Ex-soldier helps others heal wounds of war
Whether it’s skiing, ice climbing, camping or canoeing, Scott Guillon rarely misses an opportunity to be active in the great outdoors.
“In nature, you can be real and raw,” says the 45-year-old Calgarian. “It has incredible healing powers.”
After a decade-long career as a Canadian soldier where he found himself in some of the world’s hot spots, Guillon knows that healing is a vital component of successful post-military life.
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” he says of things he witnessed, like the aftermath of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, along with a 1994 plane crash at CFB Wainwright that killed five.
After years of struggle following his release from the Canadian Forces in 1995, Guillon has found new life in the outdoors. Working with Outward Bound Veterans’ Programs, he leads fellow soldiers into the wilderness, their time in nature and being among those who understand their experiences helping them to recover from the psychological wounds of war.
“Out there it’s safe for them to talk about anything,” he says of his fellow expedition members, many who came to see death up close in Afghanistan. “You see someone who’s bottled things up for so long, suddenly being able to express themselves. You take them through a process, help them let go of past events.”
The Outward Bound Veterans’ program is made possible thanks to the True Patriot Love Foundation (truepatriolove.com), a national organization founded in 2009 by corporate and community leaders. Since its inception it has raised more than $14 million for Canadian Forces members, veterans and their families.
The foundation’s vision is to “permanently bridge the military and civilian worlds, to ensure always that our Canadian Forces men and women have private dollars at their disposal to address the various gaps inevitably left unfunded by government.” To fulfil that mandate, it incorporates a wide variety of programs that address practical, health and emotional needs. Working with local military families resource centres, it provides assistance for families with special needs, emergency child care and travel expenses when soldiers are injured as well as a camp for kids of soldiers.
In 2012, The True Patriot Love Expedition saw a doctor, 10 civilians and 12 soldiers, many of them injured in Afghanistan, reach the summit of Island Peak, a sister mountain to Everest in Nepal. That journey, along with a documentary commissioned by the CBC called March to the Top, raised $400,000 for the foundation as well as awareness of its many programs across the country.
On April 3, the foundation will hold its first fundraising dinner in Calgary, with Laureen Harper, wife of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as the event’s chair. The proceeds of the event will go directly to helping those military people in our community. With a goal of raising $1 million, the organizers of the event are well on their way to reaching that goal with more than $750,000 already donated by some of Calgary’s biggest corporations.
“We saw what they were able to do in cities like Toronto and Vancouver and knew we had to bring this to Calgary,” says cochair Andy McCreath, who with tinePublic Inc. business partner Christian Darbyshire is working with TPL to stage the massive event at Calgary’s BMO Centre. “Seeing how this charity gives back to soldiers and their families, it was just a no-brainer that Calgary got involved.”
Local powerhouse Lois Mitchell, who in 2012 was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada for her decades of philanthropic work in the city, said an immediate yes when McCreath and Darbyshire asked her to sign on as a co-chair of the event. “Our country’s soldiers and their families give so much and ask for so little,” says Mitchell, whose husband Doug is honorary colonel for the King’s Own Calgary Regiment. “We need to give back to them, because they need us now.”
Harper, who hails from the Turner Valley area, says she’s especially pleased to be part of the city’s first TPL fundraiser. “We don’t have a military presence in Calgary, so it just slips your mind,” she says. “This is something that helps remind people — it’s a wonderful group of people that wants to help support the military.”
Canada’s decade-long engagement in the Afghan war indeed created a new generation of returning military with some of the great post-military challenges. Of the more than 30,000 soldiers deployed to that restive country, 158 never made it home. Of those who did, more than 2,000 suffered physical injuries that ranged from minor to life threatening. The recent suicides of four former Canadian Forces members is testament to war’s invisible but all-too-real danger — Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
A 2012 military study found that about eight per cent of those returning from Afghanistan suffer from symptoms of PTSD, while a 2011 Statistics Canada study found the percentage of deaths attributable to suicide is 45 per cent higher among veterans than for the general population.
Like many others familiar with the military mindset, Scott Guillon suspects the number of those with PTSD, both from Afghanistan and earlier conflicts, could be much higher.
“You never let anyone know if something’s wrong,” he says. “That’s your surest way out of the military.”
Combine the fear of career loss with the macho culture long associated with soldiering, says Guillon, and you have a recipe for under-reporting of the less obvious but just as dangerous psychological impacts of the profession.
That’s something Guillon knows only too well. In addition to dodging bullets, his 1990s soldier experience also came at a time when the Canadian military was going through a drubbing of its reputation thanks to such events as the Somalia affair, in which two Canadian soldiers brutally beat a Somali teen to death.
“Towards the end of my career, people pretty much weren’t wearing uniforms off base,” he says. “Even Remembrance Day was an iffy thing.” After he got out in 1995, Guillon says he spent the next few years trying to function in civilian life with only middling success. “Life just sucked,” he says of his attempt to mask on the outside his inner turmoil. “I lost my sense of purpose and didn’t know what I was even qualified to do in the civilian world.”
Around 2000, Guillon got involved in the field of personal development after stints as a renovator, landscaper and real estate salesman. That led him to the TPL Foundation’s Outward Bound program. “I couldn’t believe someone would set something up for veterans that had nothing to do with government programs,” he says.
“It became a validation of who I am — I served my country and here are Canadians who have put money into a pool to let me reconnect with other soldiers and put some closure to it.”
Today, Guillon is thrilled to spend time with other soldiers, helping them to heal by confronting their pasts in a safe environment.
“To try to share your stories with someone who has no idea what it’s like just makes you feel even more isolated,” he says. “Bringing veterans together to share their experiences helps to provide the closure needed to go forward in life.”