"It has been a hard week, we've taken a lot of hits. But I guarantee we are not going to let the bastards win," said Lieutenant Colonel Joe Pospolita, the most senior Canadian officer at Camp Nathan Smith.

Around him, hundreds of troops and civilians came to honour Sergeant Martin Goudreault, a 35-year-old Canadian combat engineer killed by a roadside bomb in Kandahar, birthplace of the Taliban movement.

"I worked with this guy before. He was doing a great job, going out every day," said Mike, a Canadian working in a bomb disposal team who did not want to give his last name.

"He was getting up every morning like everybody else. You just never know," he sobbed, surrounded by uniformed Canadians and Americans as young as 20.

"You will grieve later, once back home, because you want to stay focused on the mission," Mike added, before going to salute a photo of his dead comrade.

According to an AFP tally based on the independent website icasualties.org, 248 foreign soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year, representing an average of one or two dying each day.

But after losing five soldiers on Sunday, international forces on Monday encountered their deadliest day in combat in Afghanistan in two years, with 10 killed -- seven Americans, two Australians and a French soldier.

On Tuesday, three more soldiers, including a Briton died, in the south. Two contractors, one of them American, were also killed this week in an attack on an Afghan police school, not far from Camp Nathan Smith.

"That guy, he was his best friend," whispered one soldier, head low, discreetly pointing to a colleague of the contractor, who died just 10 days before he was due to be reunited with his wife and children.

Brigadier General Ben Hodges, head of operations for US forces in southern Afghanistan, said he worried about the families of fallen soldiers.

"Whether you lose one soldier or you lose 10, there is a family that's getting the bad news. And almost all of them are very young. You think about the impact on the family," Hodges said.

But he also voiced concern about how heavy losses in recent days would affect opinions at home about the war effort, now into a ninth year.

"In the national mind, when you lose five men in one day, it gets your attention. I worry that it could erode people's support," Hodges said.

"We've got to demonstrate that we are going to achieve that point of irreversible momentum. I believe we'll hit that point before the end of this year."

Operations to beat back the Taliban in the southern province of Kandahar, heartland of a bitter insurgency against the Western-backed Afghan government, are due to escalate in coming months as thousands more troops deploy.

Commanders have warned that military casualties would increase as their deployment grows to a scheduled 150,000 by August and as they build up a push against the Taliban in Kandahar, the most ambitious yet of the war.

"It's important to never forget the reality that's outside that gate," said Eli Gerhard, US Army engineer, Chief Warrant Officer-2, who came to pay his respects at the camp.

As a reminder, three rockets targeted Camp Nathan Smith the previous evening. None reached their target, but shots were fired into the night for a good quarter of an hour.

The worst thing about losing a fellow soldier, Gerhard said, is how quickly the public forgets each casualty.

"Try to give me the name of three soldiers who died in the past six months?" he challenged.

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