Leading by example
Harper says he went on his second trip to Afghanistan because 'it's the right thing to do.' Will Canadians notice?
Kevin Steel - June 18, 2007
A fine, white dust hangs in the air over the Kandahar airbase in southern Afghanistan, so fine it is barely visible. It obscures the view only at a distance, but you can feel it sticking to your sweat, or as a bit of grit on your teeth. That dust may well have been kicked up by the constant parade of military vehicles grinding their way along the base's main roads at all hours, but in Afghanistan it's hard to tell--the dust is simply everywhere.
It was 8:15 a.m. on May 23 and the temperature was already well on its way to 30?C when Prime Minister Stephen Harper stepped out from beside a Tim Hortons trailer onto a boardwalk and into that dusty Kandahar base. Flanked by military brass and Gordon O'Connor, his minister of defence, Harper walked to a podium set up in the centre of an outdoor hockey rink just in front of the iconic coffee shop.
About 300 troops had waited patiently on that concrete rink for over an hour to hear Harper speak, the sun bearing down on their desert hats. Directly in front of the podium, 12 hatless soldiers wearing hockey jerseys--six abreast, facing each other--stood at military ease, their hands clasped behind their backs. The prime minister, Tim Hortons, hockey: a slice of Canada in a dusty land, a long way from home.
PRIDE IN A JOB WELL DONE:
As he sits outside his tent in the waning light of a Kandahar evening, a young Canadian soldier confides that morale at the base is pretty high. He has just come back from brushing his teeth some 200 metres away. In the distance, cheering and whistling sweeps across the base from a stadium where entertainers from Canada's East Coast are treating the troops to Cape Breton Celtic music.
Yes, the troops are in fine spirits. Then again, morale in his unit is already really high. "That's because we're going home in a week and a half," he explains brightly.
But there's another reason for their good mood: the satisfaction earned in a job well done. "I think everyone here understands it takes some time to build a country," the 21-year-old corporal says. "We're pretty proud of what we did out of Camp Julien up in Kabul. That place was a mess when we first got there in 2003--in complete darkness, no power. In two years it started looking like a city again."
Page 1 of 4