VICTORIA – Remembrance Day reveries about the sacrifice of our ancestors weren’t much on my family’s mind this year.

My eldest brother landed at Kandahar Air Field some time in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 11 and spent the day moving from transitional quarters to a reinforced “Weather Haven” tent that will be his home for at least some of the next 10 months.

That’s longer than the normal six-month deployment for infantry, and it applies to a group of headquarters personnel who have communications and other experience that is difficult to replace.

Lee’s one of the older folks at the Canadian Forces base in Afghanistan. He turned 55 this spring, normally mandatory retirement age for a Petty Officer who joined the navy at Esquimalt 30 years ago. But because of his experience in the first Gulf War, then keeping up with waves of new technology at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa for a decade, he was offered an age exemption if he proved his fitness and signed up for another five years.

Instead of retiring to take up golf as planned, he lost weight, passed the battle fitness test and even ran his first half-marathon, finishing in a respectable two hours, 21 minutes. Then it was intensive training, a week off with his long-suffering wife, Karen and off to Afghanistan via Cyprus.

As an “intelligence operator,” his work will have something to do with surveillance of the volatile southern province that Canadian forces are holding against the resurgent Taliban.

Ground movements are the most dangerous for our soldiers, so Canadians now have six Chinook helicopters for troop and equipment movement, bought second-hand from the U.S. and in service since last February.

(Canada sold off its old Chinooks to the Dutch a few years ago because the Canadian Forces didn’t have the money to maintain them. New ones have since been ordered from Boeing, and the first of 16 are to be delivered in 2012, the year after Canadian combat operations in Kandahar are due to end.)

Before leaving, Lee explained some things to me about modern counter-insurgency warfare. The Canadians are currently using Heron surveillance drones from Israel, where they have learned a few things about counter-insurgency.

For all our sophisticated digital imaging and armoured vehicles, the Taliban have their own brutally effective “info ops.” Theirs include advising locals that if they co-operate with the NATO coalition, their families will be killed.

Most B.C. residents are familiar with their use of roadside bombs. These are the enemy’s last resort when they can’t find anything more spectacular or demoralizing to do. And of course, they can’t face Canadian, U.S. or British forces head on.

Lee tells me the improvised explosive devices or IEDs – crude things often repurposed from artillery shells – are set in order to contain the coalition’s movements. But that’s a secondary function. They are primarily for the consumption of the western media.

With sheeplike predictability, our TV networks and much of our mainstream media mainly report on the Kandahar story as a body count. Even a body is becoming too routine for them, as the Canadian count has passed 120.

Do these news editors know that they are being played for fools by killers who in many cases can’t even read? Do they understand that this knee-jerk coverage is exactly what the Taliban want, because they see it eroding public support for the war in democratic western countries?

On a brighter note, more rocket-resistant accommodations at Kandahar Air Field should be ready early in 2010.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press and BCLocalnews.com.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca