Posts Tagged ‘Canada And Afghanistan’

The soldiers at Camp Blackhorse don’t care about irony. They are from the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and they are about as combat hardened as any Canadian soldiers I’ve met. At the beginning of last November they were just getting rolling on their new task of training the Afghan army and already they were cranky—this new mission was nothing much, to them. A corporal I’d met before in Panjwaii came out to give me a tour of their training grounds. High on a plain up above Kabul, this was the place where fledgling Afghan army companies were taught how to survive combat as a unit. The training ground was vast and largely unprotected. “Does the enemy ever come up here?” I asked. “Yeah,” answered the corporal, nodding across the rolling ground. “Someone just tried to plant an IED on the route over there.” He paused. “Blew himself up though.” Interesting. Only in Afghanistan would a training ground and a battlefield ever get so mixed up. The corporal didn’t find it too interesting; he just liked that the enemy blew himself up.

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.

This is Part 3 of Legion Magazine’s series on the Canadian effort to win hearts and minds in Salavat, a restive community in Kandahar Province’s notorious Panjwai district.

Ambush At The White School One of the first battles for the infamous white school in the Panjwai district of Afghanistan occurred on Aug. 3, 2006—one month prior to the launch of Operation Medusa, which has been the subject of a three-part series in Legion Magazine. In the August battle, Canadian soldiers fought with great courage despite being seriously outnumbered by the enemy. What follows is one soldier’s account of that chaotic situation. Master Corporal Matthew Parsons is a transplanted New Zealander who served in 9 Platoon of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. We were sitting at Forward [...]