Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you both for coming.
I've made reference to this before, about how upsetting some of the testimony can be about the challenges people have had. I practised emergency medicine for 20 years in the inner city of the murder capital of Canada, Winnipeg, if you're not familiar with Canadian news. I had to give much bad news to people, which had an emotional toll and really it was comparable to the emotional toll of hearing what I'm hearing in this committee. It's very upsetting to hear such struggles coming from people and the challenges they have.
Colonel Lipana, one of the things that we've talked about, and I'm sure again with your work in Canada...our military has the concept of universality of service. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but it means that if you can't perform any and every duty to deploy, then you must be out of the military. We've heard reports that there are people who will not report symptoms; the paratrooper who notices they're getting back pain, the person who's starting to get symptoms of PTSD. They don't want to report it because if they don't meet universality of service, they are thrown out, and things get worse.
In the American military, are there provisions for a career in modified service for someone who has an injury that prevents certain kinds of duty but could still very adequately perform other kinds of duty?