followed over the next few minutes is best described as barely managed chaos. Similar scenes have been played out by scores of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan since 2006. Priority one was the badly injured Loewen who needed to keep moving forward to medical attention. Every second of delay deepened the need. As the Bison burned, the rear exit ramp jammed tight in the closed position, trapping its passengers. The top hatch of the vehicle, known lovingly as the family hatch, had to be forced open manually and Loewen was passed through and cross-loaded onto a the roof of another vehicle in the convoy, a Canadian Mercedes G-Wagon. As he was fastened securely to a stretcher, a couple of quick-thinking soldiers stood in the doors of the truck and held the stretcher firmly in place while they careened through the gate into KAF and finished the race to the Role 3 military hospital.
With Loewen again on his way, Sergeant Jones sorted through his remaining priorities and turned his attention onto the Bison driver. Corporal “Killer” Mackinnon, a military truck driver serving on his first ever tour of duty, was stuck in the driver’s compartment with eyes as wide as pie plates. He was suffering badly from the heat of the burning engine in the neighbouring cowling.
“Killer, hang in there!” was all Jones grunted as he climbed back on top of the vehicle to assist his driver. Jones pulled up hard on the back of MacKinnon’s body armour. I recall hearing about a farmer near our home in the mid-1970s who had lifted a corn harvesting wagon off of his daughter’s crushed legs in order to save her life. The adrenaline-inspired moment always harboured elements of the unbelievable in my mind until what Jones did. Lifting a man vertically out of a driver compartment is a Herculean task on a good day but Pat Jones succeeded in freeing MacKinnon on one of the worst days of his life. Although Killer MacKinnon was scared shitless, the only physical damage he suffered was minor burns and a melted pistol holster. As he turned to his next task, Jones wasn’t as lucky. The vehicle had a halon fire extinguisher system that is supposed to allow for external detonation. On this day of days the external release didn’t work. Tripping the extinguisher could only be done from inside the machine, and without so much as a “here I go!” Pat Jones re-entered the burning armoured vehicle. In the process of executing this drill and releasing the extinguishing chemical he received a lung full of halon. It would be days before he could stop coughing and hacking.
When Paddy Earles and I visited Sergeant Pat Jones later on the night of 3 March in the military hospital, I got my first real glimpse of the effects of war. Master Corporal Loewen lay bandaged and sedated across the ward. Pat Jones was sequestered inside a semi-private enclosure beside a young captain with appendicitis. He was sitting up as we came in, but something was tangibly wrong.
Pat Jones was a bear of a man. He routinely took his furlough from the army late in the year and derived great enjoyment from his annual hunting expeditions in northern Alberta. Jonesy had served as a young corporal with me when I was a company commander in Edmonton. During the workup training for Kandahar, he had been a rock of stability, a fine senior non-commissioned officer (NCO) and one of only a handful of convoy commanders we had to rely upon.
The look in his eyes that night at the KAF hospital was alien to the man I knew so well. He was careful, I thought, too careful to say all the right things. We could tell that he was unsettled, struggling hard against things unseen. The change in him shook my confidence. Every commanding officer, every leader, cultivates his core team, his “go to” men and women who can be trusted to get the job done when the going is difficult. Sergeant Pat Jones was born to be one of these men, and replacing an NCO of his calibre was next to impossible. Standing in the plywood Golgotha of the Role 3 hospital, I had my first bout of anxiety over the small size of the NSE. This was the third day of our mission. I had really screwed up.
Although I knew before we deployed that I didn’t have enough support soldiers, the fact that I might not have brought enough convoy leaders to see us through this mission never dawned on me. These sergeants are like bishops on a chessboard. They are gritty, experienced, and worth their weight in gold. Paddy Earles and I left the hospital and went for coffee at the little Canadian Exchange café behind our sea container headquarters. I was in hell that night, frightened on a host of different levels. If we could lose a man like Jones from our logistics team on day three of the mission, what would the next six and a half months bring?
We didn’t lose him. His lungs cleared of halon, and the faraway look in his eyes ebbed. If the haunting new tone in his voice didn’t completely go away, it at least waned to a point where it could no longer be easily detected and he returned to duty later that same week. General Rick Hillier presented Jones with a Chief of the Defence Staff Coin, followed later by the commendation, for his actions on 3 March 2006. What Jones probably didn’t know was that by his courage both beyond the wire and inside the KAF Role 3 hospital, he had restored my confidence. I was, after all, a rookie to real war. The NSE had been tested, our soldiers had been hurt, and we were dusted off and back to work the next day. For reasons that even to this day I don’t understand, this incident was pivotal. It galvanized me for the darker storms yet to come.
We got your phone message. We hope to leave it on the machine till you’re back. Your dad and I love you and pray for your safe return.
— First Letter from My Parents, 10 February 2006
If you are reading this it means for sure that I am not coming home ... I am so sorry. I do not know for certain how I have been killed but I have a pretty good idea ... When you tell people about me please don’t stress the fact that I was sitting on my ass inside a truck with my rifle between my knees when I died. Tell the kids, tell my parents ... that I died with my face toward the enemy ...
— Lieutenant-Colonel John Conrad,
“Just in Case Letter,” Kandahar Airfield, 2006
WHAT ABOUT LOGISTICS?
I have to believe that outside of the Canadian Forces it cannot be so shameful to be a logistics or a supply chain employee in a successful company. Working in corporate logistics, like being part of the prestigious German general staff, connotes a certain level of prestige. And for a good reason. Logistics in the corporate world is a big part of any company’s bottom line and it requires talent and experience. Chances are that you yourself have had to dabble in logistics at one time or another. Consider the popular television commercial that says that a family of four will consume three tons in groceries each year. If you are a farmer, business person, or just a time-impoverished parent who has had to balance hockey practice pickups with grocery runs, you’ve worked on a logistics problem.
The word logistics comes from the Greek logos, with a contemporary breadth of meaning that covers ratio, word, calculation, reason, speech, and oration.3 In other words, logistics was related to the whole spectrum of thinking and reasoning as the ancient Greeks perceived it and its growth as a discipline came out of the need for the armies of antiquity to support themselves as they moved forward from city states to campaigns. To that end, being involved in logistics is like being harnessed to the brains of your organization. NATO has defined logistics as the science of planning and carrying out the movement and maintenance of forces. For my 24 years in the regular army this clean definition is the one that served us. I think the NATO definition is somewhat two-dimensional and intellectually canalizing. It does not even begin to hint at the myriad trials and friction that bedevils a combat service support plan. After a career of supporting Canadian land forces in three different continents in classic peacekeeping operations and in war, I challenge whether logistics, at its core, is a science at all. Logistics is the discipline that deals with the provision of goods and services to an institution, but what I believe more than ever after Kandahar is that the psychological aspects prevail and in that respect, logistics is far more about art than science. The most important facets of logistics in war reside in the kingdom of
