Brave Men All

[tomahawk6]

SGT Veinot is a really lucky guy. Great story.


http://www.thestar.com/printarticle/833910

PANJWAI DISTRICT, AFGHANISTAN—Every step they take could be their last, yet the Canadians of Oscar Company aren't cutting and running.

There is no battlefield hotter than the hamlets, vineyards and bazaars the company's soldiers patrol on foot each day in Kandahar province's eastern Panjwai district, heartland of the Taliban-led insurgency.

During an especially tough spate of attacks last month, soldiers at one of the company's most exposed bases say their commander offered to transfer any soldier who wanted to leave for a safer place.

None stepped forward. All wanted to stay in the fight.

No one could have faulted Sgt., Jeff Veinot for figuring it was his time to give up and go home when two improvised explosive devices blew up in front of him five weeks ago.

But he sweated hard at rehab, pushing himself through severe pain, so that he could persuade commanders that he was fit enough to battle on.

Veinot, a sapper in a combat engineering unit attached to Oscar Company, would rather that than suffer the thought of abandoning the men in his unit, all first-timers who depend on his hard-won experience to save lives.

“It goes beyond being friends when you're in the military, especially after you've performed operations like this,” Veinot, 34, of Hemford, N. S., said in an interview in a spartan frontline camp Thursday.

“It literally becomes like family. As much as the guys I've served with before are my brothers, these ones here are the guys you're training and mentoring. They're people you have to look after. They're more like kids to you.”

Sappers, who have the heavy responsibility of finding craftily hidden IEDs, landmines and other explosives, have suffered more casualties than any other Canadian units in Afghanistan. Veinot's name joined the list on June 5.

Around 7:30 in the morning, he was on foot in front of an armoured vehicle, searching for IEDs. Suddenly, explosives hidden in the road detonated, and threw him through the air.

“It felt like somebody hit me in the chest with a sledgehammer,” he told the Toronto Star. “The first charge basically knocked me to my knees. Then the second charge knocked me into the ditch.”

The device was wired to destroy an armoured vehicle. To make it harder for insurgents to learn from any mistakes, Veinot isn't allowed to say what was in the IED. But in sapper's terms, it was “high order: it went exactly how she's scheduled to go,” Veinot said.

Yet it didn't break a bone in Veinot's body. The blast wave and hard landing twisted several muscles along with his hips and back, but the sapper was able to get up, catch his breath, and do what was drilled to do: Get immediately back to work.

He checked to make sure no one else was hurt and radioed his base to let the chain of command know what had happened. He got the armoured vehicle backed up to a better place. Then he started searching for other IEDs.

Some six hours after he was almost killed, Veinot was on a medevac helicopter flying to Kandahar Airfield, where he was treated at Role 3, a state-of-the-art Canadian combat hospital.

Doctors told Veinot that if he couldn't get back to full-duty strength, able to carry about 45 kilograms of body armour, weapons, water, food and other essentials on a 12-hour foot patrol, he'd be sent back to Petawawa, Ont.

He did several weeks of physiotherapy and strength training with weights. A chiropractor worked on his back. A massage therapist rubbed his muscles back into shape.

As soon as Veinot thought he was ready to go back to war, Veinot did his own test. He suited up in full combat gear and went for a run on the airfield.

three overseas tours, starting in Bosnia in the fall of 2003. He moved to Kabul 10 months later and quickly ended up in Kandahar province, as increasingly sophisticated IEDs became the insurgents' weapons of choice.

Veinot married his wife Rebecca, who serves in the military back in Canada, in the fall of 2006 after seeing heavy fighting during Operation Medusa, during which Canadian forces battled large groups of well dug-in insurgents.

His strongest loyalty is not to an idea or a cause, but to the men and women who may go home in a box if he has a bad day at work.

“It's not about the paycheque, it's not about saving Afghanistan or doing what the politicians think,” Veinot said.

“It's about making sure that the guys, the sappers and the corporals below us are the guys that get to go and have as safe a trip as they can over here.”

Canadian sappers are good at finding IEDs with metal detectors, so the insurgents sometimes use wooden pressure plates that trigger explosives when a soldier or vehicle passes over.

They conceal some of the devices in trees or other spots difficult to see. On July 5, an Afghan National Army soldier on joint patrol with soldiers in Oscar Company, of the 1st Royal Canadian Regiment battle group, died in an IED blast in a quiet vineyard.

Canadian troops, carefully walking in each other's footsteps, passed the undetected IED, but the Afghan veered off the path, apparently to pluck a bunch of juicy green grapes. He was blown to bits.

Canadian Pte. Adam Dover is still walking patrols in Panjwai after a lucky, early June brush with an IED, made out of a stovepipe, wired to a mud wall surrounding a vineyard.

Dover, 25, of Oshawa, leaned over the wall to check for danger and saw a green string just as someone hiding nearby pulled it.

The blast sprayed a lethal cloud of rusty metal, including bits of chain link fence and an old butter knife and jackknife blades. Everything missed Dover. He didn't suffer a scratch.

When he returned to the area on patrol early this week, the troops found five freshly laid IEDs in a roughly 200-metre radius. Like the soldiers he walks with, Dover knows the risks and just keeps going.

“If anything, it just taught me to do things differently — do them better,” he said.

Specific bases and other details can't be named under military rules governing reporters embedded with Canadian troops. One of the newest sees some of the most action.

Each day patrols go out beyond the razor wire, they are either shot at, or they find IEDs waiting to kill or maim them.

“You think about it, but there's nothing you can really do about it — besides doing the drills that we've been taught,” said Cpl. Brett Irwin, 23, of Brampton. “So there's no reason just to stress about something you can't really control beyond what you're already doing.

“There's really no point in thinking, ‘Is it going to be this step? Is it going to be this step?' You'll just go crazy.”

For soldiers such as Cpl. Steve Collins, the only thing harder than being in Afghanistan is being somewhere else when your buddies are here.

Collins was on home leave recently in Windsor when the latest bad news from the war zone made him long to be back in Afghanistan.

“When the bullets start flying, all that stuff you see on the news doesn't matter,” he said. “It's about us.”

They may be putting their lives on the line far from home, but they are still Canadian, so each day, after members of Oscar Company walk through hell and back, they sit around, make fun of themselves and have a good laugh.

Back home, with each news report of a Canadian soldier dying on Afghan soil, support for the almost nine-year war wanes. But the men and women waging it see things differently. They think they're gradually regaining the upper hand.

The feel like they're winning and want to go home certain that their enemy is defeated.

“The progress we have made is we've found they're not as big as they think they are,” said Christian Cieplik, 28, of Toronto. “There's not as many of them out there, and they don't have the influence they think they do — or that we thought they did at first.

“We get into that town and we can pretty much go wherever the hell we want. We have to build that up.”