What the Thunder Said. John Conrad

       A joint NSE-1 PPCLI convoy makes its way north on the Tarin Kot Highway from KAF to begin work on Forward Operating Base Martello in early April 2006. FOB Martello eventually served as a patrol platform for Alpha Company and as a much-needed way station for Dutch forces making their way to Tarin Kot out of KAF.

      Our relief in place, the term the military uses for being replaced while in contact with an enemy, was in full swing with the new NSE of the Royal Canadian Regiment’s 1st Battalion. The rotation flights home had started two weeks earlier with C-130 Hercules aircraft bringing fresh faces in the morning and ushering out bits and pieces of my unit in the afternoon. Today was the day that Sergeant Pat Jones, a professional army driver and convoy leader in my NSE, would depart KAF to begin his journey home. I had to see him off.

      “Well, Jonesy, you made it,” I muttered as I patted this stalwart soldier on the back. There are no words to describe how difficult it was to see Sergeant Jones leave. But he had to. He was utterly used up, charred black on the inside.

      “Yup” was all Jones could muster. He seemed surprised that I might notice his imminent departure and perplexed that I had made the effort to see him off. To that minute he never had so much as an inkling how much psychological momentum he had given to his commanding officer.

      “How are you feeling?”

      “Fine, sir. Fine ... just ... tired of seeing dead people.”

      It was the last time I ever spoke to him.

      The battlefield of the logistics soldier lies so heavily entrenched in the realm of the mind — the psychological plane. Unlike our brothers in the combat arms we rarely go on the offensive. There is no cathartic release for the logistician that an attack can permit the infantryman. The logistic soldier in Kandahar rides with passive optimism that he or she will come up swinging after the attack. But whether you live or die, whether you get to come up fighting, depends not on your physical fitness, your intellect, or your prowess with the rifle. Instead your survival hangs on such random factors as vehicle armour, proximity to the blast, and pure luck. Providence. That is hard to accept. The first move in a convoy fight belongs to the enemy and that is terrifically unsettling. Soon every Toyota that strays too close to your truck resembles a bomb, every colourful kite is a semaphore signal, and every smile from an Afghan pedestrian betrays a sinister secret. Ground convoys extract a continuous toll on the psychological reserves of a logistics unit.

      We nearly lost Sergeant Pat Jones on the first week of the tour. On 3 March 2006, two days after the Canadians took the reins from the American Task Force Gun Devil and their supporting Logistics Task Force 173 in Kandahar Province, one of our convoys was attacked.

      The convoy was using Highway 1 to deliver supplies and personnel to their new assignments with the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction team at Camp Nathan Smith, in Kandahar City. Ironically there was a military investigation team from Canada onboard conducting an investigation into the death of Mr. Glynn Berry from the Department of Foreign Affairs who had been killed in a convoy the month before we had arrived. Two of the passengers in Ian Hope’s LAV III were from my supply staff, Master Warrant Officer Mitch Goudreau and Sergeant Bird. Bird was a reservist, a part-timer, from the East Coast who was destined to become the main supply purchasing agent for Camp Nathan Smith. Mitch Goudreau was a well-travelled figure inside the PPCLI having come to the NSE from the magnificent 2nd Battalion in Shilo, Manitoba. Goudreau was along to see his subordinate properly introduced and installed at the camp. Two kilometres east of the city, their LAV III was attacked by a vehicle-borne suicide bomber. The vehicle had six rounds of artillery ammunition onboard when it detonated beside the LAV. In the ensuing blast the crew commander, Master Corporal Loewen, was badly hurt. Loewen’s arm was nearly completely severed and his life was in immediate peril. The Bison armoured vehicle in the column pulled up beside the LAV III and began to assist with medical triage. Sergeant Pat Jones was the vehicle crew commander.² Jones witnessed the entire blast from his perch behind the Bison’s C6 machine gun and he followed his drills to serve as a medical evacuation platform for the LAV III casualties. A combination of Bison passengers, 1 PPCLI, and NSE soldiers provided immediate first aid to Master Corporal Loewen. Because of the proximity of KAF, the convoy commander decided to evacuate him by ground in Jones’s armoured vehicle instead of asking for air evacuation. Time in a medical evacuation is the critical factor. A handful of minutes can make the difference between life and death. Jones pushed his old Bison so hard in the urgency to get Loewen back to KAF that the vehicle’s engine burst into flames. Just a few metres shy of the main gate into the camp, smoke began to stream from the vehicle’s engine. Power evaporated from the machine and it came to an abrupt stop, maddeningly on the very doorstep of KAF.

      What followed over the next few minutes is best described as barely managed chaos. Similar scenes have been played out by scores of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan since 2006. Priority one was the badly injured Loewen who needed to keep moving forward to medical attention. Every second of delay deepened the need. As the Bison burned, the rear exit ramp jammed tight in the closed position, trapping its passengers. The top hatch of the vehicle, known lovingly as the family hatch, had to be forced open manually and Loewen was passed through and cross-loaded onto a the roof of another vehicle in the convoy, a Canadian Mercedes G-Wagon. As he was fastened securely to a stretcher, a couple of quick-thinking soldiers stood in the doors of the truck and held the stretcher firmly in place while they careened through the gate into KAF and finished the race to the Role 3 military hospital.

      With Loewen again on his way, Sergeant Jones sorted through his remaining priorities and turned his attention onto the Bison driver. Corporal “Killer” Mackinnon, a military truck driver serving on his first ever tour of duty, was stuck in the driver’s compartment with eyes as wide as pie plates. He was suffering badly from the heat of the burning engine in the neighbouring cowling.

      “Killer, hang in there!” was all Jones grunted as he climbed back on top of the vehicle to assist his driver. Jones pulled up hard on the back of MacKinnon’s body armour. I recall hearing about a farmer near our home in the mid-1970s who had lifted a corn harvesting wagon off of his daughter’s crushed legs in order to save her life. The adrenaline-inspired moment always harboured elements of the unbelievable in my mind until what Jones did. Lifting a man vertically out of a driver compartment is a Herculean task on a good day but Pat Jones succeeded in freeing MacKinnon on one of the worst days of his life. Although Killer MacKinnon was scared shitless, the only physical damage he suffered was minor burns and a melted pistol holster. As he turned to his next task, Jones wasn’t as lucky. The vehicle had a halon fire extinguisher system that is supposed to allow for external detonation. On this day of days the external release didn’t work. Tripping the extinguisher could only be done from inside the machine, and without so much as a “here I go!” Pat Jones re-entered the burning armoured vehicle. In the process of executing this drill and releasing the extinguishing chemical he received a lung full of halon. It would be days before he could stop coughing and hacking.

      When Paddy Earles and I visited Sergeant Pat Jones later on the night of 3 March in the military hospital, I got my first real glimpse of the effects of war. Master Corporal Loewen lay bandaged and sedated across the ward. Pat Jones was sequestered inside a semi-private enclosure beside a young captain with