It's important for Canadians to know what our soldiers are going through in Afghanistan, says a University of Calgary anthropologist who just finished spending three months with Canadians in a combat platoon.

News reports, although they present accounts of specific battles or dramatic events, can't depict what life is like for a soldier in a war theatre, Dr. Anne Irwin told CTV's Question Period in Montreal on Saturday.

"The old truism about war being 90 per cent boredom and 10 per cent excitement holds," conceded the anthropologist, who has spent the last decade watching soldiers in the field. "But those boring times are actually times when things are quite stressful."

It's difficult for Canadians to get a full picture of what life is like for our troops, said Irwin, whose work has focused on the Canadian military.

Irwin received her Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Manchester, where her thesis was The social organization of soldiering: a Canadian infantry company in the field. Her M.A. thesis for the University of Calgary was Canadian infantry platoon commanders and the emergence of leadership.

"On the news they see the battles ... there's a lot of coverage about what it's like to live in Kandahar airfield," Irwin said.

But life "outside the wire" is very different, the anthropologist said.

Although Irwin reports on what she sees while living with soldiers in combat conditions, her work differs from that of the media, because she focuses on the "every day and the mundane."

Canadians don't see what its like "not having a day off for months on end, not being able to wash, not being able to eat a hot cooked meal, of constantly being tired," said Irwin.

"The everyday is having your sleep interrupted routinely, (getting) very little sleep, always being watchful so even when you do have periods of sleep there is always someone who is doing a watch or sentry duty, she said.

"It's about not having a chance to wash for as long as 14 or 15 days, drinking hot water, and working in conditions where temperatures reach as high as 60 degrees (celsius) while wearing full body armour," said Irwin, who wears the same uniform and armour in the field as the soldiers she's studying.

Irwin spent the last three months with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in Afghanistan, where she studied how soldiers share their experiences with each other.

"Anthropology is defined as much by its methods as it is by its study subjects, so what we do as anthropologists is to live with people and share their experiences as much as possible to get at their perspective on the world," said Irwin.

"I try to get inside and analyze what makes these soldiers tick, not as individuals but as a social unit," she said.

Irwin's field work, which has been characterized by the Canadians she studies as watching "grunts in the mist"  has concluded that storytelling is an important bonding experience that reinforces troops' identity as soldiers.

When they gather in small groups to relax after returning exhausted from a patrol, each soldier contributes a joke or an anecdote about what they saw and did. Banter and playful insults build interpersonal relationships that affirm their membership in the group -- and this has impact on how well the unit can perform in battle.

One of the more difficult things for soldiers to discuss is casualties, she said.

"One of the problems is that when casualties leave the theatre, the combat zone, people don't know how they're doing," she said. "People are in shock, they're exhausted and it takes quite a while to start processing the experience."

After two Canadians were wounded in the first battle she witnessed in Afghanistan, she said, "it was almost 24 hours later before people actually started to sit down and talk together about what happened and express worry about the guys who had left the theatre and wonder about how they were doing."

Irwin was struck by the Canadian soldiers' professionalism.

She described watching Canadians take a Taliban gunman prisoner after he had held up the company for more than a day by shooting at them from a rooftop.

"It took artillery and all kinds of air resources before they finally put a stop to his shooting, she said, "and before he finished he killed one of their platoon members."

The soldiers who took him prisoner just shortly after they'd seen him kill one of their own treated him with "professionalism and humanity," she said.

"They treated him absolutely within the rules of war and acted like true professional soldiers, which didn't surprise me but I was impressed," she said.

Irwin was no stranger to the military before beginning her study of soldiers. A graduate of the Canadian Land Forces Command and Staff College's Militia Command and Staff Course, she served in the Canadian Forces Reserve from 1972 to 1987. When she retired from the military she was a Military Police Officer with the rank of Major.

The work Irwin is doing is one of the few glimpses Canadians will get into our troops' experiences in battle.

"Soldiers are quite limited in what they can say," she said. "They are actually quite resistant to talking to the media because at times they see the media as focusing on a story and the dramatic."

But it's important to know what they're going through, she said, "because we're the ones sending them into harm's way, who are putting them in these positions ... So it's important that they hear from soldiers and to hear from people like me about what it is that people are living through and going through in that theatre."

With a report from The Canadian Press