Free The Patrol by Ryan Flavelle Page B

smile and continue to relax in silence. There’s still another leg left tonight; we need to push three kilometres farther as the crow flies, to Zangabad.
    The first time I saw what later became COP Haji was on a long patrol to clear IEDs from Route Fosters, a dirt road that ran all the way to Mushan. Our job was to provide left-flank security for the patrol, and we walked back and forth in the hot sun while we waited for the engineers to perform their dangerous tasks. At that time Haji was still a police substation (PSS), manned by Afghan police instead of Afghan army. The only Canadians there were a group of POMLT operators (Police Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams, pronounced “pomlette”). When we pulled into location, the PSS had serious radio problems that needed to be solved. After everybody else adjourned to the carrier to eat a ration and sleep, I found myself neck-deep in wiring problems, antennas, and programming failures. It took me almost two hours to sort them out. When Iwalked back to our carrier, everyone had finished dinner and was relaxing on the Afghan sand. Master Corporal Lizette LeBlanc, our section commander who was on leave during this patrol, threw me an American ration. No sooner was I halfway into my jalapeno and cheese pouch when a sergeant from 5 Platoon came up to us.
    “I need your fucking signaller,” he said in a thick Newfoundland accent.
    I sighed, got up, grabbed my helmet and weapon, and went over to his carrier, where I encountered a few problems that I had never seen before. The computer system and user interface that we use for our tactical radio system had been designed in the late 1980s. That radio system doesn’t enjoy heat. The basic user interface into the vehicle’s computer is a small box called a command indicator (CI), which is covered in buttons and has two lines of green text. The CIs in the LAV that I was working on were throwing letters and numbers at me that I’d never seen before. “IBIT FAIL” and “RC FAIL,” the army’s version of the infamous “PC LOAD LETTER” message from the movie
Office Space,
flashed intermittently on the screen. I had to dump everything in the radio system, reset the computer, reload the radios, and climb all through the LAV checking antenna cables—a time-consuming and exhausting procedure. Finally, after about 30 minutes of effort, I heard the reassuring beep of three working radios. As I was conducting my final checks, someone came up to the back of the LAV behind me. “Who’s that?” he asked the sergeant.
    “Oh, him? He’s just some fucking sig op.”
    I had spent the day patrolling with the infantry, I’d kept up, dodged IEDs, and helped cover the advance of a battalion’s worth of vehicles on foot. I then skipped my well-deserved supper and fixed an epic radio failure, something that the infantry had already tried and failed to do. But in the end I was “just some fucking sig op.” As retired General Roméo Dallaire’s father told him when he enlisted, a soldier “should never expect to be thanked.”
    Haji is a tiny enclosure of no more than 50 square metres. It is surrounded with razor wire and HESCO Bastions. These are three-metre-long steel-mesh cylinders with a diameter of five metres, filled with dirt by bulldozers or, in a pinch, soldiers. What they lack in aesthetics, they make up for in their ability to stop bullets, RPGs, and recoilless rifle rounds. We sit outside of the camp itself, inside the wire.
    I finish my bottle of water and ask, “Hey, Chris, what did you do with your water bottle?” I don’t want to leave trash lying around, especially after the Haji guys were courteous enough to give us some of their own cool water.
    “I just threw it over the wire where those ANA guys are sitting.”
    That’s kind of a dick move
, I think, making the ANA clean up our garbage. “Are you sure, dude?”
    “Yeah, that’s what I did.”
    I sigh and throw my water bottle over the wire.
    “Flavelle!