A Tribute to Sappers

[Geoff Winnington-Ball (RIP)]

This was on the Canoe website today. Methinks it says it all and I offer it here with my salute for a job well done.

April 6, 2008
Canadian engineers 'the real heroes' in battle against IEDs in Afghanistan
By James Mccarten, THE CANADIAN PRESS

KANDAHAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan - Outside the door to their bunker, one of a group of swaggering young Canadian Forces engineers uses a Q-tip to carefully swab clean the edges of a pair of dice that he's just embedded in the newly poured cement.

For the next five months, the new walkway these soldiers are in the process of building at this dusty patrol base west of Kandahar city will improve their living conditions. They hope the lucky seven staring up from the sidewalk will improve their odds.

"Because every time we walk out the gate," one says with a crooked grin, "we roll the dice."

These are the men - some not much older than boys, really - at the leading edge of Canada's war in southern Afghanistan, each day using metal detectors and their instincts to gingerly scour the roads of the deadly Panjwaii district for improvised explosive devices sown by their enemies.

Canadian-led coalition forces now hold fast in a part of the country long acknowledged as the birthplace of the Taliban, an enemy force of dwindling tactical power that's been reduced to insurgent tactics like roadside bombs, suicide attacks and drive-by assassinations.

Canadian soldiers now find themselves fighting an amorphous foe who blends easily into the background, armed less with rifles and rockets than with nefarious, jerry-rigged road explosives often made of scrap metal and ancient ordnance.

Of all of Afghanistan's perils IEDs are, by far, the Canadian soldier's worst nightmare. Insurgents plant their handiwork under cover of night in roads already littered with decades of metal detritus, much of it the legacy of wars both past and present, which makes them that much harder to detect.

As a result, routine patrols - both mounted and dismounted - remain pulse-pounding, white-knuckle affairs, everyone all too aware of how an IED can strike without warning, and with devastating force.

Pte. Terry John Street, 24, of Hull, Que., was killed Friday in Panjwaii when his armoured vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. Hours earlier, two Canadian soldiers and an Afghan interpreter were injured precisely the same way, also in Panjwaii.

The two Canadians were reported in fair condition Saturday in hospital and were being transferred to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany en route back to Canada.

Despite long odds, the engineers are having a lot of success in their daily search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, said Sgt. Dwayne Waller, 36, of 1 Combat Engineer Regiment or CER, based in Edmonton.

Operational security precludes the soldiers from speaking in detail about the painstaking route clearance efforts currently taking place in Afghanistan. But "we catch more of them than we miss, for sure, absolutely," Waller said.

"I can't speak for other tours, but I can tell you, we're batting a thousand."

Some days, that's not good enough.

Clearing a road is slow and frustrating work that the enemy often lies in wait to undermine. Anecdotal tales of IED strikes along routes that had been cleared only hours earlier are legion among soldiers in the field.

"A lot of it is luck, unfortunately, but we've been pretty lucky so far, I think," said Cpl. Scott King, 27, a reservist with 1 CER from Lamaline, Nfld., a tiny village on the Burin Peninsula on the province's south shore.

For King, who's on his first tour in Afghanistan, there's no place he'd rather be than up front, helping in the vital effort to keep important roads safe for both coalition forces and local villagers.

"Being in combat arms is where it's at for me and for any of us guys, and we like to be right there where the action is, and that's definitely what we do," King said.

"It's stressful, but it's exciting, and that's what those type of people thrive on, is excitement. That's what makes our job interesting, and that's part of the reason why we do it."

A NATO report released last week found that the number of IEDs in Afghanistan has spiked dramatically in recent years - a staggering 2,615 roadside bombs were either detonated or discovered in 2007, up from 1,931 the previous year and just 844 in 2005.

The silver lining is that the coalition's ability to find IEDs has kept pace. Fully half the IEDs reported last year were discovered ahead of time, either through route clearance efforts or intelligence from local nationals, a ratio that has remained steady over the last three years.

"We have seen more IEDs during the past few years, but also, we have discovered more," Brig.-Gen. Guy Laroche, commander of Canadian forces in Afghanistan, said the night Street was killed.

The fact that Canadian troops are getting more and more co-operation from local residents about where IEDs are hidden is a sign that the NATO coalition is making progress, both in terms of making the country safer and winning favour with its population.

"It's something that, you know, (is) difficult to do; there's no recipe that will help us to totally eliminate that threat," he said.

"But we're working on it, and we're using all the assets that we have in order to reduce that threat."

Those assets include an array of expensive, high-tech detection and disposal equipment and specially designed, heavily armoured vehicles, all of which the Canadian Forces do their best to keep under wraps.

But they also include the wits, fortitude and sheer bravery of the minesweepers of 1 CER.

"We have a very important job here, and the guys, they know that job to a T, and they perform it to a T," Waller said.

"It's not an easy job; it takes a lot of patience and a lot of hard work. But the end result is, to date, we're doing pretty good and we haven't had a lot of problems."

It's a commitment and a track record that hasn't gone unnoticed among the more battle-hardened members of the light infantry units that help to provide security for the engineers.

"They're very important, they're always busy, and they're going to be busy for a long time, trying to clear IEDs," said Warrant Officer Jeremy Abrahamse, of Bravo Company, 2 PPCLI, whose soldiers are stationed at one of the police sub-stations in Panjwaii.

"In my books, they're the real heroes."