The soldiers at Camp Blackhorse don’t care about irony. They are from the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and they are about as combat hardened as any Canadian soldiers I’ve met. At the beginning of last November they were just getting rolling on their new task of training the Afghan army and already they were cranky—this new mission was nothing much, to them.

A corporal I’d met before in Panjwaii came out to give me a tour of their training grounds. High on a plain up above Kabul, this was the place where fledgling Afghan army companies were taught how to survive combat as a unit. The training ground was vast and largely unprotected.

“Does the enemy ever come up here?” I asked.

“Yeah,” answered the corporal, nodding across the rolling ground. “Someone just tried to plant an IED on the route over there.”

He paused.

“Blew himself up though.”

Interesting. Only in Afghanistan would a training ground and a battlefield ever get so mixed up.

The corporal didn’t find it too interesting; he just liked that the enemy blew himself up.