What the Thunder Said. John Conrad
to KAF in less than an hour, I prayed I would not get any closer to my maker than I was right now, at least not today ...
— Lieutenant-Colonel John Conrad,
Kandahar Diary, April 2006
Warrant Officer Paul MacKinnon and Master Corporal Shawn Crowder of the National Support Element, Task Force Afghanistan’s combat logistics battalion will tell you today that it was just an ordinary sojourn in hell, a typical convoy on this strange new sort of battlefield, but 15 May 2006 became one of those marrow-sucking Kandahar days that hits a snag and then gets progressively longer. MacKinnon and Crowder were on the precarious resupply convoy to the Gumbad safe house in northern Kandahar Province when smoke began to pour out of the engine of their Bison armoured vehicle. The Bison had broken down and the convoy was split in two, with some vehicles continuing the mission so that the outpost could be resupplied. MacKinnon, Crowder, and the rest of the troops and journalists that made up this convoy fragment settled in for a dreaded long halt. The term long halt is brimming with memories and meaning for Canadian soldiers familiar with Afghanistan. It means you must wait for heavier recovery assistance; you can’t press on. The long halt recalls endless hours at the top of the world when you scrutinize the peerless blue sky of Afghanistan and watch dust devils weave their eerie paths across the broken land. A millennium can pass in an hour. A soldier on a long halt stares up at infinity while contemplating the potential horrors of the immediate. For Paul MacKinnon and Shawn Crowder a thousand years of waiting was beginning.
Gumbad is a lonely infantry platoon outpost jammed in the heart of Taliban-dominated territory. Our tour of duty was two and a half months old on 15 May and already trips to Gumbad were met with gritted teeth. Over 100 kilometres northwest of the main coalition base at KAF, the patrol house at Gumbad can only be reached using a combination of barely discernable secondary roads, dried-out riverbeds called wadis, and flat-out, cross-country driving. No matter how one looks at it there are only two meagre roads in to the patrol house — two paths offering the enemy the advantage of predictability. The spread of terrain around the patrol house is disarmingly beautiful, reminiscent of Alberta’s badlands or the raw spread of land along the Dempster Highway in Canada’s Far North. Here in northern Kandahar, however, the landscape is rife with jury-rigged munitions that can abruptly sweep away your life.
These munitions come in all shapes and sizes and are made from the most rudimentary components and are called improvised explosive devices (IEDs). It is positively eerie how basic and simply constructed many of these IEDs are. Insurgents make full use of these crudely rendered weapons and plant them like macabre crop seed on Afghanistan’s roads, culverts, and riverbeds. IEDs are the preferred weapon of the enemy for use against Canadian convoys. It was near Gumbad that one such explosive device consisting of two pairs of double-stacked anti-tank mines claimed the lives of four Canadian soldiers three weeks back on 22 April 2006.
The Canadian battle group was doggedly holding the Gumbad outpost, waiting for the arrival of Afghan authorities to share and ultimately relieve them of the task. In the meantime the job hung like an albatross around the neck of 1 Platoon, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (1 PPCLI). The gritty Canadian infantry platoon had to be sustained by lumbering logistics trucks escorted in under the muzzles of LAV III fighting vehicles. It was murder, literally, getting up to Gumbad, and the Canadians ended up holding the rustic outpost until the end of June 2006.
Alexander the Great reputedly camped along the shores of Lake Arghandab with an army of 30,000 Greek soldiers. Today the turquoise lake stands out like a precious jewel in the stark landscape along the Tarin Kot Highway. All Canadian convoys going to the northern portion of the province — either the Gumbad Patrol House or Forward Operating Base Martello — must pass this lake.
Warrant Officer MacKinnon and Master Corporal Crowder weren’t looking at Gumbad on 15 May. You feel an IED detonation for several nanoseconds before you actually hear it. They were just settling into the defensive posture of a long halt around their disabled Bison vehicle, beginning the wait for recovery when the shock waves and subsequent noise of an enormous explosion reached them from farther up the wadi. One of the newest vehicles in the Canadian fleet, a mine-resistant RG 31 or Nyala, in the small convoy that pressed on, had struck an IED device and blown apart. The fickle hand of fate had kept the NSE soldiers out of the blast area. Had MacKinnon and Crowder not broken down they would have been the next vehicle back from the Nyala. Fortunately there were no immediate fatalities in the strike, but the wounds of the soldiers were serious.
The race against time for successful medical evacuation had begun. The problem now was that the limited recovery assets from KAF suddenly had a higher priority vehicle casualty to deal with. Back on the airfield, 100 kilometres to the south, smart operations staffs were working on stretching limited resources to get both vehicles out. MacKinnon smoked a cheap cigar as he watched the hours evaporate in the blistering 45 degree Celsius heat. He was normally part of the NSE operations team, the resilient staff that worked on problems exactly like this from KAF in tandem with the 1 PPCLI Infantry Battle Group, and he knew that whatever solution was hammered out at the enormous coalition base wouldn’t assist them anytime soon.
Another eternity had passed by the time Paul MacKinnon noted the arrival of several Afghan locals. He took his interpreter over to talk with them. They told him that they were farmers. The Afghans went on to explain that between 20 and 30 more men would be joining them from a nearby village to sleep in their fields tonight. Time stood still between two beats of MacKinnon’s heart. This wasn’t right. A streetwise Cape Breton boy, Paul MacKinnon had heard enough. He realized that the time had come for them to help themselves.
“They’re gathering,” he told Bob Weber, one of the Canadian reporters travelling with them. “They’re the wrong age and the wrong attitude.” A battlefield mechanic by trade, MacKinnon had already mapped out a rudimentary withdrawal plan in his mind in the space between his conversation with the Afghan farmer and his return to the vehicles. The goddamn Bison would be moving whether it wanted to or not. He pulled aside one of the sergeants and laid out a new course. “Sarge, we’re not staying here….”
The Canadians cabled their stricken Bison to a healthy one that had stayed with them for security reinforcement and loaded up the collection of Canadian reporters who had been toughing out the day with them. Master Corporal Crowder returned to the driver compartment and began steering the dead Bison without the benefit of power. Manually steering an armoured vehicle across Kandahar Province is a brutally physical task. Over the next 12 hours the small convoy laboured to cover the 100 kilometres back to KAF. They finally arrived back at the base in the wee hours before dawn exhausted and spent. MacKinnon described the outcome as one of the very best given the situation they had faced over the past 20 hours. Nobody died. In fact, it would be two more days before another Canadian soldier was killed in Kandahar.
Paul MacKinnon woke up later that day to discover that his greater concern was with his wife. MacKinnon was an ex-smoker who had long fought the itch to start up again. His wife, checking the day’s news on the Internet back in Edmonton, had just seen a photo that showed him smoking a huge stogie on the deck of his Bison armoured vehicle, looking all the world like the Canuck version of Sergeant Rock. Shawn Crowder woke up to find his arms on fire with pain. His limbs were purple with bruises from steering the stricken Bison back from the nether regions of the province without power steering. He dismissed any inquiries into his health with a disgusted shake of the head.
“When are we heading out again, sir?” This was the only remark he made. Discussion of yesterday was firmly closed. This was the battlefield of our generation and it didn’t care if you were a politician, a journalist or a soldier. It wouldn’t discern what cap badge or rank you wore.
I remember that when I came to KAF in January the outgoing guys were building a new monument that included pieces of the one we had in Kabul. The centrepiece was a large rock that was found near where Sergeant Short and Corporal Beerenfenger were killed around Kabul in 2003, and attached to it were plaques bearing the names of soldiers killed to date. The rock was pretty much covered and I remember thinking I hope we don’t