Christie Blatchford KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN Master Corporal Todd Bennett and Corporal Paul Firth laid down covering fire after an Improvised Explosive Device blew up a vehicle in a convoy.
Sergeant Paul Jones was instrumental in the evacuation after a March 3 suicide attack on a convoy in which Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, the charismatic commanding officer of the entire Canadian battle group here, was travelling.
Their colleagues have been directly involved in no fewer than 12 attacks of various kinds, including IEDs, ambushes and suicide bombers in cars.
Still others have fired warning shots, acted as stretcher-bearers and performed first aid for wounded comrades.
They're all Canadian soldiers and trained as such, but the really compelling thing about the men who did these things is that officially, they aren't even counted as combat troops.
Rather, they are the 300 drivers, mechanics and maintainers and convoy escorts of what's known as the National Support Element -- the logistics arm of the Canadian Forces -- here in Afghanistan.
If it is probably true that they didn't sign up for combat, combat is what many of them nonetheless have found in this dangerous, volatile country.
As Lieutenant-Colonel John Conrad, the NSE commander, says, "Anyone who goes out there [beyond the wire surrounding the big base at Kandahar Air Field] is in it, because the enemy is where he chooses to be." This is a modern battlefield, he says, akin "to water droplets on a walnut table, with the droplets the safe haven." Using the phrase that has become the unofficial catch-all slogan of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan -- "not since the Korean War," a reference to the fact this is the country's first overt war effort in more than half a century -- he says that not since then has Canada produced a combat logistics team.
For the maintainers, job No. 1 is to fix things on the 800 vehicles, thousands of guns and weapons, high-tech geegaws such as night-vision sights, scopes, radios and cell and satellite phones used by the Canadian battle group -- and fix them fast, usually on the fly in the field, and sometimes working at night by the "red lights" that can't be seen by the enemy.
"These guys can fix anything," says their boss, Lt.-Col. Conrad.
"And they're ferociously proud -- what they hate the most is leaving something on the battleground. They'd rip up their underwear to fix that LAV," the Light Armoured Vehicle that has performed so heroically in Afghanistan.
The commander of the maintenance platoon, Captain Chris Wood, gleefully recalls the fellow who, faced with a broken fan belt out in the field and no replacement at hand, took a knife and shaved a wider belt down to fit. "He made it work," he said. Another maintainer used a seat strap -- because nothing else was available -- to get the air lines on a vehicle working again, which in turn unlocked the brakes and allowed the vehicle to power up and keep moving.
Axles and differentials on the LAVs, considered the miracle machines of this conflict; shredded tires on the platforms that carry the spanking new big guns of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery; transmission cases in the workhorse Bisons; whole transmissions and engines in the formidable new Nyalas: The maintainers fix them all.
Although one or two are always attached to any company that is on the march to do what's called forward repair and recovery, much of the maintainers' work is done back at base, in the dustiest and least attractive corner of the sprawling airfield.
There, in six double-vehicle open-ended tents, all exposed to the 50-to-60-degree temperatures, and in an assortment of small specialty workshops, the maintainers work minimum 10-hour shifts, often well into the night.
The conditions make the work physically exhausting and sweaty, but take as big a toll on machines as they do on men.
Already logging 2.25 million kilometres in-country -- that figure will almost reach 3.2 million by the time the current troops pull out by the end of the next month with their replacements taking over -- vehicles "go through axles and differentials like popcorn," Lt.-Col. Conrad says. "And the heat and that fine emery dust are punishing." The fleet of the eight-wheeled LAVs alone has eaten up 500 tires already.
Yet, astonishingly, the maintainers have managed to hold steady a 10 per cent VOR, or Vehicle On Repair, rate -- the very standard they meet back home in Canada.
For the drivers of the big fuel rigs and 16-tonne trucks of the 56-member transport platoon -- fully 80 per cent of whom have been involved in one kind of contact with the Taliban, many multiple times -- the first priority is to keep the fighting troops in remote areas supplied with everything from bullets to bottled water and food.
Of them, Lt.-Col. Conrad says with a grin, "They're tough little buggers." Afghanistan "is set up to deny logistics," he says. "Road is a very flattering term for what we have here." For the force protection platoon -- it is composed almost exclusively of reservists, many of them students at the University of Alberta and drawn from two proud Alberta regiments, the Calgary Highlanders and the Loyal Edmonton Regiment -- Task One is to escort and keep safe the convoys that travel to some of the hottest spots in southern Afghanistan, from Forward Operating Base Martello in the north, west past the violent Panjwai area and south to Spin Boldak.
The platoon's commander, Lieutenant Rob Gliddon of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, is himself a 24-year-old reservist and mechanical engineering student at the U of A -- his credentials giving a clue to a unit whose average age is 20-something.
"U of A students," Lt.-Col. Conrad says wonderingly. "They make me proud every day: Gritty, determined, bright." Despite acting as escorts for almost 100 convoys travelling some of the most dangerous roads in southern Afghanistan -- many of which the Canadians have named after Canadian towns and cities, with others, named by the Americans who were here first, after various beers -- Lt. Gliddon says none of the platoon has been hit.
He credits that to a smidgeon of luck, but mostly to the "aggressive and vigilant" posture his men adopt. "They're ready to employ the rules of engagement," he says. "They're not hesitant." Push come to shove, as it so often does in Kandahar province, the members of NSE are soldiers first, technicians second, and they have proven that in spades here, such that infantrymen and combat engineers quietly sing their praises.
As trucker Corporal Justin Kellehar says, "Before this tour, we had a lot of problems with the combat arms. Since this tour, their view for my trade in particular has changed. We're no less safe than they are, and they show us how welcome we are." The ancient motto of soldier maintainers is Arte et Marte , Latin for "by skill and by fighting": This tour, they and their colleagues have earned both ends of that tag.
PUBLICATION: GLOBE AND MAIL
DATE: 2006.07.18
BYLINE: CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
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