Kandahar experience was deeply significant
Time embedded with soldiers important to me
Remembrance Day dates back to the end of the First World War, but for me, it will always be about two other wars.
One was the Second World War, which ended years before I was born. My connection to it was only my late father, who served with 422 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force, based at Castle Archdale in Northern Ireland.
He was a navigator, not a soldier, but he talked with such open affection and profane joy about his former crew that perhaps the seeds for the way I view those who serve in the military were planted then.
The other war was Canada’s decade-plus mission in Afghanistan.
That one I experienced first-hand, as a reporter embedded with the three regular force regiments of the Canadian Army.
I spent the most time with the 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, which with a company of the 2nd Battalion, a battery of gunners from 1st Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, combat engineers and reservists formed the Task Force Orion battle group.
I spent almost six months on four tours (short reporter-type tours of about six weeks each) in Kandahar over the last half of 2006, and later wrote a book about the Canadians I met and got to know a little.
It was easily the most significant experience of my life.
Much of the art in my house shows that.
I have two proper Louie Palu photographs (Palu became one of the great photographers of that war, and was with me on my first trip, when we both worked for The Globe and Mail) and a collection of lesser Palu prints.
These are of so-called rock and sh--ter paintings, drawings and graffiti done by Afghans and Canadians respectively on local rocks and plywood loos. My favourite of the lot is from a loo, and reads, “I wish my girlfriend was as dirty as this place!!”, with the answering scrawl of a smartass, “I wish your girlfriend was dirty too.”
I have a giant numbered war print of a Gertrude Kearns’ portrait. Kearns is for my money (and she has some considerable amount of it) the best war artist of her generation. Her show of this work, called The Art of Command, was most recently in Calgary.
I also have in my office a large map of the Task Force Kandahar battle space, snapped up on my behalf by a military friend when it was declassified.
I digress, but the point is that my time with soldiers was and remains important to me.
I never found the troops to be uneasy, awkward or intimidated by reporters. Rather the opposite: They were ridiculously open, including about any army’s propensity to screw things up, and they swore with enviable proficiency, if not quite as well as I do.
I loved being with them, loved their boisterous masculinity (and yes, there were women there, too, but they fitted themselves in with the majority) and their great competence at so much.
They were first and foremost so astonishingly capable.
They could fix anything, cook anything, drive anything. They could talk to anyone, handle a weapon, march for days carrying ridiculous amounts of gear, set up a tent, work a satellite phone and a radio. They bitched about everything yet never complained; there’s a difference, and infantrymen know it. They were funny and smart. They were complicated and thoughtful.
When they came home — 158 of them, of course, didn’t come home at all, and many more were wounded — I stayed in touch with some.
The Patricias were posted out to new jobs in new places almost as soon as they returned. It made their adjustment to Canada much more difficult — they had grown so close and were then ripped apart — and some of my guys struggled. Others won medals for bravery under fire. Several left the Canadian Forces in the years afterwards and moved on to genuinely big jobs in the civilian world; others stayed in and moved on with their careers. A couple drank too much for a while after or got in trouble with the law or saw their relationships fall apart.
Were a couple suffering post-traumatic stress disorder? Maybe, and I’m no psychiatrist, but I don’t think so and I don’t think they think so.
They had spent six months training for Kandahar and six to nine months there in that violent and unpredictable country, feeling both terribly vulnerable and gloriously alive. They saw their friends killed and blown up and lose limbs. They were grieving and guilty and grateful. Of course they were f---ed up for a time.
For all the modern view of soldiers as victims — for God’s sakes, with the Ontario government’s move of last week to pay for trauma counselling for jurors in criminal trials, we are all victims — and with the emphasis now on PTSD in the military, my experience of them is that they were never that.
I’ll think of them all, those who are gone and those who are living, on Friday.
THEY HAD SPENT SIX MONTHS TRAINING FOR KANDAHAR AND SIX TO NINE MONTHS THERE IN THAT VIOLENT AND UNPREDICTABLE COUNTRY, FEELING BOTH TERRIBLY VULNERABLE AND GLORIOUSLY ALIVE. — COLUMNIST CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD