You Really Felt Alive

It’s exciting, right? It’s doing what you are trained to do. Not that I am any braver than anyone else, that’s not what I am getting at but it was exciting, you really felt alive. Let’s put it that way. You really felt alive. So it was interesting. It’s a country that is unlike ours and in many ways it’s a very beautiful country. You’re at a place in time, like here it is, the here and the now, it may never be there again. It started off with getting everyone to marshal at a certain time so that came out of the planning phase. You work your way around and tell people when to show up by the TOC, where we gave orders. So I would have my 2IC, that was Master Corporal Raymond Arnt, was my 2IC and I would have him organize everyone according to my plan. And he was very good at it, we were a good team. Anyway, we would marshal people up according to the layout that we had and it was different every time. The size of the convoy, the destination, the vehicles you had, you had any one of a number of things. So we are taking supply vehicles. We had a lot of the Allied Forces join us. They’d be going somewhere, they’d just hook on to our convoy so we’d go wherever. So everyone gets orders so the whole convoy comes in, I deliver orders, here’s what we’re doing, here’s where we’re going, here’s what our timings are, here’s what your actions on are, yadayada, all the simple stuff that we did. And then after getting clearance to leave the base, we would simply kick off and off we’d go. And it would be a lot of just dealing with the obstacles that show up because you never know what’s going to happen. Vehicles break down. You need to worry about recovery. You got to maybe self recover. You have to worry about things that pop up on the road because stuff pops up on the road. For us it was always trying to dodge things that went boom and then get to your next location and often we would go to one location, marshal again, go off to another one, drop supplies off, marshal again, head off to another place so you kind of went through the same process over and over without redoing everything. We weren’t so much humanitarian as we were supporting the battle group and the contingents who were in the different bases. We had the provincial reconstruction team which was in Kandahar City. There was a kind of a joint coalition communication centre that was in the middle of Kandahar City as well, separate from the provincial reconstruction team and there were fire bases that were in compounds in various places, Spin Boldak had one, there was out in Panjwai, they were all over. So we were taking these bases, their supply, dropping them off and in many cases just supplying people for the next mission that the battle group was going on.

Mr. Moroz recalls a positive approach to his reserve duties outside the wire and gives a sense of daily routine that evolved in support of the battle groups.

Vincent Moroz

Mr. Vincent Moroz was born November 12, 1965 in Spirit River, Alberta. In his early 20’s he worked as a prison guard in hopes of pursuing a career with the military police. This not working out, later on in life, at the age of 30 he re-joined the Reserve unit with the 49th Battalion, the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and within this role accepted a deployment to Afghanistan in 2006. Holding rank of section commander, Mr. Moroz held various responsibilities mainly in the convoy escort duty and providing support to Canadian battle groups. Being part of the Canadian Delegation commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge holds a great sense of pride and honour for his service as well as the sacrifice made by all our Canadian Veterans. Mr. Moroz resides in Spirit River, Alberta with his wife and family.