Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery,.......

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Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army
by Christie Blatchford

Excerpt:
"Jon Hamilton, the then twenty-nine-year-old Captain of the reconnaissance or recce platoon, first fired his weapon on February 4 in his initial week on the ground in Afghanistan during the operational hand-over from American troops. At that time, the event was so startling he was quizzed about it.

"I remember actually sitting down with the colonel and the operations officer and they were going like, 'Okay, what the hell's going on here, Jon?' I was like, 'I fired my weapon in support of coalition troops. I don't understand what the problem is here.'"

Hamilton believes he was the first Canadian soldier on the tour to fire a shot, and suspects that as soon as word of it got back home, which in our age means almost instantaneously, military bureaucrats in Ottawa had their knickers in a knot. "Now," he says, "that seems so stupid... so insignificant compared to what lay ahead."

By the end of July, Hamilton, with two dozen men, and the rest of the battalion were battle-hardened and so inured to the roar of combat that they were lighting up smokes and cracking jokes with rounds raining down on them.

"This is the kind of stuff you get used to," Hamilton says. "And it's not complacency or laziness. It's just the sh-t that happens in battle, it's the human mind protecting itself from going insane or something. It's the way soldier's are."

For recce, July 4 was the turning point."

"...The Army has a formal procedure for the sighting of enemy, just as it has formal procedure, or form, for every eventuality and every thing. That's both why it works and why it can make smart men crazy. This particular procedure is called a fire control order, and it's supposed to be done the same way every thime -- something like, "Contact, reference hill 600 metres left."

But what Schnurr barked to his light machine gunner Corporal Jimmy Funk was, "Jim they're on the right! F-ck 'em up!"

Amazon.com: Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army: Books: Christie Blatchford