A pair of Canadian helicopters circled low over a vineyard, watching two insurgents try to slip away, waiting for permission to shoot.The chopper crew and soldiers on the ground were confident they had a good kill in their sights, with little risk of harming innocent bystanders if the Griffon's door gunner pulled the trigger.
But the crew needed permission from high up the chain of command, an often frustrating hierarchy that soldiers call "the kill chain."
For months now, Canadian and other NATO troops fighting in southern Afghanistan have complained that restrictive rules of engagement, written to win Afghans away from insurgents by limiting civilian casualties, have handed the momentum to the enemy.
Not this time.
The Griffons had been flying just hundreds of feet above two insurgents for some 20 minutes on the morning of July 5. Soldiers at a nearby outpost, dripping sweat in the scorching morning heat, barely looked up.
They're used to nothing coming of it.
The insurgents were holed up in a small building the size of a shack, with thick, mud brick walls, where farmers normally dry grapes. When they tried to escape, and commanders had no doubt the men were combatants, their war was over.
The grinding noise of a chopper's motorized machine gun, capable of mincing a target with at least 2,000 bullets a minute, echoed across the desert plain. It sounded like a wood chipper dicing up tree limbs.
"Oh ya, baby!" one soldier shouted up at the sky as the airborne gatling gun spewed repeated bursts. Whoops and cheers rippled across the dust-blown camp.
In a war where the enemy hides in villages, and fights mainly with homemade bombs hidden in cooking pots, water jugs, farmer's fields and trees, it's not often Canadian soldiers get to fight back.
Oscar Company was savouring some payback, a sweet taste they've been enjoying more often in recent days.
Since Brigadier-General Jon Vance returned to take command in early June, the kill chain has been cut shorter, and Canadian troops on the battlefields of eastern Panjwai district say it's getting easier to take the fight to the insurgents.
Major Steve Brown, commander of Oscar Company, in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment battle group, called Vance "a no-nonsense kind of guy" whose personality has helped reshape battlefield operations.