Maj. Dan Hogan is 28-years old when he accepts that he may not live much longer. He is “ready to die” so to speak. It’s 2008, and he’s been asked by his commanding officer if there’s any reason why he can’t go to Afghanistan-- to which he responds--“no sir.”
It’s a chance for him to go on the first deployment of his career. He’s just become a fully qualified infantry officer, and he’s excited for the opportunity. When he gets there, he’ll be wearing full combat gear and carrying a C7 rifle with 300 rounds of ammunition. It will be about 50 degrees warmer, and the bugs he said, will be a lot bigger. But, that doesn’t quell his enthusiasm.
“Deploying is what we train for, we do a lot of training, so having the chance to deploy is kind of like being in the Stanley Cup playoffs for a hockey player,” he said.
However, most hockey players go into the Stanley Cup knowing they’re going to walk away in one piece, maybe minus a tooth or two. Things were less certain for Maj. Hogan. Coming to terms with his own mortality is something he said he had to do before going on the mission.
“Whenever you do deployments like that where the threat is very high, you kind of have to make peace with your life,” said Maj. Hogan. “The first time I deployed, I had come to peace that up to that point in my life I’d lived a pretty good life, so you know if something did happen, it was just the nature of the beast.”
Maj. Hogan was deployed to Afghanistan twice, for a total of one year and three months. During his first deployment in 2008, he was a platoon commander in charge of the defence and security unit of Camp Nathan Smith.
“It was a little stressful in the sense that you’re kind of waiting for something to happen, you hope that something doesn’t happen, but youre waiting,” Hogan said.
Being in charge of a platoon of soldiers was a big responsibility.
“The more difficult thing for me being a leader, an officer, is the welfare of my troops, I was very concerned about losing one of my troops,” he said. Death though, was an unfortunate reality of the mission.
“A number of my friends and colleagues lost legs, lost their lives to [Improvised Explosive Devices] IED strikes, so it was a little stressful,” he said.
Hogan took measures to try to ensure that his troops weren’t killed by IED strikes by looking for trends in previous strikes.
“Certain locations, choke points for example, that would be hot spots where if the insurgence had success with an IED strike, they would try to reinforce that success, they would go back to the same spot [for another strike],” he said.
Hogan would go and look at these trends, so they were aware of the hot spots before they entered an area.
“You could identify, ‘okay, the last three months there’s been six strikes at this choke point here, so that means that when we’re patrolling when we hit that point, search, get out, make sure that there aren’t any IEDs around,’” he said. It was just a constant back and forth between them and the Taliban, “a cat and mouse game,” Hogan said.
The good thing was, there was a distinction in Afghanistan between fighting season and the non-fighting season, and things calmed down once Ramadan finished.
“Fighting season in Afghanistan, particularly in Kandahar, would be pretty much from May until Ramadan,” he said. “The Taliban would winter over across the border in Pakistan, we still would have to do deal with the Taliban, but they were not as good fighters during the winter.”
Hogan said that during the non-fighting season they were able to make some gains because of the lack of Taliban presence, but often times those gains diminished once the start of fighting season began.
When Maj. Hogan came back to Canada though, this distinction between fighting and non-fighting season lost its importance. A year and three months of this on two separate missions, and now he was thrust harshly back into civilian life, where seasons were used to decipher between hot and cold, baseball or basketball, not between fighting and non-fighting.
Constantly scanning the area and looking around for threats was no longer necessary, but it was a habit.
Hogan had to somehow turn that off.
“When you come back to this country you have to normalize again and realize that ‘okay yes you could die at anytime, you could get into a motor vehicle accident and die, [but its not as likely.]’”