Mr. Chair, I feel that within the training system you should have medical experts who are contributing to the design, development, and delivery of training. However, once again, the actual hands-on, the procedures that are used within a unit, that should be transparent to the troops. They should see their chain of command treating this just as if it was applying a shell dressing to a sucking chest wound.
There used to be, in the 1970s and 1980s, a great deal of beasting going on in the ranks when we were being trained. I would submit that--as primitive as that was at the time--it built a certain strength of character in soldiers; it weeded out people who weren't really cut out to go on operations, but once again it was very primitive. If we had psychiatrists and psychologists who, in the same fashion as we do physical training, would push soldiers to their psychological limit and introduce them to the types of traumas and atrocities that they could experience in theatre....
I'll give you an example. When I was a young officer, we used to offer our troops--when they were on their basic training--rabbits and chickens to kill as part of their basic training and to eat them. That in itself, for many young recruits coming from downtown Toronto, was a traumatic experience. So these soldiers would make it through the training system, only to arrive in theatre and either kill a person, or the first dead thing they see--because it's politically incorrect to do that kind of thing now--would be a human being on operations.
So there must be ways of desensitizing our soldiers, using virtual reality, for example. They're experimenting with it in the treatment of stress casualties. I would submit that we can make the conditions real enough for them so that we can control their responses.
Colonel Grossman, in his books On Killing and On Combat, writes about separating these traumatic events, separating the emotions from the memories, so that if you don't have the emotive response at the outset, you won't have it later on when you're remembering these types of occurrences. I'm not endorsing that particular approach, but I know of no studies at this point in time in the Canadian Forces--my last job was with research and development--that are going to that length to make our training more scientific.
I'm sorry for the long answer.