Defence Today

It’s probably not the thing you’d expect to be most impressed about if you were sitting in a field watching elite Canadian snipers compete against some of the world’s best shooters, but there it is—Corporal Corey is an absolute demon on the calculator.

It was a heat-crazed Afghan afternoon in 2008 when I think maybe I saw through the war. Zangabad is a bad memory, nothing but streaks of confusion and discontent. That day in April the village was mostly deserted, just a labyrinth of tawny mud walls, a few shifty farmers and a disaster of IEDs. I was on patrol with the infantry. Their mission was to provide security for the construction of a new road passing through Haji and Zangabad all the way out to Mushan. The road was scheduled to bring peace and prosperity to western Panjwaii, the most hostile part of the most hostile district in Kandahar province, if not the country. Their mission was not going well. The road was constantly being laced with IEDs. Canadians and Afghans were dying and the whole project was in jeopardy.

The days are long and sometimes crazy, but without them the Canadian Forces would not be able to operate overseas or at home. For the most part, the men and women filling these days—and nights—work behind the scenes and rarely get recognized for turning seemingly impossible tasks into reality. All of them fall under the umbrella of the Canadian Operational Support Command (CANOSCOM) and they have been extremely busy helping to close out Canada’s five-year combat mission in Afghanistan. A major part of their work in the wartorn country involves bringing soldiers and equipment home, a massive undertaking that began months ago—well before the decision was made to switch Canada’s role from a combat mission, which will end in July, to a training mission. Over all, Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan stretches just under 10 years, an experience shared by thousands of military personnel and supported by CANOSCOM through everything from operational logistics, engineering, communications, equipment maintenance to health and military police services.

Over nearly five years of combat in Kandahar province, the Canadian Forces mission to defeat the insurgent Taliban has been called many things—‘the unexpected war,’ ‘the difficult war,’ ‘mission impossible’—but in the end it will be up to the historians, and history itself, to decide what it all meant. In the meantime, certain things are known: The counter-insurgency campaign waged in Kandahar province from 2006-2011 was the Canadian military’s first period of sustained combat in more than 50 years, since the Korean war. If nothing else, it was a test of military, political and democratic resolve. The effort to combat islamic militancy and international terrorism, borne out of the attacks of September 11, 2001, drew Canada and its military into some harrowing situations. The cost was high. What follows is a timeline of the mission’s Milestones.

When the phone rang just before Thanksgiving, 11-year-old Alisha Perreault of Petawawa, Ont., thought nothing about answering. She had no idea the call would change her family forever. After picking up, the unfamiliar voice asked for her mother, Frances.

It had been a good summer for him. He was a good fighter, strong. His name might have been Mirwais or Muhammad or maybe Zalmai. He wasn’t from Salavat, this small town in central Panjwai, but he was an Afghan and he’d come here to fight the foreigners; us.

They knew there would be bombs buried in the dirt. They knew their metal detectors probably wouldn’t detect the bombs’ wooden pressure plates. They knew that after the bombs they would be ambushed and the air would zing with high-velocity metal. The Canadians knew they were advancing to detonation, that some of them were going down, that it was unlikely they’d all make it back to base. They knew there would be mayhem and nightmare explosions and the dirty fear of dying. They went anyway. They walked across the field and into the war, and everything that they knew, happened.

This is the final instalment of Legion Magazine’s series on the efforts of First Platoon, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, to win the hearts and minds of the villagers of Salavat, a community in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. All of First Platoon’s efforts over the last weeks have led to one more meeting with the local elders, wherein the villagers will reveal whether they have decided to co-operate with the Canadians or, instead, flee the area for the safety of somewhere without coalition forces.

On Freddy’s starboard side: toes over edge of deck; eyes staring between feet at swirling water, 6 1⁄2 metres below; brain suddenly more cognizant of how the side of the massive grey warship—the freeboard—angles in and down, and how the 7 1⁄2 -metre-long rope ladder—called the “jumping ladder”—swings freely until its lower wooden rungs are held against side of moving ship by two crewmen who—at this moment—are balancing like surfers in the bottom of a small boat riding the swells to keep pace with the 134-metre-long frigate.

HEARTS AND MINDS ON THE LINE This is part four of Legion Magazine’s story on the efforts of one small Canadian unit to win the hearts and minds of a town in the Taliban heartland last fall. First Platoon of Alpha Company, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry has been in Salavat for a week and a half, living in a small school compound on the edge of town, struggling hard to get a grip on the distrustful, slightly hostile little community in the centre of Panjwai District, the deadliest place for Canadians in all of Kandahar Province. Follow the links to read [...]