War was nothing like the movies for Afghanistan veteran Tim Laidler.
There were no gunfights with the Taliban. Instead, there were long, boring convoys punctuated only once by a suicide bomber. Dozens of Afghan civilians died, but no Canadian soldiers.
Laidler, as a corporal, also drew guard detail every day at the base gate. He thought that would be dull. Instead, it was high tension every day with hands-on searches of hundreds of Afghan civilian workers entering the base, every one a possible suicide bomber.
But Laidler recalls his worst moment came when he stopped a civilian ambulance from driving to the base hospital.
The vehicle carried a young Afghan woman who had set herself on fire to escape a marriage. Despite the woman's obvious agony, Laidler had to delay the ambulance because army protocol demanded bomb-sniffer dogs give it the once-over.
It was a half-hour before the dogs arrived. Laidler was 22 and sat in the guard hut the whole time.
"That was the moment I felt something snap inside," said Laidler, now 26. "I thought, 'I can't deal with this right now. I can't even deal with the thought of the suffering she is going through right now.' "
Likewise, Laidler said the post-traumatic stress symptoms he suffered after returning to Vancouver on his 23rd birthday was nothing like Hollywood. "I wasn't drinking, or driving my car through a recruiting centre like in the movies."
Instead, everything just felt "muted." It was as though he had shut down while in Afghanistan, and failed to power up again when he returned home.
Laidler coped on his own. Relationships were difficult and fun seemed hard to achieve. But he still completed his bachelor's degree in political science and philosophy from the University of British Columbia.
He never told anyone about the young Afghan woman in the ambulance until a friend convinced him to attend a group counselling program for veterans making the transition back to civilian life.
That program was the Veteran's Transition Program. It was started in 1988 by a professor of counselling psychology at UBC. It is now also operated in Victoria by University of Victoria professor Tim Black.
The program has assisted about 240 exservice people and can lay claim to a course completion rate of 98 per cent - phenomenal for a voluntary assistance program, according to its directors.
It is entirely run by UBC and UVic with funds coming from the Royal Canadian Legion, which has chipped in about $100,000 to $125,000 annually for the past 10 years. The Legion also recently agreed to fund it with $1.4 million over the next five years.
Marv Westwood, UBC counselling psychologist and founder of the Veteran's Transition Program, said the large percentage of PTSD sufferers should not be a surprise to anyone.
After all, post-traumatic stress is really just a normal reaction to abnormal events, said Westwood.
It's abnormal for a person to see bodies flung about after a suicide bombing. It's abnormal to stop a badly burned woman from entering a hospital so bomb-sniffing dogs can give their approval.
"Anybody who does this kind of work is going to carry some residual stress, big time," Westwood said. "All these symptoms are a normal reaction to an abnormal event."
When Laidler went through the Veteran's Transition Program, he knew he was short-tempered and perhaps a little impatient with the world. But he put that down to advanced age, experience, even worldliness.
"I knew how fragile life was, and it left me feeling 'What's the point?' "
But when other men in the program heard Laidler's stories, their reaction was shock, and they let him know he had some legitimate issues to work through.
Westwood said that legitimization is part of the transitioning process.
"It's necessary to normalize the fact that when you are in a high-stress environment, like military service, you are going to shut down some systems and open up others," Westwood said.
He also started his program by thinking first about the huge strengths military people share and how they could bring those strengths to their own treatment program.
Military people, after all, are highly trained to work and solve problems as members of a team. And they are also all embedded with an enormous impulse to back each other up.
So, instead of working to psychologically de-program wounded soldiers, Westwood said it made more sense to retain their military skills but re-enlist them in their own healing.
"I don't know what it is about the military mindset, but they put a huge value on helping others," Westwood said.
"So, 'You put a high value on helping others; we'll try to give you a new set of skills to accomplish that,' " he said.
The program starts with asking the men to take part in action-based workshops.
Military people feel more comfortable with actions than with face-to-face, revealall counselling sessions.
From there, they can progress to other sessions. Later, their families might be asked to join in the discussions.
Eventually they can be trained to leave their most onerous emotional baggage behind. Meanwhile, they can learn new emotional/mental tools to cope in the civilian world.
A major part of that is to begin the task of setting goals for themselves: personal goals, family goals and career goals.
Again, career goals need not be the obvious lateral moves, for example, from military police to civilian police. Instead, service people are encouraged to explore their own ambitions and use their military service to its best advantage.
For example, weapons technology is still, at its heart, just working technology. It might be a useful jumping-off point to a civilian career in technology of different kinds.
Or, being a unit commander is basically just management in a very high-stress environment. In civilian life, having management experience of any kind is always useful.
The trick is helping the veterans realize their military-derived talents for themselves, and hang onto them. Meanwhile, they have to leave the combat world behind - not necessarily forget it, but stop carrying it like a burden.
"We push them a little to go after those dreams they had before they went overseas," Westwood said.
PTSD AND THE MILITARY BY THE NUMBERS
- 67,881 - Canadian Armed Forces regulars now enlisted.
- 26,227 - Canadian Armed Forces reserves.
- 39,000 - Canadian Armed Forces members who have deployed to Afghanistan for at least 30 days, many with multiple deployments.
- 122,842 - Veterans receiving disability pensions in Canada.
- 14,939 - People receiving disability pensions related to psychiatric conditions.
- 10,606 - People receiving benefits for posttraumatic stress.
- 4,181 - People receiving disability benefits related to service in Afghanistan.
- 2,249 - People who served in Afghanistan and are now receiving disability benefits for post-traumatic stress.
Sources: Veterans Affairs Canada, Department of National Defence.
