L
uke Carmichael still drives the car he bought for $500 while he was living in the woods near Jordan River, trying to cope with debilitating nightmares and other symptoms of undiagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTS). He spent 10 years living in a remote part of the woods — about 30 minutes by foot from Jordan River — in a tent, a shack, and for those last two years in the woods, a trailer that was given to him. Carmichael put in for his release from the Airborne Regiment in 1978; he was 10 months away from being eligible for a pension. He says he didn’t know excatly why he wanted to leave the forces at the time, but felt like something was wrong. He went on to start a successful second career in the automotive business in Halifax before he was hit again with the illness that was haunting him. “I flaked out one day and ended up in the hospital. They told me I’d have to take a long rest and not work anymore, just relax, but they didn’t tell me what was wrong with me because they didn’t know,” Carmichael said. “In those days no one knew about PTS, which is post-traumatic stress, and that’s what I had. It was bothering me something awful. I had extreme nightmares and I still have them where I wake up and I’m sweating, kicking, and [have] shortness of breath.”
Nightmares and High Tide “The same nightmare hits me all the time. I was in a small war in Cyprus for six months and this body that I saw lying in the sand was blown up from all the heat. It was there for a couple weeks on my patrol route and this was what initially really broke it out for me over the years. I couldn’t stand to be around people.” Carmichael first went to Edmonton, and then the Victoria area where he slept just below Dallas Road for a time before heading out to Jordan River in search of tranquility as he tried to cope with an illness he didn’t understand. He lived in a shack he built with his own hands, but vandals eventually destroyed it. He would hitchhike from Jordan River to Sooke in order to take the bus to Victoria once a month to buy groceries, and recalls that going in and out of the area where he had set up his camp was tricky. “It was a rough walk and I had to worry about the tides,” Carmichael said. “If it was high tide I couldn’t get in or out, there was no back route . . . It was pretty cold in winter times staying in the tent . . . I got through it all right because I was well trained for living [like that] from the Forces. [As] paratroopers, we were probably the best-trained in Canada for living in the woods, especially living on what you could put together yourself. The only thing I really had a need for out there was groceries and wood to burn.” less veterans. He accepted. “I said I’m really tired from being out in the woods for 10 years, it’s cold in the
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wintertime out there — it’s a rainforest, so I said ‘I’ll give it a try’ and about three days later I was in Cockrell House with a beautiful room and groceries and everything I wanted.”
The Invisible Population Dave Sinclair is the president of the B.C./Yukon Command of the Royal Canadian Legion, which provides the funding for Cockrell House, a building donated to the organization that provides food and housing for homeless veterans and connects them with services they are eligible for through the Veterans Association. He says finding homeless veterans is mostly a word-of-mouth process, and believes the Legion is filling a gap created when members of the Armed Forces fail to transition successfully back to civilian life. Sinclair says when workers identify homeless veterans they ask, “How did they get that way?” “One of the things coming back time and time again is that they’ve had some kind of transition problem when they left the service,” said Sinclair. “They’re not getting the proper counseling when they transition to civilian life and they’re not getting the treatment they really need. It’s obvious; I mean if they’re in these conditions, they didn’t get that help.” He is also critical of the federal government’s ability to identify and support those very people. on the streets. Our own methods have shown us . . . in our homeless shelter right now in Langford there [are] none in there — we’ve identified forty or more in this area alone,” said Sinclair. Currently the Legion funds three transition programs in B.C. They also recently endowed the University of British Columbia with $1,375,000 for a Transition Unity research chair. Sinclair says the money will train additional psychiatrists to treat veterans with illnesses such as PTS. third [chair] is important — because we wanted to get all our trained psychologists in place before all our troops come home next year.” Sinclair adds that some of that money will go to Dr. Tim Black at UVic. Black is a registered psychologist who is involved in introducing the participants of Cockrell House to the guidelines, rules and culture of the House. “It’s not a formal assessment procedure where I’m screening them to make sure they’re OK. There is a screening interview and I make sure they’ve understood and been through [that] interview,” said Black. “I talk to them about what we’re trying to accomplish at Cockrell House and how their role really is to ensure that Cockrell House carries on by being really good tenants,” said Black. Black will conduct the evaluation of the pilot program at the House with his colleague Dr. Sue Tasker; they are currently in the planning phase of the evaluation.
November 4, 2010