On the Deaths of Soldiers

by John Thompson

April 20, 2002

The accidental bombing of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan is a horrible tragedy for the families of the dead and injured. It is also another sad entry in the histories of one our more illustrious regiments (alongside hundreds and hundreds of similar entries). At another level, it is a partial payment towards the price of doing business in the real world.

In the general scheme of things and in the collective history of both our Army and the Patricias, this is not an unusual tragedy. Soldiers get hurt and killed even in peacetime; airmen fall from heaven and sailors drown. They have continuously done so in their ones and twos in the long interlude between the Korean War and our current one. Moreover some of those years of "peace" were no such thing for our soldiers: some 130 died or were injured in the former Yugoslavia and more have been harmed in many different places.

It is worth noting that these deaths and injuries provoked virtually no interest in the mainstream Canadian media and general public.

In recent years it has become customary for the privacy of grief to be violated by the media and the well-meaning — grief councilors are summoned and we look for emotion on camera to identify with and viscerally share. In this case, outsiders (people from outside the Army generally and the Patricias particularly) would be well advised to f*** off.

Infantry live in a private world which they only share with each other. Sometimes, they are even more likely to sympathize with enemy infantry than they are with non-combat troops; and there is much that they will never, ever, share with civilians or even with their own families. Those who have been in other branches of the Army, even in peacetime, know the edges of the infantry’s world but it is alien to everyone else and infantrymen resent all those who attempt to intrude.

Being in the infantry is about enduring shared hardship on behalf of unwitting strangers. It is about toil and sweat, deprivation and misery, and a perverse pride in it that is shared only with other infantry, who are the only ones who can understand it. When men are lost, the grief is shouldered along with their many other burdens, and infantrymen look to understanding from each other. They seldom look elsewhere.

Losses from "friendly fire" is an old story and always a constant danger. Medieval soldiers had to worry about "friendly stabbings" in the midst of a melee. In the First World War, Canadian infantry were expected to follow their own barrages so closely that they suffered casualties from it — the alternative was to take far higher casualties when the enemy emerged from cover. In the Second World War, the 4^th Infantry Brigade was accidentally savaged by a massive RAF bombing raid as they waited to fight their way into the Falaise Gap.

The problem has persisted since. A large portion of British infantry casualties in the Falklands War resulted from friendly fire. Most of the British deaths in the 1991 Gulf War occurred when a US aircraft fired a missile into a British armored personnel carrier. There were numerous "own goal" incidents in the Vietnam War, mostly — but not entirely -- from aircraft and artillery.

With the revolution in military technology in the 1990s, the chance for an enemy force to inflict casualties on modern Western troops has become much reduced. The possibility for death by accident remains constant, and the risk of friendly fire — while steadily being reduced — is nowhere near absent either. Additionally, modern Western weapons are very deadly indeed. When the choice is between a 500 lb bomb in the wrong place or a pair of al-Qaeda gunmen on a distant ridgeline, it is easy to guess which is the more dangerous.

When the Patricia Battle Group and the JTF deployed to Afghanistan; they did so at risk to themselves. It was a risk many of them had endured before, particularly those who had been in Bosnia and Croatia. It was also likely that accidents and friendly fire incidents could be at least as deadly as the enemy. Yet they still went, grumbling and bitching as soldiers do, into the some of the worst that their private world has to offer. Don’t ask them to share their feelings about casualties with you, because they know you don’t understand.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca