The Canadian veteran of the Afghanistan mission is talking calmly about what happened.
The calm voice is unnerving as he tells his tale. There's a slight pause and he says, "I sit before you as a man who knows what it's like to feel the wind on his exposed brains." Then another slight pause before he says, "It was an American Warthog that had accidentally strafed us."
The story is told in the magnificent series War Story: Afghanistan (History, 8 p.m.). I cannot recommend it highly enough. This week there are many programs airing to commemorate Remembrance Day and many of them good, illustrative programs. But War Story: Afghanistan is absolutely must-see.
The programs (made by Barry Stevens, David York and Bryn Hughes) are just 30 minutes long and six will air between now and Wednesday. As before, when the same team used the same technique to tackle documenting key battles of the Second World War, the power is in the unsullied narrative – the programs comprise only the personal memories of witnesses to the brutal events of war. Nothing is sullied by punditry, no experts doing their big-picture analysis.
I've watched all six programs and there isn't a wasted moment in them. And the series obliges the viewer to ask hard questions about what Canadians sacrificed in Afghanistan. It obliges us to acknowledge that for all the valour, for all the rightness of the mission, the horror is unimaginable. The final words spoken are by retired Captain Wayne Johnston, who organized the return of soldiers who died in Afghanistan. He says, "There is no good outcome to war."
The first program tonight deals with the start of the mission in 2002, Canada's first combat mission in almost half a century. Veterans recall the shock of arriving in Afghanistan and their surprise at finding that their American counterparts were mostly kids, soldiers 19 or 20. The Americans, they knew, were wondering why Canada was sending over "old guys" in their thirties. A sniper explains his work, talking about his shot that killed a Taliban fighter. "There's no celebration. It's work."
And then comes stories of the horror. The first batch of Canadian casualties was killed by friendly fire. An American pilot took it upon himself to fire at them. There is bitterness at how the incident was handled. But there wasn't time to dwell on that.
The story moves on to the period when the Canadians were put in charge of the Kandahar region, "The Cradle of the Taliban." Everything was anchored in the aid program, to help locals. Build schools, make friends. But it was treacherous territory.
As a veteran says, they had to be suspicious of everyone, and every single person or animal was a danger, including a donkey wandering down a road. An interpreter who worked for the Canadians at the time makes the remarkably understated observation, "It's a risky job."
In the program on Operation Medusa, a key and bloody battle in 2006, we meet Lieutenant-Colonel Harjit Sajjan, who as of last week is our defence minister.
The operation was the biggest battle NATO had ever undertaken. There was 72 hours of bombardment to "soften up" the Taliban. And the Canadians walked into a trap. "It was devastating," one veteran says. "We were rock stars to that point." The soldiers tried and tried and it was friendly fire from the American plane that devastated an entire battalion. Someone says, "It's not the way soldiers are supposed to go."
The final program, The Long Way Home, airing appropriately on Wednesday, Remembrance Day, at 8:30 p.m. is deeply moving. It delves into many of the narratives that this newspaper has been reporting in its investigation into the treatment of injured veterans.
We meet Master Corporal Paul Franklin, who lost both his legs in Afghanistan. He's a remarkably cheerful, wisecracking guy. But he's also a guy who had to, for a time, prove to Veteran's Affairs every year that he had, in fact, lost both his legs.
A question is asked at the end: "Was the Afghan mission worth it?" And it is Capt. Johnston, who saw so many funerals, who asks it and gives his own reply, "The only ones who can answer that are the loved ones of the fallen."
War Story: Afghanistan is the most vital, poignant and provocative program of the week, by a long shot.