Her story follows the path of Charlie and Bravo companies of the 1st Battalion, PPCLI as they fought a pitched battle for fourty eight hours against Taliban and other forces in Panjwei, one of the small villages that dot rural Afghanistan.
It's a story that truly describes the scene in a very graphic way, it was this battle that cost Cpl. Anthony Boneca his life, has resulted in numerous casualties and raised Canada's military death total in Afghanistan to 17.
Blatchford's various accounts for the Globe of her travels with the PPCLI should be required reading for all Canadians, to better understand the Canadian presence in Afghanistan.
You read them and want to say a little silent prayer for all those in harms way.
Three days of fierce, bloody war
I'd been following Cpl. Mooney around like a bad smell. But in the battle that killed Cpl. Boneca, I lost sight of him.
CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
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KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — Corporal Keith Mooney sat hunched in his wheelchair on the tarmac at Kandahar Air Field yesterday, his blond head bent, his sweet face contorted as he tried not to cry.
The body of the young man he knew only a little and then only to tease -- I forget what he said it was about but it would have been in the way soldiers relentlessly rag on one another, gentle, funny and profane all at once -- was being carried up the ramp into the belly of a green-grey Hercules aircraft to head home to Canada.
Just hours after Cpl. Tony Boneca was killed Sunday morning while clearing a mud compound in Panjwei district west of Kandahar City, Cpl. Mooney himself was hit and wounded, perhaps by enemy fire, although he remains unconvinced of that, perhaps by the secondary explosion of a Taliban weapons cache that blew up when a bomb was dropped in a mud-walled maze of grape fields where for three long days ending yesterday Canadians fought in the sort of sustained and vicious battle Cpl. Mooney calls "a shitshow."
It was a classic example of war in its most modern and ancient form, the running counterinsurgency -- multifronted, with more than a dozen mini front lines popping up in the alternately lush-then-desert rural moonscape of this part of southern Afghanistan; soldiers deking in and out of grapevines and from behind low mud walls as they sought to engage what Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, the Canadian commanding officer, estimates were a minimum of 40 Taliban fighters, and probably between 60 and 70, who were on home turf they knew intimately; the high-tech weaponry that was later called in by the Canadian and coalition forces of limited use, and such a dearth of safe places that even medics were occasionally forced to use their weapons.
For instance, two insurgents -- for the sake of convenience, everyone here calls them Taliban, but while the six arrested included two men believed to be actual Taliban junior commanders, no one is entirely sure how many of the fighters were simply poor, uneducated Afghan boys who saw no other option, or narcotics thugs drawn here to protect the lucrative poppy
fields of the region, or hardened foreign fighters -- from their hidey-hole atop the roof of a mud grape-drying compound held a section of the Canadians at bay with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades for the better part of Saturday and Sunday.
After one of them shot Cpl. Boneca as he headed up the stairs, the building was utterly pounded with Harrier-fired missiles, bombs and the big guns of the 1st Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, the rooftop repeatedly strafed by a U.S. Apache helicopter. Yet one man survived this onslaught with only modest injuries, Lt.-Col. Hope confirmed yesterday, by availing himself of a tunnel system built by the Taliban. He was arrested.
Although waged in the tight quarters of the villages of Pashmul -- these small villages are in their way every bit as indistinct and alike as North American suburbs, and many have no names -- the battle was both so diffuse and shifting that while a CTV crew, reporter Steve Chao and cameraman Tom Michalak, and I were probably never more than 50 metres apart, we never once saw one another, and indeed, emerged with entirely different snapshots of the same fighting.
I was embedded with Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry; Mr. Chao and Mr. Michalak with Bravo Company.
We might as well have been at different wars, though each of ours had elements in common -- highly disciplined Canadian soldiers and undisciplined Afghan National Army forces working together (a fabulous piece of tape shot by Combat Camera photographer Master Corporal Ronald Duchesne shows one cowering ANA soldier blindly firing into the air over a mud wall, while beside him Canadian troops stand calmly waiting for a decent shot, and I saw one "N.D.," or Negligent Discharge, by an ANA soldier) and an incredible amount of gunfire and smoke.
In the first 12 hours of battle, Lt.-Col. Hope said, the Canadians had 17 separate and distinct engagements with the enemy; in the remaining two days, a total of six.
Bravo Company alone had in swift succession its 13th, 14th and 15th all-out fights with the enemy over the weekend, but as Officer Commanding Major Nick Grimshaw said yesterday at Zharei, where the Canadians have established a forward operating base in the region, "It should be known that of those 15 firefights, we haven't started a single one. We were not on the offensive. We were reacting. If the enemy wants a fight, we give them a fight."
For all that Major Grimshaw, 35, is proud of how his soldiers have stepped up as the intensity level occasionally ratchets "up to 11," he is most impressed by those occasions when the soldiers, "in full battle rattle" as they call their body armour and kit, can switch gears on a dime to speak to villagers on medical outreach visits and the like. "We're not afraid to talk to people," he said yesterday. "Very genuinely, that's the Canadian approach. We honestly believe we're here to help."
As for Cpl. Mooney, before he was hit in the upper legs and evacuated to the small but sophisticated base hospital at Kandahar Air Field, he was ruminating on the randomness of battle.
"Bullets," he said, "have no prejudice."
In one of Charlie Company's major battles, on June 12, two of his fellows were wounded, and as he checked one to find the wound, he emerged covered with blood. "I thought I was hit," he told me as we made our way to Pashmul on Friday night. When he realized he wasn't, he was as furious as if he had been. When a brother goes down, he said, "Everything else, whether you knew the guy, or if you didn't like this guy -- it all goes out the window. It's all about winning the fucking firefight and killing the enemy. I was so proud to be with my fucking company that day."
Cpl. Mooney's turn came Sunday afternoon. I had been following him around like a bad smell -- his calm and his bulk made me feel safe and his rich Newfoundland accent falls lovely on the ears -- for two days, but during one running skirmish, briefly lost sight of him. Next thing I knew, he was hit.
He felt, he said yesterday, as though someone had whacked him hard across the knees, and looked down in surprise to see blood pouring out the top of his legs. "I started shaking," he said, "and I was so cold." He was evacuated out of the immediate danger zone, assessed by medics, who now, knowing Cpl. Mooney will recover, fondly remember him as their most cheerful patient -- once he was repeatedly reassured that his private parts were all in place and intact.
As the signaler for Major Bill Fletcher, the Officer Commanding of Charlie Company, Cpl. Mooney, a 29-year-old from St. Mary's Bay, Nfld., went virtually everywhere the OC did: He had the radio and it was his job to keep the OC in constant touch with the other companies and with Lt.-Col. Hope.
In theory, and in some armies, that would mean Cpl. Mooney would be in a nice safe spot at the rear. But the company commanders -- Major Fletcher, Major Grimshaw of Bravo Company and Major Kirk Gallinger of Alpha Company -- are all fierce young officers who lead from the front lines.
The other soldier who goes everywhere Major Fletcher does is his Sergeant-Major, Shawn Stevens, a long, lean man of 46. Of the OC, he said, with faux weariness, "Just once I want a short, fat OC who doesn't run fast, so I can start acting my age."
As Cpl. Mooney told his wife, Shannon, before heading to Afghanistan, "Don't think I have a safe fucking job. Don't be shocked if something happens. . . . You can't think nothing's going to happen. You better expect the worst, and anything good that happens, it's a bonus. It can't be a shock.
"You want combat experience, this is where you come. You come here."
When I saw him yesterday on the tarmac, I wanted to tousle his hair and thank him for looking after me better than he did himself. But then the command was barked, and 1,000 soldiers stiffened their backs: "Task Force Afghanistan, to your fallen comrade, salute!"
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