Off to War by Deborah Ellis Read Free Book Online

home and away from military surroundings is when the stress begins to catch up to them. Family members can find themselves living with a very different person from the one they knew.
    This condition, sometimes called battle fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder or operational stress injury, takes many forms. Some soldiers experience nightmares, depression, sensitivity to loud noises, and feelings of being out of place. Some experience the sensations of war in odd moments at home, triggered by a sound or a scent. Others find it difficult to be close to people in the same way they were before they went overseas.
    Being in a war zone — seeing and being with people who are suffering, being in a place where danger is all around — is bound to affect the people who go through it. Some parents, after spending months around children who are hungry and have no schooling, lose patience when their own children carry on like regular North American kids, wanting this and that and complaining about homework. Others return home changed in a positive way,
more appreciative of their families and less likely to get angry at small things.
    Since there is no standard way that parents behave when they come home from war, it’s hard for kids to know what to expect.
    Chad’s father is with the Canadian military at CFB Trenton. He recently returned from a tour in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
    My father is serving with the military. He’s trying to make chief. There are 210 people under him directly. He maintains aircraft. He started out with the military police, then he moved into maintenance. I have an older brother who is twenty-three, and an older sister who is eighteen. My mother works as a dispatcher.
    My father just got back from Kandahar, where he was building roads and a police station. He’s been overseas a lot. He was in Africa a couple of times, and Dubai. He’s on alert status more than half the time, so he’s been away a lot. Kandahar was pretty dangerous. There was a lot of stuff going through the line, rockets and things, and he had a couple of bomb threats as well.
    That’s kind of been his life. There was one time he was in Rwanda, going down the street, and they had to stop and when he looked over there was a little kid who had an M16 to his head. He was in Rwanda just after the massacres. He saw all the bodies and the body parts strewn around. He’s still going through the treatment to get over what he saw. I was around eight at the time.
    After he got back from Rwanda there were certain sounds or smells that made him snap. Before, he was just nice and quiet and easy. I’m not quite sure which sounds or smells set him off, but my mom always talks about it.
    He was in Rwanda just once, for six or eight months. Like I said, he’s still in treatment for that, and the military keeps sending him overseas.
    As soon as my father got back from Kandahar, my parents decided to split. It was his decision, really. He told us that as soon as he set foot on the Canadian tarmac, he stopped knowing what he wanted, so they split. He got back on March 1, and as soon as he stepped off the plane and hit the landing strip, he decided he didn’t know what he wanted.
    My mother had no clue about any of this while he was away. None of us did. They emailed each other all the time, and everything seemed normal, but as soon as he got back and stepped on Canadian soil, he was just — he went blank, and he didn’t know what he wanted.
    That was a couple of months ago. I haven’t asked him for an explanation. We don’t talk about anything.
    My mother was so surprised. They’d been married for twenty-three years, and she had no idea this is what was coming. She said that when he got back from Afghanistan he was acting a lot different. He was trying to control stuff. It was weird, the things that were happening in the house. It was different from before. I didn’t notice so much because I