by Marc Dauphin
In family settings, I grew quickly bored with those who were closest to me. I remember during Christmas dinner, just getting up from the table in the middle of the meal and, without saying a word, going to the living room to play with my young nephew and niece. Building things out of Lego felt way more attractive than the endless talk about the mayor’s last political gaffe or the ways in which society was changing.
My brother could reach me without irritating me, so I blessed the times that he took off from his family and his busy work schedule to be with me. One of the first weekends that I was back, he just showed up at my place telling me to get dressed because he had football tickets. That afternoon sticks out as an island of colour in an otherwise grey-and-white few months.
That was my return. It wasn’t all unpleasant. But most of it was. Fortunately I was fifty-six years old, and had enough experience to keep out of trouble.
Everyone, to a degree, experiences some of these and other symptoms after returning home. For example, during those first days back you may feel hyper-energetic, like you want to fix everything in the house. Or you’ll spend a lot of money — a car or a new house won’t seem like a lot. You may be hyper-vigilant, reacting excessively to minor stimuli. Perhaps you will fly off the handle for nothing, or try to isolate yourself. Sleep is often punctuated with nightmares, and you may wake up in a sweat with a sense of impending doom, or even of impending death. Often you will feel extremely uncomfortable in a crowd and be constantly looking over your shoulder. You may invent scenarios for normal, everyday scenes around you, and while you are doing so, you may look dazed and dreamy, unaware of your surroundings. Your emotions will often be very violent, or, on the contrary, too muted. You may tear up for nothing, or be totally indifferent to others’ sufferings. You can be easily bored and unable to concentrate. After you return to work, you may be unproductive. And you will be tired like you’ve never been tired before, yet sleep will not soothe you. Some will try to self-medicate, usually with alcohol or even drugs.
You may wreck your personal relationships. Or abruptly put an end to a relationship that was faltering — That’s it. I’ve had it. There are three doors in the house. Pick the one you want. You may be prone to abrupt decisions. You may have enough symptoms that you do not sleep. Or you may keep yourself from sleeping because you fear the evil spirits that populate your dreams. You may become so impaired that you wreck your career. Or you may become suicidal. You may abruptly decide to leave the CF, no matter what the consequences. Just to get away from anything that reminds you of a uniform.
You may become fearful of everything and become “a case of nerves” driving in the right-hand lane well under the speed limit. Or you may become totally pedal-to-the-metal fearless, a veritable maniac on the highway, an adrenalin junkie. Or a barroom brawler. You may even crave danger for that adrenalin rush that nothing here can re-create, putting your life at risk, and sometimes that of others.
To some extent, upon your return from war, unless you are very lucky, or your tour was spent in a bunker, you will experience all or some of these symptoms. They may last for a few weeks, the time it takes for you to get your feet back under you. Or they may persist for many months.
Of course, your comrades will keep an eye out for you. And you will treasure their companionship, often more than that of your spouse and your loved ones. For with your comrades you can rehash the same stories over and over. Your comrades will understand. They will not judge. And, what’s more, the war story you had told while cutting out the most horrible parts, or that war story you had cut down because it’s so incredible that no one would believe you, will turn out, when retold by your comrades, to have been even worse than what you were willing to admit to yourself: you were not only not exaggerating, but you hadn’t even told the worst of it. Yes, your comrades understand: they were there. The others weren’t.
And slowly, as the months go by, you get a more and more normal grip on your life. You begin to feel empathy for civilians who go through rough times, instead of shrugging them off with a “get a life.” You begin to find interest in the normal things, like football or hockey, or a good dinner and a great conversation, or a movie. You damn well know that nobody in EOD acts the way those guys do in the movie, but you also perfectly understand the symbolism in what that director was trying to say. And when, there in the middle of Christmas dinner, you’re suddenly not there anymore, and your mind wanders off to Afghanistan, your wife can gently recall you back to the table by saying, “Honey, you’re doing the cereal aisle thing again” (check out the last scenes of The Hurt Locker).
You may need help on your long journey back from hell. I hope you can get it.
I did. Both professional and personal. I cannot thank my wife enough for her kind understanding and her patience. Two years was a hell of a long time to get back to some semblance of normalcy, but that’s what it took me. Of course, I still get the nightmares, and I can still trigger the old adrenalin with an explosion: there is a quarry next to the base in St-Jean, and when they set off a dynamite charge, well … I don’t do the startle thing like they portray on TV, but I’ll immediately stop whatever I’m doing. And for a second, I’ll be back there. Then I’m okay. It’s funny, because the only three people who actually hear the explosions (they are quite far away) and feel the rumble are guys who were over there with me. It happened once during a meeting, and all the others just kept right on going. Except the three of us, who exchanged knowing glances and cursed under our breath.
Of course, I’ll never be like before. My wife and I have both accepted that. But life is okay. There are now some colours in it. I’m looking to the future once more.
But I will always be aware that I’ve paid the price. Thank God not the ultimate price. Just the one for seeing the elephant, like they used to say in the U.S. Civil War.
Well, now it’s January 2012, and I’m finally home.
Thanks, Mom, for watching over me.
One more thought for my comrades in the Role 3 whose lives have been forever changed by our time over there. Remember what we did. Remember what you did. Never forget. For a few months in 2009, we were it for those soldiers who got injured. The buck stopped with us. And we responded. Never have I been so proud in all my life of my work. I am honoured to have served with you, my good comrades. I hope you find the peace and the solace you so well deserve.
My final thought is for those of our brothers and sisters who didn’t come back, and who paid the ultimate price for the freedom we all enjoy — freedom from ignorance, freedom from oppression, freedom to speak our minds, to agree or disagree, freedom to send our kids to school, freedom to worship or not, freedom to dress the way we want to. And simple freedoms like listening to music or watching a movie. The freedom to walk down the road without the fear of blowing up. Freedom to respect the flag, or even to burn it, if we so choose. That same flag they saluted before they died. And the same one we drape over their coffins.
Just remember that we all owe these guys.
PTSD
And then I got PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. I caught it. Or rather, it caught me.
It was a very humbling experience. Somehow, even though I understood it in others, I still wouldn’t allow myself to believe I was ill. After all, I was a soldier and a physician. What’s more, an ER physician, used to seeing all sorts of gory stuff. And I’m not very fearful. How could I let myself be affected? Like a lot of other guys, I felt ashamed of being ill. The mental health section in Valcartier is on the second floor, so the troops climbing up there call their trip “the stairway of shame.” That’s the way I felt.
When I reread my manuscript a few years later, I could see that it was easy to forecast that I would be affected by what we did. But back then, the power of denial was in full swing.
It all started when I had a panic attack. I had never had one in my life. In fact, I’d never even been anxious. Fearful, yes, like everyone, of falling off a cliff, of having an accide
nt, of getting ill. But anxious? I didn’t even know what it felt like.
Early on in my training, when, as a medical student, I self-diagnosed with every horrible disease I studied, and after having had a few leukemias, a couple of myocardial infarcts, and various lymphomas, I resolved, through willpower, never to give in to anxiety. The way out, I reasoned, was to get rid of my fear of death. And it had worked. I had reconciled myself with death. My own and that of others. I was going to die and there was nothing I could do about it. Might as well enjoy myself while I was alive, and not worry about when I wasn’t going to be anymore.
A Sicilian friend’s father had been a marked man (and probably a “made man”), and all the kids were wondering why he lived so cheerfully when every day could be his last. “A man who is afraid dies a hundred times a day,” he had told us. “When in reality, you only have to die once.”
So, I had forced myself at an early age to be unafraid of my own death. But there was still the tricky question of dying, that transition between life and death. And the prospect of that was intimidating. I am afraid of burning and drowning — fire and water. So, before going to Afghanistan, I had to make myself unafraid, or less afraid, of those fateful few minutes to come. And it worked. I could not only contemplate my own death, but my own dying too. My trick was, “It’s going to be very painful, but it won’t last long.”
Then, before I left, I had to abandon everything I held dear. As if I was going to certain death. I know I was not alone in dealing with the stress of war in this way. Lots of my buddies were like that: accept that you’re not coming back, and you’ll feel free over there.
And it worked, too. Reconciled with the idea of death, of dying, and not caring, to my great surprise made me almost fearless while I was over there. Indeed, reckless. I’m not blowing wind here: I don’t know how I would react to my tenth firefight, but then neither does the guy who’s been through nine of them. I do know that I reacted normally to being shot at more than once: Okay, this one missed me. The next one might get me, but in the meantime, I’ve got work to do. Let’s get on with it. No worry. No imagination. I slept soundly, even minutes after a rocket exploded a few metres from me.
Like I said, everyone has to find their own way of dealing with it. That was mine. And it worked.
So, if I wasn’t really that afraid of dying, how the hell could I have picked up PTSD? After all, the definition of the syndrome includes: “This must have involved both (A1) loss of ‘physical integrity,’ or risk of serious injury or death, to self or others, and (A2) a response to the event that involved intense fear, horror, or helplessness.” Well, I certainly filled the bill with criterion “A1,” but “A2”? I never felt either intense fear, or horror, or helplessness.1
So I refused to believe that I had PTSD.
Still, I knew I had a problem. I just wasn’t right. At times I felt I was almost there, almost back to normal, but at others I felt so immensely tired, exhausted all the way to my very soul, like I was sure I would never be able to get enough rest again in my life. I also felt annoyed by the recurring scenarios I would constantly build in my mind. But I never had any flashbacks, at least nothing that looked or felt like flashbacks to me.
So, how could I have PTSD?
Depression maybe, then? But no, I didn’t feel depressed.
By now you get it that I am a proud man. To a fault.
When I came home, I asked to see a physician. It was for my cough. For the last few months over there I had coughed continually. Especially after those dust-off missions I was on. When the chopper comes down to land out in a dusty field, the pilot and crew lose sight of the ground for the last twenty or thirty feet. And, for a few very long minutes, when you don’t know if you’re getting shot at or not, you have to wait till the dust settles, and in the meantime it’s so thick that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. So it was logical that I figured my cough might be airway reactivity to the dust, a.k.a. asthma. After all, I did smoke for more than twenty years, although I had stopped more than twenty years earlier.
There is a very simple test for asthma. It’s called a peak flow. I tested myself over there, and the results were normal. In fact, better than 100 percent for my age, height, and weight. Since I don’t believe in “physician heal thyself,” (I think that the physician who treats himself has an idiot for a patient, and a fool for a doctor) I saw Annie and asked for her opinion. She examined me, and figured it could still be asthma, and she prescribed some bronchodilators as a test. They didn’t work. Back to square one. I’d have to wait till I got home for an answer. And a cure.
So, as soon as I got off the plane, I asked to see a physician. The first thing she asked me was how much sick leave I needed. Sick leave? I just want to stop coughing. I felt I’d be able to work, no problem, once I’d had my post-deployment leave.
Now, I knew I looked terrible. I certainly felt it. But I knew why: I was exhausted. Once I’d had my leave, I’d be okay. Besides, I had lost a lot of weight over there too, from not eating enough. Not on purpose: I just didn’t have the time to eat. And when I did think about food, I just didn’t have the appetite. A couple of weeks of Christine’s cooking and I’d be complaining about how my uniforms were shrinking in the closet.
The doc didn’t say much, but asked to see me again after my leave. When I saw her the next time, I told her what I knew she wanted to hear to clear me, then managed to avoid doctors altogether for the next few months. Although I still coughed a lot, and nothing worked, I just shrugged it off. No way was I going on sick leave.
Then, in February, I started my new job in St-Jean. I was living in a motel, facing the Richelieu River, while I was getting my handover. Every day I spent there, it became clearer to me that I had a huge hill to climb before I learned the new job. Throw me a half a dozen casualties and I’d come out fine, but ask me a question for which there are a dozen policies and rules to refer to, and I’d be lost. What’s more, I knew it.
When we were in Kandahar, they had sent us a TV writer. She was going to write and produce a series about our hospital. We were instructed to give her free rein, to tell her everything, except operationally secret stuff, of course. “No need to hold back, she’s not a journalist, only a writer.” So we hadn’t. For a few weeks, she was always following us, tape recorder in hand, as we tried to teach her how our minds worked, so that she could write some good stories about the Role 3. She was a very nice woman named Jinder.
Well, upon coming home, while she was waiting for Combat Hospital to start filming, she got the idea that maybe she could write a short piece about us to air on CBC Radio. She wanted to put us in a good light. Since we had been told that she wasn’t a journalist, she took the time to ask our permission before airing the piece. Forgetting what I had told her (and what she had recorded), I agreed absent-mindedly. In those days, I was either on TV or on the radio or in the paper every week, so it was no big deal, just another interview. I had sort of been the front guy for all media over there, and I continued to be so now that I was home.
I can’t help smiling, even today, when I remember a TV interview I did live on Radio-Canada one week after my return home, in which the public affairs officer (PAffO) asked me to keep my sleeves under the table so that people wouldn’t see that I had been downgraded back to captain once I got home. I guess even public affairs were ashamed of the way I had been treated, but that’s another story.
So Jinder had done her piece, and sent it to me in advance so that I could listen to it. I left it on my email for a couple of days. Finally, one night in my motel room, I listened to it before going to bed. That’s when it hit me. In the piece, I was swearing, talking uninhibitedly, telling stories about really bad things that happened over there, and brushing them off with cynicism. It hardly reflected well on the CF. Suddenly, everything I had tried to build seemed to fall apart. Convinced that I had irremediably wrecked everything, I started to shake. There was a pounding in my chest, and a tightness in my throat
that threatened to smother me. I wanted to roll up into a ball and die.
For a few hours I lay moaning on my bed. I wanted this extremely bad feeling to go away. I couldn’t handle how I was, and the only way I saw out of it was to kill myself. There was no other way that the consequences of what I had done could be erased, and no other way that I could ever feel normal again. And as I looked up, I saw my way out: the river just across the street. Swift-flowing, its freezing water would do away with me in an instant. In spite of my fear of drowning, I started to get dressed. It’s going to be hellishly cold, but it won’t last long. A minute, maybe two, and it’ll be over. My heavy army boots would make me sink in an instant. And then it wouldn’t hurt anymore. I’d be free of this moral pain, this torturing agony.
What stopped me was that I realized my family wouldn’t know why I had done it. By that time, the panic attack started to wear off. Because that’s what it was: a panic attack. Most people who experience one feel as if they are dying. Only I wasn’t afraid of dying, and I also knew that the tightness in my chest wasn’t a heart attack. I’d seen too many real ones, and I just knew this wasn’t it. In fact, the thought that it might be a heart attack never even crossed my mind until later, when I was rethinking the episode.
The next morning, I told Pierre Voyer, who was my boss at the time. I had to guarantee that I was no longer feeling suicidal. Pierre told me to go see one of my physicians, preferably an older one. I had just the right one in mind: Roger, who had once been my boss, and who had outranked me, was now one of my physicians, as he had accepted a reduction in rank to serve as a reservist physician. Well, Roger was pretty smart. Seeing my reluctance, he never let on that he thought I had PTSD.