by Ray Wiss
In what must have been a heartbreaking operation, Major Arsenault and “the Bastards” had to fight their way into an outpost we had built in 2008 . . . to dismantle it. He would like nothing better than to be able to help rebuild this country, but without security there can be no reconstruction. The priority now is to protect Kandahar City, where approximately 70 per cent of the province’s population resides. To protect the city, we have to keep the Taliban bleeding and dying in the rural areas.
The combat team’s mission statement speaks about “relentlessly disrupting insurgents.” The major is more direct: “We go out and we get into fights.”
MY FATHER
My father leads a company, but not any company
A company of soldiers who fight for humanity
When it is day time here
My father lays on his pillow his fear
When I go to dreamland at night
My father rises and faces the fight
He serves in a foreign country protecting kids
I will never meet
To make them all that they can be
He walks the land in dust and heat
When my father has to go away
His example teaches me to always pray
That the world will see a better day
And that all children will be free to play
—FLORENCE ARSENAULT, age 8, daughter of Major Tim Arsenault
Florence wrote this after her father had left for Afghanistan. She then memorized it and recited it to him over the phone one night, flawlessly. He copied it down and carries it everywhere he goes. He reads it every day.
JUNE 21 | Father’s Day with Nichola’s Daughters
How do modern armies kill?
Very few civilians are aware that the majority of soldiers killed in combat by modern armies for the past hundred years have been killed by cannon fire—what we call artillery. When you watch Hollywood movies, you come away with the impression that the infantry (foot soldiers) shoot each other on the battlefield. This is inaccurate. The role of the infantry is to push the enemy into a killing zone, where the artillery can do most of the damage.
The injuries produced by an artillery shell’s explosion fall into three main categories. Primary injuries are caused by the sheer force of the blast: the shock wave can turn internal organs into mush. Tertiary injuries occur when a body that has been thrown through the air by the blast hits something. By far the largest number of injuries, however, are secondary and are produced by shrapnel, the tremendous amount of high-velocity debris thrown off by these explosions.
Considerable shrapnel is produced by the shell itself. As it explodes, the metal container of the shell disintegrates into hundreds of razor sharp metal shards. Any one of these shards could do as much damage as a rifle bullet, if not more. Even more shrapnel comes from whatever was on the ground where the shell exploded: rocks, gravel, wood from trees, cement from buildings, metallic objects. Any of these things can be propelled at such high speeds that they can kill. Even “biological shrapnel,” the bits of bone and flesh thrown off when a body is so close to the shell’s detonation that it disintegrates, can be lethal.
The artillery represents the single most important weapon system in the battle group. If our troops get into trouble, the artillery can rain so much death and destruction on the enemy so quickly that it will be forced to break off the engagement. The infantry troopers here can tell many stories of the artillery saving their bacon.
Canada’s main artillery piece is the M777 155 mm cannon. It can fire shells weighing dozens of kilograms to distances of thirty or even forty kilometres. In other words, the guns here at FOB Wilson can hit anything in the Canadian area of operations in Zhari-Panjwayi. The trick lies in telling them where to shoot. That is the job of the forward observation officer, the FOO (pronounced “foo”).
FOOs perform the most critical and dangerous function in an artillery unit. They go forward with the infantry and tanks to observe the enemy and guide the fire of the cannons. This is a lot trickier than it sounds: think about trying to find a fox in the forest, but with shooting and explosions going on all around you.
It is also vital that they know where all the “friendlies” are. When a combat team of over 150 men and a dozen vehicles are scattered over a wide area, this can be nearly impossible. Yet it must be done perfectly, because FOOs can bring Armageddon down on the battlefield.
The “kill radius” of the artillery shells they fire is fifty metres, so anybody caught in the open up to fifty metres away from an explosion is at high risk of lethal injury. To do their job, FOOs must be right on the front line. They are more likely to be killed or injured than anyone else in the artillery.
On May 17, 2006, Canada lost a FOO in Afghanistan. She had been serving with the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery. On the day Captain Nichola Goddard died, she had been accompanying a unit of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the famed PPCLI. When they came under heavy fire, she drove her armoured vehicle to a point where she could engage the enemy with direct fire from her vehicle’s weapons while simultaneously calling in the “indirect fire” of her artillery battery.
Gunner Mélanie Faucher
Inside her armoured vehicle, Captain Goddard had good protection from the weapons the Taliban were using, but her field of view was restricted to what she could see out of a few small, shatterproof windows. To do her job as well as possible, she stood with her head and torso outside the vehicle. FOOs often do this in combat because it gives them better “situational awareness,” despite the risks it entails. It was this commitment to her duty that cost Captain God-dard her life. When a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) hit her vehicle, she was struck by shrapnel fragments and killed.
It was inevitable that this would happen. Although it is a fact not widely known outside of the military, women have been in the combat arms for several years now. There are even women serving with the hardest of hard men, the infantry. They perform the same duties, take the same risks and pay the same price.
Here at FOB Wilson, three women are serving with the artillery. I asked them if they would discuss their lives with me.
Gunner Mélanie Faucher has been in the army for two years. Now twenty-five years old, she can remember being fascinated by cannons from a young age (I didn’t ask why). The artillery was a natural choice for her. She sees herself staying in the army for the rest of her career. If you think this makes her some kind of gun nut, you could not be more wrong. She exudes a warmth and empathy that is classically feminine. She does not limit this empathy to her comrades; she has been known to seek out Afghans who work on the base to help them with some of their more unpleasant tasks. She feels entirely accepted by her male companions.
Bombardier Annick Vallières
Gunner Faucher is living a very modern kind of stress on this mission. Besides worrying about her own safety, she is also concerned about her significant other. He is a sergeant in the infantry, assigned to a neighbouring FOB. They try to talk or e-mail daily, and they see each other every few weeks. They are living an experience that would not have existed a decade ago and one that most couples could not comprehend.
Bombardier Annick Vallières, twenty-nine, is back for her second tour in Afghanistan, having been here during Roto 4. She was at FOB Wilson that time as well. She admits that her first tour was a little rough because some of the men were not as accepting of her as they could have been. I would advise the men serving with her now to do their best to be collegial: you are in the presence of a tough individual.
You might think I was describing a cliché: tough chick goes into the army and becomes tougher still. As with her colleague, first impressions are deceiving. Bombardier Vallières is the mother of three children, aged nine, six and five. When I asked what her prime motivation was for being in Afghanistan, she spoke primarily of them. She wanted to show them that their mother had done something very difficult and done it well. What is parenting, if not setting high st
andards for yourself as an example to your children?
Bombardier Vallières’s future plans provided yet another twist. When I asked where she thought her career was headed, I was guessing she would spend the rest of her time in the combat arms. Again, expectations were confounded. In the not-too-distant future, she would like to get out of the combat arms and into an office job where she can let her hair down, wear makeup and dress in “really feminine clothing.” She may be made of titanium, but she is still all woman. Lieutenant Marie-Ève Labonté is a twenty-three-year-old graduate of the Royal Military College (RMC) in Kingston. Her father is in the military, and she grew up as a base brat; but whereas her joining the military was predictable, her path to the artillery was a bit circuitous. She started off in the navy, which she hated for a number of reasons. She accepted her current posting almost as a last-minute thing . . . and found that it clicked perfectly with her personality.
Lieutenant Marie-Ève Labonté
In her current position as a gun line officer, she records the information called in by the FOO and calculates the precise angle and elevation at which the cannons must fire to hit their target. I am grossly oversimplifying things here— the numerous calculations required involve high-order mathematics, and many factors must be taken into account. I will mention only one, to make clear how intricate this task is: the shells go so far that Lieutenant Labonté must take into account the rotation of the Earth when deciding where she will shoot. A few days ago, I spent some time in the command post watching her direct a fire mission. She seemed completely at ease with her task.
I asked her the slightly sexist but nonetheless obvious question: how did she reconcile her feminine side with her job, where her orders caused the deaths of other human beings almost daily? She admitted that she was occasionally conflicted by this, but, like me, she thinks she is saving lives: Canadians in the short term and Afghans in the long term.
Speaking of Lieutenant Labonté’s feminine side, it has had an unexpected positive effect. Her second-in-command is a warrant officer, an enlisted man with over twenty years’ experience. The way the military organizes things, the officer in command is the stereotypical father figure, stern, cerebral and somewhat distant. The second-in-command is the mother, much more aware of what’s going on in everybody’s life than the father. Paradoxically, many of the men under her command have approached Lieutenant Labonté with personal issues that they have chosen not to share with their warrant officer. This somewhat discombobulated her second-in-command, but her troops have benefited from it.
Lieutenant Labonté had finished the first phase of her artillery officer training when Nichola Goddard was killed. Captain Goddard was legendary, initially at RMC and later in her artillery unit, for her affability and competence. Lieutenant Labonté is still visibly affected when she discusses Captain Goddard. When she did so with me, we were standing outside in 40°C heat. Yet she got goosebumps.
As the father of a young girl, I can’t help but look at these proud, strong, competent, honourable women and hope that my daughter turns out like them.
JUNE 22 | A Busy Morning
Major Arsenault led the combat team out for a quick operation last night, leaving only a support staff behind. When this happens, our morning meeting is cancelled. I was looking forward to sleeping in, a hope that was dashed at 0700: the UMS medic (a somewhat immature young man who has replaced the reliable Master Corporal Guay) burst into my quarters to tell me that several ANA soldiers had been wounded by a suicide bomber. With the combat team away, there was only one other medically trained individual on the FOB. All the medics and TCCCs were with their combat units. I put out calls for all the other subunits still on the FOB to send me whomever they could spare and ended up with about a dozen people all told.
I spent some time talking to the individuals who had never done any kind of medical work before, asking them to focus on plugging whatever holes they came across. If we were to be overwhelmed with casualties, simple pressure bandages could go a long way towards saving as many lives as possible.
One of the first patients to arrive had a fair amount of blood on his upper thigh and lower abdomen on the left side. We brought him into the UMS and I attended to him first. He had a small puncture in his groin that had already stopped bleeding. I ordered his wound to be bandaged and went to the overflow tent to attend to the others. Three of the four patients there had minor wounds; the fourth had arrived on a stretcher complaining only of shoulder pain. There was no blood on the front of his shirt. His vital signs were stable, but he seemed a little drowsy. As I walked by, the UMS medic told me that he thought the shoulder might be dislocated. I put my hands on both shoulders and quickly determined that no dislocation had taken place. I then examined the patient’s back and found a tiny puncture wound in his right chest, a couple of millimetres wide and no more than a centimetre long.
The UMS medic had made the classic beginner mistake of examining only the front of the patient. The shrapnel wound, though quite small, was plain to see once we had the patient sitting up with his shirt off. His drowsiness and shoulder pain now took on a much more sinister connotation. Shrapnel fragments travel at such high velocity that even tiny ones can cause massive internal damage if they hit the victim in a sensitive spot. And the chest is full of sensitive spots.*
I took the patient over to the main UMS and examined him with ultrasound. Internal bleeding had collapsed the left lung. I put in a chest tube and drained 1,200 millilitres of blood, securing the chest tube as the medevac chopper was landing. With blood no longer crushing his left lung, the patient’s breathing and level of consciousness improved. It was not necessary to intubate him.
This process took a little over an hour, from first warning to last patient departure. All the while, we were serenaded by the longest and most intense fire mission any of the artillerymen can remember. They fired nearly two hundred rounds of 155 mm ammunition—another record—in support of the combat team’s operation, all before lunch. This led to a temporary change in Bravo Company’s nickname from “Bastard” to “Boom.”
By midafternoon, the combat team had returned to the FOB. They had been in constant contact with the Taliban, meaning that they had been in gunfights all day. Several Taliban, as many as twenty, were killed. None of our guys had so much as a scratch.
JUNE 23 | God Counts the Tears of Women
I had two patient encounters today that, had they happened in Canada, would be among the most mundane. Here, they were extraordinary.
Although we cannot begin to respond to all the health needs of the local population, we make exceptions for children, particularly if they appear to be suffering from something straightforward such as a laceration or broken bone. Around midmorning, I was told there were two children at the main gate who needed care. One of them had a facial laceration; the other was reported as being “unwell.”
The child with the laceration, a four-year-old girl, had been hit by a man riding a motorcycle. She had a deep gash on her right forehead that went all the way to her skull. She was accompanied by her twelve-year-old brother and was distressed at being surrounded by unfamiliar faces speaking an unfamiliar language.
What now? Giving this child an injection of local anaesthetic would have hurt her. Also, local anaesthetics only block the sensation of pain. The patient can still feel movement. That is why children who have received local anaesthesia continue to be upset: they can feel the doctor’s instruments moving their skin around, and they think the pain of the initial needle is about to return. This child had been through enough already. I decided to repair her face under ketamine sedation.
Ketamine is a wonderful drug that allows emergency physicians to put patients into a sleep state equal to general anaesthesia, with one major difference. Under general anaesthesia, patients must be put on a ventilator, which will breathe for them. With ketamine, patients continue to breathe on their own. Equally important, their gag reflex remains intact. Should saliva, blood or vomi
t somehow end up in their throat, they will still be able to cough the material out rather than aspirating it into their lungs.
The only problem with giving ketamine is that the patient has to be observed for two to three hours afterwards, and this would tie up one of my stretchers for some time. I checked to see if there was any combat activity going on that we knew of, but everything seemed quiet. So I went for it. Within two minutes, the child was out and I was able to proceed with the tricky repair of her ragged cut. With the child immobile thanks to the ketamine, this procedure went very well: I was done in less than ten minutes. We then bandaged her and bundled her into a blanket on one of our stretchers.
The surreal part of this patient encounter came a couple of hours later, when the child was awake, alert and ready for discharge. She had been brought in from her village by the police, from one of their outposts three kilometres away. She was now going back the same way, travelling in an unarmoured pickup truck with police markings: an easy, high-priority target for the Taliban. I had thought that the children had walked in from a nearby compound. It made me sick to think of the risk we were taking with this child to get her home.
While only the method of discharge was aberrant in the above scenario, the other patient encounter was incredible right from the beginning. The patient was another four-year-old, a boy this time. He was accompanied by his two siblings and his mother. And no one else.
Sleeping off ketamine with new teddy bear, and big brother watching over
