Climb every MOUNTAIN
Training for Himalayan expedition helps veterans get back on their feet
On a rocky incline hovering thousands of feet above the highway, today’s lesson is how to climb a slab of ice. A group of soldiers and donors head toward a patch of steep snow, turned a little crusty and dark by the bright summer sun.
Cpl. Neal Carman, who was a C9 light machine gunner in Afghanistan in 2008, puts down his camouflage-coloured sack, showing off a few holes to his comrades.
He pulls out a tiny round black ball.
“This little guy here, it’s a piece of anti-personnel mine,” he said. “The metal has dimples like that sticking up and that’s what fragments evenly to get the maximum amount of shrapnel out of it.”
The little ball, he said, is the fragment of an IED that exploded and struck him during his tour of duty.
Cpl. Carman survived. A colleague, Cpl. James Arnal, did not.
Cpl. Carman now has a 13-cm scar across his left buttock, most of which he cannot feel due to nerve damage. He also suffers from chronic pain.
He puts the dark metal in an empty plastic pill container and stows it back in his bag. He and his fellow mountaineers-in-training pick up their ice axes.
He’s one of 14 soldiers — many of them suffering from wartime injuries — training in Jasper National Park this week with the hope of joining an expedition that will summit Island Peak in the Himalayas in the fall. The group, which is expected to comprise about 10 soldiers and 10 donors, is raising money and awareness for the True Patriot Love Foundation, a charity that helps soldiers suffering from physical and mental injuries.
The expedition will be filmed by a CBC documentary film crew: it was inspired by a CBC film of a trek taken by breast cancer survivors to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. The climb’s organizers hope to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the private foundation.
Many of the soldiers see this trip as being a step in their personal recovery processes.
“It was just an incredible opportunity to have a goal again and to work with a team — I haven’t had that in a long time — and to push through some personal stuff, and not only help myself along the way, but be able to help other soldiers who are injured who cannot be here,” said Cpl. Jessica Wiebe, who joined the military as a reservist a week after she graduated high school. She wanted to take advantage of educational credits offered by the forces but soon found she was drawn into military life. Cpl. Wiebe, who just finished her first year of a foundation program at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, was deployed to Afghanistan in 2008. There the artillery gunner oversaw public works projects, protecting local Afghani workers who built roads and irrigation systems.
She received a small shrapnel injury doing her duty, but found it much harder to handle home.
“I more or less had difficulty readjusting when I came back home with some stuff, but I’m not comfortable talking about that quite yet,” she said. Instead, she paints. Most of her art is impressionistic, ink-wash paintings overdrawn with pen. She keeps copies of them on her iPhone, pulling a few images to show a soldier on a lonely, dusty road and a woman in a red burka.
“I can’t stop making them,” she said. Cpl. Wiebe said she hopes one day to join the Canadian Forces Artists Program, which would allow her to draw while being stationed in conflict zones.
She is not the only soldier who has had difficulty re-adjusting to civilian life.
Carl Keenan, a square-cut, clean-shaven man, now works for the Ottawa municipal police force. He went to Afghanistan in 2007 to work as a military police officer. However, he wound up protecting VIPs: “I got to drive really fast,” he said. “A couple of times, I purposely smashed a few vehicles off the road, but that’s what you’re supposed to do. If someone looks like they’re going to be a threat, or a potential suicide bomber, you put your car between the bomber and the VIP and hopefully it doesn’t go boom.” It never did. “Afghanistan was an eye-opener. It changed me, for the better, I think. But at the same time, it was stressful. We worked long hours with very little breaks for seven months straight. You don’t realize how much of a toll it takes,” he said.
When he got home, he found he was bored.
“I was up 18 hours a day, I ripped apart my entire house and renovated it myself. I wasn’t sleeping. You can’t find enough to occupy yourself because you’re used to being so busy.”
The True Patriot Love Foundation was formed to help a new generation of military veterans returning home with physical and, oftentimes unknown, mental injuries. It raises money for a variety of programs, including the Military Families Fund — which helps the families of deployed soldiers in times of need — and a fund to send soldiers’ kids to summer camp.
That very program proved to be invaluable to Sgt. Roseanna Mandy, whose pelvis was broken during a training incident. She spent months in a wheelchair, two summers that she said were terrible for her two sons, aged 13 and 12.
“They both spent a weekend at the Muskoka Woods summer camp, and ... last summer, also when I was injured, they spent a week at Camp Maple Leaf. For me that was such an incredible opportunity to see them embark upon because when we’re injured, we’re not the only ones who that are injured, our families suffer too,” she said.
Sgt. Mandy joined the military as a teenager and was one of the first women in the infantry. She now also has hearing problems. “[My sons] probably never had a summer as boring as the ones I had when I was in my wheelchair. Children tend to grow up quickly when one of their parents is sick.”
She hopes to be among the team that will summit the mountain in the fall (not everyone doing the training will go). In her sack, she’ll take a flag from her home province of New Brunswick. She’ll also bring the names of fellow soldiers who, for physical or mental reasons, will likely never get the chance to do anything similar.
“I feel like [this expedition] is the final phase in the journey back to myself,” she said. However she hopes this trip will convince Canadians to have faith in their injured troops. “One common thread that you’ll find is that we’re resilient. My fellow brothers and sisters in the Canadian Forces are some of the most resilient, adaptive people that I’ve ever come across.”
Those wishing to contribute to the True Patriot Love expedition to the Himalayas Expedition can do so on their website www.truepatriotlove.com