The Canadian army is very small - many organizations claim to be like a "family" but the Canadian Army is a family. In the larger world there may be 6 degrees of separation but in the Canadian Army there may be only two. So every loss is a wound for all. Every loss is indeed the death of a brother.
This remarkable book is a revelation of what it may mean to be part of a true Band of Brothers - a world where the most senior general lends a master corporal his own wedding ring so that he can ask his girl to marry him - a world where the entire platoon comes to the home of a fallen comrade and spends a week in the community celebrating his life - a world where a 40 plus year old widow enlists so that she can continue to be part of the family - a world where Colonels weep for their men.
The book also causes the reader to think more deeply about war and soldiers. It is politically correct to feel that all war and everything about it is bad. But we discover, that for all its terror and for all the losses, for a soldier war is what he lives for. It is when he also discovers whether he is any good at his life's work. We discover how good our soldiers are. Surprisingly, for we always think the less of ourselves, in Afghanistan, we are considered the heavy weights who punch well above our weight.
We discover that while war exhausts a person more than any other activity, it also makes him more alive.
We discover that PTSD is much more prevalent in peacekeeping than in the kind of situation that we find in Afghanistan. In peacekeeping the kit was awful and the impotence high - imagine simply witnessing atrocity? But in Afghanistan our soldiers can take the initiative and they are very well equipped and have rules of engagement that make sense.
We discover a new kind of woman soldier - who are at home in this strange world, as is of course the "Blatch", and who are no longer seen as odd.
We discover how the families of our soldiers have been integrated into the mission and we see how the worst of all news is given and how the families are supported when what they all fear the most occurs.
This is not the civil service in green that was the sadness of our forces for many years. Implicit throughout the book is that someone really knows that he is doing. I think that someone might be called Rick Hillier.
We discover how great our local field leadership is too which also says something more about General Hillier -
Brig- Genl Dave Fraser to LTC Ian Hope, in radio orders given at 11.30pm on July 17 "You need to recapture Nawa and Garmser by 1600 hours.
Hope to Fraser: "Roger that. Recapture Nawa and Garmser by 1600 hours."
Fraser: "Any questions?"
Hope: "Just one: Where are Nawa and Garmser?'
Not only do we routinely pull off tough missions, but the Cols take all the risks that their men do - they lead by example. They also tend to do the really terrible things like personally extract the burnt and mutilated bodies of their dead so that the buddies in the platoon would not have to remember their friend like that. There is all this bull in the public service about "Servant Leadership". Here you see it for real at all levels from the LTC down to the Master Corporal.
We discover the central frustration of the mission. That we have to go back again and again and take the same ground because the ANP, the police, cannot hold it - we learn how complex this work is.
But most of all, we learn how fortunate we are to have those wonderful people wearing our uniform.
It is a mystery to me how, in a nation, so cut off from the reality of war, that we can once again have the kind of army that we had in 1917. A pathfinder Army.
A small army that can think and adapt. A small army that is lead by men and women of an integrity and skill that put our business and public organizations to shame. A small army largely made up from men and women from small town Canada who have that can do attitude that used to be the hallmark of Canadians.
Who else could tell this story but "Blatch"? A woman who acknowledges that she knows of only two soldiers who swear more than she. A woman who not only craps in combat but tells us all about it. A woman who shares the hardships, the joys, the terrors, the losses and the fun. A woman who loves her boys and who is loved back.
She writes with such a love and a passion - I could not put the book down except when my eyes were so full of tears that I could no longer see.
It is exciting, it's very funny, it's very sad. But in the end it is heroic. Not in a little boy's view of heroic but in the most mythic sense of people who live for each other in undertaking a very hard task.
At the end of the book, "Blatch" goes back to see everyone to see how they are.
"Eight months later, Hope (LTC Ian Hope) answers my email form an airport lounge somewhere. I wrote back to tell him of one of the stories - bawdy and funny, loving and sad, always brutally honest - I'd heard from the troops.
You must miss them so fucking much," I said. " I can hardly bear to write about them sometimes. I find them so beautiful."
"You understand what I miss," he wrote back. "I am Odysseus."
This is a wonderful book about wonderful people written by a wonderful person - who has by the way a wonderful dog but that is another story.
