PUBLISHED July 11, 2011, THE HILL TIMES

Murray Brewster, an Ottawa-based defence reporter for The Canadian Press, says he was travelling in Dieppe, France, covering the 65th anniversary of Canada’s battle there during the Second World War, when then-Veterans Affairs minister Greg Thompson spoke at a memorial site. Mr. Thompson told the official delegation, which included media and Canadian military vets, that Dieppe was a rehearsal for D-Day and that for every life sacrificed at Dieppe, 10 were saved on D-Day two years later.

“This one old vet, sitting in a wheel chair, he’s got a cane sort of like half there, it was almost as if he were sleeping. When he heard that, he woke up and his face got red, and he banged his cane around and he yelled, ‘Bullshit!'” Mr. Brewster told HOH last week in a telephone interview from Afghanistan. That’s when Mr. Brewster, who’s been to Afghanistan seven times since 2006 and for a total of 15 months, decided he wanted to write a book about his experience covering Canada’s war in Afghanistan.

“It was at that point that you can see the narrative of history is completely disassociated with that soldier’s reality. I see it here all the time. We’re a wired, twittering society and information gets passed around but there’s a lot of times you see stuff that doesn’t make it into the news reports, doesn’t make it into the grand narrative and that was the point where I first thought, ‘I’m going to write something.’ ”

In 2010, on a trip home from Afghanistan and with a month of overtime banked from covering the Olympics, Mr. Brewster stopped in Italy to begin writing The Savage War: The Untold Battles of Afghanistan.

While he said he didn’t want to make a political statement about Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan, Mr. Brewster said the book is a first-person narrative of his unique vantage point of the war.

“My impressions of Afghanistan are, I’d have to say, like with everything about the mission so far, the jury is still out as far as I’m concerned. This is an awfully, awfully brutal place,” he said. “I think we came in with some very naïve expectations. It’s been a very brutal awakening and that’s my impression of this place. When I say the jury’s still out, it’s out because I don’t think we can actually say with any degree of certainty how whether what we’ve tried to accomplish here has actually been accomplished.”

He called his time covering Afghanistan a “gut wrenching experience” and said he hopes to engage readers through the book.

“What I try to address in the book is, and my intent with it is to make the reader think about how we got here, about how we conducted ourselves … and I guess to reflect on the cost of this, and I don’t mean in monetary terms or necessarily in terms of lives lost or lives ruined. That’s the underpinning,” he said. “I hope it will help them reflect.”

As for Canada’s pulling out of troops in the country, Mr. Brewster said he’s “of two minds.” He said one part believes it’s time to go, which he said is also how many soldiers he’s spoken to feel, but the other part is worried about what happens now that Canada’s role has ended—officially last Thursday, in a ceremony in Kandahar airfield which saw Canadian troops handing over responsibility of two districts to U.S. forces.

“I’ve had every confidence that NATO and the military will be able to win the war militarily, there’s no matching it. But I’m concerned about whether the Afghan government will be able to win the peace. So, from that point of view, you just wonder what’s going to happen,” he said last week.

Mr. Brewster also worried about Canadians’ attention to the war waning. He said while Canadians are “tired” and the war has “largely fallen off the public agenda,” there’s a responsibility to know what’s happening there.

“I think it’s bad because as a nation and as a society, when you ask people, young people to put themselves in harm’s way and become involved in a shooting war, the least that you owe them is to pay attention to what’s going on. And that often hasn’t happened,” he said.

Mr. Brewster arrived for this latest stint in Afghanistan on May 22, and will be leaving on July 19. After covering the war and the country for so long, he said he will remember the people and the look of determination on many people’s faces the most.

“It’s not necessarily one individual, but there’s a determination in the faces of a lot of development people that I’ve dealt with here, a lot of diplomats, the soldiers, and the Afghans themselves. Everyone is very determined and trying very, very hard to make this a better place,” he said. “We have a tendency back home to be so wrapped up in our own little worlds, and into our own little niches and listening to our iPods and it’s totally different here. That’s the thing I’m going to take away, the determination that I see in a lot of people.”

The Savage War is published by John Wiley & Sons and is due out in October.