The Patrol Read Online Free Page B

and replaced by ANA. At that point we renamed the PSSs as combat outposts (COPs). The result is a line of outposts,stretching fourteen kilometres west of Sperwan Ghar, are under almost daily attack by the Taliban. Each one of these outposts, with the exception of Mushan, has about 40 Canadian soldiers and a roughly equivalent number of Afghan soldiers. It is along this line that we are to patrol and to try to disrupt the enemy’s activities.
    To our south are the Reg Desert and the Dori riverbed. To all intents and purposes, the world ends there, as no one ventures into the Reg except for nomadic tribesmen and camel herders. To our north is the Arghandab riverbed, a mostly dried-out expanse of sand and gravel sown throughout with improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
    The villages on the north side of the Arghandab have already earned their place in Canadian military history; they are Taliban Central. Every time we’ve gone near them we’ve been attacked. A large part of the fighting that has taken place over the last five years, including Operation Medusa and the Battle of the White School, was over these tiny villages. This is the situation we find ourselves in on July 14, 2008.
    I sit, smoke, and lay out my kit. I drink bottled water and what we call
Squiggle Coke
—Coca-Cola that has Arabic writing on one side. I’m packing an American backpack that I bought the last time I was in KAF over a month ago.
    Into this pack I stuff a 117F radio (pronounced “one seventeen foxtrot”), the best man-portable radio available in the world. It has a simple user interface and the ability to conduct short-range very high frequency (VHF) communications as well as air-ground-air (AGA) ultra high frequency (UHF) and satellite comms. What that means in English is that it can communicate with basically anything on the battlefield, so long as a competent operator is using it. This radio is almost impossible to find in Canada, and is a very Guccipiece of kit indeed. It has a removable faceplate that you can plug a wire into, and I’ve run this wire through my pack and put the faceplate into a pouch attached to a shoulder strap. This way I can program, change, and work on my radio without actually having to take my pack off. It’s the little things that help. The radio comes complete with three antennas and one handset that I can talk into or pass off to the company commander.
    The first time most people try to drive a stick shift, they stall. Understanding that the clutch has a sweet spot and exactly how and when to let it out takes practice. The only way to learn is to develop the appropriate muscle memory, to teach one’s leg muscles when exactly the clutch is going to disengage, through mostly unconscious repetition. I find that now the only time that I stall is if I think about how to clutch on a steep hill. If I do it unconsciously, I always succeed.
    In the same way as one develops the ability to drive stick, one learns how to perform the duties of a soldier. Basic drill, which teaches a soldier how to march, stand at attention, salute, and fall into formation, can be learned properly only when you’re not focusing on the individual movements. Your conscious brain has to be removed from the equation. On a boiling hot parade square in Dundurn, Saskatchewan (come for the dirt, stay for the cows), I stood bewildered as my instructors desperately and vocally tried to push me into the appropriate position and get our entire platoon to walk in step—a completely foreign concept. Every day for two months, we were marched everywhere, always under the watchful eye of our instructors, who would point out any faults. By the end of my time on that parade square, all of my responses were automatic. When called to attention, I didn’t think, I just put my heels together. By the end of the summer, when two or more people inour platoon went out, even on our three days off, we would find ourselves walking in step without thinking about it.