Annex journalist embedded with Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan

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A veteran journalist and longtime resident of the Annex has won the Governor General's Award for non-fiction.

Globe and Mail reporter Christie Blatchford received the award, which comes with $25,000, for her often harrowing personal account of being embedded with the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

Called Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army, it recounts her three trips to Afghanistan, which were spread out over 10 months in 2006.

"I'm really proud and grateful for it (the award), I think it's a tremendous honour and I'm mostly glad for the people I wrote about because I think this reflects on their stories and what they had to tell," the 57-year-old journalist told The Guardian.

Asked why Afghanistan became her first book, out of all her many and varied assignments forged from a high profile 25-year career, she explained, "I was drawn to the soldiers' stories - it was that simple. I just felt almost from the moment I got there for the first time, I just sort of felt I had stumbled upon this great secret that lots of Canadians didn't know about which is how wonderful and articulate and just how much fun Canadian soldiers are.

"I just liked them so much I wanted to write their stories."

The recent abduction and subsequent release of a CBC news reporter underscores how dangerous the assignment can be, even for non-soldiers, but Blatchford said it wasn't a tough decision for her to become an embedded reporter.

"The first time I went, I went because The Globe asked me to go and I always pretty well do what they ask me to do because that's my job. The danger really became excruciatingly obvious to me on my second trip when I got trapped in the three-day long battle. It was absolutely terrifying, to be honest.

"And it's hard every time to go back. I've been back twice since then and it's harder almost every time because your knowledge increases and thus your awareness of the risks you take.

"When you're actually there in it, I don't know, you just kind of deal with it, you shut up and get on with it. It's harder to get on the plane to go to Kandahar than it is to be out with the soldiers."

Blatchford's book is a no-nonsense, no-holds-barred account of life literally in the trenches.

She hopes it accomplishes two things.

The first is helping Canadian soldiers to get the respect they deserve.

"If my book plays a small part in that I would be happy."

There was a period, she said, that then-chief of defence General Rick Hillier always referred to "as the decades of darkness" in the post-Somalia period.

"I think the soldiers have done a great deal to change that kind of feeling, themselves, in places like Quebec and Ontario with the ice storm, in western Canada with the Red River floods, in eastern Canada with the airplane crash at Peggy's Cove. In all of those places, Canadian civilians could see that the people doing the toughest and dirtiest jobs were their soldiers.

"So they've gone a long way to being their own best public relations agents ..."

The second is to serve as a simple diary.

"The tempo of operations was so high, particularly for the Patricias, who are the guys I mostly write about, that the great tradition of keeping a wartime diary sort of fell by the wayside. They didn't have time. When they got a chance to sleep they just fell asleep in the dirt. They didn't have time or opportunity."

As a result, she said, there's precious little information out there "that documents what they went through, how they felt, what they did, all of that.

"My book and books like it will help fill that gap I think."

It's one thing to support the troops but quite another to be in the trenches with them as an embedded reporter.

What struck Blatchford the most, she said, was their camaraderie.

"How generous they are with one another, how kind and thoughtful they are. They operate as part of a thing that is greater than the individual. So they think of others, always, they really do. I mean they have to, they're trained to do that. But they also do it intuitively and they are selfless and loving of one another and it isn't often you can see in any part of our society, people loving each other as ultimately as soldiers do and that's what I most loved."

Also nominated in the same category was another Annex resident and U of T professor, Dr. James Orbinski, for his equally compelling book An Imperfect Offering, Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century which recounted his own often harrowing trips abroad as a doctor (and past president) for Doctors Without Borders, including his nightmarish experiences in the Rwandan genocide.