For Your Tomorrow

J
ULY
1, 2007. The fireworks explode in a fountain of light—flamingo, orange, purple, gold—and fade into the darkness. They’re cascading over Okanagan Lake, several kilometres away. But we can see them from the deck, through the leafy branches of the walnut tree.

“Happy Canada Day!” I raise my glass to Mica sitting across the table from me. She and her partner, Aaron, arrived in Kelowna yesterday, drove down from Yellowknife after completing a three-year teaching stint at the First Nations community of Rae-Edzo on Great Slave Lake. We clink our glasses. “Ah … St. Hubertus Gewürztraminer. The grapes grow on the hillside just a few kilometres from here,” I say, swirling and sniffing, “lychee and melon on the nose.”

“A hint of rose petal too,” Mica laughs at our oenophile charade, reminding me so much of her mother, my sister, at thirty years old—dimpled chin, freckles, long dark hair.
“And here’s to Jeff. To his safe return … in just a few weeks.” She smiles, the diamond stud in her nose glinting in the candlelight. Her brother, Jeff, is serving in Afghanistan with the Canadian military. When I ask how she’s coped with the anxiety of having her brother in a war zone for the past five months, she confesses her vulnerability. “I haven’t told many people about him being in Afghanistan. On Easter Sunday, the day the six Canadian soldiers were killed, I really crumbled. We didn’t hear their names for hours after it was first broadcast.”

Three more soldiers killed just last week by another IED. I shake my head.

When Jeff was home for his mid-deployment leave in April, Mica got four days off and flew back to Halifax to be with him and their family. “He made us feel so confident about his safety,” she says, her eyes brightening. “He said he’ll be staying in the same secure outpost—they call ‘the Hotel’—until he returns in mid-August.”

The spicy scent of walnut leaves wafts in the warm breeze. We sip our wine and talk about their trip to Vancouver Island the day after tomorrow. They will meet up with friends to hike the West Coast Trail, one of the most gruelling treks in North America. For seventy-five kilometres, it follows a rugged shoreline of spectacular ocean vistas, tidal pools, marine caves and the tallest trees in Canada. Then they’ll drive their packed-to-the rooftop black Hyundai back home to Nova Scotia.

Their camping gear clutters the lawn below the deck—tent, sleeping bags, foamies, head lamps, rain jackets, camp
stove. Under the lights, Aaron attempts to organize it into their backpacks. “I don’t know, Mica,” he calls up, “either half of your clothes stay behind, or we won’t be taking much food.”

“We can eat salmonberries,” she chuckles. “Melanie’s been telling me that the bushes along the trail are full of them.”

“Yeah, and we’ll dig for clams, steam them over a driftwood fire—go native,” he grins up at us. “No need to pack food.”

Like two kids let loose for the summer, they exude the carefree excitement that comes with being on the road—your hours and days defined by a map of Canada spread out before you.

O
N
J
ULY
1, the sprawling military base at Kandahar Airfield morphs from a monotone of drab desert, brown buildings and tan tents. It flashes with red and white. Strings of Canadian flags decorate the railing around the boardwalk of the central square. Huge Canadian flags hang from the ceiling of the arena. In the Tim Hortons lineup, soldiers wear Canada Day T-shirts, red-and-white-striped hats, maple leaf ties and pins. Shouts and cheers ring across the square from games of volleyball, tug-of-war and water fights. The charcoal smoke of barbecuing hamburgers and hot dogs saturates the air.

For Jeff and his comrades, it’s a welcome reprieve from five months of outpost isolation and on-call duty, 24/7. Each of them is allowed two pints of beer. Under the shade
of a striped canvas awning, they clink their plastic glasses: “To Canada’s one-hundred-and-fortieth birthday!” They drink to their country’s contribution to stabilizing southern Afghanistan, the birthplace of the Taliban. A contribution with an enormous cost. In the past five months, sixteen of their comrades have been killed—thirteen by IEDs.

“And here’s to the beginning of the end,” Jeff says, smiling, “the last full month of our tour.” They raise their glasses, savour every swallow of the cold amber ale—its hoppy aroma, foamy head, sweet malty taste and the lingering bitter finish.

A few days later, on July 4, the mid-morning sun blazes down on a convoy of armoured vehicles crossing a dusty desert road. Canadian and Afghan soldiers are returning to base at Sperwan Ghar, their early-morning operation completed.

In the gray light of dawn, they surrounded a Taliban IED cell, the bomb-making squad responsible for the deaths of three Canadians two weeks ago. A team of soldiers held the nearby mountain while their convoy rumbled up the road to the sleeping village, hoping to flush out the enemy. Forward Observation Officer Captain Jeff Francis was ready to call in fire support in case of an attack. The soldiers patrolled for hours through the sandy lanes and fallow fields. They knew they were being observed, but the Taliban remained in hiding. After a
shura
with the elders, the troops mounted their vehicles to head back to the base, tanks with minerollers leading the eighteen-vehicle convoy.

Now, in the commander’s seat of his light armoured
vehicle (LAV), Major Chris Henderson mulls over the morning’s operation. He expected the enemy to spring a trap. The locals had tipped off the Canadians to prepare for one. He knows the Taliban were there.
Why hadn’t they shown their faces?
The convoy is following the same route they’d taken earlier that morning to reach the village, a road watched by tanks and military police during the soldiers’ patrol. So IED threats are minimal, he reassures himself; an ambush is also unlikely on two infantry companies and a tank troop driving through open terrain. Still, he’s uneasy.

Standing up through their swivelling turrets, gunners survey the brown lunar landscape and the distant barren hills for anything suspicious. They scan the road for signs of loosened gravel or wires snaking beneath the stones. They pass a field, lushly green with rows of two-metre-tall grapevines, alert to its hidden possibilities—ideal cover for insurgents, waiting in ambush or holding a remote control device connected to a roadside bomb.

A hundred and fifty metres from the road, a squat earthen hut sits within the maze of vines. It’s normally used for turning green grapes into sweet raisins. But for the men in turbans, this grape-drying hut is a bunker. The ventilation slits in its metre-thick walls make perfect ports for firing and surveillance. The Taliban squad has been holed up here for days, the air rank with the smell of feces. They’ve been watching the road edging the field. It shows no evidence of their tampering. The mammoth cluster of Soviet tank mines and artillery shells was buried deep and long ago.

Between the rows of twisting vines, midway between the hut and the road, the dark-bearded Talib has complete cover. He grips a black plastic gadget in his sweaty palm—two buttons, two wires, a double-A battery. The convoy approaches. He lets the leopard tank roll by; he’s waiting for the next vehicle, the sand-coloured RG-31 Nyala with a machine gun mounted on its roof. In the past few weeks, it has lived up to its reputation, one of the best anti-mine carriers in the world, and protected its crew during two IED strikes. It is a worthy opponent for their Goliath of a bomb. As the RG passes directly in front, he depresses the switch. Nothing happens. The vehicle’s ECM (electronic counter measure) equipment jammed the signal from the detonator. But another RG follows in its dusty wake. His thumb hovers over the red button.

In the cramped interior of the second RG—a personnel carrier for Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry—the men are buckled into narrow plastic seats. The uncomfortable seat belts are specially designed to prevent their helmeted heads from slamming into the metal ceiling should a blast occur. With sidewall armour plate and a steel-welded V-shaped hull, the twelve-ton RG is made to deflect blasts from below, to protect its occupants from the equivalent of two anti-tank mines detonating simultaneously. Encased in their steel womb, lulled by tires crunching over gravel, the men are at ease. Drained after four sweat-soaked hours of foot patrol, they’re contemplating the lives they’ll soon be resuming—just four more weeks.