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 the survivors, eyewitnesses and families left behind.
The term “improvised explosive device” entered the Canadian lexicon as a result of the mission in Afghanistan. Of the 154 Canadian soldiers to die there so far, 94 were killed by IEDs, a cheap, jerry-rigged menace that has evolved into one of the most insidious weapons since the landmine.
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. Often, the military brands the most seemingly innocent detail as integral to operational security, which means an embedded journalist who discloses it faces the threat of expulsion.
As a result, many Canadians have a sanitized view of the mission’s 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 as a flag-draped casket is carried, or the teary legions of flag-waving supporters who pay tribute along the Highway of Heroes.
This story is different. Assembled from dozens of interviews conducted on Canadian soil, far from the army’s restrictions, it is the story — largely untold before now — of a single bomb and the havoc it wreaked on the five lives it took, the five others it barely spared, and the families that were left to piece their lives back together.
“It’s the first thing I think about in the morning,” Collins says. “It’s the last thing I think about before I go to bed.”
Without medication, he does not sleep.
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 put their civilian lives on hold to volunteer for the mission, passing a strict selection process before enduring six months of full-time work-up training.
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. As part of U.S. President Barack Obama’s new refocus of efforts on Afghanistan, American soldiers began arriving by the thousands in Kandahar province — the restive home turf of the Taliban and an expansive region where Canada’s military efforts had been concentrated since 2006.
Canada’s own resources were stretched thin, and local goodwill toward NATO’s presence was getting harder to come by. 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. What if something happened?
“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 then-25-year-old policy analyst from Ottawa and newcomer to the Afghanistan assignment, is sitting across from and 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 gunner, is scouring the landscape. The women are comparing notes about the day’s activity, which involved shadowing a Canadian soldier as he liaised with local Afghan villagers. 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,” she says. “Nothing that loud can be good.”
Then 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. Determined not to panic, she takes a deep breath. It dawns on her she is not dead. She will be OK.
She does not know how far from OK she is.
In 2009, Camp Nathan Smith, once a fruit-canning facility in the middle of Kandahar city, 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 and environs, both to show a NATO presence and assess the area for threats. Such patrols are also the chance to reach out to locals and determine their needs and moods.
The 80 or so Canadian civilians at the PRT seldom ventured “outside the wire.” Canadian government employees in Afghanistan were on a short leash, a consequence of the 2006 suicide bombing that killed diplomat Glyn Berry. But pressure to join the military patrols was mounting.
“We were often criticized for never leaving the wire,” recalled Ben Rowswell, who became Canada’s most senior civilian representative in Kandahar province in September 2009.
Goals for the mission were shifting toward development and diplomatic objectives, and the growing number of Canadian civilians in the country reflected that shift, Rowswell said.
The PRT’s political director, Jess Dutton, assessed the risks. Based on favourable security information, he had approved the decision to send Saeed outside the wire.
The primary objective of the mission was to visit a village just south of Kandahar city and a nearby settlement of Afghan nomads to find out what was on their minds. Saeed was to shadow Sgt. Kirk Taylor, a specialist in civilian-military co-operation.
Research was also the goal for Lang, 34. She had been in country for just two weeks, arriving at the PRT only days earlier hoping for a first-hand look at a dismounted military operation.
And so, as Canadians at home basked in 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 — a pleasantly warm, sunny winter’s day. Each vehicle carried 10 people.
In addition to the civilians Saeed and Lang, the military contingent on board Charlie 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 and Cpl. Adam Elfner. Collins and Cpl. Stuart Shier served as Alpha’s air sentries, keeping eyes to the sides and rear of the rolling vehicle.
En route, Call Sign 4-2 stopped to scour a section of the muddy dirt path ahead of them for any signs of makeshift bombs. If the area looked familiar, it should have — the soldiers had been there just days earlier, responding to a small IED not far down the road. On neither occasion did they discover anything to give them pause.
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 for several weeks.
The patrol stopped twice to talk to locals. With the help of an interpreter, Taylor asked questions of elders and their fellow villagers while Saeed wrote down the answers. Lang scribbled notes and took photos. The reception seemed friendly enough, but crowds soon gathered, making the soldiers edgy.
Saeed felt uncomfortable as children rushed over and began pressing up to her.
Saeed and Lang wore helmets and protective vests, but it was obvious they were not soldiers. Plus, they were women. To an enemy informant lurking in the crowd, it would have been easy to note which vehicle they were in, and relay the information to their attackers.
“A lot of people think (insurgents) just do random things,” Shier said. “No. They think things through.”
With the mission complete, the patrol saddled up and headed back to base, travelling 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. It would mean hours of waiting for the road to re-open, leaving the convoy exposed. Collins and Shier exchanged knowing glances.
“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 — travelling once again the muddy track they had inspected just hours earlier.
“It was my call to turn around and drive back down that road,” he said. “I broke one of my major rules: never take same way out as in.”
As they lurch down the road at about 30 km/h, he gets on the radio and suggests to Miok, whose head is poking out from 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 dirt come out. I saw the tires blow off,” Collins recalls. “I saw the grey explosion. I saw chunks of men come out.”
Dirt, shrapnel and debris shower down on the surviving vehicle. It sounds like heavy rain. Alpha’s optical system, an electronic eye that allows the driver and gunner to do their jobs without exposing themselves to potential danger, 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.”
Collins is momentarily paralyzed with fear. He is acutely aware of the threat of a second bomb or ambush. He has just seen his friend and comrade blown apart. Right now, he is certain of only one thing: he does not want to die like that.
After what seems like an eternity, Shier presses the button to lower Alpha’s ramp, and the pair heads slowly toward the crippled vehicle, eyes wide and hearts thumping.
Collins peers inside. It looks like something out of a Friday the 13th movie.
The duo returns quickly to Alpha, calling for the convoy’s sole medic. Girard-Dallaire, 24, a member of 1 Field Ambulance with a penchant for dirt bikes and a 1,000-watt smile, would later sum up the feelings of many of her colleagues with a comment on her Facebook page: “I would give two pay cheques to get drunk for two days.”
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.
Her rummaging hands find body parts — 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 is not that concerned. She believes doctors will simply be able to reattach the limb. Instead, 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. “Get me out of here.”
One minute earlier , 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.”
A couple of metres away, Fraser is struggling to catch his breath and trying to stand, having just learned the hard way why using a rifle as a headrest is a bad idea: as the blast propelled him out the rear hatch, it rammed the butt of the weapon into his face, shattering his nose. “I just remember a loud snap or crack,” he recalled, “and a feeling of getting sucked up to the ceiling.”
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. With the others forming the security cordon, it was from Alpha’s sentry position that Yee had watched the two women shadow Taylor, noting the crowds forming around them.
Now, he finds himself edging down Alpha’s ramp with the medic close behind to go see if anyone in Charlie is still alive.
An irrigation ditch runs down one side of the road, separating it from a field. There are a few trees, and some compounds a short distance away. The urban density of Kandahar is in the near distance.
Yee spots three men on a low roof a few hundred metres away. He radios Collins, who is pondering whether to open fire on the trio when he 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. He looks back at the roof. The men have disappeared.
As he approaches the wreckage, Yee is hoping against hope that 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. Diesel fuel is spilling into the debris-strewn mud.
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. Yee looks down and catches a glimpse of Taylor’s cloudy eyes.
“I don’t want to lose my legs,” Taylor murmurs.
“Medevac’s on the way,” Yee offers. “You’re going to be fine.”
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 finally reaches in, grabs Saeed’s frag vest, and drags her from the wreckage in one swift yank. Cpl. Adam Naslund carries the petite policy analyst to a nearby 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.
At the casualty collection point, Saeed lies back. For the first time, she takes in the wreckage and the frantic activity developing around it. To avoid looking at her lower body, she gazes at the sky, noting its exquisite blueness. She thinks about her family, fears how they will take the news. She has broken her promise to not get hurt.
Shier, who has training in combat casualty care, comes over. He is convinced her legs are done for.
“I was feeling her legs to try to find bone to put the tourniquets around but didn’t find any,” he says. “That’s why I just rammed them up into her crotch as far the tourniquets would go.”
The blinding pain of the life-saving treatment comes as a shock to Saeed. Then, suddenly, all she wants is a hug. She takes hold of Shier’s arm, lifts herself slightly, and for a few seconds presses herself close to him. He pats her reassuringly.
“You’ll be OK,” he says. “I’m going to go now. Is that OK? I’m going to help out other people.”
“It’s OK, you can go now,” she replies, marvelling at his good manners.
Collins, meanwhile, is waiting anxiously for the cavalry in the form of several U.S. Black Hawk helicopters. They waste several precious minutes searching to the north around the area of the traffic jam before locating the incident site.
Collins stands ready to set off a smoke grenade to show the pilots where to land. After what seems like an eternity, the first chopper throbs into view. He yanks hard on the grenade’s detonating string, but instead of triggering a plume of colourful smoke, the string snaps off in his hand.
“Can this day get any fucking worse?” he says to himself.
Saeed can see bodies around her, but recognizes no faces. She thinks again of her family. The din of an arriving Black Hawk helicopter brings with it one thought: “I get to go home now.”
From the PRT, 4-2 Bravo rushes to the scene, as does another platoon based at the nearby Dand District Centre. Afghan police arrive. They help with the security cordon and carrying the victims to the choppers, which sink to their bellies in a freshly plowed field. Night is approaching. The temperature is falling.
It is ghastly work.
“I stood for hours with the rest of my unit in a field filled with their scattered remains,” recalled Cpl. Brian Cadiz, with 4-2 Bravo. “Their blood stained my gloves and soaked through the mud into my boots.”
Chidley is trapped in the driver’s compartment, which has been left buried in the soft earth. It takes two hours to remove his body.
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.
After nine years of combat, she is the sole Canadian journalist killed in Afghanistan, and the second Canadian civilian after Berry to die as part of the Afghan mission.
In 1972, a youthfully adventurous Art and Sandra Lang travelled through a vastly different Afghanistan. It was seven years before a Soviet invasion that would set the relatively peaceful country on its blood-soaked downward spiral to ruination and a new war — a conflict that would lure the Vancouver couple’s journalist daughter to her death four decades later.
“She told us a year before she went,” said Lang’s mother Sandra. “Gradually, I got used to the idea. I wasn’t actually as worried as I should have been.”
At a museum in Monterrey, Mexico, the Langs had just finished viewing an exhibit on the Spanish inquisition when their son Cameron responded to a call from his sister Michelle’s fiance in Calgary, Michael Louie. It was the worst possible news.
“The feeling was intense, like the seconds just before a car crash,” Cameron Lang recalled. “My mother whimpered over and over that she had told Michelle not to go.”
Two days later, on New Year’s Day 2010, NATO soldiers of every stripe turned out on the tarmac at Kandahar Airfield to bid farewell to the dead. Several members of the platoon would serve as pallbearers, shouldering the caskets of their comrades into a waiting military transport for their final journey home.
Yee was getting a haircut earlier that day when he overheard a Canadian Forces officer talking about the tragedy. The inexperienced reservists had brought the disaster on themselves by failing to check the road properly, the officer suggested.
“I looked right at him and gave him this dirty evil glare, like an animal would before it pounces,” Yee recalled. “The officer just shut his mouth after that.”
Any suggestion they could have somehow averted the tragedy still rankles among members of Call Sign 4-2.
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 ever 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. Only in the fullness of time did it seem suspicious.
“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, and cast a long shadow across Canada’s costly nine-year struggle to bridge the divide between its soldiers and the Afghans they were trying so hard to help.
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 that 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.
Still, the unverified accounts were welcome news at the PRT.
“That was such a big thing — the payback,” said Elfner, now a third-year history student in Calgary. “It was very much a relief. It helped to know that somebody out there had gone after them and gotten some back for us.”
Brad Quast got off lightly. His shin was fractured. His ankle was dislocated and broken, and one foot was so badly damaged, the surgeon described what she saw as “bone salad.”
Some eight surgeries later, the pain has mostly eased. Quast hobbles around with a cane. In his dress uniform, he looks the stereotypical war veteran, except for the almost absurd incongruence of his youth.
“I get a lot of weird looks,” he says. “Especially when using a handicapped parking space.”
Quast, whose plans to join a police force or work for correctional services are on hold, thinks often about what happened. Sometimes there are nightmares.
“I’m angry this happened to us,” he says. “There’s nothing to prepare you for actually getting blown up”
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 that most people are oblivious to how minor their workaday problems are in comparison.
Barrett Fraser, another 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.”
Volochtchik is back on his feet, mostly. His bolted-together shoulder still bothers him. He thinks about what happened almost every day.
“It’s like a splinter in your mind,” he says. “It’s always there.”
MacGillivray struggles with an artificial heel. He worries what will happen once the army deems him well enough to end the contract that keeps him going now.
Saeed manages a few hours daily at home with her family and fiance. Life is still a regimen of physiotherapy and relearning basic skills, such as walking 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.
“I have never told anyone exactly what happened, because none of us who were there really knows how such a bad thing happened to such good people,” says Cadiz, who calls Dec. 30, 2009 the worst day of his life.
Despite their ordeal, most of the surviving soldiers say they would jump at a chance to go back — either to finish their aborted tours, or to be back with comrades.
“It seems more like a sense of duty now to the fallen,” said Volochtchik. “I just have to go back there at one point. Even if it is 60 years down the road, I want to go there and see.”
Not Chinn.
“What, are you drunk?” he responds when asked if he would return.
For all the effort and good intentions, for all the sweat, blood and tears, Chinn said, Canadian soldiers appear to be achieving little of lasting value.
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 it not been for Saeed and Lang?
“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.
“We were in an extremely difficult mission in a dangerous environment,” Rowswell said. “All the measures that we could have taken to mitigate (the risk), as far as I’m aware, were taken.”
Detailed after-action reports found no fault with the soldiers, he added.
“The conclusions were that all of the precautions were followed, and that the attack was larger and more sophisticated than anything they’d seen to date,” Rowswell said.
“There would have been very little we could have done to prevent that.”
Other questions linger, too: Who decided on that sunny winter afternoon to proceed with the attack? Was the traffic jam staged to force the patrol to turn back? Whose finger was on the trigger?
“There’s a lot of ‘I don’t knows.’ There’s some stuff out there that’s still very blurry,” says Yee, who works as a Brink’s guard and thinks of becoming a police officer. “Unless you’re the Taliban, you don’t know.”
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.”