U.S. report on casualties incorrect: Hillier

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This article was published 28/07/2010 (5629 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — Some of the loved ones of four Canadian soldiers whose battlefield deaths in 2006 became part of the storied lore of Canada’s fabled Battle of Panjwaii lashed out Tuesday at reports — based on leaked U.S. documents — claiming friendly fire was to blame.

Sgt. Shane Stachnik, Warrant Officers Frank Robert Mellish and Richard Francis Nolan, and Pte. William Cushley — members of Charles Company, 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, based in Petawawa, Ont. — were killed Sept. 3, 2006, in a well-documented and bloody firefight with a massive Taliban contingent in the fertile fields of the Arghandab river valley.

It was part of Operation Medusa — a fierce battle over several months in the summer and fall of 2006 to beat back the Taliban and claim and reclaim a key strip of farmland, one long since sown with the blood of Canadian soldiers.

A U.S. document, however, one of 91,000 similar pages released publicly Sunday by the fledgling whistleblower website WikiLeaks, suggests otherwise, using clinical military shorthand to categorize the four dead and eight injured as "blue-on-blue" — NATO casualties caused by NATO forces.

Sandy Mellish, whose son Frank was among the men who died that day, said the friends and families of the four men already know the truth about what happened.

But they remain angry and hurt by the mistake, regardless of the explanation, said Mellish, whose own two grandsons have been upset and confused by the reports, and with good reason.

"How do you explain after four years of telling them something — they were 11 and 14 when they lost their dad, and we told them one story, then something like this comes out in the media?" she asked.

"My youngest grandson, he’s 15 now, and last night when this came on he kicked the door in his bedroom. You know he’s not like that. That’s not who he is. I said to him, ‘Please don’t let this influence who you are."’

Retired general Rick Hillier, Canada’s former chief of defence staff and the man who was in charge during the time of Operation Medusa, said the mistake is likely exactly that: an error emanating from the heat of battle or the fog of war that persisted on file for years and was never corrected.

"Somebody wrote a document, obviously, and was wrong in what they wrote," said Hillier, who was conducting interviews Tuesday for The Motorcycle Ride for Dad, a cross-Canada effort to raise money for prostate cancer awareness.

Experienced commanders know it’s a cardinal rule of the battlefield never to take a piece of information to heart, because it’s only in the fullness of time that the true picture emerges.

"We always tried to take with a grain of salt everything we heard, because nothing was ever as good or as bad as you would first hear," he said. "We never trusted those first reports, and don’t trust them now."

Master Cpl. Kelly Dove, of Petawawa, Ont., was hoping to get through Tuesday — it would have been her late husband Richard Nolan’s 43rd birthday — without dredging up any unpleasant memories.

Then she heard about the front page of the newspaper.

"I was very shocked," Dove said. "I was just kind of hoping that today would go nice and smooth, since it is his birthday, and then to find out that his picture’s on the front page — it just kind of brings everything back. Not that anything left, but it brings it back to the surface."

Dove, who was also serving in Afghanistan when Nolan was killed, got first-hand details about how it happened when she sat down the next day with fellow soldiers who were at the scene.

"They told me Rick’s vehicle was hit by a (rocket-propelled grenade). And they told me exactly where he was hit and what damage was done to him and the vehicle. The same with Frank Mellish. Basically it was the exact sequence of events that happened that day, right from the start to the end."

It’s especially tough for the families of soldiers who gave their lives when facts are carelessly skewed, she added. "It’s almost like a slap in the face when you read something about it and then it’s not correct. It’s very much a disgrace."

There were more than 1,000 Canadian soldiers involved in Medusa, and hundreds of witnesses who saw precisely what happened, and the American account is simply incorrect, Hillier said.

"Sadly, we know from those hundreds of folks who were involved directly, that the lives of those four soldiers were lost because of enemy action, not because of friendly fire."

U.S. defence officials could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday to explain the confusion.

 

— The Canadian Press