It changes everything. It's going from black to white. It's going from young to old in an instant. You go from a person who's an Olympian-calibre athlete, who can run marathons, a triathlete, mountain man, you name it. Jody's a good example, with a lot of the stuff he's done, and I've done lots of stuff around the world. Those are examples of high-functioning amputees. It goes from that level to literally, in some cases, being bedridden and being told not to move. That's changing slowly, the medical side, but it's the military side that is such a big change.
There's a double amputee in Calgary, working at the museum. He's being medically released, forced to release, because he can't do his job, yet he recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. There are people within the military—and you have seen some of them, who have what we know as a “button disorder”—who would never be able to climb a mountain, let alone a little hill, because they are so unfit.
We have this complete disconnect of what's deployable. Why can't someone deploy behind a desk or work in a museum? Why can't I work at a computer? There's nothing that says we can't do these tasks other than universality of service, which is great, but there still has to be this part where I can teach about combat medicine. I have knowledge of this. Jody can teach the concepts of shooting. He can shoot. There's nothing wrong with his ability to do his task in this environment.
We even have amputees who have redeployed to Afghanistan and Haiti, and yet we as soldiers here are cut out. I think that's part of the problem. We go from that level to nothing; we recover to a certain point, and then we are cut down. Just as much as we lost our limbs, we lose our jobs, and everything we have ever known and done is gone.
How do we recover from that? Well, that is supposed to be Veterans Affairs. That's the piece. But Veterans Affairs doesn't support the families, as you have just heard. Veterans Affairs doesn't believe the clients. I've had to provide doctors' notes proving I'm an amputee in 2013, six years after—every year I provide a doctor's note saying that I'm an amputee, with pictures even. I even held up a newspaper once. It was hilarious.