Choice and IEDs: What Goes Through a Soldier’s Head on Patrol and Why

Cpl. Ryan Flavelle in Afghanistan

I was asked to submit an article about my experiences in Afghanistan to this website because of a speech I gave about Afghanistan at a dinner in 2008.  My experiences are diverse, and I had difficulty deciding what to write about.  I went through my journal and came across an entry about a patrol that we did in September of 2008, and what was going through my mind as we departed on that patrol.  I share with you these experiences.

As a serving Canadian soldier, I cannot publically discuss government policy, strategy, or those matters that fall into the realm of operational security (Opsec).  As such, this article merely recounts my experiences, and leaves the readers to draw their own conclusions.

For a soldier, choice is a more ethereal quality then one might think.  As a reservist, I proudly chose to go to work on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and give up my summers to go through all the training courses; basic training (BMQ/SQ), trades qualification (QL3), advanced trades qualification (QL5), leadership course (PLQ).  By the time I deployed to Afghanistan, I had been in the reserves for seven years, and had been on at least five courses, instructing two.  I felt like I was a soldier, and that I was ready to go to Afghanistan, I went in with both eyes open, and made a deliberate and fateful choice.

The ability to make a choice is probably the base unit of freedom.  Once I arrived in Afghanistan, I lost the ability to choose, and that was probably the single most disconcerting thing about my time overseas.  I’m not talking about the choice between shopping at Walmart or shopping at Superstore that pervades our society, but the ability to choose whether to partake in things that directly affect one’s safety.  I had given up that right.  It is often reported that soldiers are fundamentally fatalist in their worldview; I discovered that I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.  Where I was, how I got there, and who I was with were all decisions made by others, and they were usually better paid than I was.

This realization dawned on me in the back of a Light Armoured Vehicle (LAV), while we were en route to a combat operation in Panjway.  We’d just left one of the main Canadian Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), and were driving towards the site of an earlier major battle (I only knew that because I’d read Fifteen Days and Contact Charlie).  A few days before three Canadian combat engineers had been killed by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), and we had every reason to suspect that the roads were once again IED’d.  We were to be the lead vehicle.

One might ask; did you want to be there?  The answer to that question is more complex then one might think.  Although the “exotic allure” of Afghanistan had by that point lost most of its lustre, I fundamentally wanted to be in that country at that time.  I wanted to be with my friends in the back of my LAV because I didn’t want them to go out without me.  However, by that point in the tour (we were within weeks of redeploying to Canada), I didn’t really want to be on patrol at all, and preferred the relative safety of our Patrol Base.  The salient point however, is that it didn’t matter what I wanted; I’d lost the capacity to choose.  This is a simultaneously freeing and terrifying realization: it is freeing in that one abandons oneself into a purely deterministic universe, it is terrifying because one realizes that one’s universe is entirely determined.

Below, I recount part of my journal entry written a few days after the patrol, which explains what was going through my mind, the mind of a Canadian soldier in a bad situation;

Cpl. Ryan Flavelle's LAV

“We left at about 0400 and got to our objective at about 0415.  I couldn’t believe how quick the drive was, and I barely had time to go through my usual LAV routine.  Basically, this is how it works: Get in, get settled, notice how uncomfortable I am, shimmy my way into a comfortable position, revel in the new found comfort, sit in disbelief as to how comfortable I am in the middle of a war zone, remember the IED threat, look frantically at the (video screen), keep my franticness under cover, persuade myself either that; whatever happens will happen, nothing is going to happen, if anything happens I won’t feel it, or all of the above.  Realize just how tired I am, close my eyes and try to decide if I should lean my head back or forward, make my decision and fall asleep, wake up with an immensely sore jaw and the feeling of my helmet digging into my skull, shake the sleep out of my eyes, go back to sleep.  Wait until I get kicked in the shoulder, stand up and watch the desert landscape of Panjway while I smoke a cigarette, repeat.  In this case, I was kicked on the shoulder before I’d even gotten a chance to take a decent nap.”

Fatalism was the only option available to me in Afghanistan.  Either something bad would happen, or it wouldn’t; there was basically nothing I could do about it.  The only thing that I could control was my response, and whether I leaned my head back or forward when taking a nap.