| Eighteen blocks of C-4 go off, and that’s our cue. I run into the street and fall to the ground. All around me, people wail and scream. My husband rushes to my side and throws himself on top of me, yelling for help. No soldiers come to our rescue, so I am thrown into the back of a truck and dropped off in a field in front of a light armoured vehicle. My husband continues to cry and scream for help. The troops on patrol in the field look confused, wanting to help, but waiting for direct orders.
Six minutes pass. I’m splayed on the ground, my gaping stomach wound bleeding and oozing, and a soldier comes to ask what’s wrong. I say nothing and my husband shoos him away when he tries to touch me. A female soldier arrives and applies a bandage. By this time, the soldiers are breaking into action. I am put on a stretcher and loaded onto a military ambulance. My husband gets in, clutching my hand, but we are pulled apart by the soldiers, and he is pushed out of the vehicle.
Other people that have been hurt in the explosion are loaded in next to me and we are taken to a field and lined up to await medical evacuation. A helicopter finally arrives and I am loaded in beneath two other blast victims. The ride is about 10 minutes, the doors wide open, low to the ground, over the fields. We get to the Canadian Forward Operating Base (FOB), and I am rushed out, laid out on a field with dozens of injured, screaming people, to await a space in the operating room. A female medic sits with me, speaking to me in English and checking my vitals.
The field is cold and dusty. I am strapped in my stretcher, with an oxygen mask on my face, my head scarf tangled up in the straps, unable to see much. Medics take my vitals and reassess my wounds at regular intervals. An hour passes and there is still no space in the OR. A senior medic comes around to check on me again. She looks at my wound, determines how long I’ve been waiting to see a doctor and informs me that I am dead.
I am carried to the side of the field and laid next to another bomb victim who has died waiting for treatment. I take off the oxygen mask, unstrap myself from the stretcher and unravel the bandages. I sit up and take a look around. The scene is winding down, and there are not many victims left. A soldier comes over and tells me to take it easy. Now that I’m dead, I can take a nap on my stretcher and wait out the game.
* * *
For three weeks this May, I participated as a civilian role player in Exercise Maple Guardian, a military training program at the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre (CMTC) in Wainwright, Alberta. I was a CIB, a military acronym for Civilian in Battle Space, and played an Afghan villager.
Aside from being a victim of an improvised explosive device (IED), I was an extra in the scope of this massive program. This involved milling around pretend villages, interacting with soldiers in limited ways, pretending not to understand when they spoke English or French and thus adding realism to the different scenarios.
Exercise Maple Guardian is designed to confirm the operational readiness of Canadian troops being deployed to Afghanistan by immersing them in realistic simulations of environments and situations they will face while overseas. What this means is creating a faux Afghanistan in Wainwright on the 450 square kilometre training ground at the CMTC. Referred to as "The Box," this training area encompasses the simulated Afghan villages of Belanday, Nakhonay, Spin Boldak and Loy Karezak, which are based on real villages in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar.
Soldiers come together at the CMTC from various units and parts of the country to train as a battalion. In their 37 days in The Box, they live as though they were in Afghanistan. They drive tanks, pilot helicopters and are tested on their ability to deal with scenarios such as medical evacuations, reactions to IEDs, convoy escorts, search and cordons, vehicle checkpoints and assisting in reconstruction efforts. They use real guns, C7s, that are fitted with laser sensors and co-ordinated with vests worn by all players. The system is a sophisticated version of laser tag, called Weapons Effects Simulation (WES). When a player is hit by direct or indirect fire (which can include IEDs, grenades, roadside bombs and mortars as well as guns), sensors on the vest calculate how badly they are injured. If the hit is fatal, the vest beeps loudly and doesn’t stop until the player lies down. If the hit is not fatal, a screen on the vest provides information about the extent of the wounds sustained, including how long the victim has left to live.
The realism extends as far as possible. Propaganda is posted in the villages by both Taliban insurgents and the training soldiers. One posted by Canadian military showed a picture of happy villagers and military with the slogan, "Together we can build a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan." Another posted by Taliban stated, "Helping the infidels is like raping the nation of Islam. We are watching you and your family carefully and when the time comes, our justice will be swift and without mercy."
Understandably, co-ordinating the exercise is complex and involves thousands of people. The ACS role-player team of about 150 or so civilians plays a small part. Student journalists play the part of local and international media. They interview training soldiers and other people in the scenario, create news clips and play them for the troops each morning, so the soldiers have an idea of how to deal with media when they are overseas.
Other civilians play the roles of NGO workers – Red Cross, CARE, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) – and spend their days in meetings with the training soldiers, negotiating the construction of wells, schools, roads and hospitals to be built, arranging medical outreach programs, co-ordinating aid efforts and participating in strategic planning as part of the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT).
Others play Afghan nationals – the Governor of Kandahar, Afghan police chiefs, women’s rights activists, interpreters, Malliks (village leaders) and Mullahs (village religious leaders) – interacting with troops in their various capacities in the villages and with the PRT. The training soldiers have a lot to contend with. And this is part of the realism the exercise is designed to reflect.
There are about 2,500 Canadian troops in Afghanistan, the majority in the province of Kandahar. They are part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – over 30,000 troops from 37 nations, whose mission is to improve the security situation and assist in rebuilding the country. This includes securing border crossings, protecting water and power supplies, supporting anti-drug campaigns as well as demining and training Afghan police and army forces, managing micro-loan programs, and building schools, hospitals and police stations. All this while navigating Afghan culture, contending with Taliban insurgents and protecting the civilians who get caught in the middle.
My role as a villager, as small as it was, was important in two ways. It helped create an interactive environment where training soldiers could use their cultural training, learning to deal with Afghan civilians and some of their traditions. Another was allowing soldiers to practice protecting civilians caught in conflict situations. The number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan has been a major issue. NATO admits that its biggest error last year was killing civilians. In January 2007, it promised to do better, something that has proved difficult.
At the end of each day of the exercise, training soldiers met as a group for a debriefing. Thanks to WES technology, there was a log of who had been shot, by whom and in what context. If a civilian was shot, the soldier responsible was reprimanded and an extensive discussion of how to avoid similar mishaps in the future ensued.
In the past, military training employed soldiers to play the roles of civilians. In an intense situation, like a gunfight or an explosion, soldiers act as they have been trained to act. Civilians give genuine civilian reactions, which have proven valuable. According to statistics given by the contracting company, when a soldier goes through three of these training sessions, casualty rates, both civilian and military, drop from four per cent to 50 per cent.
For me, the experience was eye-opening. Living on a military base and riding in helicopters and tanks was one thing. Talking to soldiers who had been to Afghanistan or who were going to Afghanistan, as well as the role players of Afghan descent, was another. It was enough to shift my perspective on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.
One slow day, I was sitting in Loy Karezak, on bales of hay surrounding a wobbly makeshift table, with a group of civilians. An elder Afghan man was talking about the history of his country. After 30 years of civil war, he said, he was happy that NATO forces were in the country. "We are very happy," he said, "We have invited the whole world to bring peace to Afghanistan."
With 37 countries supplying military personnel, as well as dozens of international aid organizations, his statement is close to the truth. And while Canadian involvement is a controversial subject – the NDP is calling for immediate withdrawal and the Liberals want to pull troops out when the current mission expires in 2009 – Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently promised not to leave before work is done. For the foreseeable future, Canadian troops remain, and from the tiny glimpse I got, their work is enormously difficult. The group that just finished up at CMTC, consisting of soldiers predominantly from the Royal 22e Régiment from CFB Valcartier in Quebec, will be deployed to Kandahar this July. |
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