From: Didi Catalin Petcu <cdpetcu@yahoo.

ca>
Subject: Inside Romo Dallaires brutally revealing new memoir
Date: October 22, 2016 at 23:24:59 GMT-4
To: cdpetcu@aol.com

Lieutenant-General (retired) Romo Dallaire. (Photograph by Roger Lemoyne)

One night after he was medically discharged from the army in April 2000, former
Lt.-Gen. Romo Dallaire drank most of a bottle of scotch in his Hull, Que.,
apartment before he opened a metal box containing his fathers medals and his
50-year-old razor. Very slowly, he began to slice himself, first his thighs, then his
arms.

It was another of Dallaires rolls of the dice, another in what has become an
uncountable number of attempts, stretching over two decades, to kill himself
accidentally, through behaviour so reckless it is a wonder he is alive now. Much
of it, in Africa to start and later in Canada, involved driving, including reaching
150 km/h on a Quebec road with his young children in the back seat. As UN
commander in Rwanda during the still tense days after that nations 1994
genocide bled to a halt, Dallaire would drive up, alone and at night, to
checkpoints manned by heavily armed teenagers as skittish and traumatized as
he was.

The cutting, perhaps the most arresting incident disclosed in Dallaires brutally
revealing new memoir, Waiting For First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD, was
no different in kind, he insists. Deliberate, calculated suicide was a step too far for
Dallaires almost lifelong military sense of duty, and he points out he did prudently
hand over his guns to an old comrade, Gen. Maurice Baril. But bereft of one of
his main supportsthe uniform, as Dallaire calls it, meaning his tribe, his very
identityand overwhelmed with pain, he was willing to take what came.

I might have cut just once, he says in an interview, but the warmth of the blood
and the smell of the blood, because theres a sort of an iron smell, had an
incredibly soothing effect. So I thought [Id] see how much more of that would
help, knowing that, sooner or later, if nobody came, I would bleed to death. But I
wasnt looking immediately to bleed to death so much as wanting to feel that
release. But someone came: his sister-in-law, Christine, whose role in keeping
Dallaire alive and functioning can scarcely be overestimated. So far someone
or, often enough, blind luckhas always come.

Related: Romo Dallaire on peace, child soldiers and retirement

Dallaire was back home in Canada in September 1994, hard at work in a new job
in Ottawa as deputy commander of Land Force Command, when his boss,
Gordon Reay, called him in for a brief chat. Something new and troubling seemed
to be happening in the Canadian Forces, something to maybe keep in mind, the
chief of Land Staff told Dallaire: We are starting to see some issues with guys
coming back from [peacekeeping tours in] Cambodia and Yugoslavia, said Reay,
as Dallaire recounts in his memoir. Fatigue, a few cognition problems, some
trouble readjusting. Nothing more. Nothing to worry about.

Only five months earlier, Dallaire had been the UNs peacekeeping commander in
Rwanda, boxed into a guilt-ridden defensive posture while the worst genocide
since the Holocaust unfolded around him. After months of planning, and urged on
by radio broadcasts of genocidal propaganda, extremists within the Hutu ethnic
group raised their community against the minority Tutsi in an orgy of literally
blood-soaked murdermachetes, not sterile gas chambers, were the key tool
and sexual violence.

Rwandan force commander Romeo Dallaire (left) walks with UN envoy Igbal Riza
(right) May 26, 1994 in Kigali, Rwanda. (Scott Peterson/Liaison/Getty Images)

Dallaire warned UN headquarters about the trouble brewing, and repeatedly

pleaded for action and backup. But the worlds major powers failed to act or
provide him with troops. Dallaire, a soldier with a mission to protect and orders
not to intervene, had to stand by as up to a million people were killed in 100 days.

Already, in the immediate aftermath, Dallaire couldnt sleep. His right arm was
mysteriously fluctuating between sharp pain and paralysis. A voice in the back of
his head was incessantly screaming, Why is the rest of the world carrying on like
nothing has happened? Upon his return flight from the worst wartime experience
a senior Canadian officer had undergone since the Korean conflict, there was no
one at all, neither politician nor fellow general, to greet him at Mirabel airport. It
was a shocking breach of protocol that seemed to underscore how much his own
countrymen wanted to ignore the genocideand that his peers secretly blamed
him for the UNs failure in Rwanda.
But, for all that, Dallaire still didnt see himself in Reays prophetic warning,
because in 1994 no one saw post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for what it
was. Dallaire learned soon enough that hard work wouldnt make it go away. A
few weeks after speaking with Reay, Dallaire and his wife, Beth, walked into a
autumn farmers market set up in Quebec Citys old quarter. The sweet, humid
smell of the cascading heaps of fruits and vegetables pitched him into a living
memory. He was suddenly back in the midst of a Rwandan market, absorbing
sights and scents: a few blackened bananas and avocados reeking of rot, a
crowd of starving women and children storming a food aid truck as it arrived,
stripping it bare and fleeing within minutes, those who did not survivea couple
of women and three children, trampled to death. In Quebec, Dallaire ran for his
car.

Canadians became widely aware Dallaire had not, could not, leave the slaughter
behind in June 2000, when it was widely reported he had been found near-
comatose from a mix of scotch and anti-depressants beneath a park bench near
his Hull home. (He twice asked the ambulance crew to kill him.) And we knew
why in 2004 with the release of Shake Hands With the Devil, Dallaires award-
winning book about the genocide. But PTSD was slow to enter the conversation,
and Dallaire kept private the full cruelty of his struggle with it. He is not a man
given easily to spilling his guts. He wonders if his graphic honesty, stripping away
veils that have hidden two decades of pain, will inspire contempt for his perceived
weakness.

Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda 2004 to commemorate 10th anniversary of the

genocide. (Peter Bregg, C.M. )

Not likely: the twin hells Dallaire describes are far more liable to provoke
sympathy. The hallmark of the 1994 Rwandan genocide was its peculiar intimacy
and the deliberate obscenity of its sexual pathology. Its hard work to kill
someone with a machete, Dallaire says matter-of-factly. So it was often a blow
or two and left to die over the next day. Blood, litres of it, was everywhere. To this
day the stench of it coagulating haunts Dallaire, whose PTSD is especially prone
to scent triggers, as much as the iron-tinged smell of fresh blood soothed him
once.

And what blows they were. Beyond the rivers and creeks jammed with corpses,
the men with their heads split open, the way UN soldiers had to walk in front of
their slow-moving vehicles to avoid running over the dead and the still dying
beyond that were the women ripped open, their fetuses beside them, the women
lying in pools of blood, broken bottles between their legs, the mass rape sites.
The horror of the latter is mostly passed over in silence in the memoir, but in
conversation Dallaire captures it in the single most appalling description he
utters, recalling one site where we could still smell the sperm.

There was no relief at all to be found in writing about such memories. Nothing,
Dallaire says. Its not been cathartic, more like digging up evil again and trying to
put it into words. But he had a powerful motive to start digging. Service and duty
matter more than anything else to Dallaire, and he could see how a description of
his post-Africa lifethe story of the other hellcould help fellow sufferers,
because theres an ugly side to this injury, not just a bad, stupid side, which is
about the impacts it has on you. The ugly side is what the darkness does to the
inner person and its significant impact on others. Nobody has written really on
that because its not very nice, and so I thought Id do that.

If PTSD has had a face in Canada over the last 20 years, it is Romo Dallaires.
His life story, in effect, is a personal history of how Canada, and the modern
world in general, has responded to PTSD. Thats putting a lot on my shoulders,
he protests, before conceding its inevitability and discussing the incomprehension
that faced him when he returned to Canada in 1994, an incomprehension he fully
shared.

Weve always known about shell shock and battle fatigue, he says, but the
military has never really sustained any desire to research it, to figure out how to
handle this injury. Even as battlefield medicine began saving soldiers lives at a
rate that dwarfed past efforts, there remained what Dallaire calls the
inappropriateness of tending psychological injuries, because it was against the
fundamental culture of the military, which is so Darwinian. The military doesnt
like injuries that it cant see, he adds. And because you couldnt see it, because
it affected the way guys acted with their colleagues, PTSD wasin a term Ive
used oftenan unacceptable injury, not dishonourable but not honourable either.
It has taken us two decades to get the regiments to recognize that these guys are
injured, theyre not slackers, and if you dont take care of them, this injury can be
terminal. Weve probably lost well over 40 back home from injuries sustained
psychologically on the battlefield.
Major-General Romeo Dallaireat the Kigali airport Aug. 1, 1994. (CP PHOTO/
Ryan Remiorz)

So Dallaire was misdiagnosed when he returned home, or, more accurately, not
diagnosed at all. No one asked about the genocide, no one even mentioned
Rwanda. He was tossed immediately into the maelstrom of helping manage a
severe Canadian Forces downsizing during the budget-crimped 1990s. My
colleagues and superiors honestly believed that hard work and a stiff upper lip
were the way forward. Those giving that advice included Gen. Reay, whom
Dallaire said urged him to throw himself into his work immediately after their little
talk about troubling developments among returning troops. The subtext of this
instinctive reaction, never made explicit, was that psychological trauma was the
realm of the weak, the insufficiently committed, and not to be expected among
career officers.

His PTSD, left untreated for too long became permanentDallaire still takes
medication, still has nightmares, still goes to therapy, still becomes unstuck in
timeand he learned about its nature and effects as his life unfolded. There is no
point in telling victims, or ones self, to get over it, put it in the past, move on,
because there is no past: the memories of the traumatic experience are not
memories, but eternal moments of right now. When that Quebec market brought
the Rwandan market to Dallaires mind, he wasnt recalling it, he was living it.

No, theres no time factor, agrees Dallaire. A very close colleague of mine, who
was with me over there, ran a program for us with veterans. He got so engrossed
with their hurt that it brought back everything that he had experienced in Rwanda.
He fundamentally crashed22 years later. The stress was so powerful that he
could not sustain it and he nearly lost his mind. Another fellow officer from the
Rwandan mission hanged himself in 2008. Once the tumble into the living past
happens, sufferers become what Dallaire calls bystanders to their own actions,
people who helplessly watch themselves doing stupid and ugly things.

There is a line, not always clearly expressed, in Dallaires mind between stupid
and ugly. Suicide, as idea and action, straddles it, and the line is also blurred
when it comes to family. For all his openness about himself, he is understandably
more circumspect about his wife and children. But from scattered references in
Waiting for First Light and Dallaires careful responses when asked, its clear they
too bore the cost of his injury.

Liberal Sen. Romeo Dallaire at Senate caucus in Ottawa on Wednesday, May 28,
2014. (Adrian Wyld/CP)

Romo and Beths three childrenWillem, Flower and Guywere still young
when he returned, only 15, 12 and seven. They and his wife had learned to get
along without him, or so thought Dallaire, whose response to them veered from a
cold disdain for family life to a bitter feeling they had no idea what hed been
through and no desire to know. Once, maybe twice, says Dallaire, channelling
what he believes is a common veterans experience, your spouse will listen to
you pour your heart out, but next time theyll interrupt to ask if you remembered to
feed the dog. He was in a constant rage, yelling at his family for no reason, and
feeling that any amount of shouting was nothing compared to what he had
seen. Sometimes, as in that 150-km/h race down the road, he simply didnt notice
them. Working to exhaustion all day and thrashing about in his nightmarish sleep,
Dallaire was soon in the spare bedroom.

You come back a zombie, or at least a foreigner to your family, and everything
around you seems so material, so superficial, he says. The family had a home in
Quebec City and he had work in Ottawa, so he made the decisionwhich was
not necessarily the best one, Im sureto stay away. He would live alone in the
Hull apartment. It wasnt a good decision for Dallaire, leaving him to rail about
alone at night, drinking himself into unconsciousness and, at times, thinking
about his fathers razor. If not for Beths sister, Christine, her daughter and
another niece, who also lived in the Gatineau area and who would come by,
alone or together, to sit with him on occasion, Dallaire would almost surely be
dead.

It was not good for the Dallaire children either. All three have followed their
parentsBeth too is from a military family and is now a UNICEF ambassador
and leading advocate of family support centresinto lives of humanitarian and
military service. The youngest, the only one who has read Shake Hands With the
Devil, recently sent Dallaire an email, prompted by the anger-management
therapy he had been undergoing. He asked, Why didnt we move to be with you?
Wouldnt it have been better for all of us? For us, but also for you? Dallaire says,
I didnt know how to answer. Lately, he has drawn closer than I had ever dared
hope to his oldest child, who came home from his latest mission hurting.
Personal knowledge of how devastatingly PTSD ripples outward has put military
families much on the Dallaires minds, especially now that evidence is emerging
that the teenaged children of PTSD-injured soldiers are themselves sometimes
committing suicide.

So too is the larger military family. Dallaire did not fully realize how mighty a
bulwark his military belonging provided until after it was no more. Its no accident
that both the cutting and park-bench episodes occurred after his unwilling
retirement on medical grounds left him feeling like I was wandering naked in a
foreign land. Or that his latest episode of dangerous drivingin December 2013,
Dallaire went from a full stop directly into a pole near Parliament Hill, without any
memory of how or whycorrelates with a spate of military suicides. Dallaires
thinking here is much like that of American writer Sebastian Junger in his book
Tribe: Part of the trauma of war is leaving it, Junger writes, meaning not the
actual bullets whizzing by, but the emotional support that soldiers find in a military
units cohesion. The military puts its members into the situations that cause their
injuries, but it also provides, however badly, the only solace many have
afterwards.

There needs to be a new covenant between the military and the nation, Dallaire
argues, in part because of his belief that PTSD is not just a physical or
psychological injury, but a moral wound.

He tells a story in his memoir. After hearing of a massacre in a village, Dallaire

sends a patrol, Canadian soldiers as it turns out. They find a rape site, a ditch full
of dozens of mutilated women and girls, most but not all dead. Later, Dallaire
sums up the situation with his 26 international contingent commanders: there are
no medical supplies; the dying are too injured to be moved and there is no means
of transport anyway; the risk of HIV infection is very high. What orders would they
issue: do what you can, or move on? Only three countriesGhana, Holland and
Canadasay to intervene. But the Canadian patrol leader never gives that order,
because he never has time. His soldiersyoung men, just 19, 20, 21have
already broken ranks, and are in the ditch trying to provide what comfort is
possible.

That is the kind of army Canada has, says Dallaire, because thats the kind of
nation Canada has evolved into. We have an army that, precisely because it
carries our moral norms into immoral situations, will be sensitive to the shock
and trauma presented by those sorts of conflicts. Theres been a breaking of the
bond between the nation and its military, he says. In recent years, we have
practically had to beg for the help we need. If Canada is going to send its armed
forces to help the worlds vulnerable, and Dallaire fervently believes it should, we
need a new cradle-to-grave agreement that Canada will take care of these
soldiers, who have suffered injuries on Canadians behalf, right up to veterans
retirement homes. And suicides should be numbered among the war dead.

Dallaire is most alive, and willing to stay that way, when he has a cause and a
sense it is progressing, whether that was his work as a senator from 2005 to
2014, his efforts to end the evil of child soldiers or work on behalf of veterans
rights. But he has learned to think outside the duty box too, in his scarcely hoped-
for reconciliation with his children, and in his appreciation of the healing power of
art.

A few years ago, Dallaires Pakistani deputy in Rwanda, Iqbal Riza, sent him a
copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridges 1798
Romantic classic of life-in-death and survivors guilt. Dallaire cried for days after
he read it, seeing himself as the mariner with the albatross about his neck,
condemned to tell his tale, over and over, to an unresponsive world.

But Riza, described by Dallaire as very, very intelligent, principled, unfailingly

sensitive, may have known Dallaire better than the Canadian knew himself.
Sometimes Dallaire could find in the poem not just a portrait of his fate, but a
sense of eternity, he says, which created a friction in me. The tension was
between his belief in the better angels of our natureand his failure to protect
themand Coleridges portrayal of these endless frictions that essentially pit
human beings against each other. That is something that I am still troubled by, to
be quite honest.

Troubled, perhaps, but also eased in his sense of personal responsibility for the
genocide. Dallaire ended up framing his memoir between Coleridges stanzas,
beginning with the one that must have stabbed closest to his heart: The many
men, so beautiful! / And they all dead did lie: / And a thousand thousand slimy
things / Lived on; and so did I.

The former general is 70 now, and in as good a place as hes occupied for these
22 years, but one made precarious by the very nature of his injury. First light has
broken on Romo Dallaire, but its not full daylight yet, if it ever will be. He knows
it. Maurice Baril still guards his guns.

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