I’d never seen him so gloomy or depressed. I’ve known Ahmad Golan probably 15 years, certainly most of the time he and his family have lived in town. But on this day, late last summer, when I visited his confectionary store downtown, Ahmad (everybody knows him as Shah) seemed to carry the weight of the world.
“It’s just awful,” he said to me over the counter. “Such a waste.”
The Taliban had taken over his homeland … again, and this time Shah seemed to think Afghanistan might permanently be lost to the insurgents. As a faithful Muslim and family man, Shah had always followed his spiritual compass and shared his good fortune – immigrating to Canada and becoming a Canadian citizen – by giving back to fellow Afghanis.
In 2009, he inspired many of us in Uxbridge by acquiring a massive shipping container and cramming it full of donated new and used clothing, chairs, beds, housewares, bicycles, pencils, paper and hundreds of other dry goods. Consumed by his altruism, our town then raised thousands of dollars to ship the container overseas.
Shah shepherded it through Pakistan to Kabul, in Afghanistan. All this, as Shah saw his homeland ravaged by war, and as he lamented the deaths of 158 Canadian Forces men and women attempting to free his native country.
“It’s a black day,” Shah said in August.
I thought it appropriate in the days leading up to today, Nov. 11, that I seek a second and third opinion. If it seemed so bleak for Shah, I wondered, how might it feel for Canadian Forces survivors of the war?
I first called a retired military medic. Bill Wilson acknowledges two Remembrance Days every year. Today, the veteran from Leamington, Ont., will honour the sacrifices made by Canadians in the Great War, the Second World War and the Korean War. On April 18, however, he pays tribute to four Canadians who lost their lives in the friendly-fire incident in Afghanistan in 2002.
Nearly 20 years ago, Wilson was the lead medic on a live-fire, midnight training exercise with about 100 Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry troops at a place called Tarnac Farm, not far from Kandahar. Mistaking the Canadians for insurgents, a U.S Air Force fighter pilot dropped a 225-kilogram bomb on them. Sgt. Wilson, then 34, rushed to the wounded.
“There are three things you can do to save a soldier’s life,” he explained. “Open up their airway (so they can breathe), use a needle to decompress a collapsed lung and use a tourniquet to prevent bleeding to death.”
In recognition of the experiences of Wilson and the two junior medics with him that night, the Canadian Armed Forces asked them to design a training course. To this day, every medic and infantry soldier about to deploy overseas gets a week-long Tactical Combat Casualty Care course, based on Wilson’s friendly-fire response. It prioritizes the ABCs – airway, breathing, circulation – of emergency response.
“I always take away the sense of validation of how we performed that night,” Wilson said. In spite of the loss of four Canadian lives in the friendly-fire incident, countless other wounded have survived.
Next, I called a former Uxbridge resident, Canadian Forces vet Jeff Peck. That same night – April 18, 2002 – Peck had just led another PPCLI platoon through the same exercise, and was metres from the blast. Like most there that night, Peck had no idea what had just hit them.
Had Canadian weaponry malfunctioned? Was it a Taliban attack? Lt. Peck, then 27, did a head count of his own platoon, then deployed them to secure the casualty area, using glow sticks to mark where wounded men and body parts lay.
“The bomb hit inside the wadi, a ditch next to the exercise,” Peck told me. “A bomb like that has a danger radius of 500 metres. If it had hit on the flat of the desert, losses would have been worse.”
As it was, the blast killed Sgt. Marc Léger, Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer, Pte. Richard Green and Pte. Nathan Smith. And I asked Peck about the NATO pullout last summer, and the Taliban’s retaking of the country.
After 27 years in the military, Jeff Peck remains proud of Canada’s mission to Afghanistan. “We may not have won. But it’s not over,” he commented to me. “When we were there – whether it was me, or my platoon, or company, or battalion, of the Canadian Forces at large – great things were done. Seeds were planted.
“We have no idea what effect we had on all those young Afghani boys and girls,” Peck said finally, defiantly. “Those seeds might not grow for 10, 20 or 30 years.”
Words of encouragement Ahmad Golan could sure use this Remembrance Day.
