Mines Road Falmouth in January

Haliburton House

 

Mayflower

(NS Museum) 

Sea Creature

 

At Bayswater

 

Bayswater

(Hancock) 

Bayswater

(Hancock)
Bayswater, NS 

Bayswater, NS

(Hancock) 

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda...

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda….
an interview with a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan.

By Kel Hancock
The spring air is cold and damp as it whips through the open back of the lumbering army transport full of soldiers. Tired, muddy young men doze in the frigid air, chins on chests, heads bobbing; jammed so tightly together that they are barely jostled by the jerky gear changes of the vehicle. I want to sleep but I cannot. I am enthralled by the sound of a lone voice singing into the wind. The hum of tires and the clink-clank of the truck provide a melodic accompaniment to the soldier’s song. ‘And the band played Waltzing Matilda…’
A young soldier, a Lieutenant, sings the sombre refrain of an old Australian lament of the Great War. It is a haunting solo; chilling and warming all at once…‘as our ship pulled away from the quay…’ It is the first time I have heard this tune…the first of many.
Recently, I spoke with that soldier again. Over twenty years have passed and the young officer, although now a seasoned and hardened veteran, is not without the same inspiring enthusiasm. He is Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, the Commanding Officer of a battalion- strong Battle Group in Kandahar, Afghanistan…

KH: LCol Hope, it is an honour and a pleasure to talk with you. I appreciate you taking this time to speak with me.
LCol Hope: My pleasure.
KH: When did you arrive in Afghanistan?
LCol Hope: I arrived here on the 23rd of January, 2006, on the first flight of Canadian troops that came into Kandahar for this mission.
(courtesy DND Combat Camera)
LCol Ian Hope addresses his troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
“Here’s the thing, these soldiers are quite willing to be caught in a Taliban crossfire. They will never be willing to be, nor will never accept being, caught in a political crossfire in Canada about the mission…and neither will I”
-LCol Ian Hope
KH: You’re from the Annapolis Valley. Where is your hometown?
LCol Hope: Well, I consider Annapolis Royal my hometown. I was not born there but it is where my parents, with my brother and I, bought a house in the mid 80’s. It was the first time we had settled down because my dad was in the Army. My father is from Halifax, with a lot of relatives in the Annapolis Valley, so it was like coming home to him and we all adopted it as our home.

KH: Are you married? With Children?
LCol Hope: Yes. My wife’s name is Karen and she is from Baddeck, Cape Breton. We met at Acadia University. I have a five year old boy, Alex, and a seven year old girl named Emma.
KH: How is your family coping with your absence?
LCol Hope: They are very strong. My wife understands this in terms of importance of the mission for Canada and the importance of my part in the overall operations. She has been extremely supportive in all regards. The children are actually behaving. Which they never seem to do when dad is around. (he laughs)
KH: How many men and women are currently under your command and leadership?


LCol Hope: The number fluctuates a bit and it keeps growing, so currently we have about 970 on strength. They are from all different branches and trades. The predominant “crew” are infantry from the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. I’ve got a Surveillance Troop of armoured soldiers from 12e Regiment de Blinde du Canada, from Valcartier, Quebec. They are superb. We also have artillery gunners from A Battery, The Royal Canadian Horse Artillery in Shilo, Manitoba. We have engineers from the 1st Canadian Engineer Regiment in Edmonton. We have Military Police, Logistics support personnel and Medical personnel mainly from Edmonton. In addition we have a new attachment of Unmanned Air Vehicle operators which has been deployed for the first time. We also have a number of Civil and Military affairs officers. I also have a company of about 150 very professional Romanian Army soldiers under my command. So, I have quite a crew. Our battle group is also in a partnership with both the Afghan National Army and Police. At times our strength is between 1200 to 1300 but to give you an exact number is almost impossible.

KH: What other missions have you been deployed on during your career?

LCol Hope: I have been away quite a bit. I have deployed to Haiti, Bosnia and on many domestic operations. Immediately after 911 I deployed on Operation Apollo. Then I deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in the spring of 2004. Between deployments, training and other assignments I have been away a lot. My wife is used to seeing me come and go.


KH: Can you explain your battle group’s mission in the Kandahar region and the extent of your Area of Responsibility?
LCol Hope: Absolutely, yeah, the mission is really one of assistance. We are helping all aspects concerning the Afghan people. We are helping their government at the provincial level and the district level, particularly. We are helping with reconstruction across the province; working with the international community in that. We are helping their security forces, particularly their Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. In this assistance mission we are doing the same kinds of things as we did in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, however we are doing it in a much more lethal environment, because there is an active enemy. I know some people don’t like that word but I have to use it, as you can understand, because that‘s what it is. They are targeting us as well as our Afghan partners because we are supporting the Afghan government. The stated aim of that enemy is to overthrow the Afghan government. So from my perspective this is very much a conflict even though we are doing a great deal of peacekeeping and peace-support work because the tactical environment makes it a lot different. We are, right now, focusing almost all of our efforts in the Kandahar Province which is the mandate for my Battle Group. We are able to, and have, been able to surge out of Kandahar Province for tasks in other provinces as part of the Canadian-led Multi-National Brigade which has responsibility for southern Afghanistan.


KH: How is your unit’s presence being received by the local population at large and, in your opinion, what is the greatest threat to Canadian soldiers there?
LCol Hope: Yes, good question. It’s the early days for us yet. In Kandahar City the people understand “Canada” and where Canada, what Canada is and the difference between Americans and Canadians. We have been very well received so far because we have a different approach. It is one that, when I say it is an assistance mission for us, it is really a different type of approach then the Americans had before us where they were actively hunting Taliban and assistance was a secondary thing. We put assistance as the first mission and looking for the Taliban is something of a small nuance but is something that is very important to the people. Outside of Kandahar City, though, in the rural villages we are talking about people that are not in touch with provincial or national politics never mind geopolitics. Canada is understood by most as a country but they would not be able to describe it geographically. We are beginning to establish a rapport in the villages we work with and confidence is building. In villages where we haven’t been present or that we just pass through once in awhile, we are not perceived any differently than other forces have in the past. So we are attempting in our plans to push out into the more remote areas where we need to be and let people know that we are here to cover all of Kandahar Province with a presence. Then the confidence levels should go up. But I think it’s going to take the whole of our tour before we are able to reach out to those civilians.
KH: And the greatest threat?
LCol Hope: With regard to the threat, obviously the biggest threat to our soldiers is the use of IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that are planted on the side of the road or in vehicles. The worst of which is the suicide bomber who drives the explosive device into your vehicle or into a crowd. Sometimes he would have the explosives on his body. We have been extremely fortunate in that we have not lost anyone to IEDs. There have been well over a dozen attacks where they have been used since August and Canada lost diplomat Glynn Berry, unfortunately, but in the operations we have commenced in January we have not lost anybody. We did have one soldier seriously injured as he was up out of the LAV III turret waving vehicles off when the vehicle was struck by a car- bomber. His arm was exposed and injured, unfortunately. The number of attacks we have had by IEDs and their lack of success in destroying our vehicles or wounding and killing more Canadians is basically attributed to the type of vehicles we are using. These armoured vehicles are doing their job extremely well.
We are countering the threat with our equipment and we are countering the threat with local co-operation. There is an active information effort on our part to tell the locals that, unfortunately, IED attacks suicide attacks are killing far more Afghans and maiming Afghan children, to a degree that is tragic and they have to help. So we are starting to get some support from the local population.
KH: What are the best and worst aspects of your day-to-day job?
LCol Hope: Um...yeah…I don’t think about my personal day very much because I am totally consumed by the command of the battle-group. I do enjoy getting out with the soldiers. That is the primary thing for me. As much as I need to concentrate on planning and giving orders, the best part of my job is actually being with the soldiers on the ground in the midst of village engagements and looking for the enemy. Of course the worst part of this job is going to be dealing with casualties.

KH: What are some examples of “Hearts and Minds” operations or humanitarian efforts that are being conducted in your area of responsibility?
LCol Hope: There is a tremendous number of them happening every single day. We have delivery programs that are ongoing to establish vocational training, and equipping local police. The RCMP are in the lead of that. We are working with our government partners CIDA and FAC every day to help organise the provincial government and give them a process to establish reconstruction priorities. We have embedded a Media Officer with the government to let them know how government and media can combine and work together to get messages to the people to improve governance. Soldiers on the ground are actively delivering relief supplies to communities in the form of wood, water and basic needs like water-carrying jugs; small tokens, really but big tokens to the Afghan because we come in with these things consistently. Transistor radios are also very important here and we have delivered hundreds to locals so they can get information. We have two types of programs that are running everyday; those which you might call emergency relief like supplies, the digging of wells and road repairs. Then there is the longer term more expensive projects which we work through the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) here to carry out. These are things like larger scale road construction, vocational training and mentoring of locals. We have locals in the PRT compound which are now training as mechanics to fix Afghan National Police vehicles. This is an initiative started by my mechanics on their own. There is really hundreds of things going on everyday that directly engage the Afghan nationals and build their capacity to do things and give them the materiel they need. In the outlying villages this may be less so, especially where there is a direct over-threat from the Taliban, but in areas where we are everyday the direct focus is on reconstruction efforts.
KH: Are the troops generally pleased or displeased by the way their efforts are being received by the people?
LCol Hope: I wish I could put them on the phone so you could hear it from them. There is a tremendous amount of good feeling amongst the troops for this mission. They understand its importance and unlike other missions in the past they can see the tangible results of their efforts because these Afghans work hard; once you win their loyalty and trust they work really hard for us. Part of my planning is in achieving tangible results; not just for our own satisfaction in Canada, but so that the locals can see and feel these results as well. We are trying to start an unstoppable momentum where the Taliban can no longer come and achieve their initiatives against it. There are villages, I won’t lie to you, that are harbouring and hiding IED-bomber cells. These are places where our soldiers will go in and be seemingly well received by those very people that are supporting insurgents. That is extremely frustrating but it is a minority of villages and individuals and we are finding out, everyday, more and more information about who they are. The soldiers deal with a vast majority of Afghans who are appreciative of their efforts. I think you’ll find when the mission is over and out troops return home there will be a sense of satisfaction in a job well done.
KH: How are the troops responding to the recent deaths and injuries of their comrades and how would you describe the support network that is in place to help them deal with what they may be feeling?
LCol Hope: It is better than I have ever seen in the past. We deliberately had our official ceremonies as part of the healing process and then we got on with business immediately. Orders were passed the same afternoon that we said good-bye and we got back out into the field and on with the mission. There is a mandated process in place here where, if ever a significant incident occurs, soldiers sit with peer-counsellors to talk out the whole incident. This happens within hours of the incident and, as opposed to selecting people to go through it, we make everyone do it who was involved; with no stigma attached. We are finding that that actually enables people to get it all out in the open immediately and deal with feelings well forward and then reintegrate everyone back into their teams and then carry on with the mission. This is something we have learned over the years from ourselves and our allies. It is working very well. There was a feeling in the ’old army’ that if you shed a tear you were weak. The feeling now is, shed the tears, get it all out and get back in business.

KH: How would you describe the performance of the LAV III APC and other LAV variants, in that terrain and tactical situations you are dealing with?
LCol Hope: That’s a great question. When I came here in August for a reconnaissance the Americans said that we may have problems with the LAV. Our own estimates were, yes, we probably will. However, have not been denied, by terrain, access to anywhere. The LAV has taken us into every corner of our Area of Operations. This astounded the Americans when we first did our relief-in-place with them in January. It has astounded us in fact. Everyday I get patrol reports in that show we are going up peaks in the remote mountain area with these vehicles. We have a tremendous respect for it (the LAV) now. It has the manoeuvrability to get into remote and rugged areas, it has great power, it has the armour to withstand the IED attacks, it has a degree of firepower that they (Afghans) have not seen here…ever. We know that the Taliban is watching us; the people always watch us and we know that they have a degree of respect for it. They even have a nickname for the LAV III. They call it “The Monster”. It has won, in many respects, by its sheer presence here. I have personally trained and operated in many vehicles from many countries but I have learned to love this vehicle. I am actually living out of the vehicle. We have a large portion of the battle-group who are out there living out of the back of their LAVs, up in the mountains. It is really impressing a lot of the locals that the LAV can be a sustainment system and not just a fighting or transport vehicle.
KH: With regards to your mission, what is the hardest decision you have had to make? What is the hardest thing you have had to personally do?
LCol Hope: That’s a good one…um…I haven’t been challenged in terms of making extremely hard decisions, yet. Of course maybe the time will come. It has not been a problem for me to decide to go out and put the soldiers in the midst of the enemy areas because I have been a soldier for twenty-six years and I know that this is what they want to do. This is how success is achieved. The local nationals need this. That is not a hard decision; to push the soldiers and keep them out there in the midst of all this. I am out there everyday with them and the feedback I am getting is that this is what we need to do. I’m not sure that we will face any significant battles, so to speak. It was never my estimate, when we came here that we would have any sort of Korea-type of conflict; just fleeting engagements with the enemy now and then. None of those engagements demand of me the typical decision making of a conventional war. The hardest thing to deal with is of course, casualties.
KH: What are some of the things about your troops that make you proud?
LCol Hope: They are resilient. The Canadian soldier is a unique soldier unlike many others in the world because he or she comes from a climate that allows him to withstand the elements, he comes from a people for whom compromise is a normal thing, and he understands the need for diplomacy as well as the need to soldier hard. He can be decisive. The Canadian soldier cannot go by a ruined hospital without thinking, ‘Hey, we need to rebuild that!’. It is part of his makeup. The soldiers under my command, the men and women here, just completely impress me everyday with their ingenuity; solving problems at low levels before they ever get to my level. They have a good moral foundation.
These men and women represent the values of Canadian society and they are extending that here in Afghanistan. They are professional in the highest sense of the word. The combination of their Canadian disposition, their professionalism and experience, and a mission that I think most if not very single soldier truly believes in is vital. Vital to both Canada and Afghanistan. You see it when you are out in the Area of Operations.
KH: Are the troops generally pleased or displeased by the way this mission is being portrayed by the mainstream media?
LCol Hope: That is very difficult for me to answer because like me, they don’t se much of the results. We get noticed if there is bad publicity, right away. That which we have seen has been fairly positive. I personally have an open policy for the media; that is if you come here you have access to us, we will give you whatever we can except that sensitive information which endangers our soldiers. We have gone a long way to follow the program of embedded media, which is I think is new to Canada. It has been working well.
KH: How do the troops feel about the opposition to this mission at home in Canada?
LCol Hope: If you want to lower the morale of the troops here, have very vocal academic debate about it back there about the legitimacy of what they are doing. Here’s the thing, these soldiers are quite willing to be caught in a Taliban crossfire. They will never be willing and will never accept being caught in a political crossfire in Canada…and neither will I.
We have been in Afghanistan four years, many soldiers have been here before and we have a voluntary system. They don’t have to be here. They choose to be here and have sacrificed much already. They want to do the job. We now have a bunch of people who have just woke up to the fact that Canada is in Afghanistan and are trying to educate themselves in the public forum. It takes a long while to understand things like this sometimes. We will be here for the year. If there are going to be decisions made about future deployments, then fine, but until then the soldiers need support. Canadians need to have a degree of trust in the last government and the current government who have both endorsed this mission after the years of strategy formulation that have gone into it. I have been a part of that and I think that it is the most well thought out strategic plan for assisting another nation that we have probably ever done. Everything is connected in a long-term strategy that Foreign Affairs Canada, CIDA, the RCMP and DND have collectively shaped. For the benefit of our morale we are hoping that Canadians will see this mission in the way we have come to see it.

KH: Tell us a bit about the Prime Minister’s visit. What effect did it have for you and the troops on the ground?
LCol Hope: It was tremendous. I came in from the field late on a Sunday night to find out that the PM had arrived and we quickly gathered everyone in. It was quite a moment actually because we never anticipated that high-profile of a visit this early in the tour and it had an extremely positive effect on everybody that participated in it.
KH: What advice would you have for Canadians on how they can best support the troops in Afghanistan?
LCol Hope: I think Canadians are doing a good job at supporting their troops. We are getting positive feedback. I think they need to know that this is a hard mission. It is not a war in terms of a conventional conflict where there are going to be big decisive battles. There is going to be frustration at finding the enemy who are hiding in villages. We need a lot of patience because there will be no big decisive victory here. There will be a longer term winning over of the peoples’ trust that we will not abandon them. And with that winning over they, themselves, will turn in the enemy. So patience is what is required amongst Canadians. There is no short term decisive solution. We need to be prepared to stay here for however long it takes. Personally I think that the counter insurgency and reconstruction effort will take five to six years. That is not to say that the Canadian Forces have to take part in all that. That is not a necessity. We can transfer the responsibilities to other allies. We need to look at this like Bosnia and spend as much time here, as a nation, as it takes to help the Afghan nation. Canadians should feel extremely proud of their troops. They are not only working to rebuild Afghanistan but they are passing on Canadian values every day, to the locals; that will never be catalogued or written in military history. Not only our knowledge and skills but our values are having a tremendously positive impact. Canadians need to know that sustaining that for as long as possible is very important.


KH: What is the first thing you are going to do when you get home?
LCol Hope: The last time I came home I flew into Sydney, Nova Scotia. My wife picked me up at the airport and took me to the cottage in Baddeck, where I had a beer and looked at the green and the blue, and it was wonderful. I think, when the time comes, that my duties will take me directly to Edmonton, but after that I look forward to a quiet leave somewhere; probably in Baddeck.
KH: Lastly, is there anything you would like to say to the people of Annapolis Valley? Is there anyone you would like to say Hi to?
LCol Hope: This may not be able to extend all the way to Edmonton, but I like to say hi to my wife and family. To my relatives in Nova Scotia and particularly my in-laws in Baddeck, I wish them all the best and I’ll see you at the end of the end of the tour. Thanks for your support.
To the people of the Annapolis Valley, where I consider home, and to the West Nova Scotia Regiment, where my military career started, thank-you for your support. I have fond memories of the Valley and I hope to get down there soon.
KH: Colonel, thank-you very much for taking some of your valuable time to speak with us. Good-luck to you and your troops for both a safe mission and return home.

LCol Hope: My pleasure and thank-you.



LCol Ian Hope began his military life as an officer in the West Nova Scotia Regiment while attending Acadia University. His career now spans over twenty-six years.
Since 2001 over 14,000 Canadian Forces personnel have served in Afghanistan. Some have served more than one tour. Many of these personnel are from the Annapolis Valley region. LCol Hope’s 1st Battalion The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group will be relieved and commence repatriation to Canada sometime in February of 2007.

Kel Hancock has served with the Canadian Forces. As a career infantry soldier he has seen active duty in the Balkans, East Africa as well as on domestic operations.
He is now retired from the military and resides in the Annapolis Valley, NS.
Copyright KW Hancock, 2006