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www.oakvillebeaver.com The Oakville Beaver Weekend, Saturday August 25, 2007 - 3 DAVID LEA / OAKVILLE BEAVER TRAINING FOR THE FRONTLINES: Corporal Raeid Ishoop of the 32nd Combat Engineers Regiment takes cover with his fellow reservists during a mine sweeping scenario. This is just one incident being conducted as part of Exercise Maple Defender 2007 in Wainwright, Alberta where the scenarios encountered by the reservists are intended to introduce them to the realities of overseas deployment. What you learn here may save your life Wainwright, Alta. -- Crawling through cow dung in cold, wet weather, with the knowledge that someone is probably going to try to attack you in some way is a situation most people would do anything to avoid. However, the reservists of the Canadian Armed Forces, who live and work in communities like Oakville, are not most people and, not only are they willing to volunteer to face these situations, but they're willing to take time off from their day jobs and train for two weeks to confront such challenges head on. The Canadian military has just finished Exercise Maple Defender 2007, a learning experience conducted from Aug. 11-24 that is intended to expose Ontario reservists to the realities of overseas service. Taking place within the huge 620-kmsquared military base in Wainwright, Alta., the participants are exposed to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), ambushes, hostile Special Report Oakville Beaver reporter David Lea spent four days with volunteer reservists from the Halton area as they participated in a training exercise to prepare them for the frontlines in Afghanistan. villagers and a number of other components currently being encountered by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. "What they are going to experience here, that we can not replicate anywhere else, is Kandahar Province and the operating area that our soldiers are....in over in Afghanistan," said Colonel Gerald C. Mann, Commander of the 32nd Canadian Brigade Group. "There is a very robust opposition force here that has been professionalized. They get posted here as soldiers, they train up, they study what the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are doing and they try to take all those techniques and procedures that the Taliban use, replicate those and expose them to our soldiers in a safe environment." This year's exercise features a new training system for spotting and dealing with IEDs, a menace in Afghanistan, which is killing more Canadian soldiers than anything else the Taliban has in its arsenal. The instructors at Wainwright were reluctant to talk about the exact methods being used to detect IEDs for fear the Taliban would learn of these tactics and change their own accordingly. However, the instructors were willing to say that ways had been found to counter the IED threat and those methods were being taught to the reservists. "IEDs are tough. It's an insidious way to attack us. It's always very difficult, but for all those sad incidents of casualties that garner a lot of attention, there are also a lot of success stories that are going on over there that, for obvious security reasons, we can't share," said Colonel Craig King, Commander of the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre. What the military was willing to share See No page 16 · Wood & Vinyl Shutters, Supplied & Installed · High Quality at Affordable Prices · Customer Satisfaction Guaranteed · Serving Oakville with Shop at Home Service Authorized Vinylbilt Dealer www.shuttersetc.ca Shop at Home Service FREE