Combat School

Soldiers are people too. It’s easy to overlook that simple, obvious fact when we see them in full combat gear, faces obscured by helmets and dust, and hear commanders speak in the intentionally dispassionate vocabulary of modern militaries. But after meeting, training with and going “outside the wire” alongside Mike Company’s 1 Platoon, Canadians will have a new insight into who our troops are, what they do, and why they do it.

The six, hour-long episodes of Combat School capture — for the first time ever — Canadian soldiers going through advanced training to meet the specific challenges of Afghanistan. Then, in the final episode, viewers will see the platoon deployed in Kandahar, where their skills are put to the ultimate test.

“It’s not a political series. It’s not a story about whether they should be there, or if they can win. We just want to show what the men and women fighting for Canada are really like,” says series producer Terence McKeown, freshly returned from Afghanistan himself. “Because we were making a documentary that wouldn’t air for months, we were able to see and film things other media couldn’t.”

In October 2007 — almost a year before they were shedulded to deploy — cameras started following the 2,500-strong 3rd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, based at CFB Petawawa in Ontario. However the series mostly focuses on the 39 men and one woman of “1 Platoon,” where a key figure is Captain John Cox, its bright, self-possessed, young commander. “He’s just out of university, and on his first real job in the military he has to lead 40 men into a real war,” says McKeown. “Some, especially sergeants, are veterans in their 30s and 40s, and now this 25-year-old is their boss. So he has to prove he can meet the demands of being in a real shooting war, leading men who probably know a lot more about it than he does.”

After initial preparations in Petawawa, the battle group heads to Fort Bliss in Texas for a month, where their training intensifies in conditions that mimic the altitude, aridity and geography of Afghanistan. Then, for the most extreme stage of their training (episodes 3, 4 and 5), they go to the Canadian Maneuver Training Center (CMTC) at CFB Wainwright, Alta. There, soldiers train for two-week periods, 24 hours a day, in a recreation of Kandahar province including roads, towns, villages and over 100 Afghans posing as civilians, police and even Taliban fighters. They also experience the sleep and food deprivation they’ll encounter in the combat zone.

“I think I was one of those typical Canadians who thought we had kind of a sad sack military, but nothing could be further from the truth,” McKeown says. “The CMTC is really the most sophisticated, high-tech military training that any fighting force in the world gets right now. Our soldiers have the best equipment and training of anyone who goes to the Afghan theatre.”

The high-tech aspect is the “Weapons Effects Simulation” (WES) system — a very advanced type of laser tag. WES precisely tracks, monitors and records the actions of every soldier, civilian, weapon and vehicle, simulating fire from small arms, artillery, mortars and roadside bombs. Sensor vests tell participants when they’ve been wounded, and how seriously. All of this information is relayed to a control centre, and after the exercise they review everyone’s actions — just like a football team watching game tapes on Monday morning.

The series follows soldiers at three levels: the privates and corporals who have a distinct, but similar job every time they go on a mission, plus their commander (Cpt. Cox) and the commander’s commander. “As the Wainwright exercise develops, it becomes more of a test of the commanders than of the [grunts],” says McKeown. “They are the ones who have to make the difficult decisions — manage chaos. We’re following their ability to roll with the punches (and) rework or trash their carefully laid plans because fundamental things go wrong.”

Finally, in late September 2008, after nearly a year of preparation, the battle group arrived in Afghanistan, where cameras followed 1 Platoon for 10 days, through their first few patrols and real combat mission. McKeown says, “The real challenge when they got outside the wire was: ‘Will I have the confidence to do what I’ve been trained to do?’ And that’s the question we looked to answer out there.” •

Combat School airs across Canada on Discovery Channel in early March.