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Hang around soldiers long enough and you will run the full gamut of topics, most of them unprintable. Squaddies will talk about stuff that would make Charlie Sheen blush.

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Don’t get me wrong. They are also capable of deeper conversation and are never afraid to take on any issue, but they debate it expansively and expletively.

Every now and then you come across a soldier who doesn’t talk so much. They are a reporter’s worst nightmare.

“I always knew I was going to be a soldier,” said Sgt. Pav Pavlovic of 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment. I waited hoping for more, but just got the cool brown-eyed stare that seemed to say something between “Next question?” and “Are we done?”

As well as a 2003 stint in Bosnia, Pavlovic has been deployed in Afghanistan four consecutive times in 2005-10. The first was in Kabul on what he calls a “milk-run,” but the next three were in volatile Kandahar province. He came to Kandahar as a master corporal of a weapons detachment and left as a sergeant over a similar section of 11 men. In total, he spent two years and four months in Afghanistan.

“When I joined I was hoping to go overseas. So I kind of got exactly what I signed up for. I got to go away and I got to deploy. … As a soldier you want to go places, you want to do your job. You don’t want to train for nothing,” he says