Memoirs Written as Therapy

Signs of Trauma — Nightmares, Anger — Followed Soldier Home from Sarajevo



By Joseph Howse
Sun. Mar 9, 2008


‘THEY TRAIN YOU all your life so that you’re a loaded bullet," says retired Capt. Fred Doucette. His 30 years of service in the Canadian infantry included peacekeeping missions during the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia. "I felt like an empty casing when I came back."

Empty Casing: A Soldier’s Memoir of Sarajevo under Siege is Doucette’s autobiographical account of the United Nations’ Bosnian missions and the psychological aftermath for soldiers who served in them. Doucette has struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, which left him haunted by the scenes of suffering and sense of helplessness he experienced in Bosnia.

Doucette was in Sarajevo as a UN military observer, a role that afforded him a lot of contact with Sarajevo’s citizens but few resources to aid or protect them. Like every observer, Doucette was unarmed and mostly had to fend for himself in finding lodgings and supplies. He stayed with a local family. Like them, each night he listened to mortar shells falling and each day he passed through the crosshairs of Serbian snipers. When he could, Doucette tried to help local people by running dangerous errands for goods such as firewood and by giving first aid using a sparse Canadian medical kit.

During an interview, Doucette describes the pressure that this situation puts on soldiers. "You come back either frustrated that you weren’t allowed to do things, or guilty because you helped but it ended when you left. . . . If you don’t come back feeling some guilt, then you’re a pretty hard-nosed bastard or you never really got outside the wire, in the sense of interacting with the people."

Doucette, in Empty Casing, is a keen observer of character. Whether writing about Sarajevo’s besiegers, its besieged population or his UN team, he recalls conversations, mannerisms and actions in lucid detail. The siege is, in many ways, a battle between tactics of cruelty and tactics of sanity and survival.
On one side, Doucette describes checkpoints manned by drunken Serb soldiers who care little about shelling civilians or robbing UN vehicles. However, the besiegers also have surreally ordinary cares. One of them requests a bribe in the form of diapers and baby powder instead of hard liquor.

On the other side, one of Doucette’s fondest memories is of a birthday party held by the family that is lodging him. The birthday girl is absent — a refugee, with her mother, in Sweden. Her father and uncle have stayed to defend Sarajevo and specifically Mama, the quiet matriarch of the clan. Although Mama and her sons must survive the siege with "no electricity, no heat, no water, no gas for cooking," they have managed to put together a feast for neighbours and lodgers on this occasion.

Doucette also writes, more briefly but with equal clarity, about several scenes of carnage from Sarajevo. However, when interviewed, he emphasizes that such bloody sights are not the only part of the psychological trauma of war. "It’s no one incident," he says, "like your buddy was blown up beside you or you were shot. It’s just an accumulation of things." For Doucette, it is equally or sometimes even more disturbing to remember malnourished children and wonder whether they survived.

After his last overseas mission in 1999, Doucette consulted with a civilian psychiatrist. (Before this, a series of military doctors and social workers had dismissed his concerns about the nightmares, memory lapses and bursts of anger that he was suffering.) With medication and stress management techniques, Doucette was able to focus on his daily life again and find enjoyment in spending time with his family.

At his wife’s suggestion, one part of Doucette’s therapy was to write his memoirs of Sarajevo. Later, he succeeded in publishing these as Empty Casing.

In 2002, Doucette left military service and started another career in the government’s Operational Stress Injury Social Support program, helping soldiers and veterans who suffer from PTSD and other operational stress injuries.

The program is gaining recognition, Doucette says. "We were always concerned, when I started in the program five years ago, it was going to be like the flavour of the day — but it hasn’t; it’s grown. They’ve (military leaders have) clicked into the fact this is . . . part of the overall healthcare of the soldier."

Many clients of the support program have seen the same conflicts as Doucette: 80 per cent of Canada’s stress injury cases are in the army and, of this portion, 80 per cent are from operations in Bosnia. As members of this same generation of soldiers rise to command positions, recognition and support for programs are starting to improve.

Recently, an increasing proportion of stress injury casualties are from the war in Afghanistan. Here, too, however, it is "no one incident" that causes an onset.

Most stress injury casualties from Afghanistan have also seen previous conflicts in Bosnia, Ethiopia, Somalia or Haiti. "They come back (from an overseas mission)," Doucette explains, "and they’re still soldiers and two years later they’re going back again. . . . The military not being huge, they ask you to step to the plate a lot more often than really you should. You should have time to bleed off that stress and breathe a bit."

Since leaving the military, Doucette has also seen the stress of war from the perspective of the soldier’s family. His son has served in four tours of Afghanistan.

One day, Doucette’s two grandchildren saw their school flag flying at half-mast and came home wondering whether their father had died. "To them," says Doucette, "the only soldier in Afghanistan is their dad, and if the flag is down, then dad is dead. It’s terrible. These are six- and seven-year-olds."
The reality of war does not go away; its psychological trauma does not go away and sometimes Doucette still feels caught between two worlds. He says it took him a long time to absorb the greatest difference between his life in the military and his life as a civilian:

"Nobody will ask me to risk my life again — and if they do, I can say no, whereas in the military, you’d be asked in Afghanistan every day maybe to get in that vehicle, to drive down that same road where people have been killed."

Empty Casing takes a long, hard look down a road that Doucette and many other soldiers have travelled. The author is a gifted storyteller who vividly imparts his experience and insight to the reader. This deeply personal book also speaks for a whole generation of soldiers, for a tortured city, for the hopes and pain they carry.

Joseph Howse is a freelance writer who lives in Halifax.


Source: The Halifax ChronicleHerald, Halifax, Nova Scotia