Haji Beach

Legion Magazine's Adam Day spent some time with Canadian soldiers at Police Sub-station Haji, aka Haji Beach, this past April. He's put together a front-line story with good pictures and a video, and posted it at the Legion Magazine site, and it's worth a read.

In general, the further you get from the main NATO base at Kandahar Airfield, the more ragged things become. At KAF you can have Pizza Hut and all the warm showers you want. At Haji Beach, you’ll go to the toilet in a bag and even the rations are being rationed.

They call it Haji Beach because, at least in theory, there’s a sandy bit of riverbed down by the Arghandab that does look temptingly hospitable. In actual fact though, it is not. When a small group of soldiers from B Company, 2nd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry tried to go swimming down at the beach just after arriving in Haji, they were promptly shot at by the Taliban, who in this case the soldiers describe as “the hillbillies across the river.”

Adam obviously sympathizes with the soldiers he covers, which is to his credit, because soldiers in the field are a collection of extremes: the bravest, rudest, toughest, most tightly wound, most juvenile, most world-weary and cynical, most gallant and self-sacrificing a bunch you'll ever meet. It's tough to reconcile all that in a piece of journalism.

I found it refreshing to see a professional scribe not try to reach too far: this piece is a snapshot of one small group of soldiers in one outpost for one short period of time. Day largely avoids the impulse to draw grand conclusions about the geopolitics of the conflict from this one window into it.

I'll admit I found myself laughing at one particular line Day quotes in the piece:

They talk about other things too. They talk about watching Canadian Parliament on television and laugh how the politicians behave, about how they boo each other. “Grow the f—k up, you’re running the country,” laughed one soldier.

I hope the parliamentarians and their staffers who read this blog take note of that. And I thank Day for making sure that comment, along with all the other insights into the lives of our deployed soldiers contained in the article, made it to the light of day.