Part 2
“They’re still someone’s child”
“The hardest was when we came back,” Bobby says. He returned to Canadian Forces Base Greenwood in Nova Scotia in April 2010. With his family in another province and no spouse, he had only his dog to keep him company during the first half of his post-deployment leave. He says he drank a 24-pack of beer per day for three weeks straight.
“Then I started thinking at the same time about what I did over there, which made me drink more,” he says. Knowing that those he helped kill were Taliban didn’t change how he felt. “They’re still someone’s child,” he says.
Rose, who had been responsible for the deaths of more than 100 people during her seven-month tour, returned to Greenwood in July. Like Bobby, she had never abused alcohol, but soon enough, she was drunk by 9 a.m. some mornings.
She was angry all the time and couldn’t sleep. When she did, the dreams were horrifying flashbacks to the death she had witnessed overseas.
Months later, it was Jim’s turn to come home, and he was grateful. A navy medical officer had helped him get through the gun incident in Kandahar. Soon, though, the longtime seaman frequently found himself crying, panicked, and breathless.
“I had an idea why, but I didn’t really fully understand what was happening to me,” he says.
The military’s post-deployment screening landed Rose and Bobby in the care of a psychologist in Greenwood who would not diagnose them with PTSD, despite having exhibited the symptoms. The psychologist told Rose she was fine.
By 2011, the war was winding down and the drone operation was over. Being cleared of major medical issues, Rose and Jim were sent to Winnipeg, where the team would reassemble to work for the project to buy Canada a permanent fleet of drones. They were reunited with the small, once-tight-knit team, but anger now permeated the office.
Eventually, Jim put himself under the care of the Joint Personnel Support Unit, the Canadian military’s network of health centres for ill or injured soldiers. It wasn’t easy — he says his warrant officer tried to hijack one of his meetings with a counselor — but he was finally getting help.
The support unit puts people on one of two paths, depending on their condition: rehabilitation with the goal of going back to work, or medical release from the military.
Jim says reaching out for help amid the fear of losing his career and a tough-guy military culture that stigmatized mental illness was the hardest part. “You’re scared out of your mind,” he says.
Meanwhile, Bobby remained at CFB Greenwood. He wouldn’t be diagnosed with PTSD until he saw a psychiatrist — at his own request — in Halifax nearly a year after returning from Afghanistan.
He says he felt increasingly ostracized by his colleagues in the intelligence branch. “As soon as someone’s diagnosed with it, they get shunned,” he says. “You know, you’re treated differently. And I was, I know I was.”
He says many of his colleagues were hiding their own issues to protect their careers. “They didn’t want their mental status affecting it,” he says.
Rose was assigned to monitor Canadian airspace for a while, then participated in a simulation at CFB Petawawa, near Ottawa. There she performed the same task she had in Afghanistan, using actual video footage from the war.
She returned to Winnipeg feeling drained and was given a break. But something about a March 2012 awards ceremony that followed — the irony of a commander giving a speech in which he emphasized getting rest, despite having called Rose off leave to attend the event, or the fact that she and her colleagues were winning accolades when everyone knew, or should have known, that their hyper-vigilance and unprecedented work ethic was a symptom of PTSD — set Rose off.
Jim was riding a tractor when he saw Rose exit the building where they had worked. Now on his way out of the military, Jim had been assigned to work on roads and grounds at the base.
“She looked like a ghost,” he remembers. “She looked worse than I’ve ever seen anybody.”
He asked her what was wrong and she broke into hysterical tears. She didn’t know, she said. He told her to get medical help immediately. Instead, she went home and headed to the basement, where she began to drink a numbing mix of rum and Coke.
She looked through a box of her things from Afghanistan — T-shirts and other mementos — and the memories grew more vivid.
As she prepared to end the gruesome flashbacks, the anger, and the sleeplessness, the phone rang.
It was Jim, checking up on her.
The birds on the wire
A painted nautical star adorns the white floor of the art room in Rose’s Ontario home. Above, bright orange walls are contrasted by the black silhouettes of small birds perched on a power line.
“You ever drive down an old country road and you see all the birds on the wire?” asks Rose’s husband, a burly man with black hair. “All is good in the world when the birds are on the wire.”
“That’s how he asks me if I’m OK,” Rose adds. “‘Are all the birds on the wire?’ If there’s any birds falling then I’m not OK.”
Since her medical discharge from the military, Rose has been to in-patient programs paid for by the military and Veterans Affairs Canada, and she has seen multiple doctors. At one point, she tried to go back to school to become a welder. At the same time, a doctor suggested she reduce her medication to “feel” more and process emotions.
One morning, Rose collected the pills the doctor had told her to stop taking, drove to the LCBO, and waited in the parking lot until the liquor store opened. She bought a mickey of vodka, returned to her car, and used it to wash down the 96 lorazepam tablets.
She sent Facebook messages to her son and husband saying she was sorry, and then passed out.
Rose’s husband, who’s been with her every step of the way, rushed home to find the Ontario Provincial Police and an ambulance were already there, but Rose wasn’t.
The police used Rose’s cell phone to trace her location. They found her in the parking lot and rushed her to the hospital.
Now, Rose finds relief through art. “I’m really ashamed at some of the things I’ve had to do,” she says. She is still heavily medicated, is unable to work or go to school, and rarely leaves the house alone, but she has found a psychologist she likes.
“I lost my job. I lost my career. I lost my sense of self, put a lot of pressure on my husband, lost my identity, lost my family pretty much because the military was my family, lost hope for the future,” Rose says. “Nowhere to go, nothing to do.”
Every day is a struggle, Rose and her husband say. “And I feel guilty as hell,” she says.
“But I don’t sit and cry anymore,” her husband says, forcing a smile through his thick beard.
“There are so many damaged people”
“As far as the drone program goes, there are so many damaged people from it,” Rose says. “I’m really surprised that they haven’t looked into it a little more, seen what it’s done to their troops, and realized, wait a minute, something’s not quite right here.”
After her initial breakdown, Rose says an officer within the drone program in Winnipeg conducted an informal poll to see how many people had PTSD. The officer found it was 30%. “And that’s not including the guys that never got help,” she says.
Bobby, who wasn’t counted in that poll, says he thinks the rate of PTSD among the approximately 100 drone operators — including image analysts, pilots, and sensor operators — is closer to 60% or 70%. “No one really understands how much impact it actually does to someone,” he says.
The rate of PTSD for all Canadian veterans of the Afghanistan war is about 10%.
The Department of National Defence refused an interview request for this story and did not answer questions about the rate of PTSD among Canadian drone operators. In response to a list of allegations made by the drone operators, spokesperson Dan Le Bouthillier provided a written statement listing the military’s current mental health services.
“While CAF members have access to a comprehensive, evidence-based, interdisciplinary mental health system, more remains to be done in terms of educating our members and increasing awareness of the programs in place,” the statement said, adding that the military has made “significant investment and commitment” in mental health awareness programs.
“Caring for CAF members is a priority,” the statement read.
Countries with more advanced UAV programs are just beginning to appreciate the prevalence of mental health issues among pilots and analysts. Last year, British aviation expert Peter Gray said drone operators can suffer higher rates of PTSD than other air force members.
“They follow the pattern of life in a target environment, and they get so used to that, living day in, day out with these people, that when an attack has to be made, they feel it every bit as much as a pilot of a fast jet who just drops the bomb,” Gray said.
Similar concerns have been raised in the United States, which operates a massive, often controversial armed drone program. Hollywood has jumped on the issue as well, with the 2014 film Good Kill featuring Ethan Hawke as a conflicted drone pilot who suffers a mental breakdown.
Dr. Jakov Shlik, clinical director of the the operational stress injury clinic at The Royal mental health hospital in Ottawa, says drone operators could be at increased risk for developing PTSD because their job requires strong visual skills and memory. “For traumatic memories, it becomes a handicap, unfortunately,” he says.
He says the support people receive after traumatic events can sometimes determine whether they develop PTSD as well. The drone operators say they never had the time or opportunity to talk things out after a gruesome kill.
For drone operators, who work from the safety of a remote location, there’s no discharge of the energy and stress they accumulate either, Shlik points out. “It might start boiling up and piling up,” he says.
He says that in the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, the description of traumatic events now includes exposure to details of traumatic events, witnessed via media — especially if the person watching was responsible for what was happening onscreen.
Although Bobby masks his pain to others, the intrusive visual memories are haunting, he says. “I know what a Hellfire missile does to a person,” he says. “So, you know, that’s something that I get to live with for the rest of my life, watching that.”
Bobby eventually found a psychologist 45 minutes away from Greenwood who helped him begin to heal. He worked in the northernmost parts of the country that year, but the regular medical appointments meant Bobby couldn’t deploy overseas. The military’s serviceability policy requires that members be able to deploy anywhere at any time.
“I felt like I was forced out,” Bobby says. He was medically discharged from the military in October 2014.
Now, Bobby takes a daily antidepressant and is going to school for business management thanks to funding from the military’s insurer.
Jim, meanwhile, is now self-employed and recently had his first child. He found closure by getting a tattoo on his forearm. It shows a cross, adorned with ribbon and a poppy, on which are carved the the initials of the two Canadians who never came home.
When people ask about the initials, Jim emphasizes their bravery and dedication. “It allows me to help their legacy live on,” he says.
“I am not God; I am not the Grim Reaper”
Despite their mental scars, all three image analysts say they stand behind the potential benefits of UAVs for the Canadian military. They provided a strong tactical advantage in Afghanistan, they say, and could be used at home for border patrol and search and rescue. “They are an amazing tool, if used appropriately,” Jim says.
In the years to come, the Canadian military wants the government to spend up to $1.5 billion on a fleet of drones — and it wants them to be able to drop bombs. “There’s little point in having a UAV that can see a danger but can’t strike it if it needs to,” Gen. Jonathan Vance told a committee last week.
But Jim and Rose say the drones should not be armed. “Putting weapons on them now, that’s just ridiculous,” Jim says. “I joined Canada’s military back when I was 17 to be a peacekeeper.”
Jim says recent killing missions, such as the bombing campaigns in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, are not the Canadian way.
“That’s not who we are,” he says, “and to put weapons on these drones and […] getting people like us to sit in that seat and call PID to activate that firing sequence is just wrong. You know, it’s a God role.”
“I am not God,” he says. “I am not the Grim Reaper.”
Bobby disagrees. He doesn’t see the difference between calling PID and waiting for another armed aircraft to do the deed, and having the Canadian drone operators do it themselves.
All three drone operators agree that whatever happens, the Canadian military needs to seriously rethink the way it recruits, trains, and treats drone operators — and whom it puts in charge — before making any purchases.
Rose hopes the new Liberal government will listen. “I have a lot of faith in them,” Rose says. “I hope they look into the past and see what happened, and see if they can make things a little better for the next group that has to do the same job.”
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Eye In The Sky said:
c. looking at stuff you see 'thru the straw' on a screen orbiting above a point/target/whatever or on a screen XXXX km's away thru a feed is likely not all that different. Watching stuff on a screen is watching stuff on a screen. It will take whatever toll it takes, regardless of if it's from a manned or unmanned platform.
d. not to discount the knowledge of professionals in their fields, the professors in the article, etc, but until they find themselves actual 'links of the chain' involved in targeting and striking, it is (IMO) hard for them to know what it actually feels like to be a link in that chain. I can tell you how awesome the strawberry ice cream I had at supper was, but you won't really get it until you eat that ice cream yourself. You might find it tastes horrible compared to what you imagined it would...never know until you take a bite.
