by Tod Strickland It almost goes without saying, but this is a long tour. However, after over eight months away from home, and less than three to go, it is becoming apparent there is light at the end of the tunnel, and in a relatively short time we will all be heading home.
A tour this long has advantages to the mission, allowing people to become far more acquainted with one another, their jobs and the operating environment. A six-month tour, which is the norm, does not give that level of familiarity. But, having an intellectual understanding of a tour length, and actually living through it are two very different things. In order to get through, coping mechanisms are needed. As we start looking at the end-date, with occasional folks counting days, we are seeing more of these strategies coming into play.
Adopting a routine is obvious. Simply put, there is something comforting about controlling one’s time: when you get up, your morning coffee, breaks during the day, meal times, and when you break off from work. To be sure, there are always things that you cannot control, but exerting a little influence over the day seems to help some people through. One of my guys might be accused of taking this a little far. His routine includes calculating how many of each significant event in his week remain until the end of the tour. This has grown to include the fact that there are only eleven “ice cream Fridays” left until he flies back to Nova Scotia.
Physical training, or working out, has also assumed a new importance for many in the Task Force. Some hit the weights, while others are pounding the roads around Kandahar Air Field (KAF) and quite literally running the stress away. Almost each weekend there is a five-kilometre road race, with proceeds going to any one of a number of charities. These runs take on an international flair by the nature of the charities that they support: the British have their Help for Heroes, we have the Canadian Soldier-On program and the Americans have numerous others. Most recently, many of us ran “Pat’s Run,” named for former-NFL football player Pat Tillman who left his pro career to become a soldier and was killed here in Afghanistan in the early days of the international community’s intervention.
Kandahar Hockey League is another way some troops get through the tour. Comprised of over 20 teams from Canada, the United States and Slovakia, they are broken into three separate divisions: A Division has very high-end amateur athletes; B Division is made up of guys who wish they were in the high end of the spectrum, but lack some of the skills that would make them successful; and C Division simply takes the rest of us. The league plays seven nights a week, with no less than four games a night, and with some of the games getting more spectators than others. Standing out in their unique pink shirts (some with matching shin pads) and drawing a crowd every time is the all-female “Ball Busters” comprised of women from all over KAF. Playoffs started this week.
Practical jokes are more prevalent, and taken appropriately can serve to relieve a good deal of stress. In my personal experience the judging of appropriate can sometimes be difficult. However, coffee cups going missing and then travelling the world (with photos being sent back to the unfortunate owner) seem pretty harmless. Digital cameras and mass briefings have also occasionally combined to good result. Birthdays seem to be a natural target for jokes to occur and some of them have been celebrated in style that would rarely be seen back in Canada.
Leave, or holidays, is probably the single biggest way of breaking the monotony. Those of us who are here longer than nine months get two breaks each of two weeks. Leave is, and has always been, a big event in a soldier’s life—the chance to go home and see family, or travel to an exotic destination and see what happens. Over a third of our soldiers have used the opportunity to see somewhere different; Australia, Bali, New Zealand, Morocco, and the entirety of Europe have all seen Canadian soldiers on leave from Afghanistan.
With us now within three months of the mission closing, the tempo has picked up considerably. This increase has also come partly owing to the Taliban and their recent mass escape at Sarpoza Prison. The effect of this is that the days are starting to fly by. For those who count the days, months or weeks, the numbers are all dropping rapidly. Personally, I am not a big fan of counting any time markers until the numbers are single digits, otherwise the big day always seems
just a little too far away.
Lieutenant-Colonel Tod Strickland is Assistant Chief of Staff for Task Force 5-10, and member of the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry, serving in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
