# Tramp, tramp, tramping through Afghanistan



## Jason Jarvis (5 Sep 2003)

Here‘s an interesting story I found in  The Globe and Mail last night.

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*Tramp, tramp, tramping through Afghanistan*

By STEPHEN THORNE
Canadian Press 

Mountains Near Kabul â€” Canadian and Afghan soldiers combing mountains near the capital spotted possible insurgents making their way toward the city and traced access routes they suspect are being used by guerrilla fighters.

The sighting came on the second day of a tortuous three-day reconnaissance mission this week that took members of the 3rd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment reconnaissance platoon and three Afghans 30 kilometres through ravines, over peaks and into caves.

They found landmines, booby traps and unexploded bombs â€” likely leftover from the Soviet war 20 years ago. They were confronted by cobras, vipers, scorpions and poisonous porcupine quills 25 centimetres long.

And they humped over peaks more than 2,650 metres high, descended 900 metres into valleys and ravines, and then went back up again.

On Wednesday, while half the platoon was out on patrol, lookouts spotted three men coming in from the west. One was armed with a long-barrelled weapon, likely an Enfield rifle or its Russian equivalent.

The three high-tailed it back the way they came when they spotted the Canadians watching them from their mountain-top patrol base. They could have been hunters, said one sniper, but their behaviour suggested otherwise.

"We proved you can walk through those mountains, that you can start at one end and walk into the city," said the platoon commander, Lieut. Tim Partello. "The fact that we saw three suspicious people confirms it more."

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, is responsible for the security of Kabul. It has had reports since early July of groups of between 20 and 30 Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters slipping into Afghanistan from Pakistan. Recent incursions have involved groups as small as threes and fours.

Attacks and other incidents have been steadily creeping closer to Kabul in recent weeks.

U.S.-led coalition forces â€” not part of ISAF â€” have been battling insurgents mainly to the east, but many of the outlying areas around Kabul had been left unattended. 

This is where the Canadians come in.

On Aug. 20, the area of interest assigned to the contingent of 1,950 Canadian soldiers serving under ISAF was almost doubled in size to encompass regions far from the streets of Kabul.

Patrolling these remote areas is a measure to protect the NATO force itself, as well as the city.

This week‘s mission began in the predawn hours Tuesday. The troops, accompanied by three members of the Afghan government military force, were trucked out to the mouth of a dry creek bed.

There, they began a four-kilometre hike uphill under a hot sun to a patrol base among boulders and scrub at the foot of a mountain. They constantly watched the cliffs around them for evidence of any threats.

Engineer Sgt. Mike Cotts, a flatlander from Watrous, Sask., walked point â€” took the lead position â€” the whole three days, leading the reconnaissance platoon through some potentially dangerous ground.

"I‘m just glad he‘s got size 10 and I‘ve got 8Â½.," said Sgt. Mark, a native of St. Thomas, Ont., who didn‘t want his last name used. "He‘s a good asset for us. I don‘t worry about looking on the ground. He‘s looking on the ground and I‘m looking up."

Drawing on six tours‘ experience, Sgt. Cotts found landmines, deactivated a Russian antipersonnel mine inside a cave and discovered a booby-trapped bounding fragmentation mine alongside it â€” which he left alone. Sgt. Cotts had sat outside for a calming cigarette first before dealing with what was inside the cave.

"My heart was going; I can‘t imagine his," said Sgt. Paul Ogilvie, a native of Petitcodiac, N.B., who entered the cave with Sgt. Cotts. "I got the ****  out of there."

The mission included a Canadian soldier fluent in Farsi, who acted as an interpreter with the Afghans and others the platoon came across â€” primarily goat herders.

Early Tuesday, the soldiers came across an elderly goat herder who warned them that the high ground had been heavily mined. But after Lieut. Partello set up his patrol base in the rocky creekbed, two of the Afghan soldiers requested a meeting with the platoon commander.

The high ground wasn‘t mined, they told him. And the base where he intended to spend the night was vulnerable to attack from above. "An ambush here would wipe out everybody," one of the Afghans said. 

Lieut. Partello, a native of Guelph, Ont., countered that technology would rule the day â€” or night. The Canadians have night-vision equipment and they would see hostile forces before they would ever see the Canadians.

Canadian snipers were keeping watch higher up and the Canadians could call in American air strikes if necessary.

The Afghans were unconvinced. The Soviets did similar things and look what happened to them, they argued.

Besides, they said, come nightfall this low ground would be crawling with spiders, snakes and scorpions.

Lieut. Partello agreed to lead a reconnaissance patrol up the mountain. With Sgt. Cotts leading, a small patrol headed up more than 450 vertical metres and scoured the ground up for mines or unexploded munitions. They found none, and Lieut Partello ordered the patrol to move up to make the higher ground a patrol base, with an area large enough for the German helicopter resupply.

"They presented me with a very effective argument," said the lieutenant. "They said the chance of having a contact is greater than the chance of finding a mine."

No sooner was that said than the snipers found what they thought was a trip wire in the middle of the patrol base. As Sgt. Cotts checked it out, though, Warrant Officer Dave Hood of Port Hope, Ont., found a kite. The "trip wire" was a kite string, probably carried up from the village four kilometres down the ravine.

The tired soldiers ate army rations and bedded down, the starry sky and chirping of crickets broken by U.S. military jets passing overhead and thunder flashes from air strikes on positions far to the east and south.

Early Wednesday morning, Lieut. Partello and Sgt. Cotts took a reconnaissance patrol of about a dozen Canadians and one Afghan on a route west and north through the mountains, looping around south back to their patrol base.

What was intended to be a four-hour patrol turned into more than eight hours, taking them on a tortuous, sun-drenched journey along mountainside goat trails, through creekbeds and up cliff faces to the edge of the ISAF patrol boundary.

Lieut. Partello, Sgt. Cotts, Sgt. Mark, Sgt. Jack Durnford of Francois, Nfld., Cpl. Marty Lessisk of Toronto and Capt. Nick Williams of Ottawa shed their heavy web gear and scrambled to the top of a 2,662-metre peak for a bird‘s-eye view of the terrain.

The Afghan who accompanied the patrol suggested the Canadians were looking in the wrong places if they wanted to find Taliban or al-Qaeda insurgents. He noted there was no water where they were looking and said mountain fighters would always position themselves near water.

The nearest water was a river, reduced to a trickle by seven years of drought, in an area patrolled by Afghan government soldiers several kilometres away. Or the insurgents could be hiding in villages at either end of the range the Canadians were patrolling. That was a job for another day.

Lieut. Partello suggested it wouldn‘t be hard for insurgents to slip through checkpoints by either bribing soldiers or disguising themselves.

"The city‘s full of guns and bombs and mines," said Lieut. Partello. "It‘s people who are infiltrating the area; they don‘t need weapons to do that."

The patrol covered about six kilometres on the map but it took much out of some soldiers â€” bodies were soaked in sweat, skin was rubbed raw from equipment, muscles quivered from glucose starvation.

Communications in the mountains were a constant source of misery. Lieut. Partello‘s message that the patrol would stay out four hours longer than originally planned, relayed through their Kabul base, never reached the mountaintop patrol base.

But Cpl. Lessick, who humped the 15-kilogram main radio as well his own kit for three days, managed to maintain some communication by taking circuitous routes up and down hillsides â€” doubling his own misery.

Radio communication, said Lieut. Partello, "is as much an art as it is a science."

Wednesday ended with the medic, Sgt. Kevin McLean â€” a self-described air force brat who spent most of his formative years on the prairies â€” administering first aid to the troops.

Others took care of each other, patching up raw feet, passing out bottles of water.

The journey out of the mountains lasted nine hours under a hot sun, with most of the soldiers carrying 50-plus kilograms in rations, equipment and ammunition.

Along the way, Sgt. Cotts came across pineapple-style mines that had been washed into the creekbed from the cliffs above. He left them for another day.

The Afghans showed the Canadians different plants â€” a spikey-leafed weed whose roots they chewed into gum for water; another that settles upset stomachs.

The platoon also stumbled on a two-metre-long cobra, as big around as a pop can, slithering into a crevasse off the trailside. A metre-long viper scooted across the trail in front of another hiker later in the day.

By the time the troops hiked down 670 metres to the valley floor, they were exhausted. Then they found out the trucks that were supposed to meet them hadn‘t left camp. That unit, it turned out, did not want to venture out into so-called "Indian country" to get them even though the site was within their area of operations. The reconnaissance troops had to walk another kilometre into a village and set up a security zone before the trucks would come for them.

Lieut. Partello said the platoon obtained some important intelligence and learned a lot about mountain operations in the process including tactics, movement and endurance.

Cpl. Chris Hamilton of London, Ont., left a career in the navy, spent time in a mechanized reconnaissance platoon, then went to the infantry.

"I wouldn‘t say it‘s pleasant, but it‘s camping," he said. "Where else would you get paid to sleep outdoors and see the world?"

Said Sgt. Cotts, the engineer who walked point the entire mission: "It was like being on a stair-climber for three days."

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Am I wrong in thinking that this article doesn‘t paint a terribly flattering picture of Lt. Partello and what exactly his patrol was doing (other than the fact that they‘re all incredibly fit and intelligent)?

I‘m sure they had a good reason for being where they were (looking for Taliban), but I got the impression that they didn‘t really know how to start looking (ie, Taliban patrols stick to water -- which makes sense -- but the nearest water was a couple clicks away). Yeah, yeah, learned how to conduct patrols in the mountains -- but didn‘t they talk to 3 PPCLI before they left?

Is this just part of the normal familiarization all units go through upon arrival in a combat zone? Help me out, please!


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## Armymedic (5 Sep 2003)

Jason,
Thanks for the article....

This is the stuff people need to read.
I know many of the poeple mentioned in the article personally and I understand explicitly what they are experiencing.


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## GrahamD (5 Sep 2003)

Interesting article.

I agree that it doesn‘t sound "pleasant", but it does sound fun.


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## Joel85 (5 Sep 2003)

It sounds more than fun


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## Bert (10 Sep 2003)

Assuming Taliban/Al Qaeda move around alot, how much surviellence (sp) would Canadian Forces keep
on these locations?  Would the patrols be frequent and stealthy enough to identify movement
and patterns?


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## Etown (11 Sep 2003)

Yeah Jason, it sounds bad, but I don‘t put too much faith in the author. Once he described porcupine quils as venemous, and said there are cobras in the mountains of Afghanistan, I pretty much knew this was a puff piece and took it with a grain of salt. Don‘t believe everything you read.


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## Doug VT (11 Sep 2003)

Exactly!  Don‘t believe everything you read....


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## Deleted member 585 (16 Sep 2003)

> The Afghans showed the Canadians different plants â€” a spikey-leafed weed whose roots they chewed into gum for water; another that settles upset stomachs.


Apparently, the fellows weren‘t _that_ far away from water. ;-)


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## Jason Jarvis (17 Sep 2003)

My beef with the story was that it didn‘t make Lt. Partello look very bright. It gave me the impression that his patrol was just kind of wandering around hoping to bump into somebody "bad".  :blotto:


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## Armymedic (17 Sep 2003)

I suppose it may seem so   
(and I am very sure its not, because he is a superb soldier who was a NCM prior to going to university and recieving his commision)...

but then again, what is one purpose of recce/recce patrols?


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## Jason Jarvis (18 Sep 2003)

True enough!


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## deathwing5 (20 Sep 2003)

> spikey-leafed weed


If that‘s what I think it is, (Iskin i think) in Turkish, that stuff tastes so good once you cut off all the spikes and skin. Used to wander the mountain/hills to find and eat them, back in my village.


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## Spr.Earl (20 Sep 2003)

A very good article and by the sound‘s of it our lad‘s are doing the the job they were sent to do.

Never mind the whistle head,the boy‘s will take care of him and look after him.

I just want all of them to come home safe and sound after a job well done,that‘s all!


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## 043 (24 Nov 2004)

Chimo!!! And by the way....................the Author of this article............is very reliable..............and hard....................and courageous! As for the poisionous quills........the 3 Mujahedeen who were with us on this mission told us that.......is it true......perhaps not.....however it is what we were told so there you have it.

Chimo!


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## Genetk44 (25 Nov 2004)

E-Town....just to clear something up for you......there are cobras in Afghanistan....actually there are 2 species there ...Indian Cobra(Naja naja) and the Central Asian or Oxus Cobra(Naja Oxianus).....and both species can be found in the areas around Kabul.
Cheers
Gene


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## Bartok5 (25 Nov 2004)

There are also both species of Cobra and numerous Viper variants in the desert regions of Southern Afghanistan.   WO Billy Bolen had one crawl across his face while he was sleeping in a ditch on a mountainside one night during Op CHEROKEE SKY a couple of years ago.   He flung it off, and the boys sorted the snake out with rifle-mounted bayonets.   WO Bolen kept the skin for a belt.


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## devil39 (27 Nov 2004)

Mark C said:
			
		

> There are also both species of Cobra and numerous Viper variants in the desert regions of Southern Afghanistan.   WO Billy Bolen had one crawl across his face while he was sleeping in a ditch on a mountainside one night during Op CHEROKEE SKY a couple of years ago.   He flung it off, and the boys sorted the snake out with rifle-mounted bayonets.   WO Bolen kept the skin for a belt.




C Coy troop saved CQ A by stunning the cobra with a rock and killing it with a machete I do believe.


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