The war doesn’t end when soldiers return home

By: Lt. Gen (Ret.) Romeo Dallair, Special Contributor to the Globe and Mail 

When I learned the news last week about the Canadian veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who unsuccessfully sought help and then, overcome by his operational injury, apparently killed his family and himself – I was beyond distraught. The catastrophic case of Lionel Desmond could not serve as a more powerful warning to the senior policy-makers in our country. But will it be enough?

I have spent decades fighting for injured veterans, including myself, as we continue to destroy ourselves and too many others in our wake. The wars that soldiers fight do not end when we return home; they stay alive within us, and without urgent treatment our injury – PTSD – will destroy us. Just like an injury to the body will become gangrenous, fester, and infect, so too does this injury to our brains and moral centre. But unlike most other injuries, PTSD deeply affects the entire family as well; in this case, fatally.

The scale of the damage and the depth of the destruction that deployment in today’s complex conflicts can wreak is almost incomprehensible. Lionel Desmond’s actions were reprehensible; but, so too was the lack of care he and his family received when he returned from his mission. This was a soldier lost in a system that is grievously inadequate to handle the load and complexity of these injuries or to provide the urgent support required for vets and their families. With a chain of command out of the picture, and an underfunded veterans department strangled by regulations, our system is wholly unprepared for this postwar demand. As a result, injured vets, both in and out of service, continue to be shunted aside, falling into the support cracks, flailing for help.

This is an urgent message that must be heeded: The casualties of past wars continue to mount even as we are preparing for the next conflict. Military-weapons upgrades, the introduction of new tactics, and preparations of troops to face the next threat are all getting a heavy dose of essential funding and priority. However, penny-pinching resource allocations and prohibitive restrictions around support to casualties of the last fight clearly have devastating effects. Care for our current injured members sets the start line for the total commitment of our soldiers and their families for the next round in the defence of peace and human rights.

Nova Scotia – where Lionel Desmond lived and where I am now based with the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative – is home to a disproportionate number of veterans. To utilize the strengths and skills of injured vets, while giving them a second chance to serve, the Dallaire Initiative has instituted a training program – through which Canadian military veterans assist in the dissemination of a new doctrine to reduce battle casualties and help eradicate the use of child soldiers globally.

The Canadian government would do well to follow suit: to seek out injured veterans and provide them whatever tools they require to rejoin society after their missions, for all our sakes.

As I wrote in my last book:

“I find myself empty now, at a loss for words. Over the past two years, I mustered what I had left to share the details of my own struggles with PTSD. I turn to those pages now.

It was not easy for me to share my vulnerabilities so candidly, but the dark side of living with PTSD has to come out. If it does not, the world will continue to hear of us only when we commit suicide. … Courageous soldiers serving in today’s difficult and ethically ambiguous missions can and should be treated for PTSD at its first signs; the Forces should anticipate the need for treatment in order to head the damage off, not just wait until a soldier is desperate enough to seek help. And we – meaning all of us – need to shoulder our share of the burden and recognize the contribution made by our soldiers when they undertake such missions on behalf of humanity. We need to insist that they are supported when they come home.

The brain is as vital to life as any organ in the human body. To treat an injury to the brain as less urgent, less in need of care and compassion than other, more obvious types of injury is misguided and ignorant. Our efforts to treat our veterans with PTSD must be comparable to our efforts to repair damaged hearts, provide timely kidney transplants, avoid amputations or restore eyesight. … Only when we truly understand the injury and take action to mitigate its impact will we be able to say that we recognize the real costs of peacekeeping, peacemaking and war.”
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Lieutenant-General (ret) Roméo Dallaire is the founder of the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative at Dalhousie University, and author of Waiting for First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD.

Not helping veterans could turn into national security problem: Military Ombudsman

By: Rebecca Joseph and Amy Minsky, Global News

Canada’s approach to transitioning Canadian Forces members out of service is fundamentally flawed — and, if it’s not addressed, could lead to national security problems, said Canadian Armed Forces ombudsman Gary Walbourne.

The root of the problem is the fact many Forces members are released before adequate support is set up, he said in an interview on The West Block.

“I think … the service delivery model we’re using for the transitioning member, I think it’s fundamentally flawed,” Walbourne said. “And I think the major flaw is that we release people before they’re ready or before the systems are in place to help them.”

READ MORE: Family ‘trying to hang in there’ following Nova Scotia murder-suicide

He says he’s already recommended that no member of the armed forces be released until all benefits, including pension and their contact with Veteran’s Affairs, are put in place.

“If we don’t change the position and the approach we have, I think the conversation is going to change away from transitioning members to national security,” he said.

“I do believe that if we could get back to that one recommendation of holding the member until everything was in place, I think we could have a different conversation next year.”

The apparent murder-suicide of a Nova Scotia veteran and his family last week left the country reeling.

Lionel Desmond shot and killed his wife Shanna, 10-year-old daughter Aaliyah and mother Brenda, before turning the gun on himself, RCMP say.

Canada’s approach to transitioning Canadian Forces members out of service is fundamentally flawed — and, if it’s not addressed, could lead to national security problems, said Canadian Armed Forces ombudsman Gary Walbourne.

The root of the problem is the fact many Forces members are released before adequate support is set up, he said in an interview on The West Block.


“I think … the service delivery model we’re using for the transitioning member, I think it’s fundamentally flawed,” Walbourne said. “And I think the major flaw is that we release people before they’re ready or before the systems are in place to help them.”

READ MORE: Family ‘trying to hang in there’ following Nova Scotia murder-suicide

He says he’s already recommended that no member of the armed forces be released until all benefits, including pension and their contact with Veteran’s Affairs, are put in place.

“If we don’t change the position and the approach we have, I think the conversation is going to change away from transitioning members to national security,” he said.

“I do believe that if we could get back to that one recommendation of holding the member until everything was in place, I think we could have a different conversation next year.”

The apparent murder-suicide of a Nova Scotia veteran and his family last week left the country reeling.

Lionel Desmond shot and killed his wife Shanna, 10-year-old daughter Aaliyah and mother Brenda, before turning the gun on himself, RCMP say.

Canadian veterans say anti-malaria drug prescribed in Somalia ruined lives

By: GLORIA GALLOWAY, The Globe and Mail
Veterans who took part in the Somalia mission of the 1990s, which ended after the murder of a local teenager, blame the anti-malarial drug mefloquine for psychological damage that may have caused the tragedy and say Ottawa should reach out to others who have been affected.

A House of Commons committee heard from veterans on Thursday who say their lives have been permanently altered, and in some cases destroyed, by the pills they were required to take as part of a clinical trial involving members of the Canadian Forces who were deployed on the Somalia mission.

All of the men urged the government to create an outreach program that would educate both current and former military personnel, as well as civilian consumers, about the drug’s potential side effects.

Claude Lalancette was one of paratroopers with the Canadian Airborne Regiment who was sent to Somalia.

“This is where I can retrace the route of my mental-health issues,” Mr. Lalancette told the MPs on the committee. “We were young and so well-trained for this mission. But the intensity of our aggression and psychoses led to the closure of Canada’s elite – the Canadian Airborne Regiment.”

The regiment was disbanded in 1995 after what was known as the Somalia Affair. Master Corporal Clayton Matchee and Private Kyle Brown were charged in the beating death of Shidane Arone, a 16-year-old Somali.

“Clayton Matchee and Kyle Brown, they are victims,” said Mr. Lalancette, who blamed mefloquine for their actions. Mr. Brown was convicted of manslaughter in the teenager’s death and served a third of his five-year sentence. Mr. Matchee suffered brain damage when he tried to hang himself and was found unfit to stand trial.

Mefloquine is also sold under the brand name Lariam. A spokeswoman for the Department of National Defence has said it was given to 15,677 Canadian soldiers between 2001 and 2012.

Mr. Lalancette said his own symptoms include depression, irritability, hyper-vigilance, sleep disorders and aggression. “My temper goes from zero to 1,000 in an instant,” he told the committee.

He said he has given up driving because he cannot control his road rage. The drug, he added, has cost him his relationship with his children, his military job, pushed him into a life of poverty and prompted him to contemplate suicide.

All of the men talked about being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which they say has similar symptoms of mefloquine toxicity.

But the treatments for PTSD do not work for those whose brains have been damaged by the drug, said John Dowe, who was also in Somalia and now works with the International Mefloquine Veterans’ Alliance.

“In the absence of national action to identify and alarm soldiers and consumers of the latest knowledge about mefloquine,” Mr. Dowe said, “we are left to remember psychosis, murder, violence and suicide.”

In 1999, the federal Auditor-General said the drug had been improperly prescribed during the Somalia mission. “National Defence did not keep essential records or follow required procedures required to fulfill its obligations as a participant in clinical study,” that report said.

Different drugs that have fewer side effects than mefloquine are now more commonly prescribed to soldiers. But Canadian troops are still given mefloquine far more often that it is prescribed for troops in the United States.

The British military allows it only as a last resort after a report earlier this year cited the risk of severe psychological side effects.

Dave Bona of Saskatchewan, a former member of the Canadian Airborne, said he took the drug during the Somalia mission and again in Rwanda a couple years later, and the psychological effects have been profound.

Mr. Bona told the committee that he has tried to track down the 28 men who deployed in his platoon to Somalia and has been able to account for 10 of them. “Two have committed suicide, six have attempted it and there’s only one soldier that is actually doing well,” Mr. Bona said, “and that’s the one guy that I know did not take the drug.”