I absolutely share the concerns. We are asking our soldiers—and service members in general—to do some things. We're going to unfamiliar ground. As somebody who has been around long enough...I was in Rwanda a few years ago and saw a lot of death and a lot of suffering in places like that.
It's a two-pronged approach. The Road to Mental Readiness, education, training, self-care and coping was given to the people before and after the deployment, so they have the tools and know what resources are available. I think you heard about that from Lieutenant-Colonel Bailey, my colleague, who's been in the next office to me for about a decade. It's a great program that many of our allies are borrowing, as well.
On the other hand, in my curiosity hat, a few of us got together very opportunistically and thought that this would be a very important topic to study. We have started what we call a “mixed-methods longitudinal study” to study the impact of a deployment. We are doing surveys, questionnaires and interviews to see the impact.
To be honest with you, as a clinician scientist, I'm very curious. I could see some young soldiers perhaps wondering what the hell they are doing in this kind of deployment because it wasn't what they signed up for. On the other hand, somebody else might think that it's really nice to help people in their own country instead of 7,000 miles away.
We have this curiosity, which is surveying, questionnaires and interviewing to see the mental health impact and to see whether people felt well-prepared about the training, which will feed back to leadership.
We're also looking at the concept of moral injury, which is whether seeing the death, dying, suffering and helplessness leads to guilt, shame and other components.
It's two-pronged. We're absolutely looking after them in the best way we can from a practical point of view, but we're also curious and learning. I think many of us feel that domestic operations like this are going to carry on. We're doing research to continue, as a learning organization, to feed back our findings. This is the other thing we're doing.