Sure.
Consider who a solder is—a young person in the prime of life; they've been training for a significant part of their professional life, maybe their entire professional life, for this job. Then something happens and they have difficulty completing a mission. The loss of self-esteem that entails is devastating. The longer they feel that loss of self-esteem, the harder it is to bring them back, and the closer they are to depression and then to suicidal ideation.
We know this from long-standing experience, going back a couple of wars now. If you want the guy to come back emotionally, you have to treat him as close as possible to the front line. Again, the Canadian Forces is the world leader in that.
We had social workers, psychologists, go out to the FOBs. It was quite the thing. These people had no real combat training experience, and they were getting helicoptered out to the FOB to talk to these guys who had just been in a vehicle where two of their buddies had been killed and they were having a tough time dealing with it. Here you have a mental health professional, out there getting rocketed at the same time we were, talking to them about what's going on.
That's the way to do it. If you bring them back for two months, the only thing they're going to think about for those two months is that they let their buddies down. Remember, that is the deepest motivation a soldier has—much more than distant ideals like democracy, than hatred of the enemy, and more than self-esteem. The most important motivation a combat soldier has is his buddies and not letting them down. All he's going to think about for those two months back in Canada, or wherever, is that his buddies are out there still fighting and he's not. That's devastating to a psyche. The only way to improve that is to deal with it early and quickly.