HELL on wheels

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This article was published 31/12/2010 (5574 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Reluctantly, silently, Sgt. Jimmy Collins lifts his sleeve.

There — tattooed on the inside of his wrist, along with images of a palm tree and a maple leaf — are the initials of five fellow Canadians, victims of a single wrenching instant of violence on a muddy road in Afghanistan one year ago.

“Kandahar

Always remember

GC-GM-ZM-KT-ML”

Garrett Chidley. George Miok. Zachery McCormack. Kirk Taylor. Michelle Lang.

It’s a private epitaph born of nanoseconds of death and destruction on Dec. 30, 2009, that stretch on for survivors, eyewitnesses and families left behind.

The term “improvised explosive device” has entered the Canadian lexicon as a result of the mission in Afghanistan. Of the 154 Canadian soldiers to die in the mission, 94 were killed by IEDs, a cheap, jerry-rigged menace that has evolved into one of the most vexing and insidious weapons since the land mine.

Some 611 other Canadian soldiers have been injured in combat, new government figures show. But precious little is known about many of the wounded because the Department of National Defence chose in late 2008 to stop publicizing battlefield injuries. It’s just one of the many restrictions that bind reporters who embed with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan.

As a result, many Canadians have formed a sanitized view of the mission’s true consequences. When they do see evidence of war’s cruel truths, it is through a prism of romanticism: the skirl of bagpipes among crisp salutes at a flag-draped casket or the teary flag-waving supporters who pay tribute to the fallen along the Highway of Heroes.

This story is different. Assembled from dozens of interviews conducted on Canadian soil, far from the army’s embed restrictions, it is the story of a single bomb and the havoc it wreaked on the five lives it took, the five others it barely spared and the families left behind.

 

— — —

 

The platoon known as Call Sign 4-2 comprised mostly reservists from the Calgary Highlanders, the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the King’s Own Calgary Regiment. Unlike regular-force “career” soldiers, they had put their civilian lives on hold to volunteer for the mission.

When they arrived in the Afghan theatre in the autumn of 2009, they started hard, throwing their weight around the teeming, rutted streets of Kandahar city in four light armoured vehicles code-named Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Zulu.

The mission, however, was changing. Canada’s resources were stretched thin. Brazen displays of military muscle were falling out of vogue. Eventually, patrol convoys — usually no fewer than three vehicles — were reduced to just two in those parts of the city considered safe.

The idea did not sit well with Collins, the fiery-eyed, 29-year-old section commander of 4-2 Alpha.

“I have no cordon,” Collins warned his superiors. “If they attack, I’m done. Me and all my boys are dead.”

 

— — —

 

Enclosed in the steel cocoon of a light armoured vehicle, Bushra Saeed, a young policy analyst from Ottawa and newcomer to the Afghanistan assignment, is chatting amicably with Michelle Lang. The reporter for the Calgary Herald is also in country for the first time.

Directly in front of them, Cpl. Zachery McCormack, Charlie’s diminutive gunner, is scouring the landscape for any potential threats. The women are comparing notes about the day’s activity. The day’s outing will likely yield three stories, Lang is saying.

She does not finish her sentence.

The sound an IED makes when it explodes is nothing like the rich, orchestral expressions of Hollywood’s special-effects industry. Saeed later describes it as “a deafening loud sound, like a very big crack. Just the loudest sound I had ever heard.”

The sound is gone, replaced by an eerie quiet. Saeed finds herself lying flat on her back.

It is dark. She is pinned. Her heart is pounding violently. She is having trouble breathing. She fears she is being buried alive. She wiggles her fingers. She moves her arms. She feels her face, brushing away choking debris. It dawns on her she is not dead. She knows now she will be OK. She does not know how far from OK she is.

 

— — —

 

In 2009, Camp Nathan Smith was home to the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team, or PRT — a Canadian-led civilian effort to deliver aid, outreach and development support to the local Afghan community. Several times a day, Canadian soldiers would patrol the streets of Kandahar to show a NATO presence, assess the area for threats and reach out to locals.

The 80 or so Canadian civilians at the PRT seldom ventured “outside the wire.” But the government’s goals for the mission were shifting toward development and diplomatic objectives, and the growing number of Canadian civilians in the country reflected that shift, said Ben Rowswell, who became Canada’s most senior civilian representative in Kandahar province in September 2009.

PRT political director, Jess Dutton, assessed the potential risks against the need for first-hand intelligence and approved the decision to send Saeed outside the wire.

And so, as Canadians at home basked in the glow of the festive season, two light armoured vehicles, Alpha and Charlie, rumbled out of camp at about 2 p.m. local time on Dec. 30, 2009.

In addition to the civilians Saeed and Lang, the military contingent consisted of McCormack, Taylor, Pte. Garrett Chidley, Sgt. George Miok, Cpl. Barrett Fraser, Warrant Officer Troy MacGillivray, Cpl. Brad Quast, and Cpl. Fedor Volochtchik.

Leading the two-vehicle convoy aboard Alpha were Cpl. Steve Tees, Cpl. Taylor Lewis, Master Cpl. Matt Chinn, Cpl. Veronique Girard-Dallaire, Cpl. Regan Yee, Cpl. Adam Naslund, Cpl. Adam Elfner and Cpl. Stuart Shier.

Experts who later examined the scene said the soldiers likely never would have found the tremendous peril buried beneath their feet — several hundred pounds of homemade explosives, linked to a remote initiator by a command wire the length of a football field. It might have been there weeks.

The patrol stopped twice to talk to locals. With the help of an interpreter, Taylor asked questions of the villagers. The reception seemed friendly enough, but crowds soon gathered, making the soldiers edgy.

Saeed and Lang wore helmets and protective vests, but it was obvious they were not soldiers. Plus, they were women. An enemy informant lurking in the crowd could have easily noted their vehicle and relayed that to their attackers.

“A lot of people think (insurgents) just do random things,” Shier said. “No. They think things through.”

The patrol headed back to base on a main traffic artery — one of the country’s few paved roads — to mitigate the threat of IEDs. Before long, they encountered a massive traffic jam, meaning hours of waiting for the road to re-open, leaving the convoy exposed.

“We just had bad vibes,” Shier recalled. “And you know what? Turns out we should have had bad vibes.”

As section commander, Collins ordered the convoy back the way they had just come.

“I broke one of my major rules: Never take same way out as in.”

 

— — —

 

As they lurch down the road at about 30 kilometres an hour, Collins gets on the radio and suggests to Miok, whose head is poking out Charlie’s hatch trailing about 20 metres behind, that they stop and perform another search.

Miok, feigning exasperation, responds with an expletive. Collins looks at his close friend and good-naturedly gives him the finger. Miok returns the gesture.

In the next instant, the affable 28-year-old schoolteacher from Edmonton is dead.

The 20-tonne armour-plated assault vehicle lifts into the air like a toy. It appears to buckle in the middle as it begins to come apart. The turret, perfectly level, is spinning in the air toward Alpha. A soldier’s lower body follows behind like a wet towel.

“I saw the grey explosion. I saw chunks of men come out,” Collins recalls.

Dirt, shrapnel and debris shower down on the surviving vehicle. Alpha’s optical system swings to the rear. The monitor shows only blinding haze.

“Shit! Shit! Shit! We got hit!” Collins shouts into his radio.

Chinn, Alpha’s 36-year-old crew commander, grabs his own radio and shouts a message to base. “IED! IED! We’ve been hit.”

Perhaps the blast has only crippled Charlie’s mobility, Chinn thinks hopefully. “Is it an M-kill?” he asks.

Collins knows it’s far worse. “It’s a K-kill,” he radios back.

Catastrophic.

 

— — —

 

Saeed twists herself on to her side. Reality begins to dawn. She can see silhouettes in the interior gloom. They are not moving. Convinced she is the only one alive, she begins trying to drag herself toward the back of the vehicle, whose heavy steel ramp has been blown open by the blast.

Her rummaging hands find body parts — one of them a severed leg with a seemingly familiar boot.

“I vividly remember moving a leg and thinking that it was mine,” she said. “After that, I knew something horrible had happened.”

Still, she believes doctors will simply reattach the limb. It’s the thought of being taken hostage, tortured, raped and slowly killed at the hands of insurgents that terrifies her. She spots Collins peering inside the vehicle. She begins to scream.

“Help me, help me,” she cries.

 

— — —

 

One minute, Cpl. Brad Quast is sitting shoulder to shoulder with Saeed, his mind drifting idly. He looks across at Cpl. Barrett Fraser, who is beside Lang with his head resting on the butt of his rifle. The next thing he remembers is a loud thump, a heavy, percussive bass sound.

“I didn’t know up from down, left from right,” he recalled. “Then, all of a sudden, I was on a pile of bodies on the ceiling in the back of the LAV, looking out the back of the upside-down vehicle.”

A woman’s screams pierce the silence.

“Help me!”

“The medic is in the other vehicle,” Quast answers. “They are coming to help us as soon as they can.”

As he crawls free of the vehicle, Quast surveys the scene. Lying a few feet away is Cpl. Fedor Volochtchik, who was perched halfway out of one of Charlie’s rear hatches and was blown clear by the explosion. He has three broken vertebrae, a broken and dislocated shoulder and a piece of his buttocks has been torn off. His jaw is cracked and his teeth are broken.

“Fedor, Fedor,” Quast calls. He gets no answer.

Pain — “the most intense pain that I have ever felt in my life,” Quast later calls it — forces him to focus on his own injuries. He removes his boot to make room for the rapid swelling. “I could see the bones pushing out of the skin.”

 

— — —

 

Cpl. Regan Yee should have been in Charlie, his regular vehicle. But the 27-year-old reservist was moved to Alpha to make space for Saeed and Lang.

Now, he finds himself edging down Alpha’s ramp with the medic close behind to go see if anyone in Charlie is still alive.

Yee spots a bewildered Volochtchik, half-sitting in a depression on the road and waving his pistol wildly. Collins barks an order at Shier to relieve Volochtchik of his sidearm.

As he approaches the wreckage, Yee is hoping against hope Charlie has withstood the blast, which has left a massive crater in the road. His heart sinks.

The vehicle is on its roof several metres off the road, its nose buried in the soft ground. The bomb has blown off the wheels and ripped a hole in the undercarriage.

 

— — —

 

A dazed MacGillivray is the first to be carried out. His foot is badly damaged. Abdominal injuries lurk beneath his protective vest.

Taylor, however, is in far worse shape. There’s little visible blood, but he is ghostly pale and barely conscious. The deformities in his lower legs are obvious. He is able to move one arm. He clutches at one of Yee’s legs.

“I don’t want to lose my legs,” Taylor murmurs.

The sound of Taylor’s voice surprises Cpl. Adam Elfner, who is nearby. “I thought he was dead.”

Not until Taylor is back at Kandahar Airfield will the trauma surgeons declare him so.

 

— — —

 

Saeed tries in vain to claw her way out of the vehicle. Girard-Dallaire drags her from the wreckage. Cpl. Adam Naslund carries the petite policy analyst to a casualty collection point as Shier helps to steady her lifeless legs. Saeed remains convinced one of her limbs is still lying in the wreckage.

“Go back and grab my leg. Grab my leg,” she screams.

“You’re fine, you’re fine, your legs are on,” comes the response.

“No, no, don’t lie to me. I know it’s off, but it’s OK. Just get my leg. I know it’s off. Just get my leg.”

Finally, to placate her, someone says: “OK, we have it.”

Saeed’s pants are bloody, her jelly-like lower limbs swollen and dark. Collins does not think she will make it.

 

— — —

 

Of all the victims, none elicits as much media attention as Lang, found semi-suspended in the back of the shattered LAV. She died instantly, the bomb detonating almost directly beneath her. She is the sole Canadian journalist killed in Afghanistan after nine years of combat and the second Canadian civilian after diplomat Glyn Berry to die as part of the Afghan mission.

 

— — —

 

Fostering good relations with the local population is a vital part of NATO’s strategy in Afghanistan. When it works, soldiers get tipped off to the Taliban’s traps. In Charlie’s case, however, everyone in the village must have known about the IED, but no tipoff came.

When the convoy first passed through the area, several children could be seen standing at a distance, where they appeared to be covering their ears, Chinn later recalled.

“Looking back on it, I think they were covering their ears because they knew the bomb was there and they were expecting it to go off.”

It was a massive intelligence failure that laid bare the fickle, treacherous nature of the relationship between the military and the local population.

Four days after the blast, Call Sign 4-2 was back on the job. But they no longer patrolled District 2, the area where Charlie had been hit. Commanders feared emotions were still running too high.

Within days of the explosion, rumours surfaced special forces soldiers had gone in and killed those responsible and, within a few weeks, taken out an IED factory. No one with Joint Task Force 2, Canada’s shadowy special operations force, would confirm the reports.

 

— — —

 

Despite the perils and privations of the Afghan mission, returning to the abundant safety and peace of Canada is not easy.

Sometimes, there is anger that what they have lived through — and must now live with — is so poorly understood by others. There are bad dreams, jagged nerves and the overwhelming sense most people are oblivious to how minor their workaday problems seem in comparison.

Barrett Fraser, an aspiring police officer, suffered a damaged back and shoulder and lacerations to his face, but his feet took the brunt of the damage, requiring more than a dozen separate surgical procedures.

His dead colleagues, he says, were “like brothers” to him. “Losing them was pretty disturbing.”

Saeed manages a few hours daily at home with her family and fiancé. Life is still a regimen of physiotherapy and relearning basic skills, such as walking after being left with just one leg. Two months ago, surgeons finally sewed her core muscles back together. They had to cut them to relieve the pressure on her blast-swollen insides.

There’s more surgery to come. When she can focus on her future, she frets. Will she ever snowboard again or go for a hike in the hills? How will she raise children?

“I don’t want to lie and pretend like I’m very optimistic or happy about this situation,” she says.

When the surviving members of Call Sign 4-2 get together, they sometimes talk about the events of that day. Mostly, though, they put on smiles and talk about other things. Seldom do they discuss their ordeal with outsiders.

 

— — —

 

For the survivors and their families, and for those who picked up the pieces, one question refuses to go away: Would the bomb have gone off had Saeed and Lang not been there?

“I always think about the fact that if I wasn’t there, maybe they wouldn’t have triggered it,” Saeed says. “I don’t like thinking about that too much.”

The official perspective was and remains that the decision to send Saeed on the patrol was a good one, made only after a thorough weighing of the value of the objective against the potential risk, Rowswell said.

Detailed after-action reports found no fault with the soldiers, Rowswell added.

For Shier, looking for answers is a mug’s game.

“You can second-guess everything that you do over there,” he says. “(But) the place is so messed up, you just have to accept it.”

 

— The Canadian Press