t was early morning at a rehabilitation centre for drug and alcohol addiction, and everyone was already standing outside their dorm rooms, decked out in sweatpants and T-shirts, their eyes bleary and their hair dishevelled. A short, stout, officious morning nurse with a clipboard marched down the hall, ticking off attendance. Then a recording of an old woman's voice crackled over the intercom and led us through our morning calisthenics. "Reach up to the sky," she called. "It's going to be a wonderful day!"I was only a few days into a twenty-one-day residential treatment program for alcohol dependence, but I already knew a few of the characters standing in that lineup. There was a crack addict and compulsive shoplifter who ran a car wash in small-town Quebec; there was a raucous Montreal landlord who had gambled away half his buildings in a cocaine-fuelled fever. There were cracked-out lawyers and investment bankers, boozy police officers and firemen, and a surgeon obsessed with sex and OxyContin. And there I was, trying to touch my toes and reaching for the sky on this new, wonderful day, a writer and editor who had been chugging down whole bottles of Courvoisier beside Chinatown dumpsters, collapsing at public events, and waking up on park benches and in hospital emergency rooms.
I had heard rumours that there were rooms near the nursing station with signs hanging on their doors that read Do Not Knock, and that these were reserved for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. Then, on a smoke break later that day, I met a man I'll call Dave. Thirty-something and wearing pressed khaki shorts and a tight purple sports shirt, Dave stood well over six feet tall and was built like an athlete, his shoulders broad, his stomach and chest rippled with muscle. He rocked side to side, clasping and unclasping his hands, the veins in his thighs, neck, and forehead swollen and throbbing. He spoke in a loud, incessant banter, riffing jokes and puns off the few words anyone else could get in edgewise, then laughing explosively. His electric blue eyes gazed out past us, toward some abstract point in the parking lot.
Eventually, his monologue began to darken, and I could see his regally poised body begin to implode. He launched into a frenzied diatribe, describing how he had seen friends get their faces blown off while he was sitting in a Jeep talking to them, and how when he got back from his last deployment he started going to bars, drinking, snorting cocaine, and seducing women while his wife stayed home with their infant daughter. "I would call my wife from the bar, screaming and crying," I remember him saying, "but I couldn't stop -- not even my baby girl would make me stop."
The response was a dead, embarrassed silence, everyone hurrying to finish their cigarettes and head back inside. Lurid tales are the stock-in-trade of rehab smoke breaks; part of the bonding of treatment is the ability to reveal virtually anything without being judged. But Dave was different. He was a soldier, and with his pumped muscles and wild, sleepless, empty eyes and his almost squealing, propulsive, completely emotionless speech, with his trance-like inaccessibility, he was positively frightening.
Up to that point, my experience with troubled veterans was mostly limited to growing up in Los Angeles in the late '70s, a time when soldiers who had fought in the Vietnam War seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. They were the slightly sinister older brothers one never saw, holed up in converted garages in their parents' houses smoking pot and listening to Black Sabbath; the clutches of men in camouflage jackets hanging out in garbage-strewn city parks, their coolers stocked with Schlitz talls; the sources of empty bottles of Jack Daniel's, cigarette butts, and soggy piles of porn and gun mags in the bamboo grove beside a sludgy creek. They were treated with resentment and shame, and ultimately with the same embarrassed, uncomprehending silence that greeted Dave.
I gradually learned that Dave had been an infantry officer in the Canadian Forces, deployed in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, and Afghanistan. He rarely spoke of his experiences on his tours of duty, mostly maintaining his aggressive, alienating, and not very funny comic persona. But at least by his own account, he had conducted himself with a high level of professionalism and honour while at the centre of some of the most volatile places of the past twenty-five years. It was only when he returned from his tour in Afghanistan, in time to usher his first child into the world, that he found himself unable to cope. His was a textbook case of ptsd -- "co-morbid," in psychiatric terminology, with addiction. I later heard of his struggles with treatment: stories about him freaking out in the middle of workshops, violently cursing the therapists, hurling chairs across the room and storming out.
One weekend afternoon, though, I noticed him sitting at a picnic table, engaged in what seemed to be a normal conversation with two other patients I knew had been in the military. It struck me that above all else Dave was incredibly isolated. He was among people who had no sense of the military culture that had shaped him, and no means for understanding the traumatic events he had been through. Even the counsellors and therapists were not in his league. They were benign, soft spoken, nurturing presences promoting sleep, nutrition, exercise, relaxation, and the spiritual wonders of the twelve steps to recovery.
Still, Dave was relatively lucky: at least he had found his way into treatment. When regular Canadian ground troops first arrived in Afghanistan in 2002, our military was ill prepared to deal with the mental health consequences of such a large deployment. Many traumatized soldiers who attempted to engage with the system found themselves on their own, stranded by a culture that regarded them as weak, or worse. With the mission in Afghanistan now standing as the biggest and deadliest deployment of Canadian forces since the Korean War,* the need for change was enormous. And while the military has made dramatic inroads into the problem over the past eight years, ptsd is not an ordinary war wound. Its science and treatment are relatively young and experimental, and its long-term prognosis and consequences are still poorly understood.
n 2002, André Marin, ombudsman for the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces, issued a landmark report to the Minister of National Defence entitled Systematic Treatment of CF Members with ptsd. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former members of the Canadian Forces, the report was a thoroughgoing study and critique of how the CF had handled ptsd in the past. Traumatized soldiers were often stigmatized, Marin discovered. Investigators "found overwhelming evidence that many within the CF are sceptical about whether ptsd is a legitimate illness. There was a distressingly common belief among both peers and leaders that those diagnosed with ptsd were ‘fakers,' ‘malingers' [sic] or simply ‘poor soldiers'... We found that members with ptsd are often stigmatized, ostracized and shunned by their peers and chain of command.”The report described with uncanny accuracy the experience of a former Canadian soldier I met. John and I first spoke in earnest outside the entrance to a college on the edge of Toronto on a damp, bitter early-winter day, alongside groups of Indian students in baggy pants hanging out and rehearsing graphic rap songs. In his early forties, John had recently returned to school to get a certificate in paralegal studies, but things were not going all that well. His posture and expression were familiar: tense, self-conscious, gaze fixed elsewhere, in this case on the cigarette butts littering the cement. He wore a cheap parka and a heavy student backpack, a toque perched on his balding head. “You know,” he said after a long silence, chuckling to himself, “it can be really, really hard to relate to people, to look them in the eye, when at any moment you might see someone totally evil staring back.”
John grew up in a small town of 500 or so, north of Toronto, the adopted son of a United Church minister and a teacher. He had an ordinary, untroubled childhood, but when he graduated from high school he had no idea what to do with himself. So he made an appointment with the local Canadian Forces recruitment officer and signed up to be a sailor. When it became clear that he lacked the mathematical skills to be a naval weapons technician, he moved over to the army. By the time he was deployed to the unravelling former Yugoslavia, he was a fourth-year corporal in logistics with a specialty in mobile support equipment operation, which in his case meant driving trucks.
His first tour of duty went relatively smoothly, but certain incidents stand out in his mind. “We went into Bosnia and back, and usually on our drives we were getting shot at — we called it harassment fire,” he told me. “Usually, there would be lots of chitter-chatter on the radio, but one day the convoy commander enforced radio silence. When we pulled into town, we could feel tank tracks on the pavement under our tires. The town was still on fire, people running around, and there was a one-armed guy carrying an infant who ran into my truck. He went down, blood spurting, but we kept going. It wasn’t our mandate; our mission was to supply and nothing else. We were keeping the infantry alive.”
During his second tour of the Balkans, things became even more intense. “I was going down the road, and our convoy got separated,” he told me. “The first sign that things were bad is we heard sounds — crack, crack — and suddenly my windshield was full of bullet holes. I had my weapon, but the rules of engagement say no return fire. I put my head down, grabbed the wheel, and pushed down on the accelerator. I finally found out it was coming from an orange truck. There was a guy firing a machine gun — drunk, I later discovered.” He continued: “The next day, we went with an interpreter to a burned-out area twice the size of a football field. It used to be a prisoner of war camp, where they lit the perimeter on fire to reduce the population of prisoners; there was a guard tower from which they would mow down people fleeing. When I went back years later, you could see the lumps below the green grass where bodies were buried.”
Early on, John learned how other soldiers coped with what they were witnessing. “Some people want to call family; others overcompensate with jokes,” he said. “But no one said shit about what went on. That’s when I first saw people opening their boxes and sharing a stiff drink... One feeling a lot of people got was that it was a place where you could feel the hate. It made us feel dirty.” By the end of his second tour, he knew something was seriously wrong. “I felt that something in me was gone. I didn’t have a full-fledged personality anymore,” he said. “Back in Canada, a seven-year relationship ended. I was numb, angry, and aggressive. I had this huge ego that said, ‘I’m a soldier, you’re a civilian,’ but at the same time I was crying at nothing.” He went on a third tour, as much to try to sort himself out as anything else. This time, it was a disaster. “On the third tour, I lost it, officially. I did six months — Bosnia, winter, mountains. I was tired of being shot at, tired of walking around with guns. I felt as though we hadn’t done anything, and I was humiliated, angry, and sad.”
Still a member of the Canadian Forces, he returned to Canada for good at the end of the 1990s, first to Edmonton, then Winnipeg, then Trenton. His mental condition swiftly deteriorated. He would hole up in his apartment for days without seeing or speaking to anyone, going out only at night. Nightmares and flashbacks played out in his head. It was as though “in one eye, I was in a movie theatre; the other eye was projecting the movie, and all the atrocities, I couldn’t stop them from playing.” There were aborted suicide attempts, too — three of them. Though previously he had never been much of a drinker, he started boozing heavily, eventually putting away a bottle of rum a day.
In those days, he pointed out, there was little in the way of debriefing upon coming back from a mission, other than speaking with a padre. Though he wasn’t specifically advised to see anyone, he sought and received sporadic counselling. In Edmonton, a psychologist at a University of Alberta Hospital group therapy program identified John’s depression and alcoholism, and he was referred to the Edgewood alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre in Nanaimo, British Columbia. There, in 2003, he was finally cited as being at risk for ptsd. The following year, he was released from the Canadian Forces, after eighteen years of service. According to John, “They said I was not suitable — that due to my issues I was not deployable.”
