Coming down from the ridge, we could see the Canadian convoy, circled next to a large outcropping of rock just north of the Kandahar-Kabul highway, which protected them from fire from that direction. But their southern flank was wide open to Taliban fire, and they were being pounded. We called in our helicopter gunship and directed their rockets and cannons against the enemy to the south, so that they soon melted away into the hills. Meanwhile we advanced on the heavy machine gun which had cut off escape to the west, killing five Taliban soldiers.

Then I went to look for my buddy, Lt. Tim Carver. I knew these boys well, and had spent many evenings with them in their compound outside Kandahar, joking, singing and enjoying a few bottles of Labatt's Blue, of which they seemed to have an endless supply.

I had known Tim's sister Jill while I was at McGill University, taking a class in Canadian military history prior to assignment as liason to the Canadian forces in Afghanistan. We had told each other of growing up, she in Kitchener with her brother, and I with my brother in Maine. I described learning woodsy craft from our mother, who taught us to identify rabbit and deer droppings, to savor the sharpness of spearmint and wintergreen, the asparagus-like goodness of fiddlehead greens, and the amazing sweetness of tiny wild strawberries.

We had grown from strangers to friends and then to lovers, and I remembered how warm and right it felt to encircle her shoulders in my arm as we ice-skated on the little pond by the student union.

Now I wished I could hold her in my arms again, when she got the heart-breaking, gut-wrenching news of her brother's death in this bleak, stony valley, half way around the world.