VANCOUVER — A Canadian soldier recovering from a near-fatal axe attack mustered up the strength earlier this week to whisper to a doctor that he wanted to go back to Afghanistan to complete his mission.

The doctor then told Trevor Greene what happened to him, but the soldier's father says he suspects his son is disappointed he won't be able to fulfil his mission in Afghanistan despite the brutal attack that almost killed him.

Richard Greene said Friday his son had no idea that an axe-wielding Afghani youth had attacked him from behind until the doctor explained to him precisely how he landed in hospital.

"He asked the doctor if he would go back to Afghanistan once he recovered from these injuries and that was the key on Wednesday for the doctor to inform him of what happened and the fact that he will not be recovered until the deployment is back in Canada," Greene said.

The doctor told his son that treatment would be ongoing and that the healing would progress slowly.

"He accepted that," Greene said. "He's discussing it and he's coping with it. I'm sure that he's very, very disappointed that this happened and he's not over there doing the work that he was trained for.

"He was blindsided, he was hit from behind so he doesn't really know what happened. We know what happened. We've been informed of exactly what happened, step by step, by military personnel."

Greene, 41, is recovering at Vancouver General Hospital, where he was transferred after a brief stay at a U.S. military facility in Landstuhl, Germany.

He was attacked March 4 while sitting down for what he thought would be a friendly gathering of elders in an Afghanistan village.

Greene had put down his weapon and removed his helmet during the meeting when a villager in his teens snuck up behind him, pulled an axe from his clothing and struck him in the head. Canadian and Afghani soldiers shot and killed the attacker.

"It was a Taliban attack and they play dirty," the soldier's father said. "It was a betrayal of confidence that these people give to our Canadian soldiers, that they will be protected whenever they're meeting with people."

His son suffered severe motor control damage to his brain and was in a coma for three weeks, said Greene, who has been in Vancouver from Mahone Bay, N.S. - about an hour southeast of Halifax - to support his son during his recovery.

"He's talking now, except that it's very low in volume, kind of in a whisper," Greene said.

"He's eating a lot of homemade food, which he really likes," Greene said with a laugh about the son who's known for his hearty appetite.

Regaining the use of his arms and legs will be one of the biggest challenges for the athletic soldier, Greene said.

He said his son is "a very solid person," although it's hard to know how news of the attack will affect him.

But Trevor's spirits have been buoyed by the good wishes of people from around the globe, Greene said.

"We've gotten e-mails and cards from people that we don't know, from all over the world - Japan, Australia, England.

"There's a bunch of us down on the East Coast there that are pushing for him and praying for him as well as so many other people right across the country."

The soldier's wife, Debbie, along with their 15-month-old daughter, Grace, are also helping him to stay positive, Greene said.

"He just brightens up when Grace comes in. She calls him Dada and she just watches him when she's around."

Greene, who was a journalist for eight years in Tokyo, doesn't yet know that a book he wrote on homelessness there, called Bridge of Tears, may now be published, his father said.

"He lived with the homeless in Japan, he followed them and it's a rather interesting story in that the Japanese don't recognize that they have homelessness in their society. So those people are kind of the forgotten people in Japan."

Despite the soldier's ordeal, Greene fully supports Canada's mission to Afghanistan.

"Those people over there have been suffering for years, decades, with different kinds of wars and so on."

Canada has had troops deployed in Afghanistan since 2001 as part of the U.S. invasion force Operation Enduring Freedom.