Either of the two events that rocked their world in the dust-caked hills of southern Afghanistan one month ago might qualify as the worst day of their lives. That they came back-to-back — one disastrous morning followed by another even worse — is a matter of almost incomprehensibly bad fortune.The epic double-whammy — a perfect Taliban ambush of unprecedented intensity, followed one day later by a devastating burst of "friendly fire" from a U.S. Air Force A-10 Warthog — reduced Charlie to a status of "combat ineffective." They were the ones to fire the opening shots of Operation Medusa. But even as the massive Canada-led assault was gathering steam they were finished.
The soldiers left standing are not the same today as the ones who deployed to Afghanistan with nothing but good intentions barely seven weeks ago, as part of 1st Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, based in Petawawa, Ont.
A few are emotional wrecks, too fragile still to speak of what transpired during that fateful Labour Day long weekend. Others bleed anger from their every pore.
Some cling to wounded pride, anxious for it to be known that if not for enormous self-sacrifice, the volume of Canadian blood shed these two mornings would have been vastly greater.
Others are disillusioned, having come to regard their work in Afghanistan as a mission impossible. And others still are more driven than ever to succeed, if only to lend greater meaning to the loss of their fallen Canadian brothers.
The survivors of Charlie Company are closer now than they were before. And the other thing they have in common is a need to tell their story, which they do today for the first time.
The White School was the objective, and not for the first time. A full month earlier the 1st Battalion of the Edmonton-based Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, on the tail end of their six-month deployment, encountered serious Taliban resistance from the single-storey building. It was a hub of Taliban activity, but on the morning of Sept. 3, as Charlie Company's 7 Platoon bore down on the building, only the Taliban knew what a hub it was.
In hindsight, some of the soldiers acknowledge their "spidey sense" was tingling. It was quiet that day. Possibly too quiet, as the platoon motored through fields of ripening marijuana plants, each taller than a man.
The engineers went first, using an armoured bulldozer to open two breaches through barriers between the pot fields. A clear path to the school was opened, and into it went four LAVs and a G-Wagon, the lightly armoured Mercedes-Benz jeep that many of the Canadians in Kandahar have come to despise as a "bullet magnet."
Approaching left to right, the Canadians lined up 50 metres from the school, like ducks in a row. Sitting ducks, it would soon become clear.
"All hell broke loose," says Master Cpl. Allan Johnson of Owen Sound, in command of the LAV known as 3.1 Alpha.
"It was dead quiet. And then I saw a guy jump up on a roof. Maybe he was giving a signal to the other Taliban.
"All I know is the entire area just lit up. We were taking fire from at least two sides, maybe three, with everything they had. Rocket-propelled grenades, small-arms fire, the works.
"It was the cherry-popper of all cherry-poppers. And once we started taking casualties, we moved up to provide cover fire. Our cannon didn't stop from that point on."
The LAV from 2 Combat Engineer Regiment was the first hit, sustaining a bull's-eye RPG strike beneath the gunner's turret. The radio call announced injuries. It was the day's first fatality — Sgt. Shane Stachnik, 30, of Waskatenau, Alberta.
Seconds later the G-Wagon exploded, with an RPG blasting through its passenger-side windshield, instantly killing Warrant Officer Rick Nolan, 39, of Mount Pearl, Nfld. Suddenly, 7 Platoon had lost its leader.
Cpl. Richard "Doc" Furoy, 32, of Elliot Lake, Ont., one of the company medics, was sitting directly behind Nolan inside the stricken G-Wagon, where he suffered light shrapnel injuries. He barely remembers the chaos that followed.
"Everything in the world came down on us and then, whoomp, the G-Wagon went black. I sort of lost consciousness. I could still feel the spray of gunfire, I could feel the concussion of the rounds inside my chest. But I couldn't hear anything," Furoy told The Star.
"At some point, somebody butt-stroked me with their rifle to snap me out of it. I came back into the present, got my wits about me. I knew I was needed. I checked on the Warrant Officer (Nolan). He was dead."
Thus began a firefight that lasted a full 3Å“ hours. As crews dismounted to retrieve the dead and wounded, the Canadian LAV gunners let fly into the marijuana fields with turret-mounted 25mm cannon and C6 fire. Each vehicle burned through at least two "uploads," representing more than a thousand rounds of firepower. 3.1 Charlie went through three uploads of suppression fire before pulling back from its original position, the last to leave the battlefield.But there were more complications when the guns of one of the LAVs, 3.1 Bravo, either jammed or ran dry. Its crew compartment now loaded with casualties, Bravo reversed through the marijuana at 35 km/h, only to crash into a four-metre-deep irrigation ditch. Immobilized, its hydraulic rear ramp jammed shut against the ditch, Bravo took two direct RPG hits before its occupants were able to break open an emergency escape hatch.
With the tops of the pot plants snapping off around them as the Taliban barrage continued, many of Bravo's crew managed to make their way to 3.1 Charlie. Into a crew compartment designed for a maximum of eight, they stacked themselves like cordwood, the injured laid out on the laps of the untouched, and raced for cover.
Every battle plan includes a CCP, or casualty collection point. But in the frenzy of that Sunday morning the Canadians adapted their plan, moving their casualties to the nearest point of cover they could find — an armoured Zettelmeyer front-end loader belonging to the combat engineers.
And it was there that arguably the most tragic death of the day occurred. Warrant Officer Frank Robert Mellish, 38, of 8 Platoon was not meant to be in the teeth of battle that day. But when Mellish, a native of Truro, N.S., learned that fellow Warrant Officer Rick Nolan was dead, he stepped up to help retrieve the body. They were best friends.
Moving from the rear guard, more than 1.8 kilometres from the White School, Mellish made it as far as the Zettelmeyer when he was caught in a storm of shrapnel and died. Now 8 Platoon, too, had lost its leader. And in the same barrage, Sgt. Major John Barnes suffered a concussion, taking another key player out of the fight.
| "In the middle of all this chaos, we see this big, black fuck-off bomb coming toward us," said Cpl. Rodney Grubb, 25. "It was like a big, black steel football. It hit the ground and bounced and bounced and bounced. I hit the ground thinking, `Okay, we're done.' And then I got back up. The bomb just came to a stop. It didn't go off." |
The Canadians had left three stricken vehicles on the battlefield, but were far enough back now to call in air support to renew a bomb assault on the sources of the ambush. And what they saw next gave chills to the entire company.
"In the middle of all this chaos, we see this big, black fuck-off bomb coming toward us," said Cpl. Rodney Grubb, 25, of Kitchener.
"It was like a big, black steel football. It hit the ground and bounced and bounced and bounced. I hit the ground thinking, `Okay, we're done.' And then I got back up. The bomb just came to a stop. It didn't go off."
The 500-pound, laser-guided bomb had come from the belly of a U.S. warplane. What saved the Canadians from its explosive force was a safety mechanism designed to disarm the device when it strays from its intended co-ordinates.
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