Fighting for the idiots back home

Globe and Mail:

Private Francis Archambault takes a slow pull from his cigarette as he scans the lunar-like landscape of jagged cliffs and rugged hills before him.

He contemplates threats of possible Taliban fighters lying in wait in the valley down below without the slightest flinch. The scorching heat? An annoyance now; commonplace in time. And the countless little mounds of earth and rocks that line Afghanistan's dirt roads under which an improvised explosive device could lurk? “Destiny,” the 23-year-old soldier answers with a smile.

But when the conversation shifts toward people back home in his native province of Quebec who oppose his participation in NATO's fight against the Taliban insurgency, Pte. Archambault's smile quickly fades.

“They look at us like dimwits,” he said. “I don't want to be looked at like that. … I've once had a woman tell me, ‘If there weren't people like you, there wouldn't be any wars.' That's angering.”

Behind him, soldiers of the B Company of the Royal 22nd Regiment, known as the Vandoos, slowly emerge from their light armoured vehicles stopped on a plateau overlooking the Arghandab River Valley.

Sweating profusely through heavy body armour, the Quebec-based troops march into Taliban territory for the first time since they landed in Kandahar two weeks ago.

Like Pte. Archambault, most of the soldiers interviewed seemed unfazed, and animated by the belief that their presence in Afghanistan will, in the end, improve the lives of its people.

And, like Pte. Archambault, they were all angered and puzzled at the anti-war sentiment of their fellow Quebeckers.

Sergeant Steve Dufour, a veteran of several tours of duty abroad, including in Haiti and Bosnia, recalled how he was taken to task at a Montreal Alouettes football game by a young university student protesting against Canada's involvement in Afghanistan.

“I asked her: ‘Can you go to school if you want?'” Sgt. Dufour remembered. “Well, a little girl here will be found [dead] if she says she wants to go to school.”

“At the end of the day, we're here because we believe in the mission,” Master Corporal David Martel asserted. “And if the fact that B Company was here would have helped 10 people, then it would have been worth it.”

Perhaps their anger is compounded by the fact that the Vandoos, with typical regimental pride, are already making a point of representing their culture among NATO's multinational force based at Kandahar.

Soldiers from Quebec started landing at Kandahar Airfield about two weeks ago, to replace troops with the Petawawa-based Royal Canadian Regiment and the Alberta-based Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. In two weeks, they have slowly started to transform the culture of the battlefield.

They've rechristened the iconic LAVs, or light armoured vehicles, as VBLs or véhicules blindés légers. They've started teaching rudimentary notions of French to their Afghan interpreters.

And they refer to each other as les boyz, an affectionate moniker that crackles across their radio system every time they rush out of the relative safety of their armoured vehicles and into the unknown of the south Afghanistan countryside.

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You don't get to see many stories about the French Canadian fighters, but it appears they have their on espirit de corps, despite the misinformed back home. When you consider what these troops have been told, you have to think that the people have been taught to be that ignorant of warfare and the situation in Afghanistan. They couldn't possible be that ignorant on their own.