Defence Today
Assignment Afghanistan
For several weeks last fall, a dusty and dangerous frontier town in Afghanistan was home for Legion Magazine staff writer Adam Day. Armed with a notebook and camera, Day spent his time in Salavat with a platoon of 1st Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, deployed in an attempt to secure the town and win the trust of its people. The result of Day’s visit is a series of articles, beginning with Part 1, The Struggle For Salavat. Before we go there, however, we open with a story (Hearts And Minds) by freelance journalist Matthieu Aikins whose travels throughout Afghanistan have given him a perspective on how Afghans view international efforts to bring stability to their country.
March 1, 2010
Assignment Afghanistan: The Struggle For Salavat – Part 1
For the first few days the platoon was uneasy. So much of everything was unknown. As a unit they were new to the war but they knew the war’s reputation for random savagery.
As each patrol was leaving the little fortified schoolhouse over the first days, the soldiers staying behind would come out to see them off, pretending to tease them. Or maybe they would really tease them. There were always a few sombre last moments as the guys gave each other thumbs up or fist bumps on their way out, and then it would start. ‘Have fun at the war soldiers,’ someone might yell in a girl’s voice. ‘Watch out for those IEDs, tough guys,’ another might yell cutely. It seemed pretty clear the soldiers were worried about each other.
March 1, 2010, by Adam Day
Assignment Afghanistan: Hearts And Minds
Abdul Wali was looking back over his shoulder, explaining to me how bad things had gotten for him, and about the gains the Taliban had been making in Kandahar, when, with a crunch, he rear-ended the car in front of us, another equally battered Corolla taxi that had been trying to take a left turn.
March 1, 2010, by Matthieu Aikins
Assignment Afghanistan
Legion Magazine staff writer Adam Day spent nearly a month in Afghanistan last October. These field notes serve as a prelude to a major special section on the war in Afghanistan scheduled to appear in the March/April issue—the Editor.
AFGHANISTAN FIELD NOTE No. 1
In the spring and summer of 2009, it seemed that critical opinion about the war in Afghanistan was sinking towards pessimism nearly as fast as violence inside the country was rising. “We are not going to ever defeat the insurgency,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told CNN, and a chorus of military analysts soon joined him in expressing doubt. [...]
January 20, 2010, by Adam Day
Low • Fast • Dark: Canada’s Special Ops Aviators
The single point of failure.
This short phrase hides an idea powerful enough to make a special operations aviator professionally uncomfortable. The phrase makes them tense. It makes them speak of dangerous things.
Up in the sky, there are few places to hide. And while commanders do their best to make plans resilient enough to avoid any single point of failure, it’s a rare plan that survives first contact with the enemy and recent military history shows that occasionally even the most elite forces can become undone.
It takes just a single piece of bad luck—a dust storm that blinds and disorients, [...]
November 14, 2009, by Adam Day
The Dragon Hunters
Out in the wilds of Kandahar province, the average Canadian infantryman looks at a bomb disposal expert the same way most people look at motorcycle racers or surfers who swim with sharks—it’s a narrow-eyed sideways glance, full of frank appraisal and containing one central question: is the guy crazy? Who in their right mind would want to creep up on live explosives and disarm them?
It’s a good question. But still, somebody has to do the job.
And while sneaking up on bombs is not a game for the faint-hearted, walking serenely into a cloud of chemical weapons, or towards a live [...]
September 5, 2009, by Adam Day
Beyond Top Secret: Undercover With Canadian Special Operations Forces In Jamaica
They don’t much like the James Bond characterization, these undercover Canadian soldiers. In fact, they reject it.
But then you kind of expect that they would.
If they were the kind of people to revel in the drama of covert operations, well, they probably wouldn’t be in the Canadian Special Operations Regiment (CSOR), discreetly deployed to Jamaica to help train a special operations unit of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF).
Regardless, the cloak-and-dagger aspect can’t be ignored: a plain synopsis of what they do sounds like it’s lifted straight from a Hollywood script.
If you’ve ever seen a movie where fit-looking westerners dash across [...]
July 3, 2009, by Adam Day
The Life [And Death] Of Erin Doyle
“He died pulling the trigger. He died screaming into the face of the enemy.”
The Canadian army has a policy on facial hair. Moustaches are OK, but beards are pretty much forbidden without medical cause and even then growing anything longer than the allowed one inch is a sure way to bring a crusty sergeant major down on your own personal head.
It is called a ‘jacking.’ And it’s what happens in the Canadian Forces when a superior officer has some kind of issue with you, or with your beard.
Master Corporal Erin Doyle was not worried about getting jacked. He was, in [...]
March 7, 2009, by Adam Day
In Conversation With Andrew Leslie
Soldiers bring strange memories home from war.
Any traveller knows the feeling, the inclination to grab some piece of a place so you have something to show you were there.
Soldiers do the same thing, only they tend to cherish odder stuff than carpets or T-shirts (though they like those, too). “These were still hot when we picked them up,” said Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie, nodding at a couple of despicably jagged pieces of shrapnel sitting sort of hidden off to one side of his office’s conference table at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa.
Leslie is the Chief of the Land Staff, head of [...]
March 1, 2009, by Adam Day
Left Of The Boom
The feeling has been described by survivors as falling. Also as soaring. There’s a flash and a shrieking darkness and then the weightless moments of maximum kinetic terror when the detonation blasts you beyond gravity. After the boom there is just distorted wreckage, and dust and pain and shouting, for the survivors at least.
All the armour in the world and it just doesn’t really matter. The vehicles get tougher but the blasts get bigger. There is simply no good way to keep Canadian soldiers safe once they get caught in the boom of the roadside bombs, the suicide bombs, the [...]
