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The Trauma of War
Machinegunner Tony Spiess, a Seaforth Highlander from Vancouver, was having nightmares, drinking heavily and causing enough trouble to get himself repeatedly arrested.
Despite having returned to Canada from the chaotic battlefronts of the former Yugoslavia, Spiess (left, in Croatia) couldn't go anywhere in public without sitting with his back against a wall. He was sleeping under his bed. He didn't know why.
The survival skills that Spiess had developed to serve him well when the bullets were flying in combat zones -- the stoicism, hyper-vigilance and aggression -- were killing his soul in his peaceful home country.
Many of the comrades of Spiess, who still displays bravado, were doing no better. When Spiess talked on the phone with one of his buddies from the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Balkans, he thought the conversation had gone well. But a week later his buddy "took a shotgun to himself."
It's now estimated that hundreds of thousands of emotionally injured North American soldiers are facing a host of destructive inner demons after returning from peacekeeping missions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The veterans are emotionally crashing while trying to make the transition back to civilian life. They're traumatized. Many, like Spiess (photo below), have trouble living with the horrifying things they witnessed. Or did.
Many feel guilty they could not stop the destruction of innocents.
As soldiers, they have been trained to be hard-assed. But psychologist Marvin Westwood and Dr. David Kuhl, co-directors of a unique program for veterans at the University of B.C., say many soldiers begin discovering they cannot handle their trauma. They feel ashamed of it. And they don't feel understood.
What's more, say the UBC experts and psychotherapists, the veterans know that the stigma of admitting to a psychological wound could ruin their military careers. Because of their guilty feelings and a shortage of support services, the vast majority do not search for help.
Spiess, now 39 and a firefighter in Metro Vancouver, has been among the fortunate. He found support through the UBC program.
Spiess's story reflects a growing global crisis for members of armed services. Many of the soldiers in the UBC program have been on UN peacekeeping missions, such as those led in Rwanda during the 1990s by retired Canadian general Romeo Dallaire.
In 2000, the high-ranking Canadian officer was found drunk on an Ottawa park bench, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Among the many horrors Dallaire had towatch helplessly, says Westwood, was an incident in which two Rwandan women attacked each other with machetes, one with a baby strapped on her back.
The brutal stories that have come out of the mouths of the roughly 120 soldiers who have gone through the UBC program since the late 1990s illustrate what is happening to many Canadian and U.S. soldiers returning from current wars in Asia. A Rand Corp. study recently estimated 300,000 U.S. veterans who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq -- 20 per cent of the total -- likely have PTSD.
Meanwhile, secret U.S. government documents were recently discovered showing more than 6,000 U.S. vets committed suicide in 2005, a rate twice that of non-veterans. The danger of soldier suicide, says Westwood, is at the heart of Canadian Paul Haggis's powerful movie, The Valley of Elah.
For returning soldiers there can also sometimes be the ultimate tragic outcome of war. Some veterans Westwood is aware of return from the battlefields so severely traumatized they "act it out" in civilian life -- by becoming murderers.
CANADA'S SECRET WAR
In his many years in the military, Spiess had found a sense of belonging in being a loyal soldier and in, he acknowledges, the undeniable adrenaline rush of combat. Spiess and his .50-calibre machine gun had killed dozens of enemy soldiers.
That was especially the case in what is now becoming known as the Battle of Medak Pocket in the former Yugoslavia, a controversial 1993 firefight. At the time Spiess was on a UN peacekeeping mission. When his company was shelled by Croatian militia, the Canadians fought back. Very effectively.
The Canadian company of soldiers, with Richmond-raised Spiess at his mounted machinegun, ended up killing 27 Croatian militia.
The battle was, as Spiess puts it, "f---in' heavy."
It was so heavy that Canada's Liberal government covered up the Battle of Medak Pocket for years.
The Croatian militia had been trying to keep the Canadian troops from uncovering their ethnic cleansing of a Serbian village, Spiess says, confirming accounts recreated in the 2004 book by Carol Off, titled The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: The Story of Canada's Secret War.
When the shooting, bombing and mayhem were finally over at Medak Pocket -- with no Canadian deaths -- one of the things Spiess remembers most was the odour of death, everything from horses to humans.
"The smell will never go away," he said.
As Spiess and his Canadian comrades walked into the destroyed Serbian village that the Croatians had tried to stop them from seeing, burning corpses were everywhere.
Spiess perhaps most vividly remembers the bodies of two teenage Serbian girls hanging limp on chairs, their arms tied to the chairs behind their backs.
"They were still smouldering," Spiess said. "It was total f---in' devastation."
A chill sets in as he speaks.
The girls had been raped. Then shot. Then set on fire. The Croatian militia were attempting to hide evidence of ethnic cleansing -- the kind practised by all sides in the Balkan wars, the kind for which fugitive Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic this week appeared before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
MAKING THE TRANSITION
Much later, after Spiess returned from the killing fields of the Balkans to Canadian civilian life, he slowly realized he was having trouble making the transition to the world beyond armed combat. In war at least he knew the rules of engagement: Get them before they get you.
Instead, in laid-back B.C., Spiess was falling apart. He was extremely "pissed" his company wasn't receiving official recognition from the Canadian government for the Battle of Medak Pocket. And he began wondering if he was going to survive Canadian culture, where most people didn't want to hear war stories.
In particular, the battle of Medak Pocket, which was the biggest that Canadian troops had taken part in since the Korean War, stayed hidden from Canadians and the world because "Jean Cretin," as Spiess labels former prime minister Jean Chretien, "put a gag order on it for nine years."
Along with a few intrepid Canadian journalists and authors such as Off, Spiess firmly believes Medak Pocket was kept quiet because Canada's peacekeeping troops were already facing a blistering media attack for having beaten to death a Somalian boy in 1993.
If news came out that Canada's so-called "peacekeeping" troops had that same year shot down 27 Croatian militia, Spiess and other military specialists think that not only would the neutrality of Canadian troops have been called into question, some members of Canada's Croatian community could have gone ballistic.
Shaken to the core by what he'd gone through in Croatia, and feeling betrayed and unrecognized by the government and other Canadians, Spiess needed, desperately, a lifeline.
Unlike the vast majority of soldiers in Canada and around the world, Spiess found one. He found in himself whatever it takes to enrol in the program at UBC. It saved him.
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/thesearch/archive/2008/08/02/the-trauma-of-war-finding-healing.aspx
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/thesearch/archive/2008/08/02/the-trauma-of-war-3-men-learning-to-deal-with-grief.aspx
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/thesearch/archive/2008/08/02/the-trauma-of-war-2-career-suicide-to-discuss.aspx
The Trauma of War
Machinegunner Tony Spiess, a Seaforth Highlander from Vancouver, was having nightmares, drinking heavily and causing enough trouble to get himself repeatedly arrested.
Despite having returned to Canada from the chaotic battlefronts of the former Yugoslavia, Spiess (left, in Croatia) couldn't go anywhere in public without sitting with his back against a wall. He was sleeping under his bed. He didn't know why.
The survival skills that Spiess had developed to serve him well when the bullets were flying in combat zones -- the stoicism, hyper-vigilance and aggression -- were killing his soul in his peaceful home country.
Many of the comrades of Spiess, who still displays bravado, were doing no better. When Spiess talked on the phone with one of his buddies from the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Balkans, he thought the conversation had gone well. But a week later his buddy "took a shotgun to himself."
It's now estimated that hundreds of thousands of emotionally injured North American soldiers are facing a host of destructive inner demons after returning from peacekeeping missions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The veterans are emotionally crashing while trying to make the transition back to civilian life. They're traumatized. Many, like Spiess (photo below), have trouble living with the horrifying things they witnessed. Or did.
Many feel guilty they could not stop the destruction of innocents.
As soldiers, they have been trained to be hard-assed. But psychologist Marvin Westwood and Dr. David Kuhl, co-directors of a unique program for veterans at the University of B.C., say many soldiers begin discovering they cannot handle their trauma. They feel ashamed of it. And they don't feel understood.
What's more, say the UBC experts and psychotherapists, the veterans know that the stigma of admitting to a psychological wound could ruin their military careers. Because of their guilty feelings and a shortage of support services, the vast majority do not search for help.
Spiess, now 39 and a firefighter in Metro Vancouver, has been among the fortunate. He found support through the UBC program.
Spiess's story reflects a growing global crisis for members of armed services. Many of the soldiers in the UBC program have been on UN peacekeeping missions, such as those led in Rwanda during the 1990s by retired Canadian general Romeo Dallaire.
In 2000, the high-ranking Canadian officer was found drunk on an Ottawa park bench, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Among the many horrors Dallaire had towatch helplessly, says Westwood, was an incident in which two Rwandan women attacked each other with machetes, one with a baby strapped on her back.
The brutal stories that have come out of the mouths of the roughly 120 soldiers who have gone through the UBC program since the late 1990s illustrate what is happening to many Canadian and U.S. soldiers returning from current wars in Asia. A Rand Corp. study recently estimated 300,000 U.S. veterans who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq -- 20 per cent of the total -- likely have PTSD.
Meanwhile, secret U.S. government documents were recently discovered showing more than 6,000 U.S. vets committed suicide in 2005, a rate twice that of non-veterans. The danger of soldier suicide, says Westwood, is at the heart of Canadian Paul Haggis's powerful movie, The Valley of Elah.
For returning soldiers there can also sometimes be the ultimate tragic outcome of war. Some veterans Westwood is aware of return from the battlefields so severely traumatized they "act it out" in civilian life -- by becoming murderers.
CANADA'S SECRET WAR
In his many years in the military, Spiess had found a sense of belonging in being a loyal soldier and in, he acknowledges, the undeniable adrenaline rush of combat. Spiess and his .50-calibre machine gun had killed dozens of enemy soldiers.
That was especially the case in what is now becoming known as the Battle of Medak Pocket in the former Yugoslavia, a controversial 1993 firefight. At the time Spiess was on a UN peacekeeping mission. When his company was shelled by Croatian militia, the Canadians fought back. Very effectively.
The Canadian company of soldiers, with Richmond-raised Spiess at his mounted machinegun, ended up killing 27 Croatian militia.
The battle was, as Spiess puts it, "f---in' heavy."
It was so heavy that Canada's Liberal government covered up the Battle of Medak Pocket for years.
The Croatian militia had been trying to keep the Canadian troops from uncovering their ethnic cleansing of a Serbian village, Spiess says, confirming accounts recreated in the 2004 book by Carol Off, titled The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: The Story of Canada's Secret War.
When the shooting, bombing and mayhem were finally over at Medak Pocket -- with no Canadian deaths -- one of the things Spiess remembers most was the odour of death, everything from horses to humans.
"The smell will never go away," he said.
As Spiess and his Canadian comrades walked into the destroyed Serbian village that the Croatians had tried to stop them from seeing, burning corpses were everywhere.
Spiess perhaps most vividly remembers the bodies of two teenage Serbian girls hanging limp on chairs, their arms tied to the chairs behind their backs.
"They were still smouldering," Spiess said. "It was total f---in' devastation."
A chill sets in as he speaks.
The girls had been raped. Then shot. Then set on fire. The Croatian militia were attempting to hide evidence of ethnic cleansing -- the kind practised by all sides in the Balkan wars, the kind for which fugitive Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic this week appeared before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
MAKING THE TRANSITION
Much later, after Spiess returned from the killing fields of the Balkans to Canadian civilian life, he slowly realized he was having trouble making the transition to the world beyond armed combat. In war at least he knew the rules of engagement: Get them before they get you.
Instead, in laid-back B.C., Spiess was falling apart. He was extremely "pissed" his company wasn't receiving official recognition from the Canadian government for the Battle of Medak Pocket. And he began wondering if he was going to survive Canadian culture, where most people didn't want to hear war stories.
In particular, the battle of Medak Pocket, which was the biggest that Canadian troops had taken part in since the Korean War, stayed hidden from Canadians and the world because "Jean Cretin," as Spiess labels former prime minister Jean Chretien, "put a gag order on it for nine years."
Along with a few intrepid Canadian journalists and authors such as Off, Spiess firmly believes Medak Pocket was kept quiet because Canada's peacekeeping troops were already facing a blistering media attack for having beaten to death a Somalian boy in 1993.
If news came out that Canada's so-called "peacekeeping" troops had that same year shot down 27 Croatian militia, Spiess and other military specialists think that not only would the neutrality of Canadian troops have been called into question, some members of Canada's Croatian community could have gone ballistic.
Shaken to the core by what he'd gone through in Croatia, and feeling betrayed and unrecognized by the government and other Canadians, Spiess needed, desperately, a lifeline.
Unlike the vast majority of soldiers in Canada and around the world, Spiess found one. He found in himself whatever it takes to enrol in the program at UBC. It saved him.
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/thesearch/archive/2008/08/02/the-trauma-of-war-finding-healing.aspx
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/thesearch/archive/2008/08/02/the-trauma-of-war-3-men-learning-to-deal-with-grief.aspx
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/thesearch/archive/2008/08/02/the-trauma-of-war-2-career-suicide-to-discuss.aspx
