Fifteen Days.

"...it said that all Afghans should rise up and jihad against the invaders, especially the United States, Britain, and Canada. It carried on with ranting and crap."

"But in a weird way, I felt proud to be a Canadian."

"Ever read those history textbooks on D-Day? And it's all American and British troops? and I'm Canadian, dammit, and we were there, and so I guess it was finally nice to be recognized by the enemy... We're big enough to be recognized by guys who hate us, powerful enough to be recognized by those who hate Western Society."

That's Captain Jon Hamilton, of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.

And stuff like that is why you want to read this book - especially if you're Canadian, but heck, I'm as proud of the Princess Pat's as any Canadian is. These warriors are brothers-in-arms.

If you've an interest in this century's Forgotten War, soldiers, soldiering, and Canadian soldiers in particular (though that last really isn't needful) you want to read Christie Blatchford's Fifteen Days.

Ms. Blatchford is a Canadian journalist who made three trips to Afghanistan over a 10 month period in 2006.

She chose 15 days (not all days she was present, she did hundreds of hours of interviews) to mark the experience of the Canadian Forces in Afstan. Some of the names in the book you'll remember... we've remembered them here at the Castle.

As a book reviewer, part of what I'm supposed to do is show you how smart I am with trenchant analysis and other stuff. There's no need. Once I started, I couldn't put it down. I'll let Ms. Blatchford's prose - made possible by Canada's soldiers, make no mistake, and Ms.Blatchford knows that well, and keeps herself as a small ghost in the background - I'll let her prose and Canada's soldiery tell the tale well enough.

Any book about anglospheric soldiery that starts with a little Kipling (Tommy) already has a plus mark with me...

(I'll say this - based on prices in Clothing Sales - the "starvation cheap" line now applies to the soldier who has to buy those uniforms...)

Let's move to the excerpts... I did do some editing of the profanity, just to keep net-nanny software from blacklisting the Castle.

"Jon Hamilton, the then twenty-nine-year-old Captain of the reconnaissance or recce platoon, first fired his weapon on February 4 in his initial week on the ground in Afghanistan during the operational hand-over from American troops. At that time, the event was so startling he was quizzed about it.

"I remember actually sitting down with the colonel and the operations officer and they were going like, 'Okay, what the hell's going on here, Jon?' I was like, 'I fired my weapon in support of coalition troops. I don't understand what the problem is here.'"

Hamilton believes he was the first Canadian soldier on the tour to fire a shot, and suspects that as soon as word of it got back home, which in our age means almost instantaneously, military bureaucrats in Ottawa had their knickers in a knot. "Now," he says, "that seems so stupid... so insignificant compared to what lay ahead."

By the end of July, Hamilton, with two dozen men, and the rest of the battalion were battle-hardened and so inured to the roar of combat that they were lighting up smokes and cracking jokes with rounds raining down on them.

"This is the kind of stuff you get used to," Hamilton says. "And it's not complacency or laziness. It's just the sh-t that happens in battle, it's the human mind protecting itself from going insane or something. It's the way soldier's are."

For recce, July 4 was the turning point."

Want the rest of that story (and you do)... read the book.

Okay, I'll give you a little tease...

"...The Army has a formal procedure for the sighting of enemy, just as it has formal procedure, or form, for every eventuality and every thing. That's both why it works and why it can make smart men crazy. This particular procedure is called a fire control order, and it's supposed to be done the same way every thime -- something like, "Contact, reference hill 600 metres left."

But what Schnurr barked to his light machine gunner Corporal Jimmy Funk was, "Jim they're on the right! F-ck 'em up!"

For many of us, *that* will sound familiar.

And that is only on page 7. The rest of the book is just as good, nay, better. There's incredible bravery, there's battle camaraderie, sorrow, joy, and fierce exultation. There are obstructionist military bureaucrats (not all Canadian), bad food, a hostile environment, and flashes of the basic humanity that distinguishes many western soldiers from many other flavors of soldier.

I got the book for free to review from Doubleday Canada. I'm going to give it to the Combined Arms Research Library at Fort Leavenworth. I was originally going to give it to the Canadian Liaison Officer to pass among the Canadians studying here - but I just found out that the US arm of the publishing house is sending me two autographed copies of the book. I'll give *those* to the Canadians here in attendance. Much as I like having autographed copies on my bookshelf, well, some people are more deserving than I for these books.

Based on the rules I got from Random House, I need to link to the amazon.ca page as well as the amazon.com page - so here you go... If you're a Canadian reader and want to buy Fifteen Days, you can get it via Amazon's Canadian website by clicking here..

If you're a US reader, you can get Fifteen Days from Amazon by clicking here.