Friendly Fire

The text below is an excerpt from Friendly Fire. It is the early morning of April 18, 2002, following the mayhem of a bomb attack on a section of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. The Edmonton-based soldiers were conducting a live-fire training exercise at a former al-Qaeda compound when a U.S. fighter pilot mistook them for the enemy. At Tarnak Farm, A Company begins to board the trucks that will take them back to camp. Out of habit, Lt. Luft conducts a roll call of his platoon. 1 Section. Here. 2 Section. Here 3 Section. Alastair stops himself. There is no 3 section. Except for Cpl. Chris Oliver, the troops are either dead or in the medical tent. The guys left behind watch the trucks drive away. For nearly two hours, everyone has been operating on instinct, on training. But now, all the noise, all the adrenaline, are gone. It's suddenly real. Four men are dead. Outside the ambulance, Wilson and Speirs are chain-smoking Korea 88s, replaying the chaos and confusion of those first few minutes. Could we have been faster? Did we save everyone who could be saved? There will always be doubts... By now, there is little doubt about what happened. Some of the guys heard the jet. Some even saw it. They don't know the details yet. Nobody really does. But the Taliban doesn't have any F-16s. That was a U.S. bomb. "How could this happen to us?" Sgt. Favasoli asks Cpl. Filis. "How could this happen to coalition forces?"