What the Thunder Said. John Conrad
but something was tangibly wrong.
Pat Jones was a bear of a man. He routinely took his furlough from the army late in the year and derived great enjoyment from his annual hunting expeditions in northern Alberta. Jonesy had served as a young corporal with me when I was a company commander in Edmonton. During the workup training for Kandahar, he had been a rock of stability, a fine senior non-commissioned officer (NCO) and one of only a handful of convoy commanders we had to rely upon.
The look in his eyes that night at the KAF hospital was alien to the man I knew so well. He was careful, I thought, too careful to say all the right things. We could tell that he was unsettled, struggling hard against things unseen. The change in him shook my confidence. Every commanding officer, every leader, cultivates his core team, his “go to” men and women who can be trusted to get the job done when the going is difficult. Sergeant Pat Jones was born to be one of these men, and replacing an NCO of his calibre was next to impossible. Standing in the plywood Golgotha of the Role 3 hospital, I had my first bout of anxiety over the small size of the NSE. This was the third day of our mission. I had really screwed up.
Although I knew before we deployed that I didn’t have enough support soldiers, the fact that I might not have brought enough convoy leaders to see us through this mission never dawned on me. These sergeants are like bishops on a chessboard. They are gritty, experienced, and worth their weight in gold. Paddy Earles and I left the hospital and went for coffee at the little Canadian Exchange café behind our sea container headquarters. I was in hell that night, frightened on a host of different levels. If we could lose a man like Jones from our logistics team on day three of the mission, what would the next six and a half months bring?
We didn’t lose him. His lungs cleared of halon, and the faraway look in his eyes ebbed. If the haunting new tone in his voice didn’t completely go away, it at least waned to a point where it could no longer be easily detected and he returned to duty later that same week. General Rick Hillier presented Jones with a Chief of the Defence Staff Coin, followed later by the commendation, for his actions on 3 March 2006. What Jones probably didn’t know was that by his courage both beyond the wire and inside the KAF Role 3 hospital, he had restored my confidence. I was, after all, a rookie to real war. The NSE had been tested, our soldiers had been hurt, and we were dusted off and back to work the next day. For reasons that even to this day I don’t understand, this incident was pivotal. It galvanized me for the darker storms yet to come.
We got your phone message. We hope to leave it on the machine till you’re back. Your dad and I love you and pray for your safe return.
— First Letter from My Parents, 10 February 2006
If you are reading this it means for sure that I am not coming home ... I am so sorry. I do not know for certain how I have been killed but I have a pretty good idea ... When you tell people about me please don’t stress the fact that I was sitting on my ass inside a truck with my rifle between my knees when I died. Tell the kids, tell my parents ... that I died with my face toward the enemy ...
— Lieutenant-Colonel John Conrad,
“Just in Case Letter,” Kandahar Airfield, 2006
WHAT ABOUT LOGISTICS?
I have to believe that outside of the Canadian Forces it cannot be so shameful to be a logistics or a supply chain employee in a successful company. Working in corporate logistics, like being part of the prestigious German general staff, connotes a certain level of prestige. And for a good reason. Logistics in the corporate world is a big part of any company’s bottom line and it requires talent and experience. Chances are that you yourself have had to dabble in logistics at one time or another. Consider the popular television commercial that says that a family of four will consume three tons in groceries each year. If you are a farmer, business person, or just a time-impoverished parent who has had to balance hockey practice pickups with grocery runs, you’ve worked on a logistics problem.
The word logistics comes from the Greek logos, with a contemporary breadth of meaning that covers ratio, word, calculation, reason, speech, and oration.3 In other words, logistics was related to the whole spectrum of thinking and reasoning as the ancient Greeks perceived it and its growth as a discipline came out of the need for the armies of antiquity to support themselves as they moved forward from city states to campaigns. To that end, being involved in logistics is like being harnessed to the brains of your organization. NATO has defined logistics as the science of planning and carrying out the movement and maintenance of forces. For my 24 years in the regular army this clean definition is the one that served us. I think the NATO definition is somewhat two-dimensional and intellectually canalizing. It does not even begin to hint at the myriad trials and friction that bedevils a combat service support plan. After a career of supporting Canadian land forces in three different continents in classic peacekeeping operations and in war, I challenge whether logistics, at its core, is a science at all. Logistics is the discipline that deals with the provision of goods and services to an institution, but what I believe more than ever after Kandahar is that the psychological aspects prevail and in that respect, logistics is far more about art than science. The most important facets of logistics in war reside in the kingdom of the mind. At its best, logistics is the well-planned, logical offspring of a fertile imagination harnessed early to the demands of the tactical plan. At its worst, logistics is a crudely rendered afterthought stapled to a military disaster.
The Canadian brand of military logistics or combat service support grew up, from Confederation forward, with a young army that recognized its worth and absolute necessity. Canadian soldiers insisted upon homegrown logistics; they demanded their own. Logistics was once a valued component inside our field force, a necessary partner in the Canadian manner of fighting. It was initially homespun and somewhat crudely strung together to support the large militia operation in Western Canada in 1885. Logistics was purchased from Great Britain in South Africa, in 1900, during the Boer War — the first war to showcase Canadian troops beyond our borders. During the Boer War, Canadian troops longed for their own dedicated logistics support. They grew to resent the “country cousin” treatment they received from the British army logistics system. By the time Europe plunged into the First World War, Canada had its own logistics units. In many ways the last segment of that war witnessed the zenith of Canadian Army logistics achievement — to the point where Canadian logistics units were the envy of the Allied Forces in France. The senior leadership in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and its superb Canadian component, the Canadian Corps, was able to overcome a contemporary institutional bias that encouraged commanders to remain aloof from the logistics and administrative staffs.4 The attention afforded logistics in 1916 by Field Marshal Haig, the commander of the BEF, and Lieutenant-General Byng, Haig’s subordinate and the commander of the Canadian Corps, was instrumental in overcoming the challenges of the new, industrialized battlefield and attaining offensive success in late summer 1918. In the Second World War, Canada again maintained logistics systems up to and including sophisticated corps level units. The Canadian Army, in keeping with its allies, had gone to great lengths to mechanize support units, ensuring that replenishment and repairs could be organized and provided quickly to its fighting divisions in Italy and northwest Europe. Finally, the Korean War saw small Canadian logistics units achieve great results serving inside a Commonwealth division in direct support to 25 Canadian Infantry Brigade. But for a variety of reasons, consideration for matters logistic in the tiny Canadian Army between the Korean War (1950–53) and a series of gut-wrenching convoy assaults north of Pashmul, Afghanistan, in 2006 has been negligible.
Years of disinterest in logistics training and development in the lean years after the Korean War and particularly after dramatic reorganization of logistics as part of unification in 1968 have left Canada’s army with only one true logistics asset — the men and women in the various trades who make up the rank and file. The proud corps histories of the various logistics services were wiped away under unification of the three services. Combat logistics soldiers no longer enjoy even the soothing balm that a regimental family affords. Regiments like the storied Van Doos, the Royal Canadian Regiment, and the Princess Patricia’s