The war at home
Pete McMartin on the Surrey soldier fi ghting for a disability payment in the B. C. Appeal Court.
It’s odd to think of Daniel Scott as a veteran. He’s 28, boyish and softspoken. He grew up in Surrey. But he was in B. C. Court of Appeal on Thursday with a group of other veterans doing battle with the Conservative government. The feds were on the counter- attack.
The veterans are suing Ottawa to restore a program that guaranteed lifetime disability payments for injured soldiers. The B. C. Supreme Court reaffirmed the group’s right to sue earlier, but the Conservative government is appealing. It wants the original ruling tossed.
A judgment is not expected until next year. In the meantime, as illustration of the veterans’ case, it might be instructive if we look at Scott’s wartime experience and, even more damaging, at what came after.
In 2010, Scott, a reservist with the artillery, was on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan.
On Feb. 10 of that year, he and his platoon were at a firing range in Kandahar for a training session. Claymore mines were to be set off as part of the training session. The mines, however, had been improperly prepared, and one of them went off at close range. It detonated a second mine.
Scott tried to leap behind an armoured vehicle, but not before trying to help another member of the platoon take cover.
He was hit eight times by the mine’s metal ball projectiles. Five hit his body armour — two on the collar, two on the chest, one glancing off the shoulder. One passed through the fabric of the arm of his shirt, missing his flesh. One hit him square in his belt buckle, which saved him, he said, from a gut wound and death.
But the eighth ball pierced his body armour. It entered underneath his heart, and ricocheted downward off a rib. It fractured the rib, collapsed his left lung, and damaged his kidney, spleen and pancreas. The explosions critically wounded one other platoon member — the soldier Scott was trying to help take cover — and left three others with less- severe wounds.
Luckily for Scott, there was a U. S. helicopter nearby. He was immediately airlifted to Kandahar for emergency surgery. Scott was conscious during the flight, and held the hand of the other critically wounded soldier he had tried to help, who was a friend. His friend died en route.
Scott lost 1.5 litres of blood. At the Kandahar airfield hospital, surgeons made a 28- centimetre incision in his abdomen and removed his left kidney, his spleen and the tail of his pancreas. They inserted tubes into his chest for his lung injury and tubes into his abdomen to drain the fluids leaking out of the remaining portion of his pancreas.
After his surgery, he was airlifted to the Bagram Air Base and then flown to Ramstein, Germany, where he underwent more surgery. He was later flown to Vancouver, admitted into the burns and plastics unit at Vancouver General Hospital, and there would have the ball that wounded him removed from his abdomen. When he began to experience pancreatic burn, a shunt was inserted into his abdomen to drain the enzymes leaking into his stomach. He was released from hospital on March 2, but was readmitted two days later when he developed an abdominal staph infection. He was put on intravenous antibiotics.
In all, he underwent six operations, was two months in hospital recuperating, and lost 25 kilograms in weight. Only this year, he said, has he begun to feel physically “normal.”
He was in the hospital, he said, when he found out what he would receive from the government for his injuries. Under a new law, it would not be a monthly lifetime disability payment, but a one- time lump sum pro- rated depending on the government’s assessment of the extent of his injuries.
He was not prepared for what came next.
For the loss of his spleen, his left kidney, and a portion of his pancreas, and for a collapsed lung, a gastric ulcer and a fractured rib — not to mention his pain and suffering, his reduced quality of life, and the possibility in the future he might develop diabetes because of the damage to his pancreas — the government cut him a cheque of $ 41,411.96.
He didn’t cash it, he said, for six months.
“I thought something else was coming. I thought it was the initial payment. Then my dad ( said), ‘ Well, I think that’s it. You might as well take it to the bank and put it in there.’ ”
For serving his country, for acting as an agent for his government’s foreign policy, and for suffering excruciating pain and injury caused, not by the enemy, but by the forces of the government he was representing, Scott walked away with less money than he might have received in an ICBC injury claim.
“We went over there on behalf of Canada,” Scott said, “and they sent us there, and then the impression was they turned their backs on us when we got back.”
Did he feel betrayed by his own government? “I would say yes,” he said. So would I. More Tuesday.