In 1997, when I was chief of staff of personnel and then went public because we were misguiding our own people, let alone outside, I went to the U.S. Veterans Center for Post-traumatic Stress Clinics, which is in White River Junction, Vermont, to ask them whether all treatment should be the same, such as commanders with their stresses and training, versus soldiers. I also asked them how to help us mature our program rapidly, because they had the experience of Vietnam.
The answer was “We don't want you to go through what we lived in Vietnam, and we'll help you”, because in 1997 they had on the books a number of suicides directly related to Vietnam. They had lost 58,000 troops in Vietnam. By 1997 they had over 102,000 suicides directly related to Vietnam.
This is an injury that never leaves. You cannot get out of it, as Monsieur Bachand asked me, without professional therapy and medication and a bosom buddy. The OSISS program on operational stress with peers is absolutely critical. You need someone who is going to sit there for four hours and not ask you one question, and let you talk and talk. You need that at all times.
Your vulnerability is never guaranteed. It's like they take away your prosthesis all of a sudden. I will give you an example, if I may. I was in Sierra Leone doing work on demobilizing child soldiers--in fact, working for Madam Minna at the time--and I had come back from the rebel area and was crossing the street in Freetown. Out of the corner of my eye I see a coconut vendor who has a machete and he's setting up shop. I keep crossing the road, and all of a sudden he took the machete and lopped the top off a coconut. There was white liquid and brown, and between the sound and the sight, I went totally and completely berserk.
The three people with me sat on me to hold me down for at least five minutes, then slowly I was able to rebuild. About 20 minutes later, I actually gave a briefing. So you have no knowledge of the noise, the smell, the comment that will trigger these reactions.
We have troops in my old regiment, 5th Regiment Artillery, and when I went back last year to a golf game, there were sergeants there who had been ten years in the army. Now, you need at least a year to get them up to minimum strength and then other training, so let's say they had about nine years' operational use. They had been on seven missions!
We have soldiers in the Canadian Forces who have more combat time than veterans of World War II. In so doing, we will continue to see an attrition of them and their families, unless you get the numbers up. It is not about reducing the missions, because we should also be in Darfur and a couple of other places; it is getting the numbers up.
Rebuilding an army is a long-term exercise, so I fear there will be more casualties, simply by burning them out.
My last point is we will probably have people going overseas who are suffering from that injury. God knows, a noise or an event might trigger them back in, and how effective they will be, we don't know.