The waiting game

My husband is leaving for Afghanistan in about three weeks.

This makes me jealous and worried at the same time. When we were in journalism school, we both dreamed of one day reporting from a war zone. We didn't think either of us would be far enough advanced in our careers in time to cover the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. But he's a pretty impressive guy. There was a relatively last-minute opening - to fill the not-so-coveted Christmas slot - and he jumped at it, with my full support.

A friend who works with non-journalists told us once that her co-workers thought only the worst, most disliked reporters were sent to Afghanistan. She had to explain that no, this really is a posting people sign up for, with waiting lists and everything. They even try to go multiple times.

S recently returned from his hostile environment training. A group of Royal Marines takes a group of journalists (or aid workers, or whoever) out to a forest and teaches them war-time first aid - what to do if you come across someone with their guts hanging out of their abdomen, how to tie a tourniquet, what kind of bleeding is the worst kind - along with survival tactics like how to spot a booby-trap and how to react in a hostage-taking. He said until then he had been thinking about the trip in the abstract, but this made it real.

The main message seemed to be to plan ahead - know what you'll do if your car breaks down (it's not like you can go to the nearest house and expect help, or even a safe haven). Know what you'll do if the car you're traveling in hits someone. Know what you'll do if you're kidnapped and see or hear your colleagues being mistreated. Eliminate that ten seconds you spend to come up with a plan, and you're that much farther ahead.

I write all this knowing that 5,000 families go through this each year - my rough calculation of our 2,500-person deployment, on six-month tours of duty - and knowing that as an embedded journalist, my husband will be protected by them. He won't be on the front lines, and if he goes out on an operation or a patrol, he won't be the first guy down the path or into the compound. He will ride in one of the last vehicles in the convoy, making his LAV-3 less likely to drive over an improvised explosive device (IED). We'll be apart for less than two months. And only three Canadian journalists have been seriously injured or endangered since the Canadian forces went into Afghanistan in 2002 - compared to the 97 soldiers killed and hundreds seriously injured.

So while covering a war is necessary to any company's news coverage, and dangerous for the reporters who go, I'll never forget that there are people who face worse dangers. As we weigh the measures S is taking to stay safe, it just reminds me that he'll be safer because of the people who surround him.