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 Captain Simon Mailloux who lost his left leg to an IED blast is back on tour as he stands by the Kandahar Air Field Canadian Memorial at the Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan. (Jason Franson/Sun Media) |
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD – Capt. Simon Mailloux has faced many battles on Afghanistan soil. But his greatest victory is returning to the war zone after losing his left leg to an IED blast that killed two of his men on Nov. 16, 2007.
He is just 26. “In our history we have experience of Canadians doing stuff nobody thought we were able to and that's what makes us what we are – we have the will to achieve stuff that nobody thought was possible,” says the self-effacing Quebec City native.
When Mailloux finally came to in the hospital in Germany, his first thoughts were that he had abandoned his platoon, that he had to get back on the battleground.
“I left the guys over there. I was commanding a platoon and the guys were left without a commander. I felt guilty about that,” says Mailloux, who promised his major he'd be back within weeks.
Then the full realization of his amputation set in. “The worst time is when you wake up in the hospital, when you are helpless in the bed,” says Mailloux, who has since visited injured soldiers in hospitals across Canada to lend them words of support.
“It gets better. There's going to be surgeries, hard times but the rehabilitation does work; keep focusing on what you want to achieve, not the problems you have right now.”
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He describes the blast that killed two of the men he was commanding – Cpl. Nicolas Beauchamp and Pte. Michel Levesque — as “a shock wave of heat.”
“When I woke up I could feel my face was bruised and swollen, I had my jaw fractured so I couldn't speak much,” he says.
“You are out of it then; your skills kick in. I was trying to reach my weapon, trying to defend myself. You're helpless at that time.”
He says the LAV3 armoured vehicle he was in saved his life. “Had I been in something else, I probably wouldn't be here right now.”
Mailloux went back to work in March of last year, redeploying to Afghanistan Nov. 11 - Remembrance Day. With a prosthetic leg and steely determination, he passed the required physical fitness tests to return to Kandahar, where he now works at Joint Task Force headquarters developing operations.
He says it's important for other injured soldiers to know the option of returning to service is open. “Coming back over here is a step, but if they just want to go back to work that's a message too.”
His wife and family initially struggled with his intent to redeploy. “They were worried like any family would be, but then they said, 'You know you're hard-headed and we know what you want to accomplish.'”
But, Mailloux adds lightly, the caveat is that he not do a third tour. His drive to soldier on, he adds, is also of course inspired by the fact that the multinational effort to restabilize Afghanistan – the second most impoverished country in the world — is far from over.
“Not only in defeating the insurgency, but in helping the Afghanis, there is so much work to do.”