News and Features
How a Canadian Soldier Escaped Death in Afghanistan
By Noah Richler published Jun 1, 2012
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A young Afghan militant violently attacked Captain Trevor Greene by driving an axe into his skull. His miraculous recovery explores how we treat our wounded veterans
By March of this year, 162 Canadians—158 soldiers and four civilians—had lost their lives in the 10 years of the Afghanistan campaign. But it's the plight of the wounded, who must adapt to often unimaginably difficult lives, that brings home the truth of the extraordinary sacrifice soldiers make. The lives not just of the injured men and women, but also of their loved ones, are forever altered by war's cruel lottery: an IED by the side of the road, a sniper's bullet that finds its target, or, for Capt. Trevor Greene, an axe wielded by a deranged young Afghan militant.
The son of an RCMP officer, Greene grew up in Ontario and Nova Scotia. He graduated from King's College, Halifax, and travelled to Japan, where he taught English and tried his hand at journalism before becoming "bored and frustrated." He also grew more conscious of the "military thread" in his family that reached back to his grandfather's participation in the First World War. He applied to Edinburgh and Oxford Universities, but also to the Canadian Forces, was accepted, and returned home in 1995 to enlist.
"I had a grandiose, if immature, compulsion to become a foreign correspondent," Greene told me. "After graduation, I felt the need to travel and to hone whatever were my nascent skills. I found myself in Japan with little idea of how to actually set about becoming a foreign correspondent. I knew I had the foreign bit down, but beyond letters home I was at a loss as to the greater process, and after seven years of searching I felt the need to serve something bigger than myself. This is where my family's tradition of service came to the fore. I have always been acutely cognizant of the advantages and blessings of being Canadian, especially during my time at university when my worldview was expanded exponentially. I felt a debt to those who sacrificed so much to forge such a peaceful, prosperous nation. I saw my military service as a way to repay that debt."
An author (his book, Bad Date: The Lost Girls of Vancouver's Low Track, was published in 2001), Greene was stationed in Vancouver with the Seaforth Highlanders when, in January 2006, he was deployed to Afghanistan as a civil military cooperation officer (CIMIC) with a platoon of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. The devastating injury he suffered two months into his deployment occurred at a shura, a meeting with tribal elders that he was conducting in Shinkay village, in what he knew to be the most dangerous region in Kandahar province.
The Afghan's axe cleaved the back of Greene's unprotected head. (He had taken off his helmet and put it aside as a deferential gesture.) The blow "flipped the bone inside out" and left him with a 12-centimetre fracture. Greene, instantly unconscious, his notepad spattered with blood, was thrust to the ground before his assailant attempted to remove the axe for a second blow. The Afghani was shot dead before he could do so by Rob Dolson, another soldier in the group.
The attack was the cue for an ambush, and a firefight ensued before Greene could be flown out. The medic, Shaun Marshall, held Greene's head together until the grievously wounded officer could be put on a stretcher and evacuated from the battlefield to the base in Kandahar, his heavily bandaged head tilted backwards at a grotesque angle. A nurse, Maria Streppa, argued with the Medevac team, who saw no realistic prospect for the injured soldier, for his swift expedition to hospital in Frankfurt.
At the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Greene was maintained in a coma while pieces of his skull were removed (because of severe intracranial pressure) and his body fought perilous infections. One tube fed oxygen down his trachea; another piped nutrients to his stomach. Pumps forced blood to circulate in the legs his traumatized brain could no longer manage. Ten days later, he was returned by air ambulance to Vancouver.
