Posts Tagged ‘War In Afghanistan’

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.

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]