Existing in a Primal Environment

I always felt that there was a reason for us to be there and not just Canadians, all the coalition, everyone that was there. But if I could be brutally honest with you by the end of the tour I wasn’t a very nice person. I was seasoned in combat and saw lots of terrible things. The only way I can describe it as the longer you live in kind of a primal environment you become primal kill or be killed and, you know, it’s either him or me whether it’s enemy. You trusted people a lot less so this kind of, I don’t want to use the word fluffy but oh we’re going to go help people. This provincial reconstruction team, we’re going to help. Well very quickly we learned that that is not the way the mission was actually going to go. I got over there in January and by April late April it was a lot of enemy contact and then it just completely escalated all the way into the summer so we call it the fighting season which was new to us. I think that as a battle group handled it incredibly well. I think we put Canadians back on the map in like you know the next generation that was the next thing. I was more proud to be part of that than my sense of pride for helping people if that makes any sense. I knew we were making history at that point and time and we became, I can’t speak for everybody obviously. When you become seasoned in an environment like that you can’t turn that off. There was no, yes we did good here, let’s go home. I was very, I guess, angry, caveman person and I think what also was very interesting you became to enjoy it. I think that was the most interesting thing in my take home point was when I got home I couldn’t satisfy that sense of rawness or conflict. We thrived off it, you know, in the moment of a firefight or whatever took place, time goes by very slow in those events as well and a lot happens very quickly. And then when it’s all said and done and whether we’re back safe in our camp or whatever in the evening, how you can laugh about what happened earlier, like, “remember when you dropped that or you did this and I can’t believe that got stuck there, oh my god I can’t believe no one got hurt.” And we laugh about it. And then you are craving it. It was very addictive to go get that adrenalin surge I think. So in coming home you could not satisfy that adrenalin I guess. I don’t even think it was good adrenalin but it was fire fight response I guess and after being in a high tempo for such a long period of time that doesn’t go away overnight. And I don’t think anything really prepared us for that.