Afstan: In the field with 2 RCR

Not the sort of reporting you'll often see from our media, good on the NY Times (with slideshow):

A Quiet, Tense Night for a First Patrol

Christoph Bangert for The New York Times

Canadian soldiers of India Company of the 2nd Royal Canadian Regiment head out on a night patrol

Kandahar, Afghanistan — The crescent moon had just risen as the Canadian soldiers crushed their last cigarettes out in the dust and began helping one another put on their heavy packs. There was a soft breeze in the warm night air, pleasantly and unseasonably mild. That wouldn’t last.

They were about to go on their first dismounted night patrol; their unit had just rotated in, and most of these men, from India Company, Second [Battalion] Royal Canadian Regiment, were on their first tour of Afghanistan [they're with the Provincial Reconstruction Team, more here]. Their predecessors had over the previous year lost five service members.

“This is a presence patrol,” the patrol leader, Sgt. Dan Wiese, told them, “So when it gets too dark to see, use white light. That’s the point, to let them know we’re here.”

In a staggered double file, the 20 men marched out the gate of Camp Nathan Smith, on the edge of this city at the heart of the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan. They turned right onto the main north-south road, whose NATO name was Miller Lite, and took both sides of the pavement. It was 8:05 p.m.

For the first few hundred yards, Miller Lite ran through a busy commercial district, and people were still in the shops and roadside stalls; three-wheeled motorized rickshaws and motorcycles and bicycles all pulled over. Afghan police escorts stopped auto and truck traffic, and it piled up far behind, headlights blazing from the vehicles in front, spilling onto the dirt verges five or six abreast, engines revving, occasional horns blowing; it seemed like a noisy, menacing mob, held at bay by some invisible force.

Leaving Miller Lite, to the roar of vehicles finally released to move, the platoon followed a zigzag route along streets too small for NATO names, mostly dirt and gravel, crisscrossed by narrow alleyways.

This is District Nine of Kandahar City, where many Taliban fighters reputedly live because there are footpaths that lead into the adjoining mountains — ratlines, the military calls them...

In Wednesday’s Times, C. J. Chivers reports on a very different scene in Marja [there seem to be quite few more firefights in Helmand than Kandahar].

Via milnews.ca at Milnet.ca. More here and here on 1 RCR, the heart of our current battle group.