If there's one thing I can say about politics and the military, it's that nobody knows what a career soldier feels and is. That “family” idea is not just a platitude. My husband was a royal. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Regiment from the time he was 14, and part of his moral injury was watching everything he stood for stripped away by the politics of it all. I watched him come home from Afghanistan. I watched that happen. I watched them disband the airborne regiment. I sent letters to Jean Chrétien.
Politicians have to understand what that does to their soul. He left me with a two-year-old and a two-week-old, and went to Petawawa for the disbandment of the airborne regiment. He cried like a baby, and when he became an officer and saw the politics involved in the officer corps, it took a bit more of his soul. He sat at 51 years of age and looked back on his military career, and all he saw was failure. He was a decorated soldier. He won an Ironman competition.
Please, you have to understand what the soul of a soldier is. I was never a soldier, but I lived with one.