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No life like it: Taliban just one of the perils faced by infantry
Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News • Monday, Aug. 2, 2010
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/life+like+Taliban+just+perils+faced+infantry/3350984/story.html
SPERWAN GHAR Afghanistan — Pte. Blair Kearley was in a dither.
The 25-year-old infantryman from Baie d’Espoir, N.L. had tripped days earlier while running across a hilly field during an engagement with the Taliban, badly spraining his left ankle.
After pleading with the camp doctor, it was agreed Pte. Kearley would only have to wear a cast for four days. But with two days left before he would be able to go to war again with an ankle brace, Pte. Kearley was going stir crazy — so badly did he want to be out fighting against the insurgents in Panjwaii District with 9 Platoon, Charles Company, 1 Royal Canadian Regiment.
“Unless my wife wants me out, I’m a lifer,” Pte. Kearley said as he chain-smoked his way through a pack of Marlboro Lights and reflected on the perilous, austere life he had chosen.
Pte. Kearley, who enlisted four years ago, confided he doesn’t talk too much about the war with his wife or anyone else at home.
Part of that is operational security, but it also so as to not cause worry.
Few military jobs are more dangerous than being in the infantry. About two-thirds of the 151 Canadians who have died in Afghanistan have come from its three infantry regiments.
The risks are such that 9 Platoon infantry use a lot of black humour to mask their apprehensions. When a soldier lost a leg, the joke was that he would be “back on his foot in no time.”
But in what is a very tightly knit outfit, not much bigger than a high school class, each loss has been deeply felt.
“One IED struck the guy who had trained me and that hit me pretty hard, but he’s back home now,” said Derek Boutin of Fort Erie, Ont. “Walking through the grape fields, IEDs have hit my buddies. They have been as close as you can imagine.”
The media may be focused on the effect of thousands of leaked documents that have described the war they are fighting. But such issues and the political currents back home — where many have expressed reservations about Canada’s first shooting war in half a century — have almost no impact deep in the field. Although prouder Canadians than most, the infantry soldiers all said that they fought for each other rather than for any cause.
And although the soldiers in Charles Company acknowledged that others in their battle group have been having a harder time of it lately, their unit has had its fair share of bad scrapes, too.
“When something bad happens outside the wire you don’t think of it then, but when you get back you realize that it was like a scene in a movie — something you never thought you’d be part of,” Pte. Kearley said. “Like any job, you love it one day and hate it the next. But I like what I do. I definitely picked the right career.”
One of the toughest parts of being a grunt in Afghanistan are the 12 or 14 hour foot patrols conducted in temperatures that invariably reached into the 50s. On every one such outing the soldiers had to lug as much as 40 kilograms of water, rations, ammunition and body armour with them.
“When you in full battle rattle in the heat in the middle of the day it is almost impossible to breathe if you are under contact because of the weight of the gear, the heat and the adrenalin,” Pte. Kearley said, as he surveyed a bleak landscape that included a forest of concrete blast walls and endless acres of sand and rock.
“If there is a situation, you don’t know until it is over that you’ve got nothing left to give. It really drains you. You come back having sweated through your body armour and your boots.”
Every remedy for dealing with heat involved consuming prodigious quantities of water the night before a patrol even if that meant three visits to the latrine before dawn.
“I went down with dehydration when we were a week into it,” Pte. Boutin said. “My vision went blurry. My arm went numb. I don’t call it sweating here. I call it flooding.
“I was so gung ho I thought I didn’t need so much water. It taught me how much you need to prepare before you go out. I now try to drink 15 or 20 bottles of water the night before.”
Before deploying to Panjwaii, the RCR battle group had trained for desert warfare in California, “but there really is no way to train properly for the heat except to be here,” Pte. Boutin said, adding that some soldiers had already lost as much as 35 pounds during their tour.
Master Cpl. Kyle Manser, a 24 year old from Kitchener, Ont. served in Kandahar as a private with Charles Company in 2006. Now a crew commander, he described the heat as “the fight you just cannot win. You cannot force soldiers to drink but we push them to drink a bottle every hour. Even if you get properly hydrated, once you are out there half an hour, you won’t have to piss.”
When not trying to survive the searing heat, cope with sand fleas or malarial mosquitoes or staying alert for scorpions and deadly snakes, the main preoccupations of the infantrymen in Panjwaii is avoiding IEDs and being ready at any moment to engage the Taliban.
“I keep in mind the tactical point-of-view and I don’t worry about IEDs because that would hinder the job that has to be done,” Pte. Boutin said. “The Taliban are as creative as anyone can be. They have found some pretty innovative ways to get at us but we’ve picked up on most of them. They adapt. We adapt. They are always trying to sneak stuff past us, but we catch them.”
Like Master Cpl. Manser, Master Cpl. Mike Martin of Ottawa was in Kandahar four years ago, too.
“I can’t give you a number on how many Taliban are out there right now, but there are lots of them and, yes, they’re close,” he said. “Back in ‘06 there were large numbers of Taliban who would stand and fight. Now they shoot and scoot and try to lure us into where they’ve put IEDs.”
“I told my guys: ‘You could step on something at any time, so don’t spend your time thinking about it. That can drive you nuts and could make you miss something. Keep your eyes and ears open.’”
As dangerous as it had been during 1 Royal Canadian Regiment’s first tour in Kandahar, which included the bloody Operation Medusa, “Panjwaii is a harder fight now,” Master Cpl. Manser said. “The enemy is definitely present. They are right outside the camp and are a lot craftier with the IEDs than they used to be.”
From what he’d seen of the Taliban, “I’d say they are pretty good,” Pte. Kearley said. “It’s like playing hockey on their rink. They know this ground and they know what they need. They’ve been doing this a long time and they’re doing a pretty damn good job.”
Aside from the lethal risks posed by the Taliban, “if you are in the infantry long enough, it will break your knees and your back,” Master Cpl. Manser said.
His fellow crew commander, Martin, who is 32, put it another way.
“Infantry years are like dog years,” he said. “You use them up pretty fast. Something goes and then you can’t do this anymore.
Asked how 9 Platoon would stack up for fitness against a professional football or hockey team, Pte. Kearley replied: “They would be in better shape, but there is not a chance that they could do our jobs.”
Although as privates they were the constant butt of jokes from those who outranked them, Pte. Kearley and Pte. Boutin both spoke highly of their immediate superiors.
“I really look up to the guys who’ve been here before, even if they trash talk you all the time,” Pte. Boutin said. “If a buddy gets hurt or there is a family problem, they are always there for us, like father figures. I have learned from them that you can push yourself further as a soldier and as a person than you think you can.”
Referring to their hardscrabble forward base, which has great chow and such unexpected comforts as beds, rather than cots, Kearley said: “This is home and when we are outside the wire, we like to get back here. It is where we eat and sleep. It is where our friends and family are.”
Master Cpl. Martin, who like Pte. Kearley is married and has a child, said that “people at home might sit back and say we are crazy but what is there not to like about this? Sitting in an office punching numbers into a computer or talking about your tennis game beside the water cooler isn’t the same. We are seeing the world and making a difference.”
Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News • Monday, Aug. 2, 2010
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/life+like+Taliban+just+perils+faced+infantry/3350984/story.html
SPERWAN GHAR Afghanistan — Pte. Blair Kearley was in a dither.
The 25-year-old infantryman from Baie d’Espoir, N.L. had tripped days earlier while running across a hilly field during an engagement with the Taliban, badly spraining his left ankle.
After pleading with the camp doctor, it was agreed Pte. Kearley would only have to wear a cast for four days. But with two days left before he would be able to go to war again with an ankle brace, Pte. Kearley was going stir crazy — so badly did he want to be out fighting against the insurgents in Panjwaii District with 9 Platoon, Charles Company, 1 Royal Canadian Regiment.
“Unless my wife wants me out, I’m a lifer,” Pte. Kearley said as he chain-smoked his way through a pack of Marlboro Lights and reflected on the perilous, austere life he had chosen.
Pte. Kearley, who enlisted four years ago, confided he doesn’t talk too much about the war with his wife or anyone else at home.
Part of that is operational security, but it also so as to not cause worry.
Few military jobs are more dangerous than being in the infantry. About two-thirds of the 151 Canadians who have died in Afghanistan have come from its three infantry regiments.
The risks are such that 9 Platoon infantry use a lot of black humour to mask their apprehensions. When a soldier lost a leg, the joke was that he would be “back on his foot in no time.”
But in what is a very tightly knit outfit, not much bigger than a high school class, each loss has been deeply felt.
“One IED struck the guy who had trained me and that hit me pretty hard, but he’s back home now,” said Derek Boutin of Fort Erie, Ont. “Walking through the grape fields, IEDs have hit my buddies. They have been as close as you can imagine.”
The media may be focused on the effect of thousands of leaked documents that have described the war they are fighting. But such issues and the political currents back home — where many have expressed reservations about Canada’s first shooting war in half a century — have almost no impact deep in the field. Although prouder Canadians than most, the infantry soldiers all said that they fought for each other rather than for any cause.
And although the soldiers in Charles Company acknowledged that others in their battle group have been having a harder time of it lately, their unit has had its fair share of bad scrapes, too.
“When something bad happens outside the wire you don’t think of it then, but when you get back you realize that it was like a scene in a movie — something you never thought you’d be part of,” Pte. Kearley said. “Like any job, you love it one day and hate it the next. But I like what I do. I definitely picked the right career.”
One of the toughest parts of being a grunt in Afghanistan are the 12 or 14 hour foot patrols conducted in temperatures that invariably reached into the 50s. On every one such outing the soldiers had to lug as much as 40 kilograms of water, rations, ammunition and body armour with them.
“When you in full battle rattle in the heat in the middle of the day it is almost impossible to breathe if you are under contact because of the weight of the gear, the heat and the adrenalin,” Pte. Kearley said, as he surveyed a bleak landscape that included a forest of concrete blast walls and endless acres of sand and rock.
“If there is a situation, you don’t know until it is over that you’ve got nothing left to give. It really drains you. You come back having sweated through your body armour and your boots.”
Every remedy for dealing with heat involved consuming prodigious quantities of water the night before a patrol even if that meant three visits to the latrine before dawn.
“I went down with dehydration when we were a week into it,” Pte. Boutin said. “My vision went blurry. My arm went numb. I don’t call it sweating here. I call it flooding.
“I was so gung ho I thought I didn’t need so much water. It taught me how much you need to prepare before you go out. I now try to drink 15 or 20 bottles of water the night before.”
Before deploying to Panjwaii, the RCR battle group had trained for desert warfare in California, “but there really is no way to train properly for the heat except to be here,” Pte. Boutin said, adding that some soldiers had already lost as much as 35 pounds during their tour.
Master Cpl. Kyle Manser, a 24 year old from Kitchener, Ont. served in Kandahar as a private with Charles Company in 2006. Now a crew commander, he described the heat as “the fight you just cannot win. You cannot force soldiers to drink but we push them to drink a bottle every hour. Even if you get properly hydrated, once you are out there half an hour, you won’t have to piss.”
When not trying to survive the searing heat, cope with sand fleas or malarial mosquitoes or staying alert for scorpions and deadly snakes, the main preoccupations of the infantrymen in Panjwaii is avoiding IEDs and being ready at any moment to engage the Taliban.
“I keep in mind the tactical point-of-view and I don’t worry about IEDs because that would hinder the job that has to be done,” Pte. Boutin said. “The Taliban are as creative as anyone can be. They have found some pretty innovative ways to get at us but we’ve picked up on most of them. They adapt. We adapt. They are always trying to sneak stuff past us, but we catch them.”
Like Master Cpl. Manser, Master Cpl. Mike Martin of Ottawa was in Kandahar four years ago, too.
“I can’t give you a number on how many Taliban are out there right now, but there are lots of them and, yes, they’re close,” he said. “Back in ‘06 there were large numbers of Taliban who would stand and fight. Now they shoot and scoot and try to lure us into where they’ve put IEDs.”
“I told my guys: ‘You could step on something at any time, so don’t spend your time thinking about it. That can drive you nuts and could make you miss something. Keep your eyes and ears open.’”
As dangerous as it had been during 1 Royal Canadian Regiment’s first tour in Kandahar, which included the bloody Operation Medusa, “Panjwaii is a harder fight now,” Master Cpl. Manser said. “The enemy is definitely present. They are right outside the camp and are a lot craftier with the IEDs than they used to be.”
From what he’d seen of the Taliban, “I’d say they are pretty good,” Pte. Kearley said. “It’s like playing hockey on their rink. They know this ground and they know what they need. They’ve been doing this a long time and they’re doing a pretty damn good job.”
Aside from the lethal risks posed by the Taliban, “if you are in the infantry long enough, it will break your knees and your back,” Master Cpl. Manser said.
His fellow crew commander, Martin, who is 32, put it another way.
“Infantry years are like dog years,” he said. “You use them up pretty fast. Something goes and then you can’t do this anymore.
Asked how 9 Platoon would stack up for fitness against a professional football or hockey team, Pte. Kearley replied: “They would be in better shape, but there is not a chance that they could do our jobs.”
Although as privates they were the constant butt of jokes from those who outranked them, Pte. Kearley and Pte. Boutin both spoke highly of their immediate superiors.
“I really look up to the guys who’ve been here before, even if they trash talk you all the time,” Pte. Boutin said. “If a buddy gets hurt or there is a family problem, they are always there for us, like father figures. I have learned from them that you can push yourself further as a soldier and as a person than you think you can.”
Referring to their hardscrabble forward base, which has great chow and such unexpected comforts as beds, rather than cots, Kearley said: “This is home and when we are outside the wire, we like to get back here. It is where we eat and sleep. It is where our friends and family are.”
Master Cpl. Martin, who like Pte. Kearley is married and has a child, said that “people at home might sit back and say we are crazy but what is there not to like about this? Sitting in an office punching numbers into a computer or talking about your tennis game beside the water cooler isn’t the same. We are seeing the world and making a difference.”
