The Truth About War with Combat Veteran Kelsi Sheren
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 19 minutes
Words per Minute
197.76915
Summary
In this episode, Kelsey talks about how she joined the Canadian military at the age of 19, how she got into the military, and what it was like being a female in the military. Kelsey also shares the story of how she became the first woman in her unit to be deployed overseas.
Transcript
00:00:00.560
We don't know what we are asking people to truly go do.
00:00:13.580
What does it feel like to pull a trigger on a kid?
00:00:15.640
What does it feel like to watch someone get stoned to death?
00:00:18.000
What does that smell like when you have to go pick up burning bodies?
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It's like you're not going to win against cultures like this.
00:00:25.040
They are willing to do what we are not willing to do.
00:00:27.780
We don't know how we're going to react until we react, until we're in it.
00:00:34.920
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00:00:38.880
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00:00:42.400
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00:00:45.520
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00:00:52.820
What makes a 19-year-old girl want to join the military and go and fight abroad?
00:00:57.780
I didn't necessarily want to fight abroad as much as I wanted to join the military because I was a lost 18-year-old kid that came from a small town.
00:01:16.400
I was going to the—so you guys here in the U.K. call it Remembrance Day as well, so I don't have to Americanize it for you.
00:01:22.080
But it was Remembrance Day, and I always go down to the ceremonies.
00:01:25.940
I grew up with a family that was very much supportive of the military, the people who fight for the country.
00:01:31.960
We never had military in the family, but Remembrance Day is a non-negotiable.
00:01:35.560
So I was in college at Algonquin in Ottawa, Ontario, and that being the capital, they do the biggest ceremony.
00:01:42.280
I went down, and I came back to the college, and there was a lady on the bus who—God, I was young, so I could have said she was older, and I wouldn't have guessed how old, but she was quite old.
00:01:51.340
And she was in an Air Force uniform, and she just had rows of medals, and she just looked like she had lived a life worth dying for.
00:02:00.340
And that intrigued me, so I spoke to her for a little bit, and for whatever reason, I got off the bus that day, and I walked into my professor's office and said, I'm quitting.
00:02:08.960
And I went and found the closest office to join, and I joined the military.
00:02:15.160
And then how long did it take you before you were on the front line?
00:02:30.860
Were you taught everything that you needed to do?
00:02:34.840
So I'm an English-speaking Canadian, even though our country's second language is French.
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You learn it a little bit in elementary school, but it's not the language of predominance unless you're in French immersion.
00:02:44.280
So I was joining the Canadian Army knowing that French is around.
00:02:51.920
I did SQ and DP1, which is like your trade-specific training and all your weapons handling.
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From that point on, I was then posted to an all-French-speaking unit, completely French, out of Vachetier-Quebec.
00:03:03.540
I did not speak fluent French, but I was given the option to go to my posting or go to this posting who was going to be deploying faster.
00:03:11.180
And at the time, they have you playing war games, right?
00:03:14.540
They have you, you know, feeding it down your throat.
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The media, you know, these bad dudes, these bad dudes, coffins are coming home, flags are draped.
00:03:24.360
So I was given the opportunity to switch postings from an English one to a French one.
00:03:38.780
So I was a blonde 19-year-old, five-foot, you know, 100-pound female that walked into an all-male platoon that was an all-French-speaking platoon.
00:03:47.960
My sergeant to this day, he speaks English now, but when I got there, the only things he mustered was, I don't want you.
00:04:07.100
But it was just a new experience, and I was open to the new experience.
00:04:11.200
And I didn't have that idea of what I was walking into.
00:04:14.200
You know, we ask people to go do these jobs, and we say, ah, but that was their job.
00:04:22.800
But also, you, because I've heard another interview of you where you were talking about you were into taekwondo.
00:04:31.360
And then there was, I think it was your coach sexually abused one of your friends.
00:04:39.100
Yeah, so I'll clarify that because there's been some, ugh.
00:04:45.880
And my training partner up until that point, there were multiple years we did not know that he was sexually assaulting her when I wasn't at our morning sessions.
00:04:53.760
So if I didn't go, that's when it was happening.
00:04:56.260
I don't know how much a 13-year-old girl and an almost 40-year-old man can be consensual, but we'll leave that up to the courts.
00:05:02.480
So at that point, I stopped fighting right around 13.
00:05:07.300
I stopped that track of where I wanted to go professionally with it, left it, and I then, you know, just focused on other sports.
00:05:14.640
And then I got back into fighting again once I joined the military.
00:05:18.320
So I started to fight within the military service.
00:05:21.240
And my last fight was in Las Vegas at the U.S. Open, and I believe I was 19.
00:05:26.320
Something about getting kicked in the face and having to skip in the sauna to lose weight was just not something I was in for anymore.
00:05:31.080
Yeah. And you mentioned that a lot of people, when they sign up, they don't know what they're signing up for.
00:05:35.940
We had a very interesting interview with a British colonel, Richard Kemp.
00:05:40.120
And when we asked him why people joined the military, he was like, because they want to go and fight, and that's what they want to do.
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But you signed up because this woman inspired you.
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Did you anticipate actually, like, then ending up in a conflict zone?
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I walked into the recruiter's office, and they were very, very clear.
00:06:03.260
Canada just started to become an ISAF nation within Afghanistan.
00:06:07.260
But in two, I think, I don't want to get this wrong, but I believe 2006, 2007, Nicola Goddard was our first female killed.
00:06:17.200
And I knew, they made it clear, you're going to deploy.
00:06:20.500
We're doing six-month cycles, and you are going to deploy.
00:06:23.860
It's just a matter of when, because the trade I had chosen was tagged red, meaning we need people, desperately.
00:06:34.920
So I ran the M777 155-millimeter howitzers, which shoot around upwards, max 40 kilometers, about 100 pounds per round.
00:06:44.340
And did you choose to go into the artillery, or was that something that was chosen for you?
00:06:51.500
And then they suggested artillery as the next option, because something about sitting in a tin can while it drives down the road that's filled with IEDs didn't, you know, wasn't a pretty good thing to me.
00:07:00.480
I would have been a great driver because it's small and compact.
00:07:04.360
But I wanted to be more effective on the front lines.
00:07:07.840
All I kept, and the only thing I really knew was I wanted to make sure I was affecting change.
00:07:17.320
You need all the people that do the paperwork and get the ammunition and all that.
00:07:21.660
I've always been the forward-leaning, and as you can see at lunch, a type personality.
00:07:26.080
Yeah, you're pretty high energy when we're talking about that.
00:07:30.680
And I was wondering if, you know, the time you had with this French-only speaking unit, you're the only one there.
00:07:45.920
How do you get from that to, you know, deploying?
00:07:49.800
You clearly, you know, you actually doing the job.
00:08:02.560
By the time I got to him, I'd already done my training.
00:08:07.600
I'd already done the sleep deprivation, the weapons handling, all of the things that make you a, quote-unquote, soldier, right?
00:08:15.180
Once you do your trade-specific training and you graduate through that, then you are considered, like, that trade specialist.
00:08:23.480
You don't become a gunner until you pull your first lanyard.
00:08:32.140
And so we trained on the 105s, which are smaller.
00:08:35.180
But once you do that, then you graduate from that and then you get to your posting and you go to your units and things like that.
00:08:41.860
I annoyed the living shit out of them until I understood enough of the language where I didn't have to be like, hey, sergeant.
00:08:51.240
I'd be like, question pour vous, quoi clock en français, anglais?
00:09:01.720
But I think the reason the tolerance was there, in my opinion, at least, was I was willing to do the job.
00:09:14.280
And from a physicality standpoint, I was in shape.
00:09:22.240
So as long as you show up, you normally have to prove yourself a little bit.
00:09:32.980
And what was that like the first time you set foot on Afghan soil?
00:09:37.420
Because that must have been a hell of a culture shock.
00:09:44.020
That was an interesting concept because we did our workup training for Afghanistan in Wainwright, Alberta, in the winter.
00:09:53.160
That tracked, as the military does, that makes total sense.
00:10:01.300
And just like everyone else, we fly into CAF, or at least Canadians, we fly into CAF, which is this spot in Kandahar.
00:10:06.660
Which is a, you know, there's a Tim Hortons there.
00:10:13.740
There's, it's where the officers and your in and outs kind of go.
00:10:19.140
So it was kind of a, a soft entry into the country, if you will.
00:10:23.400
Once we got picked up by the Chinook and got taken to the FOB, we were with an American FOB out in the middle of the Mewan District.
00:10:28.980
That's when things got real, real, real, real, real quick.
00:10:31.880
Because you realize within this tiny base, everybody outside of it wanted to kill you.
00:10:38.240
HESCO is like a, like a material, like a soft material.
00:10:41.480
And you fill it with stone and then you make walls out of it.
00:10:43.700
So you realize really quickly that, you know, you stepping outside of here, you don't know what you're getting and who wants to shoot you.
00:10:53.260
And then our very first fire mission was, was an interesting one.
00:10:57.580
Well, I mean, it's the first time you realize that you're not just shooting for target practice.
00:11:01.720
You're shooting HE, you know, high explosive rounds downrange.
00:11:08.680
Because you're pulling a lanyard, waiting for the all clear, saying, you know, you hit the target or, you know, adjust, which means, oops.
00:11:17.800
Well, we missed as much because once you drop an artillery round, I mean, it just takes out a lot.
00:11:23.340
So you're not going to miss per se, but it was a disconnect for sure.
00:11:28.520
You hit the wrong thing is what you're implying.
00:11:31.600
We try not to hit the, listen, we, most of our people, my guys were super accurate.
00:11:35.220
I, every guy I served with, I got to be honest, like they were switched on.
00:11:39.340
Like I can speak for my guys and not the rest of them, but my guys were switched on.
00:11:42.700
And I got the privilege of my gun troop, my gun troop was, out of all the Canadians that deployed that time, we were taken to an American fob.
00:11:55.400
So then I got to work with Americans, learn their culture a little bit, which is hilarious when you jump on a radio and only French speaking starts speaking to Texans.
00:12:05.160
I got to tell you, the comedy was the greatest part about that.
00:12:08.680
And what's the main difference between the Canadian and the American military?
00:12:15.560
I mean, we're drastically different in the sense that we don't have Marines, right?
00:12:19.160
So like Americans have, you know, the Marines and the Air Force and the Navy and the Army, and we just have Army, Navy, Air Force.
00:12:26.460
But I mean, we have similarities, but we have differences.
00:12:36.880
And we're part of, you know, we're part of the British, the monarchy.
00:12:41.480
I mean, Canada falls under, you know, you guys, you guys control everything.
00:12:49.040
Because a former guest of ours on the show, he served in Afghanistan.
00:12:54.220
And he said a lot of the times, and I'm not putting words in your mouth, you can push back on this.
00:12:58.820
Americans very much had a policy of fire first, ask questions later.
00:13:02.500
And he said that as a British soldier, particularly as he was a conduit between the British and the Afghan tribes, he would be building these bridges.
00:13:11.960
And then the next day, they would just get burned to the ground because, you know, people would die on friendly fire and whatever else.
00:13:22.200
I personally had never experienced a friendly fire incident.
00:13:25.280
And I have a lot of friends that do that live with that for the rest of their life, and they'll never be the same from it.
00:13:29.720
They arguably struggle more from that than they do from anything else in the war.
00:13:33.720
You know, that's never, it's never what you want.
00:13:37.200
It's really hard to win a war against people who don't play by the same rules.
00:13:43.120
I think particularly topically speaking, when we talk about Israel, Palestine, for example.
00:13:50.160
Well, I actually, I had no plans to talk about it, but I just, I think you probably have an insight into that conversation that the overwhelming majority of people don't.
00:14:02.320
Playing by the different set of rules to the enemy?
00:14:04.860
I think that we're doing the, I think we have the same problem, right?
00:14:07.360
I think it's, I'm not going to, I'm going to be very clear about this.
00:14:12.300
You've never seen me talk about it on Instagram or social media for a reason.
00:14:15.540
I'm, I try really hard ever since I started podcasting on my show about three years ago to really stay in my lane unless I am really, really knowledgeable.
00:14:26.680
What I will say about that involvement is it's really hard to win against an enemy that values death more than they value life, period.
00:14:37.640
You can't, and it's not that we should ever eradicate humans.
00:14:47.380
Anybody I believe who's ever been to war and seen true violence will never advocate for war.
00:14:52.140
But we will advocate for strategic insertion because there are bad people that need to die.
00:15:03.000
There are people out there that should not be here.
00:15:08.720
And we do our job to send the SEALs and the JTF-2 and the, you know, the Rangers and the guys that know how to do this without a conventional fighting force on the ground.
00:15:17.800
I'll never advocate for a fighting force on the ground conventionally the way we did in Afghanistan.
00:15:21.480
I think a lot of people died that didn't need to die.
00:15:24.720
That being said, I don't love either side of that war.
00:15:33.980
I have issues with the way some things are being done.
00:15:36.660
It's hard to fight a force that has a government, a recognized government that's a terrorist organization.
00:15:46.820
Where was everyone when the Taliban were cutting hands off kids and blowing them into pieces?
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Where was everyone's rage when women were being stoned to death and raped?
00:16:01.620
Where was everyone's rage when people were putting teddy bears in backpacks full of IEDs and setting them in front of schools?
00:16:20.560
Because it's we pick and choose what we have outrage over.
00:16:27.820
We were doing a thing for Apple and we were chatting after and he said, you know, I'm going to go.
00:16:37.240
I want to record the things people aren't talking about.
00:16:41.020
I think Douglas Murray's got that dialed right now, bro.
00:16:53.600
But you're about to see some things that you're never going to unsee.
00:16:56.240
And I don't know that you're really ready for that.
00:17:03.080
And my husband was in the room and he looked at me and he's just like, don't don't.
00:17:37.260
It's politically better to side with one side or the other right now.
00:17:41.740
I've never seen anything like I have seen these Hamas protests across the world.
00:17:48.680
I don't know how you guys are feeling about that.
00:17:50.700
I think I know how you guys are feeling about that.
00:17:55.940
That's like that's like us during the Afghanistan war having the Taliban.
00:18:04.560
Marching around London and everyone being like, it's cool.
00:18:19.840
You go out on the streets and ask somebody what river, what sea.
00:18:29.680
Do I think that all Israelis should be pushed out of the country or Jews or should be treated like this?
00:18:36.460
Do you know which river and sea they're talking about, by the way?
00:18:39.860
The river, I know the Mediterranean, it would be the sea, but no, I wouldn't know the river now.
00:18:49.420
I'm so tired of the social justice warriors who have no clue what they're saying.
00:18:55.580
And when they say, go kill them, go kill them all.
00:19:00.380
You have no idea what it's like to watch someone's lights go out.
00:19:08.260
You have no clue what you are asking another human being to go do.
00:19:18.060
Tell me how that works out when they come back.
00:19:22.060
I just, I think we, I think we just start wars.
00:19:27.180
And I think everything that happened on the 7th is not OK.
00:19:38.980
I just don't agree with like on either side, just mass violence.
00:19:41.980
I just, I've seen it and I've seen what it does to both sides of people.
00:19:47.460
And it's the kids that are going to have to live with this.
00:20:13.160
Well, what did it create when the Soviets were in Russia?
00:20:19.300
So it creates kids and uncles and brothers and aunts and cousins and family members who are
00:20:26.840
now brought up generation after generation to just continually hate each other and perpetuate
00:20:37.780
It's that saying, an eye for an eye makes the world go blind.
00:20:46.280
Kelsey, do you think part of the problem is that war is one of those things that you just
00:20:52.960
And everybody that I know who has been to war, I remember my grandfather, who was a desert
00:20:58.320
rat and fought in the Battle of El Alame and fought in Italy in the Second World War.
00:21:07.500
And being a kid and being an ignorant little kid, and I remember trying to ask him about
00:21:13.960
But people who have never been have this almost idealized, romanticized image of what war
00:21:24.420
Because we'll think about what people are learning.
00:21:27.220
They're not learning from textbooks the way that we used to learn, where you would open
00:21:55.920
And we, you know, the history is written by the victors in every sense of the word.
00:22:03.300
I think Hollywood and other people glorify violence to make a lot of money.
00:22:08.020
I think we don't talk about what it really means, what it smells like, because war has
00:22:15.060
a smell, what it feels like, because it has a feel.
00:22:20.920
And I don't think that we articulate it well enough.
00:22:23.860
I think that's why we're so quick to just send our kids over.
00:22:27.040
We don't have an understanding of what they're about to see and what they're about to do.
00:22:30.680
I mean, there's a few films that have done an incredible job.
00:22:32.440
Fury with Brad Pitt was brilliant, was brilliant, like illustrating the smells and like the
00:22:38.600
textures of what war is, you know, but then you have like glorified Navy SEAL movies and
00:22:45.220
It's like, rah, rah, rah, let's go to America, let's go fucking kill everybody.
00:22:48.340
It's like, okay, but what does it feel like to pull a trigger on a kid?
00:22:52.140
And what's it feel like to watch someone get stoned to death?
00:22:56.480
What does that smell like when you have to go pick up burning bodies?
00:23:04.480
Do you think there's a part of human nature that, it's a strange thing to ask, but enjoys
00:23:11.100
it, that likes it, that, you know, chimps go to war, humans have gone to war for our entire
00:23:17.220
Is there a part of us that is actually into this shit?
00:23:21.200
I think there's got to be some level baked into humanity.
00:23:28.460
I mean, I'm guessing you would have served with some people who would have had a great
00:23:43.460
I, uh, it's not that I didn't hate it either, but there's something that happens when you
00:23:53.120
That's one of your own that switch flips and it's not that you love it anymore, but you're
00:24:01.840
Because you are, quote unquote, radicalized by the experience?
00:24:13.960
However, that changes the mind psychologically in those events.
00:24:20.480
That's the only way I'm, I've been able to articulate it to this day.
00:24:25.680
I still say it's a light switch where I could feel, uh, almost a wall go down where everything
00:24:33.000
I was feeling, the rage, the level of anger, the violence was okay to me.
00:24:38.760
So you were talking about basically being desensitized.
00:24:43.560
And that to me makes complete sense because that's a survival mechanism.
00:24:46.760
Because if you were aware of everything that was happening and you were taking it all
00:24:49.940
in, I mean, that would destroy you psychologically.
00:24:56.920
Um, but I think some people, it doesn't have that effect on, which is really, really fascinating
00:25:02.920
I mean, I've got guys who, you know, nine, 10, 11, 12 tours and yeah, they've got some
00:25:10.120
I'm like, damn, like, damn, like you've been, I do not claim to be that person.
00:25:18.300
I don't, I don't know that I could have been that person.
00:25:19.760
I'm not made for that, but I think you desensitize.
00:25:25.100
And the people to the left and right of you depend on you to be able to pull a trigger
00:25:32.020
Like, you know, we, they, they do a good job of baking that into you when you're in the
00:25:36.180
And tell us more about your time in Afghanistan, because, um, most people listening would go,
00:25:41.780
well, look, you're, you're pulling the lanyard on a Howard.
00:25:44.340
So how are you experiencing all of these things?
00:25:46.800
How do you go from that particular situation to having these terrible experiences and everything
00:25:58.360
So at the time when I was serving, the Canadians allow women to do combat arms roles, but the
00:26:08.380
The, the United States military started integrating women like 15, 16 into these more combat arms
00:26:16.560
And so, uh, we got, I just, listen, I'm not, I wasn't anybody special.
00:26:24.960
I just got a call, came down, uh, to my Sergeant, uh, the FOB and they said, uh, she's been picked
00:26:29.940
to go with the, the, the, the, the third Scots and the Blackwatch people.
00:26:40.740
Um, at the time my Sergeant fought it tooth and nail.
00:26:58.500
But the only way that I survived that was because I was given extra training because
00:27:01.460
my Sergeant had under been to war before and understood what that could potentially
00:27:05.260
look like if we had to move those guns and go outside the wire with them.
00:27:15.340
Because before we started, you were like, the reason I watch your show is you ask questions
00:27:19.000
that everybody has on the tip of their tongue, but is afraid to ask.
00:27:22.160
And that seemed to me like the most obvious question to ask.
00:27:28.840
So they actually put you in more danger in order to put you so that they could.
00:27:37.500
Well, when you are with women who are in burqas and things like that, the men cannot
00:27:47.540
And what we were seeing was they were starting to hide radios, money, other things that would
00:27:51.820
indicate that they were working with the Taliban.
00:27:54.980
So my job, we would stack on a house, kick the door in.
00:27:58.700
I would go in and take the women and kids, put them all in a separate room.
00:28:01.940
I would put a translator and a Brit at the door.
00:28:04.440
And then I would go in and I would search all the women and kids for anything, really.
00:28:09.240
And so you were also, so you were always the person to do that.
00:28:12.860
Now, that is high risk because obviously you don't know where you're going into.
00:28:16.260
But there's also the risk as well of suicide bombers.
00:28:21.320
I think there was one situation, well, there was only one situation where I was concerned
00:28:25.360
and it was a mom that came at me with these like material cutting shears.
00:28:33.460
It's more of being in the room when you are alone with a bunch of people and their children,
00:28:39.540
So you've got kids that are crying and screaming.
00:28:41.640
You've got a bunch of women that don't, I mean, we kick their door.
00:28:45.420
We wait till morning prayer is over because at least we did that.
00:28:53.620
So it's like, I can imagine somebody kicking my door in and going, I'm taking your kid with
00:29:01.340
So I can imagine and I can understand and have empathy now for why the women act the way
00:29:05.960
But I was also in super rural areas where, you know, the imam or the person was there.
00:29:17.220
And I still don't know what it's called, but it's like this, it acts like a drug really.
00:29:24.040
And so sometimes you get them in the room and they're all just doing this and you got
00:29:27.480
to put them up against the wall in a duck position to kind of put them off guard.
00:29:30.680
And it's, it's just a whole, it's just a whole vibe.
00:29:33.000
But the kicker was, I wasn't trained to do that job.
00:29:39.940
I got zap straps right before and a pair of gloves and said, good luck.
00:29:47.340
There was no, there was no, there was no choice.
00:29:49.160
But that seems to me just really bad practice, isn't it?
00:29:58.820
I was there to, basically all I was told was like, look, like when I deployed, I was
00:30:07.480
They dropped me with the Brits and then they, the Brits told the Brits, like, if she says
00:30:13.680
It's kind of like the bomb dog handler or the medic.
00:30:21.340
I'm like, if I find something, I know what I'm looking for.
00:30:25.200
But ultimately I was not trained to do that job in the way that I should have been doing
00:30:40.320
But I was given a 30 minute crash course from the RCMP about like my legal rights and what
00:30:49.740
Can't put a bag over their head, but I can cover their eyes.
00:30:55.740
If they had things on them, I had to place them down in front of them and show them that
00:31:03.220
I didn't take it, but it was in their vicinity.
00:31:05.740
And eventually that just became out the door with it because I'm not tolerating it anymore.
00:31:12.820
You don't really have time to be like, this is where your necklace is.
00:31:19.200
So, and most of the time they thought I was a little boy.
00:31:23.200
Then I'd have to take my, because it's like a little boy's going in the room with all
00:31:26.640
And I have to take my helmet off and show that I was a female.
00:31:32.380
And again, politically incorrect, but this is so fascinating.
00:31:38.060
I imagine there is, I imagine kicking someone's door in and invading their home in that way,
00:31:46.480
particularly initially, is a kind of internally very unpleasant experience.
00:31:51.320
Even if you're quite low empathy like me, I don't think I would enjoy doing that.
00:31:56.520
The first time I did it, it was very uncomfortable.
00:31:58.800
But I also imagine that then your own concern for your own security and the security of your
00:32:11.880
And it's only later that perhaps you start the process.
00:32:20.760
But once we started to lose people and bullets started to fly, I didn't care at all.
00:32:28.200
Frankly, I just only cared about the people in our uniforms.
00:32:37.640
And it's also as well because you inevitably see these people, I imagine, as the enemy.
00:32:44.700
Like, look, I, for a long time, the women and children, I never really had an issue with.
00:32:53.120
That took, even when I got home from Afghanistan, that took me a hot minute to be around a Middle
00:32:57.220
Eastern man without just being, you know, shifty.
00:33:06.640
I did my best to see people as human beings until all of a sudden they weren't.
00:33:10.740
And the moment that they weren't is at the moment that they became a threat or they showed
00:33:20.420
Most of the time, the women and kids never did anything wrong, right?
00:33:23.320
They may have hated you, but they weren't violent with me until they were violent, right?
00:33:28.220
So it's like I judged people just like I judge in life.
00:33:31.560
It's like if you give me a reason to dislike you or have a reason, I'm probably going to
00:33:36.160
I'm going to look at why I feel that way and go, is that a projection of something going
00:33:42.480
But when I was over there, no, I, I, you're outside the way or you were a threat.
00:33:48.540
It's that simple because they wore the same clothes as everyone else.
00:34:00.620
And that's completely different, like Hamas at the moment.
00:34:04.860
Your job is to go in with a team that kicks in doors.
00:34:12.440
Well, you had a whole bunch of experiences in Afghanistan.
00:34:17.360
Yeah, I had, I was out with the Brits for, it sounds short, but we're out there for a week
00:34:24.500
It was a larger conventional fighting force that was kind of attacking things.
00:34:28.800
And I only recently found out last week what we were even doing.
00:34:32.720
We were looking for IEDs and caches and things like that.
00:34:37.220
You were out in Afghanistan in armed combat and you weren't even informed about what you
00:34:54.720
I mean, dude, I was in the army for like a year and a half.
00:35:06.400
I would imagine the reason is, look, you need to do this because ultimately we need to
00:35:12.520
secure this area and blah, blah, blah in order that this can happen.
00:35:16.240
I wouldn't expect you just to be put in somewhere and you literally have no idea.
00:35:25.660
Well, you might not have been in Afghanistan around that time, but we were...
00:35:30.500
It was a rough, I mean, you know, 7 to 12, whatever you want to say, Canada's involvement.
00:35:36.420
2009 was a really rough year, really rough fighting summer for a lot of countries.
00:35:49.880
And ultimately, the summertime is the worst because they're harvesting opium.
00:35:56.000
Like, you know, the summer, they're going to put more of a resistance up.
00:36:01.780
I'm trying not to be blank because I know there's people who are going to be like,
00:36:09.940
But yeah, so for me, it was definitely interesting.
00:36:13.320
When I was with the Brits, we end up having an IED death where somebody, their foot hit
00:36:20.240
That was my first experience of what an IED will do to a human body.
00:36:31.880
I was one of the people that was body collection for that individual.
00:36:36.200
And if you know anything about the Taliban and what they love to do is they love to watch.
00:36:41.380
And they love to set off secondary devices once everyone rushes in for help.
00:36:45.260
So as soon as that first IED went off, things happened.
00:36:53.240
And then we had to get to there to get him out.
00:37:03.860
Like, you know, autopilot, do things, move, run, shoot.
00:37:07.980
When I got back, that's when I started to rub my hands pretty excessively.
00:37:12.560
And the medic saw it and noticed it and was like, you're good.
00:37:21.220
So that was the first time I had experienced a death in front of me.
00:37:24.560
And also listening to the ICOM radio, listening to the Taliban praise that they got one of our guys.
00:37:30.480
So that infuriates and stokes a level of anger that's really hard to articulate.
00:37:36.740
But then after that, you know, just we were just in countless firefights.
00:37:44.560
You're just fighting a group of people that would rather die and be honored to die, right,
00:37:53.160
And that's hard to wrap your brain around that people would prefer to die than to live.
00:37:57.820
But I mean, like a million songs have written about it.
00:38:00.120
They've told us now, like they've showed us who they are.
00:38:07.240
And this may sound like a weird question, but does it ever occur to you at this point to go,
00:38:16.500
No, no, I am property of the Canadian Armed Forces, son.
00:38:20.660
You go where you're told, you shut your mouth, you do your job.
00:38:28.800
All we were doing was sending rounds down range.
00:38:30.800
It gets boring when you're not shooting, right?
00:38:35.660
It's not like, oh, we're going to shoot today at this.
00:38:37.480
I mean, it is if the Americans are planning an operation.
00:38:39.980
They're like, we're going to need loom at this time, this many rounds.
00:38:43.840
Otherwise, you wait for a radio and then you could be out on a run around the fob or you
00:38:48.580
could be working out or in a shower and you just hear missing all set.
00:38:51.700
And it's like everyone, everyone drops towels, whatever.
00:38:54.900
And you run to the guns and then you get ready to go.
00:38:57.180
And so it was a very already a heightened state all the time.
00:39:01.300
We're like, oh, we're going to, when are we going to go?
00:39:04.760
And then I got favoritism because I got picked, right?
00:39:10.580
So I got picked up and they took me away and everyone stayed at the fob.
00:39:14.480
And I went to do what everybody wanted to go do, which was go fight in war.
00:39:25.820
When I came back from that, I didn't want to go back to the guns.
00:39:29.280
I wanted to stay with the guys because they rotate us women, right?
00:39:33.260
So instead of just keeping a CST, which is called a cultural support team,
00:39:37.520
is what they call them now, they would just like rotate us through.
00:39:40.840
And what happens is like when you get back, like a CST gets back,
00:39:43.960
what they do is they don't like go with the guys and like process like you were mentioning
00:39:52.900
And then you go back to wherever you came from.
00:39:54.460
And then you go back, however you are psychologically or whatever it is.
00:39:59.300
And you have to cope with that in a group of people who don't understand what you just went
00:40:02.260
through, nor do they believe it, nor were they there, nor will they understand.
00:40:06.380
So you just naturally outcast yourself, which is a really shit situation to be in because
00:40:17.960
And you talked about the hand rubbing and that's obviously OCD and a form of PTSD as well.
00:40:26.240
And when did you start to notice that your mind and the way you saw the world was being
00:40:34.660
adversely affected by the experiences that you were being put through?
00:40:45.320
CAF is where you fly into when you get out of Afghanistan.
00:40:47.460
So I got back to CAF because that's where they would do the operations in and out of.
00:41:04.700
And then ultimately it kind of came to a head when a QM warrant officer told me that
00:41:08.540
my braid was a mess and that I didn't have any ammunition left in my mag.
00:41:13.580
When we walk around CAF, you have to have a full mag on you.
00:41:17.720
And I told the, I think I told the warrant officer, you would know if you left CAF why
00:41:24.120
I didn't have any, you know, just like being nasty.
00:41:26.780
And then ultimately that got brought to the staff.
00:41:30.760
And they had medicated me without telling my staff.
00:41:34.260
So I was on 11 different drugs, sleep meds, uppers, downers, you name it.
00:41:38.680
I was on all of these different medications to get me to sleep, to get me to function again
00:41:44.260
And ultimately I went out onto the tower one day and I saw something that wasn't there.
00:41:49.760
And instead of like I racked around and my guy was like, what are you doing?
00:41:55.340
She was waving, but I thought she was pointing.
00:42:01.300
And I jumped off the tower and I went and told the radio guys, I was like, I'm not okay.
00:42:08.820
And then they sent me back to the hospital at, in CAF to get me checked out by a psychiatrist.
00:42:13.660
And, oh yeah, he sat down with me within like 10 minutes.
00:42:16.220
He's like, oh, okay, you're going to go home soon.
00:42:19.740
And then they sent me home three weeks early with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:42:24.760
And then I was ripped away from my unit and I never saw those guys again.
00:42:36.680
Because PTSD, that's a term that gets bandied about, but that is incredibly serious.
00:42:43.220
I mean, I came home and I attacked a Muslim family in a Walmart.
00:42:48.940
It was to the point where I wasn't functioning.
00:42:58.200
I would say horrible things about anybody who looked like I hated the way I was.
00:43:08.100
It did damage for the majority of my, you know, I mean, I'm 34 now.
00:43:12.400
I kind of started getting myself together around 2016.
00:43:16.440
Really psychologically started getting myself together around 19, 20.
00:43:29.140
Because at the time, Canada didn't, and my sergeant will say this to this day,
00:43:34.240
We hadn't encountered what had happened to you yet before.
00:43:37.920
And we did not know how to work with you or how to fix that
00:43:41.160
or how to keep that going or keep you in the service.
00:43:44.640
I mean, PTSD is pretty common in soldiers, isn't it?
00:43:48.140
But it's, normally the soldier will say, is smart enough to say, no, I'm good.
00:43:54.980
But I was being honest because I was like, well, I'm not good.
00:43:59.380
But what I didn't realize was that would mean that I would lose my job.
00:44:02.120
So, normally the guys would be like, yeah, I'm good.
00:44:06.460
They might go and do crazy shit, but it's more, so you write it off.
00:44:11.780
How do you think most of the special operations operate?
00:44:14.820
You think that they're always feeling great about their stuff?
00:44:19.940
You don't want to abandon the guys that you were with, so you say, I'm good.
00:44:27.500
I just, because of the operation I was in, it was known what happened.
00:44:31.920
And it was a bigger deal for me to be a part of.
00:44:51.960
And the support that you got from the military was minimal, I take it.
00:45:09.760
Yeah, it was really funny because I just found out this year when I was going through my documents
00:45:13.040
with my psychiatrist who's been treating me since 2011.
00:45:16.380
And he flipped through and he went, yeah, no wonder you were as bad as you were.
00:45:20.840
Because they gave me people to work with me that were not qualified to handle what had just happened.
00:45:26.180
Because, again, Canada's involvement was much later, right?
00:45:41.520
You know, we hadn't gone through all of that yet.
00:45:44.900
We started to see people turn around with multiple deployments and have issues.
00:45:47.700
But the guys would just come back and drink, right?
00:45:51.220
Like, one of my buddies, a sniper, and he was like, yeah, we would just, we would handle it our way.
00:45:55.560
But all we want to do is go back outside the wire.
00:46:01.820
But I just made the mistake of saying I wasn't okay.
00:46:08.320
Because now that you've been through all that and you...
00:46:19.640
And I think that's kind of what happens, right?
00:46:23.420
Everyone says they're good, they're good, they're good.
00:46:28.520
Medication, medication, alcohol, medication, compound, medication.
00:46:33.800
And what you've just described just explains why we have so many problems with veterans
00:46:41.160
when they come back and they're completely unable to function in society.
00:46:49.020
If you put people in that situation and they do and they get exposed to those type of experiences,
00:46:55.440
it's going to make reintegration and a normal life, in inverted commas, pretty difficult.
00:47:03.800
We have no clue what we're asking people to go do, right?
00:47:07.660
So it doesn't, shouldn't be a surprise that we've gone from 22 a day to 44 a day and climbing.
00:47:19.200
I did a TEDx a couple weeks ago for an organization called Honor House that I support.
00:47:26.540
And the first thing I started with is, what does the number 44 mean to you?
00:47:29.660
To an audience of 1,800 people who had no clue what that number meant.
00:47:35.220
That's pretty indicative in what's going on in the world.
00:47:39.680
When we ask people to go do this, we don't understand what that does to the families
00:47:44.020
and to the children and to all of these people, right?
00:47:46.600
It's, again, we don't know what we are asking people to truly go do.
00:48:04.720
They're at the Ivy League schools being smart, using their brain, right?
00:48:08.140
And if you're lucky enough and you come back and you can use your brain,
00:48:10.600
you can use your GI Bill to go do awesome things, for sure.
00:48:17.920
And some people don't ever adjust and they take their lives.
00:48:20.260
Some people, they adjust, they get home, and they crack on, and they're totally fine.
00:48:25.820
We can't, we don't know how we're going to react until we react, until we're in it.
00:48:39.660
He seems to be one of the guys that is okay, despite all of his injuries and the experiences he went through.
00:48:50.540
I, listen, I, there's something that is said in the community.
00:48:54.620
It's like, nobody hates a successful veteran more than another veteran.
00:49:12.300
I mean, like I said, I've got plenty of friends who are special operators.
00:49:20.880
I'm very privileged to be in the circles I am in and to be welcomed into the ones I am.
00:49:26.660
Yeah, man, these guys were 25-year, crack on, you know, clapping dudes like it was nothing.
00:49:34.780
And they go through just as hard as everyone else does.
00:49:38.380
You know, it's just about your network of support and if you have one or not.
00:49:43.640
Because in his books, he talks about his girlfriend and family being so super,
00:49:47.220
fiance, I think she was at the time, super supportive.
00:49:49.540
But anyway, can I ask an even more politically incorrect question?
00:50:01.420
How do you feel about the fact that women are increasingly encouraged to serve in combat?
00:50:18.560
I'm asking from a place of like, I have no idea.
00:50:21.440
I don't have an opinion about it because I genuinely don't know.
00:50:28.320
Look, women have always been doing combat arms rules in Canada, as far as I'm aware.
00:50:32.500
I could be wrong and I'm sure I'll find out after.
00:50:36.780
I'm sure all of my opinions will be well known after this.
00:50:40.760
But what I would say is, look, we can do the job.
00:50:43.300
That being said, do we should we be doing the job?
00:50:47.660
Yeah, Mike Ritland asked me this when I was on his show and he goes, look, I don't think
00:50:54.580
I said, well, let's have the real conversation about how men assault men and no one talks about
00:51:01.520
But I'm saying like normally the conversation is, well, it's an assault issue, right?
00:51:08.040
OK, so in terms of actually serving in that capacity, if you can do the job effectively,
00:51:14.400
That being said, there are plenty of men, old school thinkers or even now who are like,
00:51:22.560
Men are going to respond differently when women are around, i.e., like if she's in danger,
00:51:27.540
there might be more of an inclination to be like, oh, and then that person gets killed
00:51:31.540
and it's like maybe they wouldn't have reacted if women weren't there.
00:51:34.300
I think there is a need for us, especially when we're fighting up against
00:51:37.860
we're going to be Geneva Convention, so we got to follow it.
00:51:44.060
Otherwise, they're just a soft, they're an opportunity.
00:51:46.700
They're an opportunity for them to abuse us in the sense of we, we respect the Geneva Convention,
00:51:55.160
Well, what do the Taliban start doing for a little while?
00:52:00.020
So, I mean, you need, I think you do need women on the battlefield.
00:52:03.400
I think it's hard to, harder to integrate them.
00:52:05.480
I think it has to be a specific type of female.
00:52:07.860
I think the idea that every woman is going to transition well into that space is naive.
00:52:13.820
I guess partly what I'm also asking is, I would imagine just with my cursory understanding
00:52:20.740
of evolution, this is me talking out of my ass potentially here, very possible.
00:52:26.460
But is it possible that men evolved to fight more so than women?
00:52:42.720
So what I'm saying is, just because you can pull the same lanyard that a man can with the
00:52:49.520
same efficiency and you're strong enough to do it and you're good enough at picking the
00:52:53.660
cord and it's where the shell is supposed to land and you're good at taking orders and
00:52:56.900
you may even be even better, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:52:59.620
Is maybe the impact on you down the line greater because you're just not involved as much to
00:53:07.220
be able to handle the violence, the brutality, the whatever?
00:53:13.720
I feel like I need to ruminate on that before I answer, but I don't think I have time.
00:53:23.940
I think there was plenty of, you know, if you go back into generations of different cultures,
00:53:29.840
So I, you know, there's the bloodline, you know, where does your genetics come from and
00:53:35.480
I was, I grew up as a fighter, so I didn't know any different and that didn't cross my
00:53:42.560
mind at all to even think that, okay, maybe there'll be a genetic component that could play
00:53:50.500
As a mother now looking at that, would I ever go do that again unless somebody kicked my door
00:53:56.160
So I think for sure, I think there's a biological component that we do overlook that, you know,
00:54:01.780
naturally just due to the wokeism of the world, you know, women can do everything.
00:54:05.800
So I think there's always going to be a bit of that, but I think it's not about having
00:54:11.240
It's about what is most effective on the battlefield, in my opinion.
00:54:15.500
And unfortunately, due to, you know, the culture, politics, whatever you want to say, you're going
00:54:23.780
to have, you know, we can do everything kind of conversations no matter what.
00:54:29.280
And I have some of the baddest females I know were special warrant officers, special, sorry,
00:54:33.340
female special warrant officers who went down range with the Rangers, some of the baddest
00:54:40.760
Well, as long as we're fighting people where we're going to abide by their Geneva Convention,
00:54:46.760
Until that ends, until we start saying no, we're just going to do that.
00:54:51.600
Well, I mean, that's why we didn't win the war.
00:54:52.860
I mean, we can't, we can't win against things where people aren't playing by the rules.
00:54:56.880
If there's a set of rules, and both of you aren't playing by it, what do you think is
00:55:13.680
I think about this all the time, you know, because if I read history a lot, I mean,
00:55:22.380
conflicts are won by the side that is willing to use unmitigated, overwhelming force.
00:55:31.500
And if you are not prepared to do that, then the other team is going to win.
00:55:36.240
And we don't, and we, I don't think in the social media world, I said this before, I
00:55:41.080
don't know if the West is ever going to win another war.
00:55:44.260
And I hate to say that because that sounds terrible, but.
00:55:50.200
Not, no, because we fall under NATO, which falls over, we have the Geneva Convention.
00:55:54.820
There are things we cannot do, regardless of them being right or wrong.
00:55:59.540
If we need to kill a bad dude, but he's in a compound filled with women and kids, we're
00:56:11.820
Well, it depends who you're asking, because the Taliban will hit that compound, no problem.
00:56:15.620
Better yet, they'll hit the compound, take the women and kids and enslave them into
00:56:21.600
Let me, let me, I don't know if you guys know about this.
00:56:24.080
You might because you're smart individuals, but most people are kind of blind to this.
00:56:27.760
Have you ever heard of, uh, of Man Love Thursdays?
00:56:33.880
That wasn't where I expected that to go, I'll be honest with you.
00:56:45.920
So in Afghanistan, poorer families will take the young boys to the Taliban or those people.
00:56:56.140
Yeah, so they'll take them to the, um, there, the boys will serve the chai tea and then the
00:57:05.920
Well, we're not there to fight that, so we let it happen.
00:57:10.860
Well, you see a mother getting buried up to her neck and stoned to death by her husband
00:57:15.240
and children because she looked at a male soldier.
00:57:25.220
Shouldn't you kill the father because he's probably associated?
00:57:31.940
They're about to murder someone in front of me.
00:57:38.280
So it's like we can allow for raping of children and we can allow for open-air sex slavery and
00:57:45.900
for we can allow for, you know, grown elders to come marry off of seven-year-old girls and
00:57:53.900
know they're going to be raped the rest of their lives.
00:57:57.140
But if you point at me with a gun, then I can take you off the face of the air.
00:57:59.960
It's like you're not going to win against cultures like this.
00:58:03.340
They are willing to do what we are not willing to do.
00:58:07.020
And that's not about, you know, and I'm going to hear about this for sure.
00:58:19.260
They were always in charge, whether it's by proxy or what.
00:58:23.560
How about the billion dollars of weapons that were left?
00:58:27.300
If I lose a flashlight, I am getting a written charge on my record.
00:58:34.020
I had guys on the ground during the pullout who were being told to do the opposite of
00:58:39.320
We are told anytime you leave something, you destroy it so it can never be used again.
00:58:59.000
It's way above my pay grade, but let's be honest.
00:59:06.960
Nobody wants to talk about that because we did a snap election and no one could talk about that.
00:59:13.040
You know how we were chatting about media prior?
00:59:18.200
And we get this, I get this phone call from a buddy of mine named Griff.
00:59:26.120
And he goes, hey, I got a nine pack of VIP Canadians.
00:59:38.320
I'm over here running a jewelry company and a podcast, guys.
00:59:43.660
We start making connections with people on the ground.
00:59:46.260
And I'm sitting on Signal on my phone and I'm trying to, you know, talk, hey, where are these people?
00:59:56.160
And they're like, you know, Kelsey, we'd like to interview you.
01:00:01.320
We want to talk about how you feel about how the pullout's going.
01:00:05.640
So I said, so you want to call in nationally, across the board, gaslight a bunch of veterans
01:00:11.020
to make us look angry, violent individuals to, you know, justify the way you treat us
01:00:16.580
And she goes, well, no, we just want to question you.
01:00:29.780
The Trudeau administration has set a blackout on anything Afghanistan related.
01:00:33.640
So as this is happening, while the Brits are coming over to Afghanistan and the Americans
01:00:38.580
are there on the ground and you've got ex-contractors, dudes just flying in on their own trying
01:00:44.520
to help, Canada cut the lines of communication and anybody who had a Canadian visa was not
01:00:53.860
So we got our family out using Americans and some other people that were willing to do some
01:01:04.500
But that being said, the amount of people we've abandoned, it's like, number one, Canada
01:01:18.560
Do you think anybody who we'll ever fight against in another country is ever going to
01:01:25.980
No, not if they're, you have their head on their shoulders.
01:01:31.460
There's so few of them that got that that got out of the country, truly.
01:01:40.460
I think that we not only lost, but we set back anybody who supported us, any women and
01:01:45.580
children, anybody who thought they had a future.
01:01:48.040
The second we left that country, that was over.
01:01:51.340
Those women and kids, unless you're a boy, you're never going to school.
01:01:57.260
All you're going to do is get married off, just like they started doing again.
01:02:01.820
Into sex slavery that nobody wants to talk about.
01:02:06.480
10.3 million women and children that are in sex slavery.
01:02:12.320
Let's not have the conversation about 46.9 million people by the United Nations that are
01:02:16.060
in sex slavery and just slavery in general across the world.
01:02:22.340
I struggle with these issues because our people who are making the decisions to go to war
01:02:35.900
Like these colonels, these people who sent who were running Afghanistan.
01:02:40.560
Not a single one of them has been reprimanded for the fact that we billions on billions of
01:02:44.780
dollars and we lost how many lives and then we abandoned all of the people and then all
01:02:50.600
Like that's never we've never abandoned that much weaponry.
01:02:53.440
And I can't even I can't even think of a time where that would have been acceptable
01:02:57.780
So it's like, of course, things are the way they are.
01:03:02.240
Of course, of course, you know, these countries are the way they are.
01:03:38.320
Someone was having that discussion on social media.
01:03:41.700
And I was I really don't know how I feel about that because I am always the same as you.
01:03:52.060
I think I think it's possible to regret things if you imagine yourself being a different person to the person that you were.
01:04:03.480
The only way you were going to learn the things you had to learn is by doing the things you ended up doing.
01:04:09.340
Do you do you the pull out from Afghanistan atrocious, the war in Afghanistan ultimately unproductive and in fact counterproductive, you might argue.
01:04:22.200
Do you think that is because we never should have gone in the first place or do you think that's because the way it was done once we were in?
01:04:31.340
Well, I think we could only do what we can do again following the Geneva Convention.
01:04:41.280
And when you go into things without an end result here, you're going to kind of flounder.
01:04:46.600
I'm guessing if they sat down and tried to plan it, they'd probably decide not to go in because they would have looked at history and they would have gone.
01:04:54.640
They call it the graveyard of empires for a reason.
01:04:57.320
But I think we also went into Iraq under false pre-census.
01:05:00.020
So I think I think we should never have gone in.
01:05:03.400
I think we knew from what I'm and other people can say whatever they want.
01:05:07.000
But from what I was told is like we knew where all those key figure where figures were a long time ago.
01:05:11.200
So it's like we needed a justification to go in to war.
01:05:14.680
We needed a justification to send our women and kids to die.
01:05:17.220
You can't just be like, oh, well, we knew where this guy was hiding the whole time.
01:05:20.760
We could have gone on like you need a justification for everything.
01:05:24.720
You need to be able to tell the CNN and the Fox of the world why our kids are coming back and in bags or if anything's coming back and not filled with sandbags.
01:05:37.680
So you need to justify why coffin after coffin after coffin is coming home on herks and women and kids and wives and husbands will not have their spouses again.
01:05:50.080
You need to justify you need to have a reason to justify why literally in 44 a day.
01:05:55.960
So if you do the math on that, I mean, took me from October 6th to November 11th to do my speech.
01:06:02.300
And from that time, it was 1,584 deaths by suicide.
01:06:08.180
That's moms and dads and aunts and uncles and cousins.
01:06:14.160
How many does that represent if you take one father away?
01:06:22.780
And to watch them raise their kids and to have to explain to them that daddy couldn't stay around anymore.
01:06:29.700
Well, now those kids think they couldn't stay around.
01:06:41.860
We've now had, I think it's, if I'm not mistaken, it's four times more deaths since Afghanistan than we did in Afghanistan.
01:06:51.560
But yeah, our friends that were there, it's really hard for me to say that because I'd like to think that their lives were for something.
01:06:58.420
When they were there, we had a mission set and we were doing it.
01:07:01.480
But I mean, look at the way we left that country.
01:07:10.960
And the people we left there and the blood that was spilled in Iraq and Afghanistan.
01:07:16.620
You mentioned earlier that you wouldn't send a conventional force anywhere, really, to fight anyone.
01:07:26.120
I mean, I'm, you're asking somebody with four years of service if I would change up what a general would do.
01:07:35.060
The dudes that show up in all black are a lot better than we are.
01:07:39.960
These guys spend years, years training to go in and take someone out.
01:07:47.440
And they do it effectively for a reason because they're good at it.
01:07:50.980
The SEALs, the Rangers, the Delta, the JTF-2, there is a reason they are the elite of the elite of the elite.
01:07:59.820
Don't send a mass group of like 19, 20, 21-year-olds who are just happy to be here.
01:08:07.480
It's like, who are you going to send to build a rocket?
01:08:12.860
No, we're going to send Elon because we know Elon's got his shit together and we know he understands how to do that.
01:08:17.900
It's no different than saying, like, I'm going to go be a surgeon.
01:08:27.380
Because we were in a war, we didn't have time to train people super effectively to do the job.
01:08:34.600
Of course, we're going to have psychological casualties.
01:08:36.080
We have more of those than we have physical ones, right?
01:08:38.640
So, no, I really think that we need, there are bad people that do need to be eliminated.
01:08:47.020
But I think there's a better way to do it than the way we've been doing it.
01:08:50.720
Because if you guys haven't noticed, it doesn't seem like we're doing well the way we're doing it.
01:08:56.120
Well, look, I mean, if you look at Israel-Palestine, I mean, I understand why Israel is doing what it's doing.
01:09:02.920
But I also, I see all these fucking Hamas leaders on TV from their luxury hotel room in Qatar.
01:09:16.300
I mean, one of my favorite moves that Douglas Murray has made recently was making sure the address was known.
01:09:24.260
We were waiting for the Uber to pick us up to come here.
01:09:30.400
I just wanted to take a stick and just put it into his spokes so bad.
01:09:35.840
Because that's like me walking around with a Taliban flag in Canada.
01:09:41.020
And everyone being like, do you think that, look, I'm just trying to.
01:09:51.780
Because one of the things we started doing on the channel, I don't know if you've had a chance to see, is going out to these protests.
01:09:58.180
I've seen like you were doing it, but I haven't watched any clips yet.
01:10:06.200
I don't know if you have these people in Canada.
01:10:12.660
And there are a lot of people there who, you know, they just have, they see the pictures.
01:10:19.340
And if you are a human being, you see the pictures and you go, those are terrible pictures.
01:10:27.940
And therefore, their Palestine flag is more like an Afghanistan flag than it is a Taliban flag.
01:10:34.600
I think for me, because I've seen what London has been the past little bit.
01:10:37.640
And I've seen some of the people walking around.
01:10:46.360
I'm talking about the ones that I saw yesterday.
01:10:49.220
There's a stark reality that they are not just like.
01:10:52.260
There's an element of the protest that absolutely, you're 100% correct.
01:10:57.520
Like one of my good friends, she's Muslim and she is from Serbia.
01:11:02.120
And the stuff she's been posting, she's like, you know, she's the complete opposite, right?
01:11:05.980
Where she's like very pro-Palestinian and all of these things.
01:11:10.260
When you see innocent people getting slaughtered, you have a right to be upset.
01:11:15.180
It doesn't matter what color of their skin or what religion or whatever.
01:11:18.160
You've got to remember, these people have been under terrorist occupation for how long?
01:11:26.160
Anybody who's under a terrorist government, I feel for.
01:11:34.740
I mean, what happened over COVID in Canada was crazy.
01:11:38.900
We've got something way worse going on that no one's paying attention to that has been really interesting.
01:11:49.640
Yeah, there was actually something that I wanted to say.
01:11:52.800
There's a very famous saying, because when I was listening to you talk, and it brought up to me this saying that it was prevalent during the First World War, lions led by donkeys.
01:12:04.600
And it seems to me that that's actually what you're talking about here.
01:12:09.800
Because the guys that I fought with, like the Brits, the Americans, the Canadians, switched on as it gets.
01:12:25.280
Bad decision making because of politics or for whatever reason.
01:12:29.900
One ego is pissed off at this ego, so they don't get the equipment they need.
01:12:39.560
The fault of humans, in my opinion, isn't that we're different and it isn't that we're not all the same.
01:12:47.140
The fault is that we all have egos and we either lean into them or we learn how to work with them, right?
01:12:55.020
That's where, like, the psychedelic conversation comes on.
01:13:03.880
It's about regaining control about where you come from and why you come out the way you do and the perceptions you have.
01:13:10.160
Because most of the time, if you don't like someone and you're seeing something like that where you're like,
01:13:15.840
Like, most of the time, the world is just a perception of how we view each other.
01:13:23.820
The world, people would say, oh, it's falling apart.
01:13:38.840
But organically, if you go off the street, most people are quite lovely.
01:13:42.180
The world is quite kind if you choose to see it that way.
01:13:46.240
But if you slow drip the media, the world looks like it's falling apart.
01:13:56.300
I think the world is in a very chaotic period and one that may continue, frankly.
01:14:04.160
But at the same time, we've built these incredible societies, particularly here in the West, that are stable, that are prosperous, that are comfortable.
01:14:17.260
Listen, this has been longer than most of our episodes because we've enjoyed it so much.
01:14:26.360
As you know, the last question, before we head on over to answer our members' questions, what's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be?
01:14:38.020
Medical assistance in dying and what Canada is doing to its citizens.
01:14:44.560
So since 2019, the Canadian government was offering it to veterans instead of PTSD treatment and traumatic brain injury when they were asking for help.
01:14:53.100
We have audio recordings and all of the lovely things they say we don't have to prove, but we do.
01:14:58.120
As of March of 24, the Canadian government is opening MAID up to mental health, meaning depression.
01:15:09.300
Children down to the age of 12 with parent consent.
01:15:17.960
Meaning like, does your child, because here's the kicker, right, with MAID.
01:15:23.680
Long-term cancer, you know, real big struggles.
01:15:26.420
Well, how about preventative medicine and better palliative care?
01:15:29.700
Number two, you've got people walking into the hospital saying I'm suicidal.
01:15:35.340
And the right response is a 48-hour to 72-hour hold for a psyche eval.
01:15:39.880
But instead, what's happening is you've got them being killed within 24 hours.
01:15:45.820
There is a really amazing daughter I got to know, Alicia Duncan.
01:15:51.420
I say murdered because there's some sketchy situations around how MAID was used.
01:15:56.280
There's other individuals who were off using MAID, another Canadian citizen.
01:16:01.100
His disability was hearing loss and cognitive disability.
01:16:10.020
And I am 72% considered disabled by the government.
01:16:15.560
So it is now going from terminally ill to mentally ill, meaning you can have fibromyalgia,
01:16:20.380
you can have depression, you can be homeless, you can be an addict, and you can, with parent
01:16:28.480
The Canadian government is taking the vulnerable population and straight enacting MAID on them.
01:16:35.360
And the reason they're doing it is because they've saved over $98.6 million of palliative care
01:16:42.840
by just enacting MAID on people instead of looking after them to the end of their life.
01:16:50.920
Canada is doing some things right now that people aren't aware of.
01:16:54.260
And you're not aware of it because Canada is making sure under our iron curtain that you're
01:17:02.640
Because if Canada is going to start doing this, which they are and they have been, killing
01:17:07.960
I said this on Piers Morgan and I'll say it again.
01:17:10.560
There has been a stark increase on medical assistance and dying like we have never seen
01:17:17.420
Canada is on a track to break records for the amount of people we kill.
01:17:21.200
And the document I leaked to the Daily Mail back which came out on July 1st was a slideshow
01:17:27.840
of them offering MAID and excited to do so to pensioners who were perfectly healthy.
01:17:34.600
And that was under the Fraser Health Care System in British Columbia.
01:17:42.040
It's being pushed anywhere they possibly can because it saves the government a ton of money
01:17:49.160
And they are targeting veterans and they're targeting the mentally ill and they're targeting
01:17:52.620
children and they are targeting anyone they can so that they don't have to pay for them.
01:17:56.220
So please read more about that and look into it because we are screaming about it in our
01:18:10.600
Yeah, we do like to end the interviews on a positive note.
01:18:13.980
We're not ending the interview because we're heading over to answer questions from our supporters.
01:18:19.860
I haven't had a chance, neither of us, to read your book, but really looking forward to reading
01:18:23.100
Brass and Unity and we'll have another one of these conversations.
01:18:30.740
What is the average Canadian soldier's opinion of Justin Trudeau?