I'm from Vancouver, British Columbia. My name is Aaron Michael Bedard. I was a combat engineer in the Canadian Forces. I served on Task Force 106. I was outside where Charlie Alpha Bravo companies in the QRF served in Sangin and all that good stuff.
In the summer of 2006, being in constant combat and around colleagues who were dying almost every single day, it was something that's not like suicide but quite similar. You were prepared to die and were accepting it every morning. “Is it my turn yet”, because every day someone was getting hit and killed. It's a road that you can't come back from and I deal with suicide every day.
I have a new wife and a nine-month old and it's something that still pops into my mind every day. And I'm worried that if things take forever to get fixed with this, it's just going to get worse with suicides. It stabs me in the heart every time I see one. We've got an anniversary of Vimy coming up and an anniversary of the armistice, and I hope and I pray that we get it all sorted out before then, because it's going to be pretty hard to celebrate those events if this isn't fixed.