- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 410
I have received permission from the editors of The Walrus to post the link to this article. The editors were kind enough, upon request, to put the article in its entirity up on The Walrus website so that it could be easily viewed from army.ca.
By the way, The Walrus is a Canadian magazine and I highly commend it for your reading.
***
Soldiers Not Peacekeepers"
We are at war. Will Canada admit it?
by Sean Maloney in Afghanistan and Tom Fennell in Toronto
The men in Sergeant Jamie Bradley's patrol knew the drill. They had been told that there were suicide bombers in the streets of Kandahar and that the insurgents had scouted the unit. But no one in Bradley's crew seemed visibly nervous—the risks were the same every time they rolled through the gate of the old factory where the Canadian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team is located. So machine guns were mounted, loaded, and cocked. Radios checked. A crewman opened his M203 launcher and inserted a 40 mm grenade, while the exposed turret gunners wrapped themselves in shemagh scarves to ward off the early winter wind blowing in from Afghanistan's southern desert. As I prepared to board one of the Mercedes-built G-Wagons, equipped with nearly a ton of plated armour and bulletproof glass, Master Corporal Forbes, our mustachioed crew commander, emphasized the danger that lay ahead when he asked if I was carrying a tourniquet—one of the new ones, he explained, that can be applied one-handed if your other arm happens to be blown off in an attack...
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/25/1945255
By the way, The Walrus is a Canadian magazine and I highly commend it for your reading.
***
Soldiers Not Peacekeepers"
We are at war. Will Canada admit it?
by Sean Maloney in Afghanistan and Tom Fennell in Toronto
The men in Sergeant Jamie Bradley's patrol knew the drill. They had been told that there were suicide bombers in the streets of Kandahar and that the insurgents had scouted the unit. But no one in Bradley's crew seemed visibly nervous—the risks were the same every time they rolled through the gate of the old factory where the Canadian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team is located. So machine guns were mounted, loaded, and cocked. Radios checked. A crewman opened his M203 launcher and inserted a 40 mm grenade, while the exposed turret gunners wrapped themselves in shemagh scarves to ward off the early winter wind blowing in from Afghanistan's southern desert. As I prepared to board one of the Mercedes-built G-Wagons, equipped with nearly a ton of plated armour and bulletproof glass, Master Corporal Forbes, our mustachioed crew commander, emphasized the danger that lay ahead when he asked if I was carrying a tourniquet—one of the new ones, he explained, that can be applied one-handed if your other arm happens to be blown off in an attack...
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/25/1945255
