I won't talk about the charter, because I'm the chair of the veterans subcommittee. We've been studying it for the last eight months, and we hope to continue to study it and get into the nuts and bolts of not only the charter but how it's being applied and interpreted in the regulations. I am also the one who, in 2005, passed it through the Senate, so I'm committed to it.
It is resultant of the studies. The question is how effective it is. Well, we're learning how effective it is, and that's how we'll continue to improve it, of course.
In regard to the state of mind and the impact thereof, what is creating a lot of the injuries is not only the sights and the smells and the sounds. Often you're in the midst of it, you're busy doing things and you're trying to save other people and so on, so there's a kind of a film in front of it. It's when you come home and you're sitting at home having a beer that all of a sudden--boom--it starts to come clear. Or it's at night, or on a bad day like today and stuff like that.
If you don't build that prosthesis of knowing places to avoid.... For instance, I don't go to grocery stores because of the opulence of the fruits and vegetables and the smell and the odours literally paralyze me. I can't move, because it brings me back into the food distribution points and where people were trampled to death and so on. So there's a building of the prosthesis that takes time and must be nurtured by therapy and peer support.
Where we really we see the casualty levels, or that difficulty of living with life around, is in the moral and ethical, and sometimes legal--depending on the mandate--dilemmas of actually.... Contrary to World War II, where the rules of engagement were that you knew what uniform they were wearing--bingo. It was very linear, a very set piece, and so on. Today they are in all directions. Today the other side, the extremists, the terrorists, play by no rules. It could be a 14-year-old pregnant girl who is a suicide bomber, just as it could simply be a 14-year-old pregnant girl who is looking for protection.
It is those dilemmas and how we respond to them that are really burning up the cells. PTSD is a physical effect on the brain; it's not simply psychological.
When it comes to the numbers, I keep hearing all those numbers, that there's no more than on civvy street and so on. But let's think about it. I mean, these people are selected, these people are trained, these people are sort of weeded out, those who will not be able to meet the requirements. They are prepared for the operations. They're under a whole system of control and command and so on. They entered a way of life, a culture that instills pride and all that kind of stuff.
So you have all that positive baggage, and yet we say that our figures are no more than on civvy street? Well, if they're the same as on civvy street, we have one hell of a problem. Surely, even though they see these traumatic experiences, they should have, because of the selectivity of it, less than equal, let alone more.
A year ago I was lecturing at the U.S. Marine Corps where they were having a symposium. The Americans were having massive problems of suicides that all of a sudden appeared because of the stressors of coming back to a normal life that simply was not there any more: I'm not who I was when I left and my family is not who they were when I left.
So bringing that back together is where some of those stressors really create the traumas.