The entire Canadian team had worked most of the day under canvas on the dust-pounded airfield preparing a heap of PowerPoint slides for the concept brief. I worked with Major Paul MacDonald, Brigadier-General Dave Fraser’s brigade G4 (principal logistics staff officer) on the logistics part of the presentation. There were a number of complicated logistic wrinkles to be smoothed ranging in scale from how Canada would be allowed to award a contract for gravel, right up to full ownership of the sprawling airfield base itself. We pared back the logistics points to two sparse slides outlining only the big ticket items, the subjects I felt absolutely had to be addressed. However, during the final preparation for the presentation, the slides dealing with logistics were axed by a Canadian staff major in an effort to keep the brief at a reasonable length. General Fraser’s presentation was indeed comprehensive save for one glaring area. Upon completion of his presentation, the general turned to Colonel Owens and asked the wiry commander of Task Force Bayonet if he had any further questions.
“Yeah ... Dave,” Owens said. “What about logistics?”
Fraser blinked, clearly not expecting a salvo from this particular quarter. “Well ...” The general twisted in his chair and swept the rear of the conference room with his eyes.
“What’s the plan?” Owens prompted. The commander of U.S. Task Force Bayonet seemed startled that the subject of logistics responsibilities on the forthcoming handover hadn’t come up. At the very least the Americans were desperate to have someone share the financial burden of an expensive Kandahar Airfield. Undoubtedly Owens had been straining to hear some shred of information in this regard. In the silence that followed his question, the droning of an underachieving air conditioner filled the conference room. Sitting at the back, I felt that I could have hugged him. The difference between our army’s professional culture and that of the war-weary United States was never so apparent.
“What about logistics?”
I am a logistics officer. I commanded the first Canadian combat logistics battalion into Kandahar in 2006, the men and women charged with the responsibility for moving the resupply convoys over a dangerous new sort of battlefield. My specific role in all of this was to shape the Canadian Task Force logistics structure on this landmark mission into southern Afghanistan. My battalion, with its bland and non-sexy title of National Support Element (NSE), deployed to Afghanistan in February 2006 after nearly 40 years of intellectual neglect of combat logistics by the Canadian Forces. As it would turn out, sustaining Canada’s Task Force Orion in southern Afghanistan in 2006 would be a very near run thing: a brush with failure that was all too close. The logistic success of the Canadian battle group, Task Force Orion in 2006 constituted a remarkable military accomplishment and a nearly unbelievable story. With the noted exceptions of Christie Blatchford’s despatches for the Globe and Mail and her bestselling book Fifteen Days: Stories of Friendship, Life, and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army, and Rosie DiManno’s stories in the Toronto Star, the logistic aspects of this story haven’t attracted the attention of historians and journalists. To be blunt, a story like this would be hard-pressed to find a sponsor because it is a tale about logistics desperation. With few exceptions Canadian military history has ignored the combat logistics side of the battle — the nine-tenths of activity and effort that lie below the surface of all military operations. In my admittedly modest academic experience, I have noticed that the records at the National Defence Directorate of History and Heritage and Archives Canada are full of material on combat units but extremely lean on logistics memories.
In Kandahar, a dramatically different type of fight than Juno Beach, important visitors and members of the press again wanted to be at “the front” and near the thick of the fighting. Senior VIPs of the government and the Canadian Forces flew to the various forward operating bases by helicopter. This is the safest and most sensible way to move about in southern Afghanistan, but it cheats these leaders of the opportunity to experience the weight and smell of the humdrum logistic war on Afghanistan’s roads. Many of the press stood among our convoy trucks beyond the wire as if they were in a copse of thick dark trees. They implored us to drive them to the forest, not initially appreciating that a large part of the story is here, not realizing at first that the enemy is everywhere and nowhere in particular. Insurgents attack where and when they choose, and the story that should be ringing loud through the modems of the press is that the new battlefield is an illusive, placid vista that could pass for a postcard picture, while combat logistics is more vital than ever to the success of the army on this new sort of battlefield.
I have read that during the intense fighting in the First World War the artillery barrages that came before major assaults on the Western Front sounded like thunder. The sound of this man-made thunder could be heard as far away as Paris and even in London, across the English Channel, in singular cases. The awful realities of combat were only experienced when one got close to the thunder. The farther a soldier was removed from the front, the less loud it became. In Kandahar the frontline is not so pronounced that it can be identified and fixed by anything as declarative as direction. And yet the sound of thunder is omnipresent. Combat can and does occur anywhere.
Logistics in Kandahar during Canada’s return to sustained combat in 2006 owed its success to innumerable unsung heroes, the soldiers of all the various logistic and medical trades of the Canadian Forces. They served in a unit that was a bit too small to do its original support task in southern Afghanistan, and then was stretched as the Canadian infantry battle group found itself badly needed all over RC South, moving ever farther away from Kandahar Air Field, the main logistics hub, for increased periods of time.
A large part of my desire to write this book stemmed from a deep need to give voice to this exceptional group of men and women who rarely find a champion. I have grown up with these soldiers in the army and I have seen what they can achieve in peace and in war. They are ordinary people who do extraordinary things. I want people to understand the inside horrors and tribulations of doing this mundane replenishment work in southern Afghanistan.
The intent in these pages is to furnish a recollection as honest as I could capture it, complete with emotions, impressions, failures, and successes. The ensuing chapters offer neither an academic treatment of the Canadian campaign in Afghanistan nor a particularly detailed survey of logistics history. There are several such books available now that deal with Canada’s role in Afghanistan. These books are not of uniform quality, but as a body of work they treat the strategic sinews of the campaign far better than I could attempt.
I will offer a brief overview of Canada’s Afghanistan campaign and the logistics history of the Canadian Army only in as much detail as necessary to provide some context to the combat logistics challenges my unit faced on our country’s return to Kandahar in a clear combat role. The unit you are about to meet in these pages numbered fewer than 300. They are the finest Canadians I have had the pleasure to know. Mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters, brothers, beer drinkers, hockey players, and NASCAR fans all of whom wore the maple leaf on their shoulders.
This is a war story of a logistics battalion, and in that respect, it is a highly unusual book. In our time, in our tiny Canadian Forces, logistics books are simply not written, yet, ironically, this is the exact time in the history of Canadian arms when they are needed the most.
I want to share with you at least a little of what the thunder said.
JOHN CONRAD
ORONO, ONTARIO, 2007
You have never seen a starry night sky until you have lifted your eyes to the heavens in northern Kandahar Province. I lay down to catch 40 winks on the wooden deck of the Arnes trailer in FOB [Forward Operating Base] Martello and was startled at the radiance and closeness of the stars all around me. I swear I could reach out and grab a handful of them. I felt I was peering into the very soul of God. We had avoided two IED attempts on our convoy