Good To Go

The first-aid class we’d taken earlier that week—“Tactical Combat Casualty Care”—was sobering. As we treated each other with objects at hand (a rolledup notebook and a scrunchie make a dandy forearm splint), we were given directives that reflected the shift from peacekeeping to peacemaking in Canada’s mission abroad. In peacekeeping, troops withdraw from the field when they suffer casualties, and medics take over. In peacemaking, though, first aid is geared toward “care under fire”—the bare minimum necessary to maintain life and continue the mission.

Now, as we struggle to get our injured soldier out of the jeep, I’m keenly aware that lessons that seemed straightforward in the classroom are difficult to apply in the field. The eight of us are shouting, arguing about how to treat his wounds. Meanwhile, he appears to lose consciousness. (The acting is first rate, perhaps because Meaford is a training base and the troops are accustomed to war games.) At the debriefing, we ruefully admit that we lost the casualty. In class, Sergeant Malen Vidler told us the forces are no longer taught to “scoop and run,” or retreat with their wounded. “Now we tell them to stay and play”—that is, keep fighting. The implicit message was that journalists should be prepared to administer their own first aid; in combat, they might be a low priority.

The Canadian program at Kandahar Airfield hosts fifteen journalists at a time, each of whom may stay a maximum of six weeks, and requests to deploy have been growing steadily. For the Canadian Forces, this is embedding on an unprecedented scale. With our troops committed to Afghanistan until 2009, news outlets will have to rotate large numbers of staff through this assignment, and many who will go have had no experience in conflict zones. The fact is that conflicts are no longer covered solely by seasoned war correspondents, but often by reporters who may have little or no experience with the military. In addition to classes like “Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Detection and Survival,” we had “Military Structure and Operations” (which taught us, for instance, to identify rank) and “Weapons of War, Type and Employment” (which included the weapons of the enemy}—lessons that assumed no familiarity with such things.

The military does not require journalists to take this course before arriving, but most news organizations insist on some kind of training, both for the safety of their reporters and to lower the cost of insuring them. The insurance for a reporter in a conflict zone can cost up to $1,000 a day—a huge pressure on the already strained resources of most news organizations.

Each major network and newspaper has at most one correspondent and one photographer or camera operator stationed in Afghanistan, and almost all of those are reporting in the south at Kandahar Airfield. Journalists can leave the base at their own risk, but it is increasingly dangerous to do so. Furthermore, as Christina Stevens—the Global television correspondent beside me in the ditch, who has since returned from a stint in Kandahar—told me, “The networks discourage taking extended trips away from the base, in case there’s breaking news.” The reality is that the media must always be on casualty watch. Unfortunately, at this point little else from Afghanistan is making headlines.

Embedding may be nothing new, but it’s only in the last few years that the military has begun to train the media. Major Peter Sullivan, Deputy Commanding Officer of the Land Force Central Area Training Centre at Meaford, greeted us when we first arrived by saying, “The whole point of having you here is so you come home alive. It’s that simple.” It would be naive, however, to take him at his word. This training also reflects the military’s relatively new, proactive approach to the media—and this is where journalists get uneasy. At the same session, Brigadier General Guy Thibault, Commander of Land Force Central Area, was straightforward about a larger agenda: “This is a very selfish program from my perspective, in the sense that we need something from all of you.”

One thing the military needs is to ensure that reporters do not become a liability to their operations. They encourage journalists to accompany soldiers on patrol, in convoys, and even to field bases when possible. But because of suicide bombers, media are no longer permitted to join a convoy in their own vehicles; now they ride alongside the troops. At the very least, the military has to be confident that reporters and photographers will not interfere with or slow down a mission.

And they need us to be prepared for life on the base, which has its own hazards (the least of which are camel spiders that like to follow in your shadow—those you just kick away). In Meaford, we spent a night in the field, sleeping in rows of cots under a large tent and a black sky. At 2 a.m., we were awakened by ear-splitting explosions and voices shouting, “Stand to! Stand to!” We were under attack. As I fumbled for my glasses and helmet in the wet grass under my cot, half awake, with the searing hiss and bang of smoke bombs falling all around, I could barely recall where the bunker was. Rocket attacks are frequent at Kandahar Airfield. I could have used more practice taking cover.

We also received lessons in convoy discipline, learning how to comport ourselves in light-armoured vehicles (lavs), and how troops would react in case of a strike. We practised donning masks in a hut filled with tear gas; I blew it and had to run outside, eyes streaming and throat burning with the sweet, acrid fumes. We learned how to scan the horizon for suspicious objects; every one of us failed to spot a camouflaged sniper in the tall grass a few metres away. We were even shown how to light a Coleman stove—apparently the best way to make friends in a lav is to start up the coffee while the soldiers secure the area.

Many of our classes served the dual purpose of preparing us for conflict while ensuring that our reporting would be accurate. When we screwed in our earplugs to watch a machine gunner blow a stack of cinder blocks into oblivion, leaving nothing but a small patch of burning grass, it impressed on us both the name of the machine gun (a C6) and the lesson (never take cover behind a cinder-block wall).