# Canadians  trust the vehicles that keep them moving through hostile terrritory



## GAP (3 Jan 2007)

*Lives riding on wheels of war*
 TheStar.com - News - Lives riding on wheels of war 
Canadians learn to trust the vehicles that keep them moving through hostile territory
Oakland Ross Toronto Star
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KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan–It was a day of good luck and bad for Master Cpl. Andy Singh.

The 30-year-old soldier from Toronto was in his customary place – peering out at the passing Afghan countryside from the rooftop hatch of a Bison armoured personnel carrier. As usual, he was armed with a C8 automatic rifle.

Singh's Bison was in second-to-last position in a 10-vehicle supply convoy that had just left Ma'sum Ghar, a satellite Canadian military base here in the far south of Afghanistan. 

It was early in the afternoon of Nov. 28, and the convoy was bound for Kandahar Airfield, the main staging area in the region for a NATO-led multi-national military force – including some 2,500 Canadians – fighting alongside the Afghan National Army against the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban.

Singh had made the jittery, two-hour trip many times. But on this occasion, the journey would be different.

The Canadian troops here – or those among them who are obliged to take their lives into their hands by venturing "outside the wire," or off the main base at Kandahar Airfield – are likely to ride in four main types of vehicles.

All four machines are armed and armoured to varying degrees, and serve somewhat different purposes. 

But it's risky travelling by road through southern Afghanistan, no matter what transport you have. The Canadians know it.

"When I first got here, I had that queasy feeling, of car sickness almost," says Master Cpl. Kellie Smith who, like Singh, is a Bison crew commander. "I feel apprehensive to this day."

The Bison, built by General Motors in London, Ont., is primarily a personnel carrier, a machine designed for moving people across hostile territory. And although technically amphibious, the Bisons operated by the Canadians Forces are rarely asked to demonstrate their seaworthiness any longer.

Capable of transporting up to eight passengers comfortably, Bisons also carry a two-person crew – the driver, who must peer through periscopes to see the way ahead, and the gunner, who's also the vehicle's commander and in a particularly vulnerable position, poking above the hatch in the roof.

"You are exposed," says Smith. "Anything suspicious, you get down low."

And nothing is more perilous than the prospect of an SVBIED – a suicide-vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.

Singh's convoy hadn't travelled far that November day before it confronted an oncoming black Toyota station wagon with a single occupant. That last detail – one car, one occupant – is a dead giveaway here. It's the hallmark of a car-borne bomb.

"The first vehicle called it up on the radio," Singh says now. "`Single occupant. Left-hand side.' We moved over to the right. I had my weapons on him. He had his head down."

Convoy vehicles currently in use by Canadian forces differ in their abilities to withstand various kinds of explosions, but embedded reporters are instructed not to reveal such details, as they might jeopardize troop security.

Suffice it to say that if you had to travel from Ma'sum Ghar to Kandahar by road, a Bison might not be your first choice, but it would also be a long way from your last.

"Bisons have been with the military for a long time," says Smith. "It's an excellent mode of transportation."

Perhaps the most potent and physically intimidating of Canadian vehicles in use here is the LAV-III, which resembles the Bison but is faster and more heavily armed. With a 25-mm cannon mounted on its turret, it is primarily a combat vehicle.

If a bomb went off nearby, says Smith, "I'd rather be in a LAV."

That day, however, Singh was in a Bison when the black Toyota passed with its lone occupant.

"He just looked up at me," remembers Singh. "Pop
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