Story and photos by Stephen J. Thorne

Clockwise from top left: Master Corporal Vic Mover of Thunder Bay, Ont., keeps a watchful eye on an al-Qaida cave-and-bunker complex located at the south end of the mountain; Soldiers spent days climbing and picking their way through rock shattered by U.S. air strikes; members of 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry destroyed 45 caves and other sites during the five-day operation, after which they boarded American Chinook helicopters for the trip back to base; Loaded with rucksacks weighing up to 50 kilograms, Canadian troops wait to board a helicopter in Bagram for the flight into the combat zone.

It was a crisp morning. The sky was a clear blue and the mountainous foothills of the Himalayas were a vivid yellowy white in the early light. It was just after dawn, usually the most peaceful time of day. But on this day–March 13, 2002–there was a terrible beauty in those rugged mountains, and an ominous threat in the thin air of eastern Afghanistan. Here on this tarmac amid the din of thunking rotor blades and whining aircraft engines were hundreds of Canadian soldiers preparing for their first combat assault since the Korean War.

As a war correspondent with Canada’s national news cooperative, The Canadian Press, I was assigned to Chalk 4, the fourth helicopter in, as the only news reporter or photographer to deploy with the troops. Somewhere out there, we had been told, on a mountain called the Whale’s Back, were 60 to 80 al-Qaida fighters from places most of these soldiers would never see–Chechnya, Pakistan, Uzbekestan. They were staging their final stand as remnants of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network escaped Afghanistan through these very mountains into the relative safety of neighbouring Pakistan. They had cleared out villages in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, where the week before they had given troops from the American 101st Airborne Division a hell of a fight. We were told that we would probably be dropping into a hot landing zone, that we should expect casualties. These last enemy soldiers were prepared to fight to the death, said the intelligence reports. Surrendering enemy were to be given two warnings to stop in their tracks, the judge advocate general officer said. There would be no third warnings. Soldiers–Canadian soldiers–were to shoot them in their tracks.

The faces around me were calm, resolute, almost peaceful with the knowledge that this was what they had trained for their entire careers. For many in this largely veteran group of Canadian troops, this six-month deployment to Afghanistan represented a career highlight–the very mission for which they, as soldiers, had been groomed. For me, as a journalist, it marked the pinnacle of a 23-year career. For as long as I could remember, I had studied the phenomenon of war. I had listened to the stories of my father, a World War II Royal Canadian Air Force officer, and many other veterans spanning the history of conflict from 1914-18 through Vietnam, the Gulf and the Balkans. I had watched countless documentaries and read a library of books. Yet answers to the questions I was asking could not be found in any veteran’s fading recollections, on the pages of any Stephen Ambrose book or on any grainy old black-and-white film. The answers to my questions lay inside of me–here, on this tarmac and most of all, out there, among those mountains.

I kept myself busy shooting the preparations. The Canadians had come under derision back home because they arrived in Afghanistan wearing green uniforms instead of the desert yellow of their British and American allies. Yet here they were, seated on the cold concrete lined in chalk after chalk, “camming up” their faces in shades of green and dark brown. There was little of the typical soldierly jocularity. Many seemed lost in thought. I had no illusions or doubts about what I was about to do, but I felt sick to my stomach just the same. My knees were weak. I kept thinking of the CP reporters who went before me–of Ross Munro recording the disaster at Dieppe and Bill Stewart hammering away on his typewriter at Juno Beach.

If I didn’t already appreciate the gravity of the mission on which we were embarking, the sight of an American padre giving communion on the tarmac brought it all home. I’m not particularly religious, but the image of this holy man in combat fatigues, a ceremonial stole around his neck and a battle cap on his head, blessing these battle-ready troops and administering the holy sacrament, touched me deeply.

“Excuse me, Father, I’m Anglican,” I told him. “Can I still take communion?”

“That’s OK, son,” he replied with a smile. “I’m Anglican, too.”

So I took the bread and the wine and almost immediately a kind of calm settled over me. I was ready to accept my fate, whatever that might be. An Alberta filmmaker and colleague from my days in Kosovo, Garth Pritchard, was there. He will never let me forget the fact that he was one helicopter ahead of me and landed on the Whale first. Before he headed for another part of the mountain, we exchanged contact information in case of the worst. Several soldiers had done the same, giving me the names and numbers of their girlfriends the night before.

It was a long, low helicopter ride out to the mountain near the town of Gardez. We dodged and weaved among the hills and rocks and across plains and valleys, swirling up dust and sending herds of goats and sheep scattering as we went. I was seated next to three Canadian snipers who ate candy the whole way out. They had just been through an incredible eight days with the Americans, helping two entire companies of 101st out of al-Qaida ambushes during protracted and repeated firefights. They’d returned to Bagram for just two nights and now they were off again.

I was assigned to Sergeant Torry White’s six-man reconnaissance, or recce, section. Recce–first in, last out. Led by Captain Ryan Latinovich, the officer commanding the reconnaissance platoon, and accompanied by his radioman, Master Corporal Erik Kuerr of Edmonton, we would make our way down the length of the Whale over the next two days, up and down, up and down until we reached the south end, where all my questions would be answered.

We landed halfway up the mountainside in a swirl of noise and dust, pouring out of the back of the American Chinook helicopter. It was all adrenaline at this point. I remember little of the next few hours. The troops formed a perimeter. I stuck close to the medic and the radioman and was declared the first casualty of Operation Harpoon, as it has been dubbed, when I put a thorn, of all things, through my thumb.

The closest welcoming committee was friendly: Allied Afghans, we assumed, sitting on the peak of the nearest outcrop. They watched for a while, then left. Afghan troops had moved in while the Canadian operation was being planned, rousting some al-Qaida but at the same time preventing the Americans from dropping three powerful daisycutter bombs intended to make way for the Canadian assault. Colonel Pat Stogran wasn’t happy. He figured all the Afghans managed to do was tip off the enemy that something was afoot–unintentionally or, as is often the case in the mixed ethnic allegiances of Afghanistan, otherwise.

We made our way up the mountainside, the troops straining under packs weighing upwards of 50 kilograms. Mine probably weighed half that much, but then, I was twice many of their ages. Our little group split off from the main force. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie companies of the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, fanned out over the mountainsides like ants. They took with them a platoon of mortars, a direct-fire support unit, an administrative company and 12 Field Squadron of the Edmonton-based 1 Combat Engineer Regiment. There were also 150 assault troops from the vaunted U.S. 10th Mountain Div.

An officer built like the proverbial fire hydrant, Latinovich was a native of Welland, Ont., and a graduate of the Royal Military College. At 28, he was already a nine-year Canadian Forces veteran. He appeared absolutely confident in his task.

White’s section was a cross-section of Canadian youth–M.Cpl. Chuck Cote of Edmonton, who patched up my bleeding thumb; M.Cpl. Vic Mover of Thunder Bay, Ont., a well-travelled kid who’d spent much of his youth in Israel; and M.Cpl. Jeff Whibbs of Peterborough, Ont., who made repeated trips over rugged terrain to fetch resupply; along with Private Francis McCann of Langley, B.C., a quiet, insightful soldier, and Pte. Shaun Cameron, a native Indian from Duck Lake, Sask.

It was hard going. The mountainsides were steep and covered in loose shale. There were the remnants of the U.S. bombing–craters in the hard rock the size of Jacuzzis or bigger. Unexploded ordnance and ammunition, including the infamous cluster bombs known as BLU-92s, were scattered everywhere. Bending under the weight of their packs and carrying weapons, helmets and flak jackets, the troops proceeded slowly, in single file, carefully placing each step and pointing out each unexploded bomb to the man behind. The thin mountain air robbed lungs of oxygen; the anticipation of what lay around each corner and over each rise quickened heart rates and compounded the effects of altitude and exertion.

We reached the ridgeline at something over 8,000 feet by mid-afternoon. There were still traces of snow on the Whale, known to Afghans as Tergul Ghar. To the north we could see the hulk of an American Chinook, shot down in the fierce fighting the week before. To the east, across the valley, lay the mountain range where, for the next four days and nights, we would witness the wrath of the mighty B-52s as they dropped their payloads on al-Qaida targets. I got permission to file and I set up my satellite telephone, its panel pointing toward the Indian Ocean to the southeast. As I spoke to my desk in Toronto halfway around the world, a U.S. Marine Cobra helicopter came straight at me from the valley to the east. It was an ominous sight as this heavily armed killing machine flew at eye level, then pulled up at the last second, passing just 10 metres over my head. As it did so, it rained glowing, smoking metallic wafers down on our position–chaff, designed to attract heat-seeking missiles. I would later learn that the helicopter’s warning system had mistaken my satellite signal for a missile radar lock-on. I was just glad that was the only defensive system it triggered!

It was an eventful yet, thankfully, uneventful day. As we settled down for the night, fully exposed on the east side of the ridge, we could hear the drone of an unmanned observation plane overhead, the screech of F-16s, and the roar of the B-52s, their contrails cutting huge arcs and figure-eights in the sky. The explosions were spectacular, some as high as the mountain peaks that rivaled any I had seen in the Canadian Rockies.

Early the next morning, we resumed our trek along the ridgeline. More unexploded ordnance and more traces of
al-Qaida presence: bomb craters, unused ammunition, abandoned equipment. We encountered a cave and a mortar position, later destroyed by U.S. engineers. Elsewhere on the mountain, Canadian engineers were destroying more caves and mortar positions–a total of 45 were found on the four-day operation, 15 more than previously had been known to exist.

White and Mover set out ahead to scout the terrain. Nearing the end of the Whale, they found a bomb hole and debris, including a tripod mount, an unexploded grenade and belts of ammunition. Around a large rock they found a single gun position–a small dugout with a rock wall. Down to the left was more ammunition, along with three mortars and a recoilless rifle with a round inside. Just behind was a bomb crater about three metres in diameter. The machine-gun nest looked out across a swale 150 metres to a castle-like rock formation at the southern end of the mountain. On the east side of the feature, looking across the valley to the mountain range, was a stone bunker. It took a trained eye to notice it. I sure didn’t until it was pointed out to me.

“What keyed me to the fact that it was a good objective was that all the way along the ridgeline, the bunkers had been destroyed,” White said. “This one was intact.”

Latinovich arrived and the two consulted. There was no sign of life around the bunker. It apparently had no view back down the mountain. One of the Canadians set up his machine-gun, took out his binoculars and watched. White radioed in our coordinates and a platoon of 10th Mountain boys, who were already collapsing from heat and altitude exhaustion, set out in our direction. Whibbs made the long, hard trek back along the ridge to lead them in.

By the time they arrived 2 1/2 hours later, Latinovich had an attack plan all laid out. It was late afternoon, about 4 o’clock, and the sun was low to the west. The American officer listened as Latinovich outlined his attack plan. He nodded and ordered a dozen of his soldiers to assume positions along a natural rock wall tailing off to the left–a firebase that looked for all the world like a firing line straight out of the American Civil War. An assault force took up positions to the right. I hung back 10 or 15 metres and a little to one side, away from the backblast of the Americans’ shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. I was behind a table rock, on which I set up my satphone.

Well, those 10th Mountain boys weren’t much for hiking and climbing, but they sure knew how to kill. They opened up with two anti-tank rockets into that bunker, destroying it and blowing the head off an al-Qaida fighter who was sitting down to eat a bowl of rice. Then they opened up with a deafening volley of machine-gun fire. By this time, I had reached my desk in Toronto and was madly telling them to “roll the tape, roll the tape!” The guns in front of me ceased and suddenly the assault force poured across the swale and swarmed over that rock, firing as they went. Three Canadian snipers were with them, and several of our recce boys fanned out behind them to watch their flanks. A convoy of what we assumed were allied Afghan soldiers was stopped on a road to the west, thousands of feet below, watching the action. I began a play-by-play commentary as the Americans, their barrels smoking, fired into cave openings and dropped fragmentary grenades and satchel charges. Rat-a-tat-a-tat. Boom. Rat-a-tat. Kablam. Smoke billowed from the caves. I could only think of Marines in the Pacific islands routing Japanese from their holes as these troops stood exposed, firing down at 45-degree angles into the darkness of the caves. Reports came back over the radio of two enemy dead; no coalition casualties.

Eventually, my radio desk cut me off. “We have to get this on the wire,” I was told. “Give me the World Desk,” I shouted. And so I dictated a print story while the action continued, my editor questioning me all the time: “Are you all right? Are you all right? What was that? Don’t you think you should hang up now?” The story filed, I hung up. The firing continued. I asked the American commander if I could go over. He said: “Be my guest.” And so I tightened the chin strap on my blue helmet, made sure the zipper was secure on my flak vest, and made a dash across the swale. I don’t know how many pictures I shot but I stayed just long enough to hear somebody yell they were going to drop a big satchel charge in one minute, and this one could blow out the whole side of the feature. That was enough for me. I was gone, sprinting back across the swale and up to the relative security of our position, nearly passing out from lack of oxygen.

When it was over, the Americans came trudging back. There were no thank-yous for the Canadians, just “good jobs” to the Americans. It was as if they had just played a hard-fought game of football and were too exhausted to celebrate. They disappeared almost as suddenly as they had come–no fanfare. A day’s work in 25 minutes and now it was time for bed. It was unclear if anyone had fired back through the whole thing–one American soldier said yes, another said no. There were two dead that they knew of, and probably more inside the caves, where soldiers could see stacks of rockets and mortars on the floors, even IV bags hanging from the ceilings.

The young Canadian rifleman, Francis McCann, looked at me in disbelief. “I never thought in this day and age it would have to come to this,” he said. Amen.

A day later, the 10th Mountain boys were pulled from the Whale. Mountain fighting apparently was not to their liking. At least a dozen had to be revived with saline IVs and, to Stogran’s disgust, many had shed their equipment all over the mountainside. To be fair, they had just spent a couple of months at sea level in Kuwait or some such place. But their sloppy exit extended far beyond the mountainside into the command-and-control facilities at Bagram, where it wreaked near-disastrous consequences that would later ring with a haunting poignancy.

The U.S. brigade commander who ordered the Americans off the mountain also took his duty officer out of the tactical operations centre–an air-to-ground link located in a hangar at the base northwest of Kabul. In doing so, he didn’t bother to tell the Canadians their primary link to air forces had been severed.

So when an F-16 picked up activity on the Whale, the pilot thought he had a plumb al-Qaida target in his sights. He relayed the coordinates to an American AWACs–airborne warning and control system–aircraft. And when that aircraft passed them on to Bagram seeking clearance to allow the F-16 to drop its bomb, there was nobody in the tactical operations centre officially aware that the Canadians were even on the mountain. A U.S. air force controller called out the co-ordinates and U.S. army plotters checked their computer screens. Nobody clued in to the fact that the figures the F-16 pilot was seeing were Canadian troops, even though they wore reflective tape on their helmets specifically to prevent attack by friendly aircraft. A Canadian captain who happened to be in the operations centre at the time heard the coordinates, peered over the shoulder of a U.S. army controller and realized he was looking at the Whale.

“Check fire!” he called out. “Those are Canadians out there!”

Soldiers in Bagram at the time estimated the Canadians came within a few seconds of being bombed.

The incident would likely have cost many more lives than the tragedy a month later at the Tarnak Puhl training compound near Kandahar. Sheer luck and a large wadi or drainage ditch prevented more deaths at the former al-Qaida site. There was little such protection on the rocky ridgeline of the Whale. Like us, many of the Canadian troops were exposed and vulnerable throughout most of their mission.

I certainly felt that way as darkness descended on us after the assault. There was no doubting that we were there now. And if anybody was watching from among the ridges and caves below, they knew exactly where we were. Curled up with three soldiers inside that bomb crater, huddling against the cold, we waited, fully expecting a mortar or rocket attack. We always wore our boots and I was instructed to leave everything behind if we had to skedaddle. Mercifully, no attack came. But just before dawn the next morning, an almighty firefight broke out in the valley to the east, directly below us. I sleepily pulled myself up to the rim of the crater and peered over the side, watching as tracers cut lazy, deadly arcs across the valley.

It was about this time that we started running out of food and water. We had been ordered to carry 24 hours’ worth of rations and were told we would be resupplied. We weren’t. Not until late on the third day were American MREs (ready-to-eat rations) and boxes of bottled water dropped at strategic sites along the mountain–the nearest a two-hour hike away from us, the forward recce element. This was one of the sacrifices of being almost entirely dependent on someone else–in this case, the Americans–for logistical support. Canada sold off its Chinooks to the Dutch a decade ago. So now it was the Americans who were dictating when and where they would resupply our troops or pick them up.

Elsewhere, the engineers were scrambling up and down steep cliffs all over the mountain, firing rockets into caves, then opening up with machine-guns. In one of the lesser-envied jobs of the whole operation, it was they who stuck their heads inside the caves first, finding ammunition, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. They found two bodies in one cave and all over they found remnants of clothing, lanterns, stoves. The American engineers killed three al-Qaida as they ran from a cave the same day that Latinovich and White led the U.S. assault troops in. Canadian mortarmen fired on suspected al-Qaida positions.

The Whale was surrounded by high ridges fanning out from the mountain like waves and riddled with openings that might or might not have been caves. We watched for an hour or more one afternoon as two Cobras played hound and hare–one flying low and slow, looking to attract enemy fire; the other hanging back ready to attack. Stogran personally scaled one of the features himself to oversee parts of the operation. His troops forayed down the mountain cliffs, fully loaded, and then made their way in and out of the ridges, up and down, sliding on their behinds down loose-rock slopes. They found some caves, but their prize came later when they discovered an adobe hut at the mountain base that the al-Qaida had apparently been using as a refuge from mountaintop duty. It was filled with supplies and documents.

We had landed on a Wednesday. Late on Saturday afternoon, I reluctantly left the recce section and headed down the west side of the mountain with about 20 troops. This was far worse than going up. The cliffs were steep–some almost vertical–and our packs and equipment made the descent that much more treacherous. In some instances, the first bounce would have been in the hundreds of feet. As bad as it was for me, who had a tendency toward vertigo, it was far worse for the troops, whose gear was far more awkward and heavy than mine. It took us about four hours. We reached the bottom at dusk, then made our way across and around the ridges to open ground and a route into Stogran’s command post. Twice we hit the dirt at suspected enemy contact. By the time we reached Stogran’s camp it was well after dark and I was ready to collapse.

My aim was to get back to Bagram as early on Sunday as I could. It was the last day of the operation. I had taken my satphone and camera with me when we’d left Bragram but, in an attempt to shed as much weight as possible and prevent any damage, I didn’t bring my laptop (I was on my third). Now I wanted to file pictures for Monday papers back home, and by late morning I was on a helicopter headed to the base.

There was little time to take it all in. I had much work left to do over the next week before we returned to home base in Kandahar. I would go to the frontlines on two more combat operations during my three months in Afghanistan. But that Thursday, March 14, on the Whale would represent my only firefight. I had done my job, just as the soldiers had done theirs. I had seen battle, and answered any doubts I might have had about my ability to function in such trying circumstances. I had seen, too, what it took for soldiers to perform their tasks–sheer guts and conviction was the way I saw it.

No, I’ll take a trip down the Whale with a Canadian soldier any day.