Reservists in Afghanistan

Ian Elliot of the Kingston Whig-Standard - one of the MSM reporters who participated in the same trip I took to Afghanistan earlier this year - has had his pieces released bit by bit in his newspaper, and his latest deals with local reservists. Specifically, it focuses on Cpl Sean Jump of the Princess of Wales' Own Regiment, who was working at the KPRT when we were there, and then broadens out into a bigger discussion of reserve involvement in Afghanistan.

Ian's angle is a local one by necessity, but I find that wider discussion of the role of our CF reserves quite of interest.

I know Ian hates this - we had a long, jet-lagged discussion under the desert stars about it one night at Camp Mirage - but I'm going to nitpick him a bit: BGen Gary O'Brien, isn't "the senior officer in charge of the country's reserves," but rather the senior army reservist, as I understand it. He's currently on a three-year full-time turn with the CLS in Ottawa.

Other than that, the article's excellent. I particularly liked this passage, as it builds on something I've been saying for a long time:

CFB Kingston base commander Spike Hazleton, who just finished a tour in a command role in Afghanistan's RC South headquarters -a bullet-pocked stucco building where the Taliban are reputed to have staged their last stand against Soviet forces years ago -noted even if a reservist leaves the army for a civilian job after an Afghanistan posting, the country is stronger for it.

"Can you imagine someone who has worked over there stepping into a civilian role as a teacher or an office worker or a leader?" he asked recently.

"After what they've been through over there, there is going to be nothing they can't handle. After serving in a war zone, they are coming back supremely competent in whatever they do. It's hard to imagine these young people in any situation worrying that they don't know how to handle it.

"Like the generation of veterans who came back after World War II, the country is only going to be stronger for it."

And the truth is that we're using a lot of reservists in the mission. As O'Brien said to us "there's no cap brass on helmets": the reservists who deploy are fully integrated, and the last numbers I heard were that they made up 12% of the total force, a number that has been moving steadily upwards since the beginning of the Afghan mission.

Interestingly, BGen O'Brien did a presentation just over a year ago that exposed some significant statistics (pdf). Three slides in particular stand out:







The first two show the raw numbers of reservists involved in deployed operations to date. Those figures are significant, and unlike the regular forces, the deployments are actually improving retention in the reserves rather than eroding it, according to O'Brien.

The third slide shows the level of time commitment required to participate in a deployment for a reservist: somewhere between 14 and 25 months. Quite the "part-time" job.

Of course, the time away from family isn't the only potential impact on a reservist's life. Ask Trevor Greene. Ask a reservist with an operational stress injury. Ask the family of Corporal Anthony Boneca, or Corporal Jason Patrick Warren, or Master Corporal Raymond Arndt, or any of the other reservists who came back draped in their nation's flag. This is not a light undertaking.

But where would we be without that commitment?

A big thanks from this corner to all our CF reserves. The title of 'citizen-soldier' is an honoured one in my books.