It's our home.
Evidence of meeting #83 for National Defence in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was know.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #83 for National Defence in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was know.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5 p.m.
MCpl Jody Mitic
It's our home.
5 p.m.
MCpl Jody Mitic
Right, but we were forced to live in a small duplex at Uplands. It was a tiny little thing that was built probably in the fifties or sixties, and it was supposed to be home for three to six months, six months being worst-case scenario. We didn't move out of it for 18 months, and we forced it; the house wasn't done yet, but we were like...Alannah, she had to get out of there. My mom was living with us. They did rent the other half of the duplex, but for both put together, it was like maybe the top floor of the house that we did buy.
5 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
So what you owe is on your own house.
What exactly do you do at the JPSU? What's your role?
5 p.m.
MCpl Jody Mitic
Right now I'm awaiting retirement. I haven't actually been employed militarily, probably since I worked at Soldier On with DCSM.
I decided to try a career in broadcasting. I've interned at The Bear, one of the local radio stations. I was trying to get on SiriusXM and stuff. I've done a few other projects as well with TV and radio.
5 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
I thought maybe you were doing IED awareness training for the troops as they were going over—
5 p.m.
Fundraising Chair, Amputee Coalition of Canada, As an Individual
Now that would make sense.
5 p.m.
MCpl Jody Mitic
No, I've never been asked.
The operational bases are Petawawa, Edmonton, Wainright, Valcartier. Being here in Ottawa, everyone assumes I'm working within the system, and until I decided to unplug, that's what I did do.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
So you're transitioning now.
Having gone through JPSU, would you say there's a different between JPSU and SPHL?
5:05 p.m.
MCpl Jody Mitic
I never actually did SPHL. When I was a young soldier, SPHL was a threat. As Mr. Harris said, it was the kiss goodbye to your career. So when it was used as a threat to me....
The difference, though, is that SPHL was seen as a scrap heap and JPSU is like a repair bay. Do you know what I mean? It's convincing soldiers that's how they need to see it. I tell the guys, look, if your LAV gets blown up, you don't fix it yourself in the unit. You send it to the mechanics and they put it back together. Well, the JPSU is the mechanics for us.
I think the difference is going to be perception. If we could eventually have a few guys and girls go back to the units as whole soldiers again, we could have some success stories. But it's so new. It's only been around since 2009. I don't know if we have any success stories that the military could point to and say, be like him, or be like her. I don't know. If they do, they might want to take advantage of it.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
You're in a unique situation in that you've been living both with your own physical injuries and then you mentioned that your wife has PTSD.
Was that on a tour after she was with you?
5:05 p.m.
MCpl Jody Mitic
No, her last tour was mine as well.
The way I describe it is that I did the damage; she actually saw what happened after. She would roll up.... She had a tough time with some of the stuff she saw, and it took her a long time to admit it to herself. We almost broke up because I thought she was just being a bitch, but it turns out she was dealing with PTSD. I didn't know the symptoms myself, right? I also had an OSI for a short period after being wounded.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
So you have the experience with a physical injury, a psychological injury—you mentioned OSI—and now you're living with your wife, who is going through PTSD treatment, I hope.
5:05 p.m.
MCpl Jody Mitic
Yes, she's getting lots of treatment.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
How would you compare the treatment that somebody gets for a physical injury versus a psychological injury?
5:05 p.m.
MCpl Jody Mitic
As I said, my physical injuries were never a problem to deal with. As a patient you have your ups and downs. In my view, with a lot of the mental stuff, the patient has to be as honest with themselves as they are with who they are dealing with. The biggest step we've made in the last 10 years or so is making it okay for people to seek that treatment.
Personally, how I dodged the PTSD bullet is I started talking about what happened to me pretty quickly. I don't know if you remember, but CBC had that show Dispatches, with Rick MacInnes-Rae. I think that's his name. He was in my hospital room within a week. I said okay, because even at that time I thought, who knows what's going to happen to this new Veterans Charter thing.
I remember as a kid hearing about the merchant marines getting their pensions or something in the 1980s, I think. I said, “I don't want to be like those guys, so let's make our stories known.” When I see a lot of the other.... Alannah's thing was that she had a tough time admitting it to herself and everybody. My medical stuff, my physical stuff, was dealt with pretty easily. It's pretty straightforward, right? Then it's the mental stuff.
There are a lot of staff issues. You go to see a psychologist one day, and then you go back for your next appointment. If you're lucky it's a month later, but it's someone new, so you have to start all over again. I saw a psychiatrist briefly in Toronto. I had six sessions, and they changed. At the fourth session I ended up with a different person. They read the notes, but still, when you're in that state, you're wary of new people.
I think the biggest issue they have is people. In Petawawa, I guess, keeping a psychiatrist there...they can't do it.
5:10 p.m.
MCpl Jody Mitic
Yes, they have always had one to deal with a battle group of 3,200 people. That's a lot of people for one person to deal with. I don't know.
Seeing it, I think the physical injuries were straightforward. It's the mental injuries that are the hard side. We keep hearing...like the group before Paul and me were saying about their people; it's tough to deal with.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
In terms of the biggest changes you have had to make, obviously yours both were physical, or would you say there are other big changes you have had to make in addition to having to change the way your homes are? Are there other big changes you have had to make?
5:10 p.m.
Fundraising Chair, Amputee Coalition of Canada, As an Individual
It changes everything. It's going from black to white. It's going from young to old in an instant. You go from a person who's an Olympian-calibre athlete, who can run marathons, a triathlete, mountain man, you name it. Jody's a good example, with a lot of the stuff he's done, and I've done lots of stuff around the world. Those are examples of high-functioning amputees. It goes from that level to literally, in some cases, being bedridden and being told not to move. That's changing slowly, the medical side, but it's the military side that is such a big change.
There's a double amputee in Calgary, working at the museum. He's being medically released, forced to release, because he can't do his job, yet he recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. There are people within the military—and you have seen some of them, who have what we know as a “button disorder”—who would never be able to climb a mountain, let alone a little hill, because they are so unfit.
We have this complete disconnect of what's deployable. Why can't someone deploy behind a desk or work in a museum? Why can't I work at a computer? There's nothing that says we can't do these tasks other than universality of service, which is great, but there still has to be this part where I can teach about combat medicine. I have knowledge of this. Jody can teach the concepts of shooting. He can shoot. There's nothing wrong with his ability to do his task in this environment.
We even have amputees who have redeployed to Afghanistan and Haiti, and yet we as soldiers here are cut out. I think that's part of the problem. We go from that level to nothing; we recover to a certain point, and then we are cut down. Just as much as we lost our limbs, we lose our jobs, and everything we have ever known and done is gone.
How do we recover from that? Well, that is supposed to be Veterans Affairs. That's the piece. But Veterans Affairs doesn't support the families, as you have just heard. Veterans Affairs doesn't believe the clients. I've had to provide doctors' notes proving I'm an amputee in 2013, six years after—every year I provide a doctor's note saying that I'm an amputee, with pictures even. I even held up a newspaper once. It was hilarious.
5:10 p.m.
Fundraising Chair, Amputee Coalition of Canada, As an Individual
That goes to the point of where we were.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to you, both, for lending an aura of reality to our discussions here. We appreciate your courage, and both of you are extremely articulate. I have never heard of the concept of “button disorder”.
5:10 p.m.
Fundraising Chair, Amputee Coalition of Canada, As an Individual
I was trying to say it in a good way.
