OTTAWA—Gun shot wounds, buried bombs, vehicle rollovers, rocket attacks and suicide bombers.
For seven months in 2008 — from March to September — those were just a few of the battlefield traumas suffered by Canadian troops as they tangled with insurgents.
They are the very incidents that the military has tried to keep out of the public eye with its decision to keep details on wounded soldiers under wraps.
The policy of releasing the number of injured soldiers only once a year — on Dec. 31 — has obscured the intensity of fight facing Canadian soldiers, as well as the nature of the sometimes life-altering injuries. It has also given Canadians back home a mental buffer against the numbing realities of war — soldiers who fight hard also get hurt.
Over seven months, 52 soldiers were wounded in action and another 24 suffered “non-battle injuries.” Seventeen soldiers died in combat and two others are listed only as “deaths,” language typically used in the case of suicides or when the cause of death is undetermined. The good news in the numbers is that 34 of the 52 soldiers wounded in action were able to return to duty.
The normally secret records, which are produced in Afghanistan and circulated throughout the defence department, show the pace of war is relentless. In just over one week at the end of May 2008, one soldier is injured when a Light Armoured Vehicle rolls over; four are injured when a suicide bomber blows up his car; one soldier takes ill; two others suffered unspecified “non-battle injuries;” three are hurt in a “probable” mine strike and one suffers a gunshot wound.
The deployment, known in military circles as Roto 5, was also a time of rapid change in the political focus and intensity of the Afghan war. In the United States, President Barack Obama was coming to power with a promise to re-engage in America’s then-forgotten war. In Canada, much of the attention was directed toward the capital.
A panel appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper had recommended more NATO troops and more helicopters and more focused aid projects if Canada was to extend its mission by two years to 2011. The charismatic chief of defence staff, Gen. Rick Hillier, stepped aside for his successor, Gen. Walter Natynczyk. The nation’s first Red Rally stoked home front support for Canadian troops overseas.
By the end of the summer, though, insurgents had sprung their Taliban brethren from Kandahar’s Sarposa prison in a spectacular truck bombing and Harper began to lay out Canada’s exit strategy from the war ahead of a September election call.
Throughout this period, the records reveal that Canadian troops were taking casualties at least once every three days in life-and-death battles that have rarely been revealed to the public and are almost never acknowledged by defence officials.
A key example was during a visit to Kandahar by Gen. Walter Natynczyk in July 2008, one month after he had assumed the role of chief of defence staff. Wrapping up his five-day visit on July 13, he delivered what one account termed a “cheerful assessment” of the security situation, one that echoed that of ministers in the Conservative government who were running the war.
The Taliban enemy was scared of a face-to-face fight, he said, and security around Canada’s forward operating bases in Kandahar province had shown “significant progress.”
But the days that preceded and followed his visit were some of the most intense of the tour for Canadian soldiers. Thirteen names were entered into the casualty register between July 4 and July 19, the result of 10 separate incidents.
On July 4, Cpl. Brendan Downey was found dead in his sleeping quarters at Camp Mirage, a support base in Dubai.
Pte. Colin Wilmot, a 24-year-old medic, was killed July 5 when he stepped on an IED during an early morning foot patrol. The other was that of Cpl. James Arnal, 25. He was killed on July 19 when he too stepped on a buried bomb.
That blast also injured a corporal with the Royal Westminster Regiment, a reservist from British Columbia, who was treated and returned to duty “complete with a scar in his hindquarters,” according to his regiment.
On July 4, a master corporal and two privates based at CFB Shilo in Manitoba were blown up by an IED. A roadside bomb struck a corporal from Edmonton on July 7. A warrant officer, an experienced senior soldier from Edmonton, was hit by the Taliban’s weapon of choice on July 17. All were treated and returned to duty.
Then, just as Natynczyk was sharing his assessment of the battlefield with reporters, a rocket attack injured a young female soldier. She was a private with the 26th Field Artillery Regiment, a reserve force in Brandon, Man.
The fact that injuries are kept out of the public eye illustrates how unaware Canadians are of the price being paid by soldiers in Afghanistan, said Senator Colin Kenny.
“In death, you hope it’s fast and very little suffering. But the suffering of the wounded goes on and on and on,” said Kenny, the former chair of the Senate defence committee.
“All you have to do is go out to the hospital to meet them. You’re looking at people with half their face gone or their mouth is wired up and their ankles are broken because of the force of the IED,” he said.
In addition, some soldiers complain that hiding the wounded prevents them from being recognized and celebrated for their physical sacrifices on behalf of Canada. In hospitals across the country, they are suffering and recovering alone and in silence, something that can contribute to their frustration, breed resentment and lead to mental health problems.
Defence officials defend the secrecy, saying it’s vital to safeguard operational security and keep insurgents in the dark about the toll their attacks are taking on Canadian troops.
But critics mock that reasoning, noting that allies like Britain and the United States, release their own tallies of wounded troops on a more timely basis — sometimes weekly.
“The lack of transparency here is something that I simply don’t understand,” Kenny said.
He bluntly dismissed the military reasoning as “bulls**t.” He said it’s “not credible” to think that the Taliban don’t have moles inside the coalition base, able to feed out information.
“There are Taliban who are active inside the wire in Kandahar. They bring workers in every day,” Kenny said.
“It’s not credible to say that the Taliban don’t know when someone’s been hurt. They see the helicopters come in and do the medevacs,” he said.
Improvised explosives account for the majority of the incidents and the injuries.
But the records reveal the array of risks that confront a soldier in a war zone, such as gunshot wounds, heat exhaustion, unspecified illness, falls and in one case, a “blow to the head.”
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