When was 18 and in the Canadian Armed Forces, Ron Raby remembered going sleepless for days while stationed in the town of Soest, West Germany. It was 1953, during the Cold War. “We had to sleep in tents, in weather below 45 degrees,” Raby said.

On March 4, 2009, Canadian soldier David Macdonald pulled ahead of his convoy on its way into Kandahar to ensure that a bridge ahead was safe. Fourteen days later he came out of a coma in a German hospital bed. “I woke up … (and ) they told me about my injuries. I asked them where my platoon was and they said they were still back in Afghanistan,” MacDonald said. “That was far worse than hearing about any injuries I had.”

Jason Mullis waited patiently for the funeral to end. People paid their respects at a coffin draped with the Canadian flag and with flowers all around the gravesite. “I knew something was different,” he said, “so I stood there for … hours waiting for everyone to leave.” That’s when he finally spoke to Denise, the mother of the deceased veteran being buried. Mullis simply wanted to offer his assistance to her. He recognized the difficulties she might have faced as the mother of a former soldier who died by suicide.

As a civilian in Canada, Hans Christian Breede teaches. As a soldier in Afghanistan, he became a student again. “We were in awe at how (Afghans) live without all the creature comforts we here in Canada are so used to,” he said. In Kingston, Breede works at Queen’s University as an assistant professor of political studies. From September 2008 until the end of March 2009, Major Breede was deployed in Afghanistan serving with the Force Protection Company of the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team.

At 5 a.m. each day while on duty, David Garcia woke up to the sound of the alarm, strapped on his gear and readied himself for anything and everything. "You are faced with tough decisions a lot of the time, but you don’t have a lot of time to react," Garcia said.

Canadian Forces soldier Matthew Jackson finds simple satisfaction in his work with artillery. “They are very satisfying to fire,” he said. “Although it makes me sound like a child, they are very loud and very fun to fire.”

For Sylvia Rooker the war in Afghanistan came down to winning over the women civilians. “I got to know seven women there,” she said. “I would learn to speak their language and they loved that. They were not used to being treated with respect.”

Canadian veteran Mark Chamberlain is training for a mission this spring. But it won’t put him in harm’s way. “This was a way to get the soldiers together … to talk about something that was common to them,” he said.

In the summer of 2007, Bill Walker and his two sons stood on a bridge overlooking Highway 401. They were honouring a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan. As the military convoy passed by, Walker’s eldest son had a proposition for his father.

In April 2007, eight Canadian soldiers, shouldering a wooden casket, marched across Kandahar Airfield. Five more caskets followed. As the plane, carrying the bodies of their fallen comrades, departed Afghanistan, pallbearer Mike Lassaline, 27, noted a single tear streaking down a friend's cheek.

Murray Brewster remembers the last interview he conducted with the mayor of Kandahar. The award-winning war correspondent from Canada was standing with Mayor Ghulam Haidar Hameedi on the steps of the governor’s palace in Kandahar. Suddenly, Brewster noticed three men striding across the lawn in front of them.

Suraia Sahar says former British Prime Minister Tony Blair should be put on trial...