I think the general was referring to Vietnam when he mentioned the Americans. That really did not work well, so we developed this idea of doing a third location decompression. Anecdotally, people talk about it having helped, about having that space with their buddies, with their colleagues, prior to coming back home to their families and to Canadian society, to everything that is here that wasn't over there. It's like a little safety time for people.
This is totally anecdotal, but I always remember a spouse from Petawawa telling me that her husband had deployed to Afghanistan both before we had third location decompression and after. She said TLD was wonderful. Her way of measuring this was that beforehand it would take six months before she could take him to Tim Hortons when he came home, and after he had gone on his second deployment and had had third location decompression, it took only about a month and a half. That was her measure for the difference: he was able to be around people and not be hypervigilant and not be triggered.