Army told of suicide risk to veterans
Mentally ill targeted by fellow soldiers
Canadian military commanders have been warned that veterans with mental illnesses are being bullied online by their fellow soldiers, a situation it is feared could prompt some to commit suicide.
Though warnings were sent to senior officers in 2015, and the Canadian Army told the Ottawa Citizen it believes it now has the situation under control, others told the Citizen the online bullying continues.
In a December 2015 email — one of three warnings he sent to commanders that year — Col. Brock Millman, since retired but who held various senior positions in the army reserves in Ontario, described a cyber civil war that had broken out in which serving and former military personnel from the Toronto area were fighting with each other and harassing injured veterans. Though the veterans subjected to online harassment often responded with hostile comments of their own, many of those targeted were among the most vulnerable — those dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I think this is going to end with a body,” Millman warned, requesting “command intervention” to deal with the situation. He noted in one of his warnings that a perception existed that some of those involved with the harassment had support from army leadership.
Army spokesman Lt.-Col. Andre Salloum confirmed Jan. 12 to the Citizen that the problems were centred on a Facebook group, the 32 CBG Veterans Wellbeing Network. According to the group’s Facebook description, it exists to help current and former members of the army reserve’s Torontobased 32 Canadian Brigade Group dealing with operational stress injuries.
While the group is not officially affiliated with the army, it operates with the knowledge and support of commanders, army officers say.
Salloum told the Citizen that a number of army personnel and veterans were alleged to have been involved in cyberbullying, but that “to the best of the Army’s knowledge,” the alleged bullying stopped after changes were made to the Facebook group. Those changes included having a new moderator preview comments before they were posted. In addition, Brig.-Gen. David Patterson, deputy commander of the Canadian Army’s 4 Division, made a plea for the parties to get along.
Millman also warned in one of his emails that some members of the 32 CBG Veterans Wellbeing Network group continued to bash injured veterans on other private online forums, and other former soldiers have emailed the Citizen to point out the harassment is continuing at other online locations.
According to Millman, who declined to comment for this article, the hostilities within the Facebook group appeared to start after some of the group’s members seemed to align themselves with the Conservative government. Some of those serving soldiers on the site attacked anyone who questioned Conservative policy or criticized the Harper government for not doing enough for injured veterans. In addition, officials from the office of then-veterans affairs minister Erin O’Toole were invited to join the group as observers.
In an August interview with the Citizen, Craig Hood, a sergeant with the Queen’s Own Rifles and an Afghanistan veteran who created the Facebook page, said the invitation to O’Toole’s staff was not political and was for intended to help veterans by allowing the minister to better understand issues. “We have to remain apolitical because the primary users of the network are the servants of the government,” said Hood. (Just before the past federal election, however, Hood tweeted via his personal Twitter account a message stating Justin Trudeau was “just not ready.”)
Hood acknowledged that in some online posts he had referred to certain veterans as “irrelevant little s---s,” referring to one as “couch potato,” another as “poser boy” and another suffering from stress as a “whacko vet.” In other cases, the obscenity-filled postings were aimed at veterans, both injured or otherwise, at other sites.
In a comment posted to the National Post’s website last year, Hood also denounced prominent veterans’ advocate Sean Bruyea, who suffers from PTSD, as well as another injured veterans advocate, Mike Blais, “as morons.”
But Hood said he made the comments while defending himself against online attacks; that he has never engaged in cyberbullying, and is in fact himself a victim of cyberbullying by others.
In the August interview, Hood said he stood by his various comments and had support for his actions from his commanders. “I’m an infantry sergeant and I speak the language I speak,” said Hood, who also added that he suffers from an operational stress injury.
However in a new statement released Feb. 6 through an army public affairs officer, Hood told the Citizen he now pays more attention to what he posts online and “looking back, I regret some of the posts that I published.”
Bruyea, who said he hadn’t heard of Hood until he found himself targeted on the National Post’s website, told the Citizen the issue of cyberbullying against veterans is greater than any one Facebook group. “It’s time for military commanders to start taking this seriously before some tragedy happens,” he said.
Salloum said the army does not tolerate harassment of any sort and takes any such allegations very seriously. But, he said, the army is a large institution and it can be challenging to monitor the online presence of several thousand soldiers.
Shortly after receiving the statement from the army that it believed it had the cyberbullying issue under control, the Citizen received an anonymous email warning against publishing this article. “Publish at your peril,” read the email, which appeared to have originated with a Toronto-area server.
PRIMARY USERS OF THE NETWORK ARE THE SERVANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT.