Trauma of Rwandan genocide haunts ex-soldier

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/03/2018 (2779 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Early in Joseph Conrad’s tale of 19th-century colonial Africa, Heart of Darkness, the character Marlow remarks that this part of the continent was once “one of the dark places of the earth.” As the narrator’s story unfolds, we learn it is a place of unspeakable human horror leading men to a complete madness.

Retired Canadian Lt.-Col. Stéphane Grenier takes readers into one of our modern “hearts of darkness:” the Rwandan genocide of the early 1990s. He reflects on his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and empathizes with the plight of soldiers who served during the deployment as well as the psychological traumas soldiers face today in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Grenier was a young captain, happily married with a growing family, when he was deployed to Rwanda in 1994. He was assigned to Gen. Roméo Dallaire’s United Nations peacekeeping force as a media relations officer. Dallaire has also told his own story of the Rwandan genocide and PTSD in his Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.

The truth of Rwanda hit Grenier on his first day. Driving from the airport to his hotel, the Tutu genocide became a reality — a horror he would face over the next 10 months. He saw his first corpse, he writes, “there by the side of the road like piece of unwanted garbage someone had thrown from their vehicle… it was obvious the person had met a sudden, violent death. This was the first of thousands of corpses I would see on my tour of Rwanda.”

The only picture of corpses we see are that of an older man and a young girl lying on her stomach, the latter’s arms tucked in beside her body and her fists by her head, in a “posture my own daughter often assumed” while lying in bed. But with this girl, “one-third of her head was missing, leaving her brain exposed. Her murderers had deliberately cut her head in two pieces and left her body to rot.”

Grenier relived this image after he returned home when watching his daughter sleep.

Grenier didn’t recognize the psychological changes taking place as his deployment continued and, worsening the problem, there were no mechanisms in place to help soldiers in the early stages of operational stress injuries.

The old soldier’s motto “suck it up, buttercup” was still the operational standard.

An adage states that politicians and generals always fight the last war. Grenier believes the military hierarchy didn’t understand that the peacekeeping missions in the 1990s, where the opposing sides were still killing each other, were radically different than the role Canadians played in the Sinai Peninsula and Cyprus.

Grenier spent the next years of his military service challenging the military establishment to create and implement new approaches to mental health. He now works in the private sector, promoting mental health in the workplace.

Ian Stewart’s previous review was of Jody Mitic’s book Everyday Heroes.