Will future generations ever mention “Kandahar” in the same tone as “Vimy Ridge”? If Captain Ray Wiss has his way, A Line in the Sand will make them do so. Wiss travels to Afghanistan, a country notoriously unfriendly to conquerors, to chronicle the lives of Canadian servicemen and women on duty at the front there. Forget the media, forget the feeds that condense every major event into neat sound bites, this is the real deal. We meet the men and women who fight the war for us, warts and all. The Taliban are definitely a weird bunch, not the least for the effect they’ve had on people who consider themselves firmly on the left side of the political spectrum. These religious reactionaries were so reprehensible in terms of womens’ rights, education, mediaeval attitudes et cetera that armed conflict suddenly became acceptable. Politics truly makes strange bedfellows.
Wiss is glowing in his reviews of all the personnel on their tour of duty. He finds fault with none of the corpsmen and is quick to defend them against slights in the media, both by the press corps there and back home. Wiss gets past the usual boys’ club banter and discusses the ideological bent of someone who would support a war from a nation normally so pacific. The book is good at doing what it sets out to do, which is to explain the motivations and daily grind of people who are fighting a dirty war in a country divided along several fault lines.
All in all: read for a quick synopsis of modern warfare in a not-so-clean war.
ISBN: 978-1-55365-592-3