Packing up can be a pain, especially when being interrupted by rocket attacks.
Just ask Maj. Craig Malin. As one of the last Canadian soldiers to leave Kandahar Airfield last fall, it was up to him and about 1,600 others to clean up the thousands of tonnes of stuff Canada had there in order to wrap up the country's combat mission in Afghanistan. He shared his experience earlier this month with the Rotary Club of St. Albert.
"We were given a hard right shoulder of being out of there by the end of December," says the St. Albert resident, and they had a lot of stuff to pack – enough to fill 2,300 sea-cans. They also had to close some 5,000 contracts, clean and ship about 850 vehicles and help set up the new training mission in Kabul – all while under periodic rocket fire.
They did it all in five months.
"It was not exciting or sexy work or anything like that," Malin says. "Did it get dull? Yes."
But not when the 107-millimetre rockets were raining from the skies, although Malin says they were "more of an inconvenience" than anything else. "It's a fact of life there."
Soldiers and shippers
Malin says he touched down in Afghanistan last July in the middle of the night. It was 42 C outside – so hot that he thought someone had forgotten to shut off the plane's engines.
"The first few days there, I probably drank 10 litres of water a day."
He spent most of the next five months stationed at the busiest airport in the world, home to some 30,000 soldiers and contractors. As part of Canada's logistics unit, it was his job to help retrieve equipment from the field and support everyone else on the base.
One of his co-workers was Maj. David Charron, also of St. Albert. Charron's unit had to count, sort, fix, clean, ship and sell all the stuff Canada owned at the airbase.
The troops had some 31,000 line items to count and label, Malin says, including bombs, bolts, bullets, uniforms and main battle tanks.
"We had an inordinate amount of tires," he says, and a mind-boggling amount of spare parts. "If you can envision Commonwealth Stadium full of sea cans, that's how many spare parts were there."
Canada couldn't just leave all this stuff behind, Charron says because that would have left the military short-supplied for any future missions.
"As mundane sometimes as the tasks got, a lot of guys found motivation in knowing that we were enabling the next operation."
Still, his unit had to be picky about what it shipped home due to the costs involved. Much of Canada's gear was given or sold to NATO allies or the training mission in Kabul. Electronics were dismantled and shipped out of the country so they could not be used to build roadside bombs.
"For ammunition, it was more prudent and economical to destroy it," he says.
That meant getting his demolition squad to haul it to a blast pit, wire it up with explosives and blow it up.
Crews used bar-code scanners to speed up the sorting process, but still had to count every bolt and clean every car — thoroughly, in the latter case, in order to get them through customs.
The moving-out mission lost a lot of valuable time last fall when most of their planes got diverted to the air war in Libya, Malin says.
"Now you're not moving potentially 12 vehicles a day, 20 sea cans a day," he says. "It meant for some challenging times."
The roughly 56 rocket attacks on the airfield also tripped up their efforts. Every time the warning siren went off, Malin says, everyone had to drop what he or she was doing, hit the dirt for two minutes and then get to a bunker.
"The thing about rocket attacks is that they happen all the time," Malin says. "At times, it can be an annoyance."
They can kill, however, and at least one landed within a few hundred metres of his location while he was there.
Lights out at KAF
Malin says the end of Kandahar was a lot different than the end of his previous overseas tours. There was no hand-off to the new soldiers, no briefings on what to expect — there would be no more Canadian troops at the base once they left.
"It was just strange," Malin says, noting that as the cleanup progressed, Canada's presence went from more than 1,000 personnel to maybe 60 when he left on the last plane out. "It just kind of became like a ghost town."
Malin and Charron are now back at the Edmonton Garrison, but Canadian troops will be in Afghanistan until at least 2014 in order to train local troops and police officers.
Speaking as a civilian, Malin says he's not sure what the future holds for Afghanistan. Canada's had some success in the short time its been in Afghanistan, but that country still has a long way to go if it's going to stand on its own.
"Will they get there by the end of 2014? I don't know."
