So, how was your day?? Tough commute??? Car wouldn't start?? Boss acts like a jerk?? Kids & wife making life tough?? Try a day in the shoes of some guys who walk down the roads in AFGHANISTAN....
These are our Canadian Friends, hanging around Camp Nathan Smith, a nasty little place just on the edge of Kandahar City....Not the kind of neighborhood you would WANT to hang around but one these intrepid warriors will make home for the next year.....yeah, they had a tougher day than you did. Hands Down.
Take a walk with India Company, Second Royal Canadian Regiment on their first tour of Afghanistan
Kandahar, Afghanistan — The crescent moon had just risen as the Canadian soldiers crushed their last cigarettes out in the dust and began helping one another put on their heavy packs.
There was a soft breeze in the warm night air, pleasantly and unseasonably mild. That wouldn’t last.
They were about to go on their first dismounted night patrol; their unit had just rotated in, and most of these men, from India Company, Second Royal Canadian Regiment, were on their first tour of Afghanistan. Their predecessors had over the previous year lost five service members.
“This is a presence patrol,” the patrol leader, Sgt. Dan Wiese, told them, “So when it gets too dark to see, use white light. That’s the point, to let them know we’re here.”
In a staggered double file, the 20 men marched out the gate of Camp Nathan Smith, on the edge of this city at the heart of the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan. They turned right onto the main north-south road, whose NATO name was Miller Lite, and took both sides of the pavement. It was 8:05 p.m.
For the first few hundred yards, Miller Lite ran through a busy commercial district, and people were still in the shops and roadside stalls; three-wheeled motorized rickshaws and motorcycles and bicycles all pulled over. Afghan police escorts stopped auto and truck traffic, and it piled up far behind, headlights blazing from the vehicles in front, spilling onto the dirt verges five or six abreast, engines revving, occasional horns blowing; it seemed like a noisy, menacing mob, held at bay by some invisible force.
Leaving Miller Lite, to the roar of vehicles finally released to move, the platoon followed a zigzag route along streets too small for NATO names, mostly dirt and gravel, crisscrossed by narrow alleyways.
This is District Nine of Kandahar City, where many Taliban fighters reputedly live because there are footpaths that lead into the adjoining mountains — ratlines, the military calls them.
After a while there were no more shops or even stalls, just mud walls. With no traffic at all, the darkness was complete but for the feeble moon and the soldiers’ white lights. Still, on the corners and here and there, Afghan men in their waistcoats and baggy shalwar kameez stood as motionless and quiet as statues.
The mud walls of Afghan communities give them a primeval air; they might be five years old or incredibly ancient. It is impossible to say, since the mud just gets renewed with every rainfall, then baked hard in the sun, until even in a short time it all looks as if it just grew there organically. The only sign anyone was at home inside were the drain holes spaced along the base of the walls, with rivulets of raw sewage running out, to join the open sewer in the street. The smell overpowered the sweet spring air.
Everywhere on the way the soldiers’ lights danced over piles of dirt and gravel, the sort of places they had been trained to look out for in a war where the biggest killer is the hidden bomb. On these roads, though, such places were every few yards.
“If you started thinking about it you’d never go anywhere,” said Capt. Rob Morency, a civil affairs officer, who was just six days away from heading home, along now to advise his last patrol.
Would the residents tell them if someone had hidden a bomb on the route, or was waiting in ambush in the black mouth of an alleyway?
“Fifty-fifty,” the captain said. “In the marketplace, maybe, but further up where there were hardly any shops…” Probably not, was the completion of that thought.
True, the people weren’t overtly friendly, but as one of the veterans of the past year here observed, “We’ve been on plenty of patrols where they stoned us.”
One of the soldiers’ lights caught an ominous black line in the dirt, half-buried and dead straight. Half-a-dozen flashlights lit up its route, dozens of yards up the street. Sergeant Wiese leaned over to look at it closely. “Kite string,” he pronounced.
The men left District Nine and crossed a footbridge over a canal; the rushing water cleansed the odor from the air. Through fields wet with spring rains, the moist softness of the evening returned. Three miles and two hours later, the lights doused as the gates of the camp swung open. Back at the patrol’s own corner of the base, the packs came off and the cigarettes came out.
“It was a pretty good first patrol,” their platoon commander, Lt. Kyle Ashe, told the men.
Sergeant Wiese, the patrol leader, had said his goal was to get everyone back alive and unhurt, and in that sense it was a success. Along the way no one cheered them, it is true, but nor did anyone stone them. And though they had shined a lot of white light, no one had shot it out.
These are our Canadian Friends, hanging around Camp Nathan Smith, a nasty little place just on the edge of Kandahar City....Not the kind of neighborhood you would WANT to hang around but one these intrepid warriors will make home for the next year.....yeah, they had a tougher day than you did. Hands Down.
Take a walk with India Company, Second Royal Canadian Regiment on their first tour of Afghanistan
Kandahar, Afghanistan — The crescent moon had just risen as the Canadian soldiers crushed their last cigarettes out in the dust and began helping one another put on their heavy packs.
There was a soft breeze in the warm night air, pleasantly and unseasonably mild. That wouldn’t last.
They were about to go on their first dismounted night patrol; their unit had just rotated in, and most of these men, from India Company, Second Royal Canadian Regiment, were on their first tour of Afghanistan. Their predecessors had over the previous year lost five service members.
“This is a presence patrol,” the patrol leader, Sgt. Dan Wiese, told them, “So when it gets too dark to see, use white light. That’s the point, to let them know we’re here.”
In a staggered double file, the 20 men marched out the gate of Camp Nathan Smith, on the edge of this city at the heart of the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan. They turned right onto the main north-south road, whose NATO name was Miller Lite, and took both sides of the pavement. It was 8:05 p.m.
For the first few hundred yards, Miller Lite ran through a busy commercial district, and people were still in the shops and roadside stalls; three-wheeled motorized rickshaws and motorcycles and bicycles all pulled over. Afghan police escorts stopped auto and truck traffic, and it piled up far behind, headlights blazing from the vehicles in front, spilling onto the dirt verges five or six abreast, engines revving, occasional horns blowing; it seemed like a noisy, menacing mob, held at bay by some invisible force.
Leaving Miller Lite, to the roar of vehicles finally released to move, the platoon followed a zigzag route along streets too small for NATO names, mostly dirt and gravel, crisscrossed by narrow alleyways.
This is District Nine of Kandahar City, where many Taliban fighters reputedly live because there are footpaths that lead into the adjoining mountains — ratlines, the military calls them.
After a while there were no more shops or even stalls, just mud walls. With no traffic at all, the darkness was complete but for the feeble moon and the soldiers’ white lights. Still, on the corners and here and there, Afghan men in their waistcoats and baggy shalwar kameez stood as motionless and quiet as statues.
The mud walls of Afghan communities give them a primeval air; they might be five years old or incredibly ancient. It is impossible to say, since the mud just gets renewed with every rainfall, then baked hard in the sun, until even in a short time it all looks as if it just grew there organically. The only sign anyone was at home inside were the drain holes spaced along the base of the walls, with rivulets of raw sewage running out, to join the open sewer in the street. The smell overpowered the sweet spring air.
Everywhere on the way the soldiers’ lights danced over piles of dirt and gravel, the sort of places they had been trained to look out for in a war where the biggest killer is the hidden bomb. On these roads, though, such places were every few yards.
“If you started thinking about it you’d never go anywhere,” said Capt. Rob Morency, a civil affairs officer, who was just six days away from heading home, along now to advise his last patrol.
Would the residents tell them if someone had hidden a bomb on the route, or was waiting in ambush in the black mouth of an alleyway?
“Fifty-fifty,” the captain said. “In the marketplace, maybe, but further up where there were hardly any shops…” Probably not, was the completion of that thought.
True, the people weren’t overtly friendly, but as one of the veterans of the past year here observed, “We’ve been on plenty of patrols where they stoned us.”
One of the soldiers’ lights caught an ominous black line in the dirt, half-buried and dead straight. Half-a-dozen flashlights lit up its route, dozens of yards up the street. Sergeant Wiese leaned over to look at it closely. “Kite string,” he pronounced.
The men left District Nine and crossed a footbridge over a canal; the rushing water cleansed the odor from the air. Through fields wet with spring rains, the moist softness of the evening returned. Three miles and two hours later, the lights doused as the gates of the camp swung open. Back at the patrol’s own corner of the base, the packs came off and the cigarettes came out.
“It was a pretty good first patrol,” their platoon commander, Lt. Kyle Ashe, told the men.
Sergeant Wiese, the patrol leader, had said his goal was to get everyone back alive and unhurt, and in that sense it was a success. Along the way no one cheered them, it is true, but nor did anyone stone them. And though they had shined a lot of white light, no one had shot it out.
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