Badly Hidden

By R.C. Westland

Years after Captain Scott Weatherhill returns home from Afghanistan, images from a firefight there are stirred up in his mind at a family campground. Demons are unleashed that spiral out of control, with devastating consequences. Badly Hidden is a fast-paced psychological thriller and a troubling interpretation of post-traumatic stress disorder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780994035844

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Acknowledgements

AFGHANISTAN

ONE

At seven o’clock in the morning on a cold November day, a civil servant on her way to work in Canada’s capital city dialled 911. In the bushes alongside the walking path, emergency responders found the body of a retired major general whose struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder had become public knowledge. Excessive drinking and hypothermia would be listed as the immediate causes of his death. In the case of the colonel who jumped off the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge into the icy waters of the Ottawa River, the cause of death would be listed as suicide. And it appeared to be speeding and personal negligence that killed Sergeant O’Malley when his car spun off Highway 416 at the tail end of a police chase. The police officers who went to the home address shown on his driver’s licence learned the sergeant had strangled his wife before fleeing.

In print and online, Canada’s largest privately owned media chain highlighted these three deaths in an investigation that ran for the entire period of the federal election. The impact of PTSD upon dozens of soldiers who had returned from active theatres of war, and upon their families, was exposed. O’Malley’s murder of his wife, it was reported, could almost certainly be attributed to what he had endured in Afghanistan. Anguish and shame were at the wheel of his car when he died, not the man he had once been.

Drug abuse, suicide, murder. These are part of the shameful legacy the government will be leaving for its most deserving citizens, wrote a retired chief of Canada’s defence staff in an op-ed piece in one of the chain’s regional papers. The articles and tweets that followed drew nationwide attention. They sustained a discussion that led to a crescendo of support for soldiers with mental health issues and to a battering of the government at the polls.

The Atlantic Press Council says our content was too partisan, said the newspaper’s publisher after the election. Well, too bad. It was time to throw the bums out. It’s time we treat our veterans with the care and respect they deserve.

The incoming government was strongly committed to dealing with a matter that the previous government, during its nine-year term in office, had largely ignored. The newly minted ministers of national defence and of the federal health department stood together to say that henceforth no creative proposals for dealing with PTSD were to be left off the table.

The money will be there, said the minister of defence when a reporter asked about cost. We have given our deputy ministers carte blanche to work with experts in the medical field, military and non-military alike, to design and implement innovative solutions.

Major David Price, the senior army psychiatrist at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Kingston, subscribed to the thesis that a PTSD event leaves a chemical imprint in the brain. Drugs like propranolol, imipramine, or hydrocortisone, he believed, could have a countervailing effect. Those drugs could prevent the onset of a full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder if administered as soon as possible after a stressful event. Price felt emboldened by the changed political environment. On his own initiative, the major ordered that all ranks in an active theatre of war submit themselves to drug intervention if medics in the field believed it was necessary. The operations order was mandatory.

Major Price felt he had bloody well earned his right to make independent decisions. By this time he had served eight years in the military. His tall, lanky frame had become well known to front-line soldiers in the Canadian forces. The sharp look in his grey eyes, coming at you from under too much hair for a military man, was unsettling for those who did not know him. The way he would pull at his nose, as if wanting to lengthen it even more, had made him the object of ribald jokes within the ranks. Spaghetti Nose. He fucks the troops with it. But his voice was calming. He looked for honesty in reply to his probing questions and he usually got it.

Captain Scott Weatherhill’s name was brought to the attention of Major Price because the captain had refused follow-up treatment upon returning to his forward operating base (FOB) at Ma’sum Ghar, after a firefight at Talukan that rated high on the scale of potential PTSD events. Many lives had been lost in that place, including ten civilians.

From allied forces headquarters in Kandahar, where the captain was taken by national investigation service (NIS) officers to account for the civilian loss of life, Weatherhill sent a message to his unit commander. In his message he took issue with questions posed by the NIS and said he would be resigning his commission rather than answer them. Because one of the steps in the captain’s release procedures would be a round of debriefings in Kingston, Major Price would get a chance to find out why Weatherhill had disobeyed his order and why he was quitting the forces.

Did he give his reasons, Paul? Price had put in a call to the FOB and managed to get Sergeant Hamilton on the line. The use of first names between commissioned and non-commissioned officers in the medical corps was common. They knew one another from the many times they worked together. They each respected the other’s expertise, regardless of rank.

He was aware of the op order, Dave. He cut me off when I was explaining myself. He said his actions were consistent with his training and if the army wanted to charge him for the loss of civilian lives so be it. He was pretty angry.

In the formal letter of resignation that followed his initial message Weatherhill’s anger came through as deep disappointment. During my ten years in the army, he wrote, I incorporated the army’s code of conduct, morals, and ethics in every action I took and in every command I gave. I knew what I was doing in that family compound. I made the right decisions.

To prepare for his meeting with Captain Weatherhill, Major Price obtained travel authority from Colonel Thomas Smart, commander of the military hospital at CFB Kingston, to fly from Trenton to Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield, southeast of Charicar in Parwan province. There Price met with Warrant Officer Brad Peterson, Weatherhill’s second-in-command, in an interview room set up with low-profile cameras and a recording capacity. The room was used primarily by journalists.

Warrant Officer B.R. Peterson was a man who looked to be in his late forties. His mostly grey hair was cut short, shaved very close around the sides and up the back of his large head. The power in his lean, six-foot body was evident by how he walked and moved, even by how he sat. He looked tense, ready to spring. His blue eyes appeared dark. The dark came from within. When Price compared notes with his staff officer, Lieutenant Franks, Franks swore that Peterson’s eyes were black.

Warrant Peterson, whose rank placed him at the top of the men and women who were non-commissioned officers, appeared wary when he stepped into the interview room. Price suggested they go to the cafeteria and talk about his unease over coffee. When we do the interview, Price said, I will need to record it.

I don’t like how Captain Weatherhill was treated, Peterson began. The cacophony of sound generated by hundreds of soldiers sitting at dozens upon dozens of picnic-style tables under the humongous cafeteria tent ensured the conversation between them would be private.

We were fucking under fire—excuse my words, Major. Those guys in Investigation should have been there. They have no idea what real warfare is like.

The warrant knew his words did not apply to Price. While almost always within the relative safety of the green zone, David Price had done two tours of duty in Afghanistan. He and Warrant Peterson had first met in Bosnia when Price was still a captain and Peterson a sergeant. Price had signed up because he had medical school bills to pay and Peterson was a career soldier. They had both earned their spurs.

On the short walk from the cafeteria back to the interview room, the two men chatted about people they had known in the former Yugoslavia. While settling into facing standard-issue metal chairs, Price reminded Peterson that the web camera was on and his every word was going to be taped. The warrant knew Price was there on business and had no choice in the matter, but Peterson appreciated the reminder. By now he had become anxious to share his memory of what happened. When the telling of a war story has begun it can be much harder to stop an old warrior than it was to get him started.

Warrant Peterson spoke in a deep, raspy voice. Each word sounded as if it had hurt his throat on the way out. But he needed no further prompting. He wanted to be heard. He wanted to defend, to the best of his ability, the captain he had served with in Afghanistan.

Testimony of Warrant Officer B.R. Peterson

The land was dry and the dust was always in our mouths, noses, and ears. The villages and the fields were crisscrossed by ditches—or wadis—that were part of the Afghan irrigation system. The wadis were lined by mud walls that could be as much as three metres deep.

When on dismounted patrol the fields had to be crossed. The wadis had to be waded or jumped across. The walls had to be climbed. The roads had to be avoided. The roads were where the Taliban—usually under cover of the night but sometimes in full daylight—planted their improvised explosive devices (IED).

When we walked—very carefully—along village pathways our hearts were in our throats and our breathing was uneven. If we were lucky enough to get four hours of downtime under our blankets, two of those hours were spent slapping at the bugs that were in there.

We would walk looking down at our feet, trying with every step to stay within the footprint of the one in front of us. That way you were less likely to trip on an IED. Those things rip a person and anyone standing close by to pieces. The combined severance of legs, arms, and genitals had become the signature wound in Afghanistan. Our medics used the words dismounted complex blast injuries.

Our daily goal on Captain Scott Weatherhill’s last patrol, with six villages to visit, was to cover an average of fifteen kilometres a day. It was hard for us Canadians to keep up.

There were four of us providing operational mentoring support to an Afghan platoon of twenty Afghan soldiers. For the presence patrol ordered by the Afghan commander, Captain Mansour, we Canadians each carried a kit that weighed in at eighteen kilos for weaponry, fifteen kilos for ammunition, and forty-five kilos in body armour, such as the Kevlar flak vest with the ballistic plates in front and back. The Afghan soldiers carried half that.

Anything suspicious on or under the ground would call for a stop and an inspection. Culverts could be crossed only after one of the Afghan soldiers crawled through to confirm that each one was clear. Even if culverts had been checked on previous visits by Afghan National Army or international forces, the Taliban could have been back with another set of explosives. The visual presence of fighting-age males, each and every time, demanded a stop in our progress and a confirmation of their intent. While most of our patrol would then assume a position in which to be safe, where we could use our weapons if necessary, a designated few from among the ANA soldiers would move ahead and ask what those guys were up to.

Our patrol was an unending series of stops and starts. Each stop was unnerving because we would fear an ambush. Each start brought on the adrenaline surge that comes with risk. This was how we had to manage our way over ten to twenty kilometres of terrain each and every day.

One out of every two times our ANA platoon made contact with the fighting-aged males it turned out to be the Taliban. The Taliban would deploy to pre-set positions and commence firing. We were in a firefight every other day.

The incoming rounds would register as snaps in the air. You would feel them before they could be heard. One learns very quickly the difference between a snap and a crack. The sound of a crack means that the bullet has come far too close. The Taliban were well equipped. They seemed to have an endless supply of rocket-propelled grenade warheads. We would see those RPGs fly over our heads and hear them land behind us. Or they would land in front of our planned way forward. The louder the crash the closer the Taliban were getting to their target. And that was us.

The desk jockeys back in Ottawa say all of this should be normal for those of us in the field. None of this is normal. It is not normal to be the target of live fire.

Yes, we members of the Canadian forces made a personal choice to be soldiers. Even so, the real thing is about as surreal as anything can get in life. We train for it, we prepare for it. But when the incoming rounds explode around you, first you are terrified, then physically ill, and then you are angry. To be effective, however, one has to stay cool.

Captain Weatherhill was the leader of our operational mentor and liaison team, or omelette as we called it. His muscular shape, sculpted onto his five foot ten frame by the regular exercise we saw him do every day inside the perimeter of our forward operating base, added to our feeling that he could be counted upon. From his blond hair and blue eyes it was easy to guess that he was of Dutch descent. The Dutch, too, were in the desert as part of the international security assistance force. We teased him about this: Excuse me Captain, are you lost or something? Your guys are over that way...

Captain Weatherhill never lost his capacity to see what was going on around us even if we had dived behind walls or below the tops of ditches and could no longer see anything at all. He had an intuitive sense of what the enemy were doing and where they were likely to pop up next. He always got Mansour’s Afghan soldiers to the places where the Taliban would be eagerly running, thinking they had us fooled and would destroy us in an ambush.

After our captain had set his traps, I often had to caution him to then step back and let the Afghans do the shooting. The purpose of our omelette was to mentor, not to lead. Like so many others in this business our captain had become more aggressive, more angry, more hate-filled as his tour wore on. As his second-in-command I could see this happening and we talked about it. I was pleased for his sake that he would soon be going home. He needed the break.

After a few months in the field it could be hard for our soldiers to stay positive about the Afghans we were in that country to help. The conduct of the Afghan soldiers we were mentoring could be bizarre. We learned not to trust anyone.

Word had come to us of the ambush and near scalping of a Canadian captain by a ten-year-old boy. That captain had felt safe enough among Afghan soldiers and villagers to remove his helmet. We knew of rescue missions where our guys, racing to help injured civilians, were purposely led by Afghan escorts across IEDs that exploded and killed. We knew of international force soldiers who had been mowed down when led by their Afghan guides past small grape huts where the Taliban were sitting with their machine guns at the ready.

A hatred, like I was seeing in our captain, built up within most of our guys. It was a soldier’s response to fear. A soldier can be removed from the field at short notice but the hatred can stay in that soldier for a very long time, long after the reason to be afraid is gone. It became quite common for us Canadians to refer derisively to the Taliban as Timothy. No one has any idea how that choice of name came about. But it wasn’t beeb—another slang some of us used—and it wasn’t censured, and it seemed to help. Almost everyone hates Timothy over there.

Until the very last day we had lost no one on our side. Among the Taliban we estimated a half-dozen killed or wounded on this patrol alone. Yet only one body could be confirmed as a kill. The Taliban will move heaven and earth to drag wounded comrades and especially bodies of the dead away from the scene of a fight. A believer has to be buried as soon as possible after death. The Taliban left the bodies of infidels like us and our allies to rot.

I should note that the ANA was not the only armed Afghan organization operating in our area. Because our area of responsibility was close to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, we also encountered the Afghan border police.

The border police were the ones we worried about. A couple of times during my three tours to Afghanistan, when we thought our firefight was with the Taliban, we learned after a few dozen rounds that those on the other side were members of the border police.

It was not unusual to come across those stupid guys, fully armed, yet wearing light clothing and perhaps not even shoes. They looked like hippies back in the 1960s and 70s. They were ill-disciplined, often under the influence of drugs, and loud with their voices and their equipment. Motorcycles, small and poorly muffled Hondas, were a preferred way for them to scoot from place to place. They took those bikes away from Afghan civilians whenever it suited them to do so. I saw this happen on a number of occasions. Let me tell you, to be seen working with the Afghan border police was not a way to curry favour with villagers.

The combat outpost just outside of Talukan was intended to be the second-last stop of our patrol. We had planned to still reach one more of the outposts in our area before returning in our own cars, what we called our LAVs, to our home base. But things went off the rails in Talukan.

First I should step back and describe the shura. The Canadian captain who had been attacked with an axe had been sitting in a shura.

Shuras are council meetings. Western forces in Afghanistan called for shuras, or were welcomed to them, when our operations could have an impact upon villages in the area. Sometimes our purpose was only to explain our presence. Sometimes we wanted to learn whether we could count upon civilians to help us track down the Taliban. If provincial reconstruction teams (PRT) were in the area, we would use shuras to update village leaders on the status of their projects.

Whereas village leaders fully expected officers leading international force operations in their area to explain themselves at a shura, Afghan National Army officers were welcomed less frequently. Don’t get me wrong. I am sure most village leaders and residents were very pleased to see their own nationals taking charge of the future of their country. But their own nationals were less of an attraction than our guys.

When our patrol approached Talukan, our omelette had not expected to attend a shura. We were unaware of any PRT projects in the vicinity. We thought we would just be passing by. We were surprised when Captain Mansour told Captain Weatherhill that he had called for a meeting with village chiefs. We were told the meeting would take place in a compound at the edge of town.

Our captain did not look pleased about this turn of events. It is one of the operating principles of the omelette, however, that the team leader should not second-guess what the Afghan commander decides to do. Captain Weatherhill could advise and mentor, he could support, he could call upon additional firepower if necessary, but he had no authority to call anything off.

Captain Weatherhill had nevertheless called into Ma’sum Ghar, our forward operating base in the region, for authority to hold back. He proposed to have Captain Mansour go into that compound on his own. Captain Weatherhill was told to follow the Afghan captain’s lead. He was ordered to go in there.

There had not been any shura at the other villages in the previous eight days. Our Afghan commander had attended only a couple of council meetings in the whole time we had been embedded with his unit. When something not normal is about to happen in a context where, as I have said, the word normal itself hardly applies, one moves onto the fringe of predictable behaviour. We on the omelette felt that frisson up our backs that warns of danger.

The compound we were headed into, furthermore, looked foreboding.

Its construction was of the thick mud bricks typical in this country. The building was surrounded by walls well over five metres high, with an entry gate facing west and two towers built on either end of the southern wall. The compound was fairly large, about thirty square metres. When I peered in I could see a courtyard and a number of closed doors along the insides of the walls. By my count there were as many as six separate rooms leading off from the courtyard, three lined up against the inside of each of the northern and southern walls. The doors were covered by a metre or so of overhanging tin that ran from one end of each wall to the other.

The open space within the compound allowed only a small group from our patrol to stay inside. Captain Mansour and four of his platoon would represent the Afghan army. Our omelette would be represented by Captain Weatherhill, joined by his supporting twosome of Master Corporal Sean Brant and Ali. Sean Brant was a signaller, an Aboriginal from a Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario, who didn’t mind our salute to him as a worthy descendant from those who helped beat the Americans in Canada’s War of 1812. Ali—it was the only name we knew him by—had been assigned by Captain Mansour to be our translator.

As I was stepping back from the gate with the rest of our team, Captain Weatherhill broke away from a quick exchange with Brant and pulled me aside. He told me to confirm the coordinates of the compound and, separately, of each of its two towers above the southern wall. He instructed me to send the coordinates to the British forces that were on the other side of the Arghandab River.

What happened next inside the compound is something I can report upon because of the debrief I received from Brant. But first, let me describe what happened outside the compound after the gate closed.

Quite far down the road, coming from the direction of Ma’sum, came a hard-riding group of yahoos. I counted ten of them. They were waving their rifles with their free hand and appeared to be yelling and whooping, but all we could hear was the gathering roar of the motorcycles on which they sat. Their loose clothing and robes fluttered wildly in the air they were racing through. Their eyes, when they got close, were maniacal.

Corporal Kempt, our rifleman and the fourth Canadian on our team, cried out: Goddamned border police! We all felt that way about them. We expected frenetic bargaining to happen between them and the ANA when they reached us. The border police were pleased to make themselves inconvenient to the Afghan army. They usually wanted ammo and then they would get lost.

When the motorcycles pulled up beside the compound, however, all hell broke loose. Adding to the roar of those engines, the riders began firing their weapons into the air.

The front gate of the compound opened to a crack when the firing began, and then closed again. In the space of a few seconds the Afghan so-called elders had sprinted out of the compound and ran into the fields. I now suspect that if we had looked more closely into their faces at the outset we would have seen half the wrinkles that Afghan elders usually have. It was a trap.

The people we had thought to be border police then skidded their bikes to a stop and raced to the northern and southern walls. Rope ladders were thrown down by men who appeared on each

wall, and the Taliban, for that is who they were, climbed to the top in only a moment.

We on the outside were stunned. The Afghan soldiers who lined up with Kempt and me against the western wall in front of the re-locked gate appeared as dumbfounded as we were. The Afghan soldiers did absolutely nothing until I took command. Though a Canadian and an omelette advisor, at my rank of warrant officer I was the senior officer outside the gate.

By reflex I sent out a troops-in-contact alert to everyone who might be within range of my broadcast. A TIC alert focused the attention of all allied forces in the area to what might happen next in our particular area of activity.

I learned from Brant that the world inside the compound had been turned upside down.

The shura had been organized to take place near the gate of the compound. The village leaders were in the centre of the courtyard, Captain Mansour and his group were to the left along the north wall. Captain Weatherhill had moved to a position between the two towers along the south wall, under cover of the metal overhang.

They had heard the roar of the motorcycles. They saw the village leaders dive out of the compound’s gate when it had opened for that one instant. They saw, from their own vantage points, the appearance of a man on top of each opposing wall. Ten armed men joined them, five on each wall. Visible to Captain Weatherhill’s group of three were six Taliban. There were another six on the southern wall, visible to Captain Mansour’s group of five.

The firing inside the compound started the instant the two captains appreciated their situation. What happened next, Brant told me, was also instantaneous.

In the barrage of snaps and cracks from the incoming rounds and in the hundreds of rounds of automatic fire directed to the top of the two towers by Captain Mansour’s soldiers, Captain Weatherhill led his team of three in a dash to join the Afghan soldiers across the open space between the two walls. It was an extremely dangerous move.

Brant said that Weatherhill had had to physically drag Ali over the short space of open ground. Ali glanced back at the towers and angry shouts were exchanged between the two of them.

There was no time to think about risk. There was no time to debate the merits of having all eight members of our side under one overhanging cover to shoot up at only one set of targets, atop the towers of the southern wall. There was no discussion of this tactic being preferred to the alternative of our two groups being separately exposed to the shooting from the facing walls.

By the time he reached the other wall, Captain Weatherhill ordered me over his personal response radio to direct fire from outside the compound to the Taliban standing on the northern wall. We took five of them out. Through Sean Brant, Captain Weatherhill had simultaneously called for the Brits to unleash Javelin anti-tank missiles upon the towers. The Brits had received my TIC message. They were ready.

The firefight ended by a set of massive explosions when the British missiles hit their respective targets. Each of the two towers along the southern wall was obliterated.

Only one of the Taliban survived the attack. He had been seriously hurt in a fall from the northern wall that was broken by his crash through the tin cover. We watched him get hauled, without regard for his extreme pain, into custody by an Afghan soldier after the gate reopened. We could have stepped in to insist upon more humane treatment. None of us had any time or inclination for pity.

On our side everyone got to the other end alive, though Mansour and three other ANA were wounded, one seriously. That one soldier’s death a few days later was the only allied loss of life in our platoon during Captain Weatherhill’s entire tour.

We had not known there were women and children inside each of the two towers.

It was only when we had been cleared by the engineers to walk through the wreckage and grab whatever evidence might be useful for a report to higher levels that we saw their bodies.

The captain and I counted as many as six children and four women killed in addition to the dead Taliban. Enough remained of the bodies of two of the women to see the fear stamped onto their faces. One of them still held her locked arms around the remains of a child. The other women, the other children, left traces of themselves in the bodies, heads, and limbs that were strewn about. The work of a reconstruction team would be needed before the actual number of women and children killed could be confirmed.

Yes, the towers had been destroyed on the orders of Captain Weatherhill. Yes, the ten confirmed deaths of women and children were the direct result of the captain’s orders. The captain and I were very aware of this when we stepped through the blood and the gore. We could not look into each other’s eyes.

I am certain our captain would not have called in the missiles had he known. As we walked through the debris, I could not look him in the eye because my agony might have been read by him

as doubt.

Our patrol was terminated by the Afghan National Army immediately after this event. A couple of Apache helicopters were flown in by the Americans to pick up the four wounded and the only surviving enemy. The rest of us were ferried by Afghan army trucks back to our FOB.

We had tried to do what was right. During our return to base I remember the captain shouting to Brant and Ali over the din of the truck engines. He asked them over and over whether they had heard anything from within the towers before the firefight began. From Brant, the loud reply, emphasized by the firm shaking of his head, was no. Ali’s