Under Contact with the Enemy

Heroes Remember

Under Contact with the Enemy

Transcript

Going back to the villagers, how some of them wanted us, some of them didn’t. This one particular day we were just doing a presence patrol through a village looking for Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the villagers kept saying, no, no, there’s no one here, there’s no one here. We said alright but the hairs on your back kind of twinge a little bit. We kept asking and they kept telling us no and then we were ambushed by a significant force that were waiting for us. One of our platoons was cut off and we had to go and so they were behind us and we were spread out in formation, them behind us so we had to backtrack to try and try and get them away from contact. So when we initially headed backt hey had a secondary ambush set up that hit my team and I was in a small unit that day because we were just trying to help the village so I think there was maybe fifteen of us. And we came under contact right away. We took up a defensive position in these ruins. We engaged the enemy long enough for that our quick reaction force could get to us. I don’t know what happened to the village people that we were talking to. They just all disappeared. It’s like a ghost story. It went from being a pleasant day walking through this nice farmland, canal area to all kinds of hate and discontent getting thrown at you and seen some guys get wounded. You know having to do the extraction and then extract ourselves pretty much and get out of there. That’s what you are dealing with. You don’t know when it’s going to happen, you just know it’s going to happen every day. Every day we left that wire in my time in 2007 we came under contact. First civilian contact is enemy engagements. We were engaged with the enemy every day we left the wire, sometimes twice.

Description

During his ’07 deployment, Sergeant MacEachern speaks of how his team was ambushed - coming under enemy engagement every day, sometimes twice!

Brian MacEachern

Mr. Brian MacEachern was born August 2, 1975 in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. With his father being a reserve soldier for over 30 years, Mr. MacEachern knew his own destiny at a very young age. Joining the reserves with the Combat Engineers division, he later specialized in combat diving and ordinance disposal. Throughout his military career Mr. MacEachern was part of the Swiss Air recovery mission and credits this exercise as being his reasons for continuing to serve in the Canadian military. In 2004 Mr. MacEachern accepted a deployment to Ethiopia and later that year travelled to Afghanistan and again in 2007 holding rank of sergeant with Combat Engineers. After being released from the military, Mr. MacEachern accepted support through Soldier On and in 2016 became a member of Team Canada Invictus Games travelling to Orlando, Florida as part of the cycling team. Mr. MacEachern continues to stay involved in the sport and now resides in Nova Scotia with his family.

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