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Twenty-five years ago, Canada went to war in Afghanistan. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, Canada joined a coalition to pursue al-Qaeda and unseat the Taliban.
The consequences of the war in Afghanistan continue to ripple through our politics, the military, and the lives of those who served. The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan tells their stories. We examine why Canada went to war in Afghanistan, what happened there, and the war’s complicated legacy.
The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan is a podcast by the Canadian War Museum.
• Narrator: Anna Maria Tremonti
• Historian: Andrew Burtch
• Producers: Lisa Gabriele and Neil Morrison
• Associate producer: Hailey Choi
• Mixing: Cameron McIver
• Executive producers: Jenny Ellison and Steve McCullough
Many voices heard in The Long War came from the Canadian War Museum’s oral history project In Their Own Voices: Stories from Canadian Veterans and Their Loved Ones. Both these projects are generously funded by donors including the A. Britton Smith Family; the Azrieli Foundation; Arthur B.C. Drache, C.M., K.C., and Judy Young Drache; The Royal Canadian Legion; The Legion National Foundation; Friends of the Canadian War Museum; the Crabtree Foundation; Robert Stollery, in honour of his service in the Second World War; Colonel (Ret’d) Stanley A. Milner, O.C., A.O.E., M.S.M., C.D., LL.D.; and individuals from across Canada.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: [Music begins]. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti, and this is The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan. By the summer of 2006, Canadian soldiers had already paid a terrible price in Kandahar. Diplomat Glyn Berry was killed by a suicide bomber in January. Then in May, Captain Nichola Goddard became the first Canadian female soldier killed in combat. But what was coming would be even worse. In the Panjwaii and Zhari districts in southwest Kandahar province, hundreds of Taliban fighters were massing and getting ready to fight a conventional battle against NATO forces. And they were planning to take Kandahar City, just 30 kilometres away.This is the story of Operation Medusa, the largest battle Canadian forces fought in Afghanistan. Twelve Canadian soldiers died: five during the major combat operations, five in bombings, and two in mortar-and-rocket-propelled grenade attacks during the reconstruction phase. Dozens more were injured, making 2006 the war’s bloodiest year yet. [Music ends].
ANDREW BURTCH: Over the spring and summer of 2006, the battleground was being shaped by the increasing presence and changing tactics of the Taliban as they were reintegrating and essentially entering that area in strength.
TREMONTI: Andrew Burtch, the Post-1945 Historian at the Canadian War Museum, is our guide this season. The area he’s talking about is the Panjwaii and Zhari districts, parts of the Taliban’s spiritual homeland. By summer 2006, the Taliban were making a calculated bet. The NATO alliance was taking over from American forces in southern Afghanistan. It had never fought a major ground war, and the Taliban were about to test NATO in their own backyard.
BURTCH: So, Panjwaii is, and the districts adjoining it, are in that greenbelt of agricultural activity characterized not by kind of desert conditions, but these irrigation ditches and wadis and village compounds that have existed there for quite some time, probably centuries, with hardened mud and thatch buildings, irrigation ditches that basically run like trench lines, that are so thick that they can stop fairly sizable munitions from penetrating them.
TREMONTI: The dense landscape of the Panjwaii and Zhari districts was ideal terrain for the Taliban to establish supply routes and ambush points throughout the region. In the centre was the White School, a fortified compound and a key Taliban stronghold used to launch attacks.
BURTCH: So that’s what the significance of the White School was. It really did prompt that strategic shift and redirection to very deliberate operations by NATO and partners to operate in and to claim that area and pacify that area to eliminate the threat to Kandahar City and also to the coalition presence in the Zhari district and in Panjwaii district and areas in between.
TREMONTI: On August 3, 2006, Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope led a composite force including a platoon from Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, or PPCLI, across the Arghandab river. The goal: clear out the Taliban and secure the White School. Intelligence reported a Taliban commander in the area, surrounded by an estimated 20 fighters. As the Canadians approached the White School, the Taliban opened fire. They were caught in a three-sided kill zone. By the end of the day, four Canadian soldiers were dead: Sergeant Vaughan Ingram, Corporal Christopher Reid, Corporal Bryce Keller, and Private Kevin Dallaire. About a dozen more were wounded. The battle was a wake-up call.
BURTCH: It really did indicate the emerging threat that later came to be painted in intelligence as basically mustering to deal a signature blow to NATO by occupying or severely endangering Kandahar city.
OMER LAVOIE: We actually got off the plane in Dubai to transition into tactical airlift on the 3rd of August.
TREMONTI: Lieutenant-Colonel Omer Lavoie was travelling to Kandahar Airfield the same day as the White School battle. He was stepping into an escalating crisis.
LAVOIE: So the first thing that the Sergeant-Major and I were told as we got off the airplane was that four members of the Princess Patricia’s battle group had just been killed, which immediately set the tone of what the 1st Battalion, the RCR battle group, was about to get into.
TREMONTI: Lavoie ordered his soldiers to seize the high ground at Masum Ghar and locate a Taliban mortar threat. Masum Ghar is the mountain that dominates the Panjwaii district, providing observation over the battlefield. From that high ground, you could see across the Arghandab river into the Taliban heartland. The company was headed by then-Major Michael Wright. Wright is now a Lieutenant-General and the Commander of the Canadian Army.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: We arrived, we linked up with the Afghan National Police who were on the high feature, and I had a discussion with him to find out what he thought about where we might see any enemy coming from. We were very much arrayed, so we were focused north looking towards not only the Argandab river but also the White School in Pashmul where 1 PPCLI had had their casualties just a couple of weeks earlier.
TREMONTI: And so when you got there, when did things start to turn?
WRIGHT: Well, things started to turn relatively quickly.
LAVOIE: I still remember clearly my operations officer came out to get me to say Masum Ghar is under a significant Taliban attack.
TREMONTI: It was August 19. Major Wright had placed his forces on Masum Ghar — he estimates between 40 and 50 soldiers, and several light armoured vehicles. They were mainly watching north toward the known Taliban positions.
WRIGHT: We had arrived, I had placed everyone, I was just sitting down to write confirmatory orders. And I heard a pop from the west, and I looked up, and where there had previously been an Afghan National Police Observation Post, there was a figure who was obviously Taliban who had just fired a rocket-propelled grenade towards us. And the RPG landed probably within about 7 or 8 feet of me and luckily didn’t explode, because that would have — I don’t think I’d be with you doing this interview today. But then almost immediately after that a firefight started that lasted the better part of a few hours.
TREMONTI: The Afghan National Police positions on Masum Ghar had been overrun. The Taliban were already on the mountain. From their positions, one of Wright’s officers could see wave after wave of Taliban fighters trying to climb up to the Canadian position. [Addressing Wright]. Where did they go, those Afghan National Police?
WRIGHT: The Afghan National Police, so, that’s a question that to this day I’m not entirely sure. My assumption is a lot of them went to the Panjwaii district centre. You know, some of them would have been killed, unfortunately, but then some of them as well would have gone to the Panjwaii district centre. Because over the course of what was a few hours of firefighting between ourselves and the Taliban, it became clear, first of all, that it was a very substantial force that was attacking us.
TREMONTI: Lavoie offered Wright reinforcements. But in the dark, on those even more narrow roads, Wright was worried more vehicles would just add to the chaos, so he made a calculated decision.
WRIGHT: So what I said is, you know, we’ve got it right now. We’ll be able to hold on to the fight here. But then we were starting to be concerned about running short of ammunition.
TREMONTI: They went through the town of Bazaar-e-Panjwaii and linked up with another platoon for resupply. At sunrise, Wright’s company was ordered to evacuate the Afghan National Police wounded in the firefight.
WRIGHT: It was then in daylight that we realized what a significant battle it had been, because at no other point during the mission did I see Taliban bodies left behind. But as we were going back into Bazaar-e-Panjwaii, we actually saw some Taliban bodies that were still there. And then what we found out later is anywhere from 200 to 400 Taliban soldiers that had attacked Masum Ghar that evening.
TREMONTI: [Music begins]. The Taliban had massed in force, prepared for conventional warfare against coalition forces. And though there were no Canadian casualties, by some estimates, Canadians had killed between 72 and 100 Taliban fighters. This wasn’t the counter-insurgency mission they’d trained for.
WRIGHT: We were expecting more insurgency-type actions by the Taliban. So you know, hit and run ambushes as we saw, IEDs as we saw, but to actually see them attack in the numbers that they did showed the strength of the forces of the Taliban that were in the area and how much capability they had. [Music ends].
TREMONTI: For the new Battle Group Commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Omer Lavoie, the implications were clear.
LAVOIE: And so right there it confirmed my suspicions where a conventional mechanized infantry company, which has a lot of firepower, was under attack by about 300 or so Taliban insurgents, which was almost like three to four times the number that was being portrayed to us in the intelligence picture. And so that sent a very strong message to NATO that they had a problem on their hands.
TREMONTI: Within days, Brigadier-General David Fraser gave Lavoie a warning order: It was time to prepare for a major combat operation in Panjwaii and Zhari.
DAVID FRASER: [Music begins]. We knew after Mike Wright’s attack that there was something big out there. Then we knew when Ian Hope got hit at the White School, something big was out there.
TREMONTI: Operation Medusa was about to begin. It was the biggest combat operation since the invasion, and would involve air support, artillery, armour, and hundreds of ground troops. [Music ends].
BURTCH: Operation Medusa was conceived as a means to isolate the combatants in that terrain, then to create two hard points that would then close in and close on the Taliban, just like a hammer and anvil. One from the south heading up to the north, and one from the north heading down to the south. And then they would sweep westward in order to eliminate as many of the Taliban threat as possible over the course of several weeks.
FRASER: I mean, Medusa was the biggest fight that NATO has ever had.
TREMONTI: Brigadier-General David Fraser commanded Regional Command South for NATO from Kandahar Airfield. He was responsible for coalition forces across southern Afghanistan.
FRASER: The Taliban took Canada on and they took NATO on specifically at that time because they thought that we, Canada, did not have the will to fight. And they thought that NATO, who had never been in combat, would not succeed.
TREMONTI: The plan called for three days of aerial bombardment, artillery strikes, reconnaissance. Softening up the Taliban positions and determining the best direction for the ground assault. Intelligence suggested 500 Taliban fighters were dug in around Zhari and possibly as many as 1,000 in Panjwaii. Then, September 2, the first day of Operation Medusa, disaster struck. A British Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft crashed after in-flight refueling, about 20 kilometres west of Kandahar City. Everyone on board was killed.
FRASER: Fourteen people were on that plane, and it had an equipment malfunction, and it crashed, and it was a huge surveillance capability. The largest ramp ceremony I ever went on.
TREMONTI: The single largest loss of British forces in Afghanistan. And it meant that when Lavoie’s troops crossed the Arghandab river into those Taliban defensive positions, they would do it with less ability to see what was waiting for them.
FRASER: But that was just the reality of war. And we hadn’t even started the battle yet, and we lost 14 people. Yeah. Everything that could go wrong was going wrong.
TREMONTI: While Fraser commanded from Kandahar Airfield, Lavoie — his Battle Group Commander — was on the ground in Panjwaii. [Addressing Lavoie]. I want to talk about the start of Medusa under then-Major-General David Fraser. What kind of a leader was Fraser?
LAVOIE: To be professional, I’ll just say that we had very different command styles and very different, I think, perspectives of where commanders ought to be when you’re making decisions that are going to affect soldiers’ lives on the battlefield. And my take on it has always been, if I’m making decisions that are gonna affect my soldiers on the battlefield, then I ought to be there with them.
TREMONTI: The plan was to seize battle positions on September 2, then conduct three days of aerial bombardment and reconnaissance before attacking across the Arghandab river toward the White School. Three days to find the Taliban’s defensive positions, determine the best direction to attack, and clear the improvised explosive devices from the river crossing. Early on September 2, Lavoie’s troop took their positions on Masum Ghar without much trouble. Then, sitting in his tactical headquarters on the mountain that night, Lavoie got an order from Brigadier-General David Fraser to begin the attack. Not in three days, as planned, but in three hours.
FRASER: I didn’t know Omer until he got on the ground, and I asked him to do almost Mission Impossible.
LAVOIE: And at first I thought, okay, it must mean 0100 like three days from now, which would have been the plan. But then it was like, no, 0100 like in three hours from now.
TREMONTI: It was a controversial order to accelerate the attack. Fraser was under immense pressure from multiple directions. The Americans were concerned that Operation Medusa would use precious assets that could be tied up in one place indefinitely. The Deputy Commander of ISAF was U.S. Major-General Benjamin Freakley. He was under pressure from Combined Forces Command and US Central Command, or CENTCOM. They wanted the operation to move faster. ISAF headquarters in Kabul also wanted a win for strategic effect with the Afghans and their wavering NATO allies. And Fraser believed the intelligence picture had shifted — that in fact the enemy wasn’t occupying Pashmul in the numbers originally estimated. It was felt that more reconnaissance, followed by bombardment, would produce diminishing returns. And the allied organizations temporarily deployed for Medusa could only be held in place for a limited period, possibly just seven days, before they’d have to redeploy elsewhere.
FRASER: And at a certain point, I was getting a lot of pressure from everyone. We are gonna run out of steam here. We’re gonna run out of troops. We're going to have to start pulling things back, and balancing that off with the intelligence picture. That’s why we accelerated. Anna Maria, in hindsight, in hindsight, I would’ve done the same thing, because the success or failure of this operation, in the end, it was my decision. If it was a failure, the only thing people needed to remember is Dave Fraser — I failed. But if it was success, everybody can say they were part of the success. But in hindsight, and the judgment at the time, we needed to do what we did.
TREMONTI: But Lavoie had different concerns: His soldiers hadn’t reconnoitered the river crossing, so they didn't know where the IEDs were, and he didn't share Fraser’s confidence in the new intelligence. Rushing in blind, he said, could get his troops killed.
LAVOIE: And, you know, I was on the brigade net, which means brigade radio network, which means almost every soldier in the battle group can listen to that radio. And I just said, “no.” We were not prepared to do that. We hadn’t done a reconnaissance of the river. We knew from, with the Patricia’s experience on the 3rd of August that the place was filthy with improvised explosive devices. And I just didn’t see what the, what we would be gaining by going earlier. And I couldn’t really explain, you know, if it was giving us a tactical advantage somehow, then okay. But that wasn’t clear.
TREMONTI: Lavoie refused the order over the open radio network, where his soldiers could hear him. Fraser ordered him off the net and told him to call on a secure satellite phone.
FRASER: And Omer and I had a lively conversation and he expressed his opinions. But at the end of the day, as I said to Omer, there are only two people here that are gonna make this thing happen. It’s you and me, because Canada is on the firing line. We are at the tip of the spear, and I need to know that you’re with me and you’ve got the mission. And he did it. So, as much as we might have had some lively conversations, Omer, you know, did what he was asked to do.
TREMONTI: Fraser agreed to let them wait until first light, but it still only gave Lavoie a few hours to plan.
LAVOIE: I then convened my company commanders, who I think thought that I’d lost my mind, that we were gonna conduct an attack at first light, which is about three or four hours of preparation time which was, you know, not very much to do something at that scale. So, you know, came up with a plan and the adage in the military is there’s two kinds of plans: ones that might work and ones that don’t.
TREMONTI: Lavoie ordered Charles Company of 1st Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment to cross the Arghandab river in the pre-dawn darkness of September 3.
LAVOIE: Surprisingly that part of the operation went okay. We got across with the engineers and didn’t hit IEDs.
FRASER: Everything starts off fine. We had the plan, everything starts off fine. Charles Company gets onto the objective, everything’s going all right, and then all hell breaks loose.
TREMONTI: The White School — that fortified compound where the Canadians had already fought one month earlier. The Taliban were waiting for them. Four soldiers were killed: Private William Cushley, Warrant Officer Frank Mellish, Warrant Officer Richard Nolan, Sergeant Shane Stachnik. Ten more were wounded, including Master Warrant Officer John Barnes, who was close friends with Mellish.
JOHN BARNES: I found myself sitting in the back of a LAV, unable to hear, unable to stand, and my soldiers were still out on the ground fighting for their lives. And at that moment, and even now, part of me feels that I failed them. That our team failed them. And the fact that I wasn’t on the ground to help them is something that I live with every day. Maybe it’s guilt. Maybe it’s thinking that there was something I could have done differently, I’m not sure. But at that moment, sitting in the back of that LAV, I felt like a complete failure, absolutely.
TREMONTI: To Lavoie, this wasn’t an ambush, because the Taliban were in defensive positions, already dug in and waiting.
LAVOIE: An ambush to me is hit and run, but they continued to fight and I had to order a tactical withdrawal and then use some significant air power to cover that withdrawal and to, at least at that point, break the attack of the Taliban and get my troop back across the river and medevac back to base.
FRASER: We had been fighting over that piece of ground for months, if not years. Ian Hope had fought over it. That was Ian Hope’s last fight, was on the White School. That’s when we knew things had all changed. And then it was Omer’s first fight, and it was a bloody fight. And again, the Taliban got the better of us on those two engagements, but it was the last time they ever got the better of us on that engagements. But, it was off to a really bad start.
MARK GASPAROTTO: The insurgents are masters of that terrain. They are really the only ones who can blend in and move without being noticed, whether they’re moving within a sea of people or otherwise.
TREMONTI: Major Mark Gasparotto, Commander of 23 Field Squadron, fought that day.
GASPAROTTO: It’s very difficult for a coalition soldier to move around covertly, especially during the day. So, the order to launch early — and there’s been lots written about that — is one I still don’t fully understand why we did it.
TREMONTI: For Lavoie the loss of four of his soldiers was personal.
LAVOIE: In my mind, there’s probably no more of an emotionally charged place in the world than on the battlefield when you’re in a close fight and you’re losing, and you’re losing soldiers. And, you know, and to put that in perspective, I mean, one of those soldiers I lost, Rick Nolan, I mean, he was my brother’s Best Man. My brother’s also RCR. So when you get to the casualty collection point and you talk to the Sergeant Major and you ask, “Who’s in those body bags” and you get that answer back. And, you know, my first thought was, “How do I tell my brother I just got his Best Man killed in a firefight?”
TREMONTI: [Addressing Lavoie]. You just said, “I just got my brother’s Best Man killed.” That you did that. Is that how you saw it? Did you carry that guilt? That you were responsible for getting them killed?
LAVOIE: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, I can’t see any other way to think about it. And I think that’s just, I’m sure you’ve heard the term, the cliché, “the burden of command.” And that’s just the cross you carry as a Commander. That you put soldiers in harm’s way and that they get killed following your orders. Now, it’s not me who killed them, it really is the Taliban, but it was my orders. And, you know, on too many occasions had to, you know, give that speech in the back of a Herc during a ramp ceremony where, excuse me, you know, where and I’m sure you’ve covered or you’ve seen it where at the end of the ceremony and you know, sometimes four or five caskets are in the back of that Herc. And their closest buddies are allowed to come in just to pay their final respects and then get back out. And you just feel the weight on you as the Commander. And these are very tough men and they’re choking up and whatever and look into their eyes, and I’d always told them at the same time that, “if you want, you know, if you want to know who’s responsible for your buddy in that flag-draped coffin, you’re looking him. It’s me.”
TREMONTI: [Addressing Lavoie]. I have never heard anyone say that. I’m, I’m . . . that’s just such a burden to carry.
LAVOIE: Yeah, well I guess, the responsibility, you know, continues to go up the chain of command as well. But clearly, I mean, it’s . . . as you get higher up the echelon, it gets less personal, right?
TREMONTI: The anger Lavoie felt wasn’t his alone. Bruce Moncur was a Corporal with Charles Company.
BRUCE MONCUR: There was a lot of anger, I recall. This was probably one of the first times I’d seen some of the lower — like the privates and the corporals — basically defiant to the warrants and the master warrants and the officers. And I guess when your life is on the line and you see how much of a collateral damage you are, I think that the rank can quickly fall apart. I wouldn’t say it was mutinous, but I would definitely say that there was a lot of anger about how the plan was implemented and how it went down.
TREMONTI: [Music begins and ends]. Charles Company had suffered the worst day of their lives. Now, on the next morning, September 4, the Company prepared to attack the White School again.
LAVOIE: I was just about to give confirmatory orders from my light armoured vehicle. And I’d just stuck my head down the turret to get on the radio and heard this explosion like right next to my vehicle.
TREMONTI: An American A-10 Thunderbolt, called a “Warthog,” was flying overhead to provide close air support. The U.S. pilot, a veteran of 60 combat missions, saw smoke coming from below. He thought it was an enemy position and made the decision to strafe the area with his 30-millimetre cannon. It was, in fact, a garbage fire, lit by the Canadian soldiers from Charles Company.
LAVOIE: And at first I thought, okay, maybe it’s a Taliban rocket or a Taliban mortar round that had come in. But then seconds later, the A-10s had this very eerie sound, sounds like a circular saw, and I heard that sound like a second later and knew it was a friendly fire event.
TREMONTI: Major Wright was a couple hundred metres away from the attack.
WRIGHT: So the A-10 Thunderbolt is an American airplane and the main gun they have has a very distinctive sound. And shortly after hearing that, I heard the Battle Group Commander Omer Lavoie’s voice on the radio alerting his headquarters that there was a mass casualty situation on Masum Ghar with Charles Company.
TREMONTI: The American A-10 strafing killed Private Mark Anthony Graham, a former Canadian Olympic athlete. More than 30 Canadian soldiers were wounded, many seriously, including Corporal Bruce Moncur.
MONCUR: And I knew it was bad because I couldn’t quite lift my head. And I grabbed my legs, and I did an extremities check, and I realized that all my arms and legs were still there, and I just let out this like sigh of relief, like this [inhales and exhales]. And as soon as I did that, I think my head came down and the blood from my head wound started pouring down. And I’m starting to try to catch the blood in my hands. And as I see it fill, almost overflowing, like you use the sink, and you fill your hands with the water to put it on your face. That’s how much blood I had in my hands.
FRASER: At which point they came over and knocked on my door. And when somebody knocks on your door at ten to six, you know you didn’t win anything. And my team knew at that stage in the game to give me the bad news up front, and that’s why they said, “One killed, 34 wounded.” And I said, “Where and who?” And it was Panjwaii and it’s Charles Company. And it was just disconcerting because, you know, they were supposed to be in a safe area and it was a friendly fire incident.
TREMONTI: The tension between Lavoie and Fraser reached a breaking point. Charles Company had been decimated twice in two days. Lavoie refused to send his soldiers back into the kill zone without more preparation.
LAVOIE: Well, I mean, clearly it was heated. I was pretty pissed off, to say the least, with that headquarters. And I essentially said that if the headquarters wants us to do this a third time, then we’re going to need to find a new Battle Group Commander because I wasn’t going to do it.
TREMONTI: After the friendly fire incident on September 4, after the heated confrontation, Fraser and Lavoie regrouped. Charles Company was mostly out of action. Lavoie’s battle group, now led by Bravo Company, would attack from the north instead.
LAVOIE: And it went fine. We had a lot of combat power and we were moving. The Taliban weren’t oriented north. They were oriented south because that’s where they thought we were coming from. So, day by day, we just started wrapping up these objectives.
TREMONTI: [Music begins]. Canadian and coalition forces ground through Panjwaii and Zhari, village by village, compound by compound. The fighting was close-quarters combat in grape fields, irrigation ditches, and mud-walled compounds.
JOHN BARNES: Operation Medusa, and Afghanistan as a whole, really changed how I looked at the military and how Canadian soldiers are looked at by others.
TREMONTI: Master Warrant Officer John Barnes.
BARNES: I mean, I say it was the best and the worst days of my life. [Music ends]. How could it be both? Well, I mean the worst days of my life, because I lost friends. I lost soldiers. I saw them die in front of me. I saw them bleeding out in front of me. But I also saw young Canadian men and women be heroes. Things that, you know, you only hear about in movies. Watching these young kids running through a hail of bullets to help somebody else was very, very enlightening for me. So the best and the worst days of my life.
TREMONTI: On September 14, the remnants of Charles Company were among the patched-together coalition that finally took the White School, with little resistance from the Taliban. Three days later, on September 17, NATO declared Operation Medusa complete. But Major Wright wasn’t celebrating.
WRIGHT: I don’t think it felt like a victory. It felt like, okay, you know, the initial objective we had to push the Taliban out of that area of Pashmul was a success. But I think at that point, it was a, what are the next steps going to be?
TREMONTI: Before they could establish those next steps, a suicide bomber struck a Canadian patrol in Panjwaii district on September 18. Four more soldiers from Major Wright’s company were killed. This was the same company that had held Masum Ghar on August 19 against hundreds of Taliban fighters. The same soldiers who’d fought through two weeks of Operation Medusa.
WRIGHT: So it was two of our platoons who were doing a dismounted patrol. And I can no longer remember the name of the village, but it was to the west of Pashmul. And so, yeah, four soldiers: Shane Keating, Glenn Arnold, Keith Morley, and David Byers, were killed when a suicide bomber, you know, basically had made himself into a human claymore. Got too close to the platoons, blew himself up, resulted in the deaths of those four soldiers and then the serious wounding of a number of other soldiers.
TREMONTI: [Addressing Wright]. You can remember their names so quickly all these years later.
WRIGHT: Yeah, sorry, I just need to take a minute. Yeah, so, you know, absolutely I remember their names 20 years later. You know, it’ll be something I’ll never be able to forget. Certainly every year that goes by, I think I think more about them.
FRASER: You know, no one believed that Canada could have done this mission, and we did, and we kept ramping it up because we wanted to win. So I think we have to be proud that we didn’t back away from anything.
BURTCH: Medusa became this kind of linchpin of the signature Canadian operation in Kandahar with it being likened as, you know, the battle that saved Afghanistan or the battle that had been likened to Vimy Ridge. So it was significant and it was a victory. It was a victory that didn’t necessarily solve the broader problem of addressing the insurgency or creating the conditions for a greater victory. You know, it wasn’t the battle that saved Afghanistan, we know. But it definitely provided a greater degree of security to Kandahar than would have otherwise been the case.
TREMONTI: Before the fighting season had even begun in 2006, Fraser had presented a slide to Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Rick Hillier, warning him that they could expect as many as 42 soldiers dead between February and November of that year. Hillier’s response was blunt: Take that slide out and never show it again. The prediction proved close to right. By the end of that year, 36 Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, compared to one the year before. It was the deadliest year of Canada’s war. Dozens more were injured, and estimates put enemy casualties at more than 1,000 dead. Numbers that still haunt Fraser.
FRASER: I actually, I’m kind of numb about it all cause it was just so much. It’s just numbing. The death, the death toll, it just disgusts me. Too many killed, on both sides. But you know, I would look at Canada and just say, “we did what was asked of us and we should be proud of what we did.” Yeah, we accomplished what we needed it to do. It was a shift. The Taliban after that didn’t attack us like they did before, which was in direct gunfire. They went to the insurgency: IEDs. That was the big change. It became more dangerous for all of us.
TREMONTI: On November 1, Fraser’s command of Regional Command South was handed over to an incoming Dutch general. The Canadians had endured their trials in Panjwaii. [Music begins]. But the Taliban remained, striking even as the Canadians and their allies attempted to build on their victories. More on this volatile chapter later this season. Next time on The Long War, Canadians attach yellow ribbons to lamp posts. Crowds gather on highway overpasses as flag-draped coffins make their way along a route renamed the Highway of Heroes. The war that had seemed distant was landing on doorsteps across the country. But as casualties mounted, so did the questions.
JOHN MANLEY: The soldiers were very visible. The LAVs rolling into Kandahar were quite a spectacular sight. But, you know, what were we doing there to make their lives better? Not evident.
TREMONTI: Protests break out across the country — and one family begins to grieve.
KATE GODDARD: I was 16, 17 and invulnerable. She was my big sister and also invulnerable. And so I don’t think it ever, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that she would get hurt.
TREMONTI: The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan was produced by Lisa Gabriele and Neil Morrison. Our associate producer is Hailey Choi. The series was mixed by Cameron McIver. Executive producers from the Canadian War Museum are Jenny Ellison and Steve McCullough. Andrew Burtch is our historian throughout this series. The Commanders you heard in this episode have all moved on from those battlefields in Panjwaii. David Fraser, who commanded NATO forces in southern Afghanistan as a Brigadier-General, was promoted to Major-General and retired in 2011 after 31 years of service. Omer Lavoie, the Battle Group Commander, rose to the rank of Lieutenant-General before retiring in 2021. And Michael Wright, the Company Commander who held Masum Ghar, is now Lieutenant-General Michael Wright, Commander of the Canadian Army. Some of the veterans who you heard in this episode were interviewed for the Museum’s oral history project called In Their Own Voices. To learn more, visit warmuseum.ca or see the links in the show notes. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening. [Music ends].