When Charlie Savard touched down on the dusty earth from a medivac helicopter, it was into a scene of death and fear and tension, all under the boil of the Afghanistan sun.

It was his job to ignore the chaos while collecting scraps of evidence: metal and wood shards, traces of explosive and soil samples — whatever remained from an improvised explosive device, or IED.

Where police detectives in Canada might have hours or days to collect bomb fragments, Savard had 45 minutes, tops.

“The scene is secured like a police scene here,” he says. “But you don’t want to stick around too long. We are in a war zone.”

Savard, a Langford resident and chief petty officer second class with the Fleet Dive Unit (Pacific) in Colwood, spent 7-1/2 months in Afghanistan, a landlocked country that would normally not see navy clearance divers.

Like all Canadian military personnel, he volunteered for the mission, working as a post-blast investigator with fellow clearance divers Lieut. Rick Kappel and Master Seaman Vince Gruthro. They arrived back in Canada in early October.

Although he can’t talk about specifics, IED events were treated like crime scenes. From residue and fragments collected at the scene, Savard could work out if the IED was pressure activated or remotely detonated, the explosive size and type, and the bomb’s level of sophistication.

If he was lucky, he could even collect DNA and fingerprints left over from the bomb maker. “We can help track down actual guys,” Savard says.

Typically, warlords and insurgent Taliban forces plant IEDs along roadways to kill or maim Afghan soldiers and forces under NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). More than 40 Canadian soldiers died from IED attacks in Afghanistan since 2002.

At least nine Canadian soldiers were killed by IEDs during Savard’s tour, although he couldn’t talk about specific incidents. In all he flew to 22 bomb scenes, including one where he knew the men who perished.

“I lost a couple of friends out there. I’d fly to scenes where I knew the guys. It is a very challenging job,” he says. “It’s bad enough with 45 C heat, body armour, helmet and extra gear. But when you get to a scene and find out a comrade is gone, you’ve got to push that aside and be a professional.”

Work they did in Afghanistan helped ISAF commanders devise strategies to evade or detect IEDs and to get a sense of the insurgency’s evolving technical abilities. Bombs could be advanced, such as cellphone-triggered devices or as simple as a pressure trigger in an unexploded shell.

“IEDs are cheap and safe (for the bomb maker). You set an IED and just walk away,” he says. “They target civilians or coalition members indiscriminately.”

Life in Afghanistan was spent mainly in the Kandahar Airfield military base, analyzing evidence and ducking the occasional “nuisance and inaccurate” rocket attacks. Savard played volleyball with Afghan police and had tea with Afghan tribal elders. He said most people they came across understood what the ISAF mission is trying to achieve.

“What a clearance diver was doing in the desert was hard to explain,” he laughs. “I had a lot of generals in my lab ask why a navy diver was in Afghanistan.”

Of course a bomb is a bomb, underwater or in the dirt. Savard has been a navy clearance diver since 1990, where his “bread and butter” is deactivating mines 300 feet below. He had NATO training on every kind of ordinance between a hand grenade and a thousand-pound bomb.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea if something blows up what’s involved,” he says. “I enjoy the job. It’s a lot of fun.”

One of the bigger challenges of the tour was reintegrating into normal life with his family in Langford after an extended tour in the pressure-cooker of a war zone.

His wife Gina organized a military appreciation event at Everything Wine before Remembrance Day. She did so largely as a coping mechanism, she says, to avoid thinking about the dangers her husband faced.

“I didn’t realize how worried I was until he came home,” she says. “I tried not to think about the realities of the danger he was in.”

editor@goldstreamgazette.com