from the blast when a soldier shot the driver from a distance after he started a fast break toward the convoy. The blast killed 20 Afghan locals.
Tower knew none of this at the time. He had come running at the distress call, crossing open ground under heavy fire, with a heat-stroked master corporal and a medic.
Because of the casualties, Tower had suddenly become the acting commander and, as his regimental sergeant major described it to Blatchford, gathered the remnants of his men together with a rousing series of clear orders.
“They were mortally hurting, physically just hanging on,” Chief Warrant Officer Randy Northrup said. Tower “did the Knute Rockne thing. He goes, `All right, I need you f--king guys to stand up. You, you're the section commander; you, you're the second-in-command. Shut the f--k up, this is what I want. I want everything inventoried. I need a movable force, I want ammo, weapons, dismounts. Gentlemen, it's time. It's your turn. Get on with it.”
Fifteen minutes later, Tower reported his progress: “I've got these vehicles running, fully crewed, distributed ammo. Where do you want us?”
As Tower's citation for his Star of Military Valour reads: “Following an enemy strike against an outlying friendly position that resulted in numerous casualties, Sergeant Tower assembled the platoon medic and a third soldier and led them across 150 metres of open terrain, under heavy enemy fire, to render assistance. On learning that the acting platoon commander had perished, Sergeant Tower assumed command and led the successful extraction of the force under continuous small arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire. Sergeant Tower's courage and selfless devotion to duty contributed directly to the survival of the remaining platoon members.”
There is a pair of boots archived and sometimes displayed at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, which Macdonald wore through his combat in Afghanistan from January to August 2006. They are not much to look at, just basic hikers worn through the leather in the obvious places. It is the blood stains that make them noteworthy, faded over time but no less poignant.