Soldiers honour dead comrades at Afghan forward base

Each stone was a symbol. Some had names painted on them, and some were simply whitewashed chunks of rock. But together, they represented the memory of Canada’s casualties in the Afghanistan war.

That memory was honoured Wednesday in a solemn ceremony at the foot of a dun-coloured hill, deep in the countryside of southern Kandahar province, which for five years has been Canada’s main field of battle.

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Soldiers bury Canadian memorial

Canadian soldiers will remain at the base for now, before transferring responsibility to the American military as the Canadians withdraw from Kandahar in July. But they paused in those preparations to reflect on the human cost of the war.

“This is about reflecting on the sacrifice made,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Michel-Henri St-Louis, the commander of the last of Canada’s battle groups to fight in Afghanistan, as the stones were placed in a common grave that is meant to remain long after the combat mission ends next month.

It was an unusual ceremony, as unusual as the memorial that had evolved stone by stone over the years since Masum Ghar grew from a dangerous frontier outpost constantly hit by insurgent mortar fire into Canada’s largest forward operating base.

On that wind-carved hillside back in 2007, American and South African dog-handlers working with the Canadian troops had the idea to honour the soldiers they watched fight and die for this ugly bit of high ground.

First they constructed a large natural mural of the Canadian flag, painting gravel and stones red and laying them out in the form of a maple leaf stretching some 17 metres wide.

Just below, they started planting rocks inscribed with the names of Canadian casualties, and soon the Canadians at Masum Ghar took up the custom.

There was nothing uniform or regimented about the stone memorial. Some of the rocks were small boulders, others light slabs of yellow-tinged stone. Some were jagged pieces torn from the craggy hill. Several names were painted on some, a single name on others. Nine of the 59 rocks had nothing written on them at all, but were meant as reminders of a fallen soldier all the same.

It was decided to leave this memorial in Afghanistan, rather than ship it back to Canada as is planned for others, and to bury the stones under a tall wooden cross that rises above the tents, generators, landing pads and corrugated steel buildings that now make up the sprawling base.

One reason was that the scorching sun and simple punishment of time had rubbed out or rendered illegible some of the names painted on some rocks.

“We couldn’t return them to the families back home,” said Major Grahame Thompson, chaplain for Task Force Kandahar. “You can’t return some and not all. So we are burying them here, so that anyone who passes by here will remember.”

Not all the names of Canada’s 156 military casualties in Afghanistan were on the rocks. But the memorial’s location, clinging to the high ground of the district of Panjwai where Canadians fought their fiercest battles with Taliban insurgents, has a resonance that echoes widely.

“It’s not all-inclusive,” Col. St-Louis said of the monument. “But this place has great meaning, and it became a central point for the deployed troops, those that operated outside the wire.”

As the setting sun behind the hill threw a shadow over the troops lined up six deep facing the stones, each of the 59 rocks of the Masum Ghar memorial were pulled up from the ground by a pair of soldiers. They placed them gently, almost reverently, in a hole dug just to the side of where the stones had stood. Some were so fragile that they broke apart in the soldiers’ hands as they were carried down to their final resting place.

The names of 63 men and women named on the rocks were read out, and nine other rocks were interred with the same honour under the name “unknown.” A lone bagpiper played a dirge. Prayers were said.

The oldest stone was inscribed with the name of Sergeant Shane Stachnik, killed on Sept. 3, 2006, during the fierce battle known as Operation Medusa in which five Canadians died.

The last stone commemorated Corporal Steve Martin, killed on Dec. 18, 2010, by a roadside bomb.

Then one by one, the assembled soldiers from all the forces now working at Masum Ghar – Americans, Canadians and Afghans – walked past the hole. Some tossed poppy pins onto the jumble of painted stones. Many saluted. Others dropped in insignia from different infantry companies, twigs, gravel, sand scooped up from the ground and many tiny sun-bleached Canadian flags.

One of the last people to add a memento was Captain Paco Simancas, the chaplain of the Royal 22e Régiment. He said he knew three of the dead whose names were on the stones that would soon be covered over by the dry grey-brown dirt of Afghanistan. He pulled a small cross from his pocket and silently let it fall into the hole.