National Defence Committee on April 17th, 2008

[Col Omer Lavoie]

Yes, sir. Absolutely.

It unfolds in two ways, from my experiences. One, as you're aware, I think, is that the commander of a unit that's about to deploy will go overseas at least twice--once on a strategic and once on a tactical reconnaissance. He is forward with the commanding officer, in our case, and we have an extensive opportunity to discuss everything from the operations to the more human aspects of dealing with combat. For most of us, as COs, it's really the first time we have experienced that kind of intense combat in our careers.

The second opportunity, though, is back in Canada. Not too long after returning from Canada, you go through a series of professional development opportunities with units that are about to deploy--it's a speaking tour almost--to pass on lessons learned. In our case it was with the 3 Van Doos battle group. Even further, most of my officers, including myself, deployed to Wainwright, Alberta, for about a three-week period. So while that battle group was going through its validation exercise, we were there as mentors. A large part of that was dealing with the operational side. But I certainly had a lot of evenings where it was heart-to-heart discussions with both the commanding officer of that battle group and his regimental sergeant major on the human aspects that you face in combat, up to and including, unfortunately, losing soldiers occasionally.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I don't want to make this too personal, because I know you've been through a lot.

We talk about stress of the troops, and obviously stress knows no rank. Could I get a quick comment, particularly from you, Colonel Lavoie, about dealing with that kind of personal stress, when you are the battle group commander and people are looking to you not just for command leadership, but for fatherly leadership?

[Col Omer Lavoie]

I think it's the training you receive. You might take it for granted until the first time you actually get into those situations and bullets are flying, but I certainly found that when you do get into those hard situations--and I've been in a few myself--the training did kick in pretty automatically. Sometimes it's almost surreal. You see yourself doing exactly what you were trained to do throughout years of infantry training and company commander training and CO training. You see yourself doing it by the book, as if you're being evaluated.

I think the other aspect, though, that's ingrained into us as a culture in the Canadian Forces and in the army is this concept of leadership from the front and achieving your mission. I always found that when you did have dark hours, and I certainly had a degree of very close personal loss over there, you knew you still had 1,200 soldiers looking at your every move. In the end, your duty was to keep that ship on track and accomplish the next objective or the mission that you had been assigned. I think you get a lot of personal strength from that, and that does get you through from one bad day to the next.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

I'd like to look ahead a little bit. We're predicting changes to the mission, with more civilians, more DFAIT, more CIDA people, not just going to the PRT but going outside the wire to the projects, and so on.

Actually, I'd like to hear from Colonel Hetherington and Colonel Lavoie, from a PRT perspective and from a battle group commander perspective, about the challenges in getting more civilians in harm's way and how we're going to deal with that from the point of view of teaching them or looking after their stress levels, and so on.

[LCol Simon Hetherington]

You're asking me to speculate a bit, and obviously I'd rather not do that.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Well, no. I'm not saying where we're going to put them in harm's way, but they will likely be in somewhat more harm's way. How are we going to deal with the training of those people, to equip them, as we train the uniformed people?

[LCol Simon Hetherington]

I completely understand your question, sir.

I stay in very close contact with my civilian counterparts with whom I served in the PRT. In fact, as recently as last night we were out discussing this. I think what needs to be considered, and I'm sure it will be, is being able to provide to those civilians the same degree of care and consideration for their mental health as we provide for our soldiers. That's not lost on anyone. How the training and preparation for that occurs, I'm not sure how that will work. As long as it's recognized that they are under similar stresses and we take measures to assist them, that's important.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Obviously the CF is there to assist DFAIT, CIDA, and what not, in that kind of indoctrination.

[MGen Tim Grant]

Absolutely.

From the standpoint of CEFCOM, we work closely with the Department of Foreign Affairs and CIDA, offering them the opportunity to get their folks to training venues like Wainwright. Not only can they meet the people they will work with in theatre, but they will have some exposure to some of the challenges they'll have in that environment.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Colonel Lavoie, as a battle commander, you've babysat, willingly or not, people like journalists who were embedded, who were obviously civilian. How did you find they handled that whole situation, as civilians?

[Col Omer Lavoie]

It often surprised me for the most part that they're certainly professionals as well and a lot of them have been in a lot of not-so-nice places in the world. It always struck me that, surprisingly, they handled some pretty tight situations as well as they did.

Just to build on what Colonel Hetherington said on the other aspects of civilians in the battle space, which is a term we use now, I do remember when PRT was training initially. As much as he won't admit it now, the PRT was initially part of 1 RCR Battle Group during the mounting phase. Certainly Colonel Hetherington orchestrated, as part of that, the preparation of the civilians who came from the other government departments. He brought them to Petawawa for a week or so, and they were exposed to some of the stressors that soldiers would experience in theatre, including seeing weapons being fired and artillery going off and receiving some degree of first aid and mine awareness. We do have the capacity to provide some of that training, which is general to everybody, whether you're going on a fighting patrol or you're part of a PRT in a reconstruction effort.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

We're obviously not going to intentionally put anybody in harm's way, soldier or civilian, but we have thought of that ahead of time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

That ends the first round. We'll start into the second round. We'll start with the official opposition, back to the government, and then over to the Bloc.

We'll start with Mr. McGuire, for five minutes.

[Joe McGuire, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

I'll repeat what Dawn said to you, that it's nice to see you back in a different.... You all look better, anyway, when you're back here. I know we had a chance to see Colonel Lavoie--he had just come in off the front when he gave us a briefing at that time. I think General Grant was back and forth.

The topic we're interested in is how the soldiers are treated, not only when they come off the battlefield, but also at home when they come into various situations in the family, whether there's family breakup, and how the family is treated versus how the soldier is treated, and how the reservist is treated differently from a regular soldier, and so on. When Colonel Lavoie was there he was very action oriented, period. He not only had people who were killed and wounded, but he probably had quite a few people who had post-traumatic syndrome at some point after those particular battles.

Now there's a different mental outlook there, I would think. I was wondering if any of you are in a position to judge whether it was any tougher when you were there in a more action-oriented arena than it is now, when you are worried about roadside bombs. Fewer people are getting killed, but are fewer people being affected? Is there less treatment required now from when you were there? Do you have any statistics to compare between the two situations?

[MGen Tim Grant]

From my understanding, the statistics, if they're there, have not been compiled yet from the rotation. The 3rd Battalion of the Van Doos battle group has just come back home, and I'm not aware that the statistics on the challenges faced by them have been compiled at this time.

I would say, as I mentioned earlier, there are stressors on everyone, and everyone handles those stresses in a different manner. There are some people who would suggest that there should be less of a result from combat action because you can take offensive action at the same time, as opposed to being in a more defensive routine, where you feel less capable of managing your environment. You can use the example of Bosnia in the early 1990s, when PTSD really started to come to the fore.

I'm not sure that at the end of the day, sir, those statistics are particularly important. I think the issue is that there continue to be stressors put on soldiers in the environment they're in today. As a result of that, we need to make sure that the medical system is still as robust as it was during the combat phase so that we can, in fact, make sure that if something comes up we can deal with it in a quick and timely manner.

[Joe McGuire, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Is there more stress seen now at the Kandahar hospital among medical doctors, psychiatrists, or people who deal with mental injury? Is there any difference in the numbers of people required there?

[MGen Tim Grant]

The numbers have remained the same. The numbers of psychiatrists who were there on rotation 2 and rotation 3 are the same as on rotation 4 and rotation 5. So those have not changed.

I had a discussion the other day with my senior medical officer from rotation 3. His belief, after looking at the statistics that he had for rotation 3, was that the complement of mental health specialists from psychiatrists to mental health nurses to social workers to padres was sufficient to handle the demand that was placed on them, not only by Canadian soldiers, but also by soldiers from other nations who were in Kandahar and could access that Canadian system as well.

[Joe McGuire, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

We had another reservist in here a few weeks ago. He was there for a very short time, but he was on the front and he was associated with a roadside bombing incident. When he came home nobody would believe that he was actually injured. He wasn't injured physically, but he was certainly.... And what they went through, the reservist and the parents, was a particular hell. I'm just wondering how often that happens. The nurse in charge of his file basically accused him of lying, pretending he was injured and looking for a pension or something. All he wanted, and apparently wasn't getting, was his proper treatment. Those people are falling through the cracks. I don't know how many. You can't interview everybody who comes back, or their parents.

Are the reservists being treated any better now than they were? I understand they were treated differently for a while. Are they still treated differently? Is the medical response to them, at the time and when they get back, the same as to the regular soldier?

[MGen Tim Grant]

It is difficult for us to respond to cases of soldiers coming back. We don't have access, nor should we have access, to their medical documents to determine what has occurred. Those situations are best addressed by the medical world, which can investigate and determine where help is and what can be provided.

We're much better now at dealing with reservists who have deployed overseas, in part because there are greater numbers. We've learned through our mistakes in the past. Looking back at Bosnia, some of the reservists who came back from the Second Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in the Medak pocket got off the plane and went home, never to be seen again. We don't do that any more. We have procedures for follow-up. It's not perfect, but we try to learn from our mistakes, and we try to make sure that nobody falls through the cracks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Ms. Gallant.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

With regard to the soldiers who have been injured and are seeking compensation, we've been told about something called a CF 98 form. Maybe you could explain these forms to the committee. Apparently they are not all being completed as necessary, even though compensation hinges on whether or not these forms are submitted. Is it realistic to require that all the injuries and incidents requiring the submission of a CF 98 be done in theatre?

[MGen Tim Grant]

I'll give a general comment and then I'll turn it over to the COs, whose responsibility it is to fill out these forms. It is a document that Veterans Affairs reviews with respect to compensation and pensions. It records the incident and the circumstances to confirm that the individual was on duty at the time, and that the incident was the result of a service necessity. It has a place where a medical authority can sign off. In the current structure, it is required. Is it difficult to do? It can be, but I'll let the COs address that issue.

[Col Omer Lavoie]

It's a responsibility to ensure that the troops under your command, if they're injured, no matter how, have the injury documented and tracked. The system isn't perfect. But even if the soldier is injured playing hockey in CFB Petawawa, nothing to do with duty, there's an obligation for the chain of command to ensure that it's been documented.

I don't think it is very difficult, especially in this day and age. It's a simple form. When a soldier is injured, whether or not he's in an operating environment, the company clerks and medics all have this form and it's filled out. In the worst case, it can be done on a scrap of paper. If it's witnessed and annotated by chain of command, at least it serves as some source of documentation.

I don't think it's perfect. Do they sometimes not get filled out? Yes, unfortunately. I've been guilty of it myself. Sometimes you don't think it's a big deal, you don't fill it out, and then four or five years later you wish you had.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Another problem that has been related to us has to do with the transfer of medical records. They're getting lost. Somebody hurt in theatre will go to the CAF hospital, perhaps be transferred to Lahr, then back home to a hospital, and finally, with luck, back to his base. So they'll be seeing the base doctor and they will be referred to a specialist eventually. With all these transfers of records, they're getting lost and causing delays in treatment and referrals.

Some have suggested that these records become electronic. You have been in theatre. Is this a realistic recommendation to put forward?

[MGen Tim Grant]

I would suggest that this is the wrong trio to answer that question. The medical documents are held by the medical community, and the challenge would be for someone in the medical community to look at the matter and decide the best way to deal with it. This is beyond our purview.