CF's COIN reality at Kandahar/Next roto arriving

The new face of--not often--battle (nice reporting by Murray Brewster of CP):

Bombs, bullets and boredom: Charlie Company saw it all
Halifax corporal: 'I thought it would be a lot different'

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Many of them came charging into Kandahar last fall with visions in their minds of gun battles and light armoured vehicles laying down cannon fire across the desert [full roto listed here].

But for members of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, theirs turned out to be a very different war.

The battle group's commanding officer, Lt.-Col. Jerry Walsh, seemed fond of quoting some his soldiers who described their tour as ``living like rats'' in the tiny, spartan patrol bases that dot the Panjwaii district outside Kandahar city.

Even for the veterans of Charlie Company, the last six months have seemed a little bit unreal.

The unit, among the most storied in today's Canadian army, has seen two tours of this region. It was among the first companies to be bloodied by the Taliban as violence spiralled out of control in the spring of 2006 [more on that here].

There are many fresh faces in the ranks, some of them young kids who joined up in 2007 watching the images of Charlie Company's battles on the television news.

But that was then. That was back in a time when Canada was defending virtually the entire province and soldiers were running between battles.

``We were firefighters back then,'' the veterans like to say.

The influx of thousands of U.S. troops, as marked the other day by the handover of Canada's so-called model village project in Deh-e-Bagh, in nearby Dand district [more here], has radically changed the face of this conflict.

So has the strategy of western soldiers living in communities with their Afghan counterparts at combat outposts, instead of fortified bases.

The Patricias were there first battle group to do so.

There are still enormous risks, but instead of wild firefights, there is a steady stream of homemade bombs and roadside explosions. Eleven soldiers died and an untold number of wounded went home during PPCLI's latest tour.

But when they patrol, it is in support of the Afghan army and on Afghan time, which is decidedly more relaxed than what Canadian troops are familiar with.

And for many of these guys, Kandahar has slipped into the old adage: War is 95 per cent boredom and five per cent sheer terror...

Troops from the Ontario-based 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment, another battle-hardened unit that fought the landmark Operation Medusa in 2006, have started to slip in to the lines to replace the Patricias [part of Task Force 1-10, more here, here and here]...