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Sweating bullets

Kandahar posting was war on heat, soldier says

By BILL SPURR Staff Reporter
Sat. May 2 - 10:05 AM

Shane Schofield's pants aren't baggy because that's the fashion - they're a souvenir of five months in Afghanistan.
The Canadian army private, who arrived at the Halifax airport on Friday night, lost 46 pounds while on duty with Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry at the Kandahar airport.

Creature comforts weren't a priority in Kandahar, where Canada's soldiers slept two to a tent the size of a dining-room table and, for the first month, ate their meals standing up while holding a tray and wearing a helmet and full gear.

"You'd get a good gust of wind and it would blow the food off your tray," Pte. Schofield said Saturday, sitting on the front step of his parents' impressively landscaped home in Lower Sackville.

"The dust would blow into your food. Eventually they got us a tent where we could sit on the floor while we ate."

And eating preservative-filled American rations wasn't always the most delightful dining experience.

For example, the eggs were brown - not the shells, the eggs.

"People would get there and ask, 'What's this?' and you'd tell them, 'That's your eggs,' " he said.

"But just because of the Canadian way of putting a little extra effort into things, our guys were able to get us a few barbecues, which was really good."

Not that anyone was offering any beer, but he wouldn't have taken it, anyway.

"If someone put a beer in front of me, I wouldn't have drunk it.""You knew you had to drink 15 litres of water a day, and beer would severely dehydrate you," he said, recalling that temperatures of 58 C were common.

"Plus you just couldn't imagine waking up hung over — it would have been torture."

Exhaustion was a constant companion as the soldiers humped up and down mountains, carrying 45-kilogram packs filled with water and plastic explosives.Pte. Schofield took photos of caves the Canadians cleared, where they sometimes found rocket-propelled grenades and, occasionally, bones.

"There were a lot of guys in Afghanistan who did the job and did it well but saw that it might not be for them forever, so they're looking at other trades in the (Canadian Forces) and the odd one will be getting out. For the most part, the guys there were doing what they love," Pte. Schofield said.

"There were a lot of positive things about it, the whole patriotic aspect of working with other countries and proving we can do the job."

During their time off, soldiers tried to read or exercise, but in Afghanistan even those activities have their challenges.

Men had to wear gloves to lift weights because the bars were too hot to handle, and they found the weight loss and heat had made them weak.

"You'd put on (a weight) that you used to be able to handle easily and it would pin you to the bench," Pte. Schofield recalled.

"If someone sent you a book, you just had to accept the fact that it wasn't coming home with you. You'd turn the page and the whole book would fall apart because the spine had melted. It happened every time."

The dust gave CD players a lifespan of about 10 days and took a mental toll on the men.

"You could never get a comfortable feeling. You'd take a shower and 15 minutes later you'd be all grimy again," he said. "A lot of the time it was just so rotten there that guys couldn't even see the end."

Several men, including a medic in Pte. Schofield's camp, were stung by scorpions, and one soldier was awakened by a viper slithering over his nose.

Now 22, Pte. Schofield joined the army right out of high school. He had considered following his father into law enforcement but decided he needed some life experience.

Postings to Bosnia and Afghanistan, and witnessing the deaths of men he knew, have provided that.

Pte. Schofield was on roving security about four kilometres away from the site of the accident that killed four Canadian soldiers in April.

"The sky lit up and the ground shook," he said of the incident in which an American pilot mistakenly bombed Canadian soldiers involved in a live-fire exercise.

Pte. Schofield had only a nodding acquaintance with the four men who were killed and said the tragedy didn't change anybody's attitude about the mission itself.

"But I know for a lot of guys, particularly the company that was on the range, it made things difficult for a while in terms of working with the Americans," he said. "There was a surprising number of them who didn't know about what happened, and that was frustrating."

After a four-day "decompression period" in Guam, Pte. Schofield's company got back to Canada on July 31.

The first thing he did was hug his girlfriend, Rene Boughton, who accompanied him to Halifax from Winnipeg, where they both live.

"She's never been to Nova Scotia before, so I'm really looking forward to showing her the sights around here," he said.

Pte. Schofield now thinks a career in the military might be even more gratifying than the one he had originally planned as a police officer.

One thing's for sure — he won't voluntarily return to Afghanistan.

"Absolutely not," he said firmly. "Some guys in the company would say things like, 'When I retire I'm going to buy a boat because no matter how lost I get, I can never end up in Afghanistan.' "