‘A rough ride’

By Craig Westcott
November 10, 2023 Edition

Unlike most people who will stand at attention Saturday as the bugler plays the Last Post at Remembrance Day ceremonies, John Barnes won’t have to imagine what it’s like to face live fire and see his brothers-in-arms die in the service of others.

Barnes, originally from Riverhead, St. Mary’s Bay, spent 36 years in the Canadian Armed Forces, which included tours in Bosnia and Croatia, and Afghanistan, where four of his friends were killed and he was wounded during their first hours of combat.

Much of his experience is recounted in his memoir, White School, Black Memories, a frank, detailed and engaging account of life as a soldier in the Canadian military. Barnes admits all the conflict heating up in the world lately, in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine, reminds him of what soldiers and civilians face in war. The title comes from the object of a major battle Barnes and his comrades were involved in in Afghanistan, a fight to dislodge Taliban from a white school building.

“Even more so probably now that I’m retired and I have a daughter and a son-in-law in the military,” Barnes said. “I kind of look at it a little differently, I think… The world is a scary place, and I don’t know where we’re headed anymore, but I know that depending on the government of the day, our soldiers could find themselves an any of these places, whether as peacekeepers, or peacemakers.”

Barnes’s daughter Jana is currently deployed to the United Kingdom, and his son-in-law to an undisclosed location, leaving John and his wife Julie, herself an air force vet, to look after the grandchildren.

Barnes was part of the first rotation of Canadian soldiers into Bosnia and Croatia in 1992 following the breakup of Yugoslavia and its disintegration into a heated and complicated civil war. He returned in ‘98 for another tour. What was supposed to be a peacekeeping mission saw the heaviest fighting by Canadian soldiers since the Korean War. Barnes’s group fought, literally, to open Sarajevo Airport so that western humanitarian aid could be flown in to help civilians.

“The first tour of Bosnia was pretty rough,” he allowed. “The airport was a mess… We had been in Croatia maybe three weeks and had already been under fire and taken artillery and mortar fire when we got the word that our battle group was moving to Sarajevo. It was a mess in the city at that time. Artillery was falling in the main city from the mountains where the Serbs were.”

Once they secured the airport, Barnes’ unit was tasked with protecting the aid trucks shuttling supplies to the Olympic Stadium. That meant taking more fire.

“It was a rough ride,” he said. “Very quickly it becomes real. The first time we came under artillery fire was in Croatia, when we first drove in. The first night we moved into this old schoolyard and set up tents and parked all of our armoured vehicles and started getting ready because the next day we were going to start our patrolling of the area. And that evening, I remember sitting outside the tent and hearing this whistling going overhead and I’m looking at the guys who were working with me there and we’re going, ‘What the heck is that?’ It was just a loud whistle and then boom, there were air explosions. Then when the leaves start falling off the trees and the shrapnel starts landing you realize, ‘Okay, now is real,’ you don’t sit around anymore.”

Barnes was lucky he didn’t lose any comrades during his two tours of Bosnia, but there were injuries. “We had some people who were shot up. Once of our vehicles, a Jeep, got shot up and all the guys inside were wounded but nobody was killed, and we had a Newfoundlander, Dennis Reid, who lost a foot on a mine,” he said.

Afghanistan was even more dangerous.

After Arab terrorists hijacked passenger planes and flew them into the Twin Towers In New York and at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Canada joined its allies in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan which was a safe haven for Islamic extremists. All told, some 40,000 Canadians served in Afghanistan over 12 years, with 158 soldiers killed, 13 from Newfoundland. It was the largest deployment of Canadian troops since World War II. Barnes was part of Operation Medusa, which became the biggest combat operation Canadians had participated in since the Korean War.

Barnes was the company sergeant major for Charles Company with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment and was responsible for helping lead about 130 soldiers.

“We were the first full task force to go into Kandahar province,” Barnes explained. “When we got into Kandahar province there was a full raging war going on. That’s the homeland of the Taliban, where they were formed… The area was very, very pro-Taliban.”

Barnes’ group was flown into Kandahar airport then dispatched to live and fight in the badlands, “sleeping in the dirt and the filth for the first three months, patrolling and coming under fire almost daily,” he said. 

The toughest part was figuring out friend from foe. “Nobody is in a uniform and the Taliban became very good at hiding their weapons and filtering in to the population,” said Barnes.

Under the rules of engagement being followed by the Allied soldiers, you couldn’t attack anyone unless it was clear they were Taliban, or actively firing on you.

“Our hands were kind of tied,” said Barnes. “You’d go into a village and speak with the elders, and you’d see these young men sitting off to the side, most of them were dressed in black with large black beards and they’re just glaring at you. And you know deep down inside that they’re Taliban, but they have no weapons (on display), they’re not doing anything and you just kind of watched them and carried on. But it was a nasty time, a very nasty time.”

About four weeks into his tour, Operation Medusa started. Barnes remembers crossing the Arghandab River on September 3, 2006 to attack a Taliban position. “They had somewhere between 400 and 700 Taliban dug in and Charles Company took the lead and we got our asses handed to us initially,” he said. “We lost lots of soldiers, lots of my friends were killed and there were a lot wounded in the first 24 hours.”

The company lost its first soldier within minutes of crossing the river. Sgt. Shane Stachnik, an engineer, was killed when the vehicle he was driving was hit by enemy fire. 

“One of my jobs as the Company Sergeant Major was to collect casualties, the dead and the wounded and medivac them,” said Barnes. “So, we took Sgt. Stachnik out of the vehicle, put him in a body bag and put him off to the side while we carried on with the battle. And then just a few minutes later I got the word over the radio that a good friend of mine, a fellow Newfoundlander who has got a street named after him now in Mount Pearl, Warrant Officer Rick Nolan, was killed. And maybe 15 minutes later I’m standing in the casualty collection point where we collect all our casualties together, under fire, and try to triage them to see who needs help first, and get on the radio and try to call a helicopter in to get them medivaced, and another one of my platoon Warrants, Frank Mellish from PEI, came over to me and wanted me to set up a team to go back into the fray to get Rick Nolan’s body, because after Rick had been killed, everybody in his vehicle had been hit or wounded and had to get back and they had left Rick’s body. So, they wanted me to go back and get Rick’s body and that was the last thing he said and then there was an explosion and when I came to on the ramp of the vehicle Frank was dead, and another soldier on the other side of me was dead and I was only wounded. I got lucky. They were standing next to me. And that’s how that day ended for me.”

The next morning, just at daylight, Barnes, who was recovering at a medical station on Kandahar airfield, saw a nurse running towards him, crying. “She says, ‘Sgt, Major I’ve got some bad news for you.’ And I was thinking, how much more bad news can there be? Charles Company had pulled back across the river and was getting ready to attack that position again and just as they were getting ready to attack, an American A-10 aircraft flew over bombing the enemy position and it made a mistake and actually fired on Charles Company, my company, and killed another one of my soldiers, Mark Graham, and wounded about 40 of my soldiers. So that was all within a 24-hour period. In the first 24 hours of Operation Medusa we had five soldiers killed and about 50ish wounded, some with terrible wounds that people are still carrying with them today.”

Canada lost 12 soldiers in the fighting, but they managed to push the Taliban out of Panjwai district.

But some 13 years after the West entered Afghanistan to fight the extremists and help establish human rights, including education for girls, Canada, Great Britain, the United States and the other Allies pulled out, leaving the forces they had trained to fight the Taliban on their own.

The Taliban gained control of the country even before the last western forces had flown out.

“I will never say it was for nothing because I lost too many good friends,” said Barnes. “But we were certainly disappointed to see them fold like that. I think we helped, and I think we gave the country of Afghanistan an opportunity during the decade we were there. We gave them lots of more education and hospitals opened and peace in parts of the country, hoping that they would be able to finish off the job on their own. But it didn’t happen. We gave them 10 years of a bit more security, of education for girls, medical care for girls, but in the end it all fell apart. But I will always say it was worth it, because to say anything else, I don’t know if I could even live with myself.”

Barnes donates 100 percent of the royalties from his book, which is available on Amazon, to veterans’ charities. Come January, the book will also be available as an audiobook.

Growing up in Riverhead, Barnes used to watch his Dad every Remembrance Day. His father, also named John, had served with Newfoundland’s 166^th heavy artillery regiment, which saw action in Africa and Italy during World War II.

“The only time my Dad dug out his medals was on Remembrance Day,” said Barnes. “He’d pull them out of the drawer and he’d dust them off and they’d be tarnished, they wouldn’t be shiny, and he’d put them on and he’d go to the church and then to the Legion. And all these old veterans, World War I and World War II veterans, I’d often wonder as a kid, ‘Why would they be out here on this cold, dreary day in Riverhead, and I often wondered what they were thinking. I would ask my Dad questions, like a child would ask, ‘Did you ever kill anybody?’ And my Dad would never answer me. He’d either change the story around a bit, or he’d just walk away, and I’d notice that he’d be sad for a while. I could see the sadness coming over his face, and I could never really understand it. Now I understand it. Now I know why it’s so important to remember… It’s important that Canadians remember, because all of these people are Canadians, young men and women who put their lives on the line and made the ultimate sacrifice. And those who came back from Afghanistan? They’re changed forever… My only regret is not being able to sit down with my Dad, now that I understand it so much better, and talk to him about what happened in World War II.”

Barnes said there are so many resources available to today’s veterans that weren’t there for his father’s generation to deal with post traumatic stress disorder. The reason he wrote the book, Barnes said, was to deal with his own PTSD.

“To watch a young 19-year-old running into a hail of bullets to drag his wounded buddy back from a vehicle that’s been blown up and never hesitating, boy, that’s just amazing and it’s not surprising what a soldier will do for his brother in arms,” said Barnes. “We fight for our country and our government, but when the battle starts and the bullets are flying, and people are being hurt, we are fighting for the guy on our left and the guy on our right, and that’s what’s important.”