Modified On July 20, 2008
Currently residing in Toronto, Canadian comic Pete Zedlacher just returned from a visit to Afghanistan and the Gulf for his fourth and fifth Canadian Forces Show Tours. From his blog entry on his MySpace blog:
When I got home from Afghanistan I realized all my clothes were salt stained. It’s so hot there, your body just continuously sweats to cool you down and the salt collects in your clothes. I found it unbearable, I can’t imagine what the soldiers experience in the same temperatures carrying 70 pounds of gear.[…]
Like I said, this was my second trip to Afghanistan, the first was in ’02, when there was a couple thousand troops there. Today, I’m not allowed to say how many exactly, but it’s a LOT more. And it’s changed a lot too. There’s now a Tim Horton’s there. Kandahar Afghanistan got a Tim Horton’s before my hometown of Wawa did. They even had the Roll-Up-The-Rim contest in the spring. I joked to the soldiers, “What were the prizes? Body armour?”
From the desert halfway around the world, Zedlacher is now at the Festival in Montreal.