Posts Tagged ‘Operation Medusa’

In the early afternoon of Operation Ateesh Bazi’s second day, as our patrol staggered through its 10th hour and third suspected insurgent stronghold, the heat became something more vivid and invasive than a phenomenon of weather should ever be.

Numbers alone cannot contain or relate the effect of that high-noon Afghan desert sun on the brains and bodies of cold-weather-bred Canadians. You get so hot it would be inappropriate to call it hot. You suck at the air. Your body armour cooks you like simmering hot plates strapped to your chest and back and head and you are dimly aware […]

Rick Hillier is still grinning, even if just barely. After more than three years at the head of Canada’s armed forces and at the centre of relentless media attention and political controversy over the war in Afghanistan, Chief of the Defence Staff General Rick Hillier, Canada’s sometimes embattled top soldier, remains determined and steadfastly optimistic.

Hillier is optimistic not only about the mission in Afghanistan, where he says there is progress every day, even if it is slow and incomplete, but also about the future of the Canadian Forces, which he says is finally becoming an organization that its members […]

Part 3: The Fall of Objective Rugby.

Whatever the new rotation of Canadian soldiers were expecting to find when they rotated into Kandahar in August 2006, it wasn’t this.

They had trained for counter-insurgency warfare, but what they found was a lot closer to conventional war.

What they […]

Part 2: Death in a Free Fire Zone.

Having just been blown up, Corporal Richard Furoy lay on the hard Afghan earth bleeding, in untold kinds of pain and probably close to shock. Beside him lay the body of his friend, Warrant Officer Rick Nolan. Enemy rounds […]

Part 1: The Charge of Charles Company.

Within sight of the infamous white schoolhouse, epicentre of the insurgency in Kandahar province, the hastily assembled Canadian force entered the kill zone. An enemy signal flare shot up across Charles Company’s lead elements and there aren’t […]

Canadian soldiers are fighting a war in Afghanistan.

In Spin Boldak, at the eastern edge of Kandahar province, the soldiers watch over the Pakistani border. At Forward Operating Base Martello, north of Kandahar city, they patrol the mountains. Across Panjwai, southeast of Kandahar city, they rebuild after […]