CFB PETAWAWA, ONT.—Cpl. Steve Davidson’s emotional problems began in April 2007, after a roadside bomb near Kandahar City killed two of his comrades and grievously injured another, all coming to the aid of his team in the Zhari district of Kandahar province.

His psychological descent accelerated two months later as a Hercules military aircraft carried him and the body of his best friend into the sky above Kandahar Airfield.

“It was the coldest C-130 ride I’ve ever had in my life, because it was only me” — Davidson corrects himself — “me and Darryl. I sat with his body the entire way back.”

Trooper Darryl Caswell, a 25-year-old from Bowmanville, had lost his life in another roadside explosion on June 11, 2007. He was the 57th Canadian soldier killed in the war.

When the two first met early in their military careers, during training in New Brunswick, Davidson was put off by the older Caswell’s brash and mouthy personality. The teasing turned to friendship, a bond so close that when Caswell was killed, Davidson asked to escort his body back to Canada.

“Darryl was my best friend and I brought his body home to his family, and it shattered me,” says the Winnipeg native, now 24, who has been getting treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder for the past three years. “I guess I’ve just never been able to get over it.”

The damage sustained by Cpl. Matthew Dicks was just as grievous, but more tangible.

Dicks was part of the team that hit the roadside bomb while rushing to the aid of Davidson’s crew on April 11.

Dicks suffered extensive injuries, including a concussion, fractures in both his ankles, a broken tibia, fibia and femur in his right leg, torn ligaments in both knees, fractures to two vertebrae in his lower back, and breaks to the orbital bone around his right eye, his cheek bone and his sinus wall.

The damage has meant that the army trades they make feature movies about — infantry, artillery, engineering — are no longer an option for Dicks, a 27-year-old from Foxtrap, Nfld.

“My legs,” he says, “aren’t good enough to do it.”

The young men of B squadron, the Royal Canadian Dragoons’ armoured reconnaissance team at CFB Petawawa, started arriving in Kandahar in February 2007. They were to be there for six months. Some had been before, but it was the first brush with war for Davidson, Caswell and Dicks.

For almost 18 months they had been training for this, with weeks spent studying weapons and tactical driving at CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick and more time still running through a mock-Afghan village at CFB Wainwright, east of Edmonton.

As the journey to Kandahar approached, the Dragoons pushed aside their anxiety and embraced the excitement of going to war. The soldiers’ state-of-the art training, heavy armour and massive, 15-tonne Coyote vehicles gave them a feeling of invincibility. That was blown away when the improvised explosive devices they encountered in Afghanistan took three lives and crippled the confidence of the surviving soldiers.

This reconnaissance team, like others in Afghanistan, would spend almost all its time outside the security of Kandahar Airfield. The soldiers would watch villages for Taliban activity, travel the dangerous roads with supplies for other soldiers posted to forward operating bases, and occupy remote observation posts.

For B squadron, one of those posts was Gundy Ghar, a hill about 40 kilometres west of Kandahar City surrounded by vast poppy fields.

“That’s all it was: a big dusty hill that we moved into and made home,” says Dicks.

“It was an absolute shithole,” recalls Davidson. “It was literally a pimple in a flat land.”

Soldiers were posted at both the top and bottom of the hill. As they dug in to build their defences, they started digging up human bones. Russians had fought and died defending Gundy Ghar. The rumour among the Canadians was that one of Alexander the Great’s armies had done the same thing in 330 B.C.

For the two bleak months they were posted there life resembled shift work more than combat. One man stood guard, another slept. Outside of that, they ate, bathed, wrote letters, watched movies on laptop computers, cleaned their weapons and fixed their vehicles.

But every few days the dangerous reality of roadside bombs hit home as they headed out the gate of their fortified shelters in convoy.

The frontline soldiers tell the same story as their military masters in Ottawa: 99 of every 100 roadside bombs are located before they explode, either with sophisticated route-clearing equipment or because they are poorly concealed in the road or in a culvert.

But it is that unexpected one that keeps the soldiers on edge.

Often it is a gut feeling, a hunch, that puts the soldiers on high alert, such as when they approach a natural choke point in the road that would be strategically suited to an ambush.

“Even when you think you’re invincible you’re still on edge,” says Davidson. “You’re watching for everything. It’s always in the details. Everything is in the details.”

Near 6 p.m. on April 11, 2007, Davidson’s crew was on its way to an observation post to relieve Dicks and three others.

Davidson was the surveillance operator, sitting in the back of the Coyote when it made a wide turn around a corner and triggered a buried bomb.

“I remember just being thrown around like a rag doll,” says Davidson. “It was one of the scariest experiences of my life. It’s . . . like it happened in a split second but it lasted for an hour, kind of a thing. I remember smoke, dust and the smell of explosives.”

In the darkness, Davidson and the rest of the crew patted themselves down for signs of injury, then each of them answered to a roll call. Apart from bumps and bruises, no one was harmed.

The driver is always the most vulnerable in an IED strike, but he was spared this time, likely by having taken the corner wide. The bomb exploded on the opposite side of the vehicle, which was destroyed in the blast.

All around, their fellow reconnaissance teams beat a path toward the explosion. The first to arrive secured the area and then escorted Davidson’s crew back to base in an ambulance.

Dicks’ team raced toward the blast site from their observation post. In the turret, Dicks tucked one leg under his gunsight to brace for the bouncy ride. They were directed to cordon off the front of the wrecked vehicle and had to drive into a field and through an irrigation ditch, or wadi, before going back on to the roadway.

“That’s the last thing I remember,” Dicks says.

The blast from a second IED, metres away from the first, killed Master Cpl. Allan Stewart, a married father of two, and Trooper Patrick Pentland, who was driving. And it severely injured Dicks. Cpl. Jesse Renaud, the surveillance operator in the back of the vehicle, walked away unharmed.

Two months later, B Squadron suffered another terrible loss. Although Trooper Darryl Casswell was still based at Gundy Ghar, on June 11 he was part of a team performing the routine task of resupplying troops, in this case ones in the Shah Wali Kot district in northern Kandahar province.

Caswell and Cpl. Wade Wick, a gunner who was also on the resupply mission, had just returned from a three-week break that they spent scuba diving in Australia. They had about a month to go before returning to Canada.

Caswell was driving the lead vehicle in the convoy. At about 4.30 p.m., he led them into a valley. Wick, who was in the turret with another soldier, recalls that something twitched in his mind, a sensation that screamed “Danger!”

“This is a pretty sketchy-looking area, eh?” Wick said over the vehicle’s radio.

He continued scanning the route but saw nothing to back up his concerns.

“I was about to click on my radio and say something to Darryl, and just as my hand hit the radio we jolted up,” Wick recalls.

A thunderous blast erupted beneath the Coyote, blowing the main 25-mm gun off the vehicle. The explosion took Caswell’s life.

Davidson, Caswell’s close pal, was back at the Canadian base at Spin Boldak, a town in southern Kandahar right at the Pakistani border, when he heard about a communications lockdown affecting Canadian soldiers. Radios went silent. Internet connections and telephone lines connecting soldiers to their homes in Canada were cut.

In the strictest sense, a communications lockdown simply means something has happened. It could be the start of an operation, but most often it indicates something has gone wrong.

“It was the weirdest thing because I felt it,” says Davidson. “We’d been through I don’t know how many comms lockdowns and it was weird. It felt very, very different to me. Then we find out Darryl’s dead.

“I just remember pretty much going numb and going into my own little world. I remember hitting the table as hard as I could and then I think I yelled at my gunner at some point for asking me if I was okay . . . I cried after that. It was the next day that we went back to (Kandahar Airfield).”

“I’m very vigilant about everything that’s going on,” says Davidson. “You watch vehicles and odd behaviour. Things like that. It’s things that you’ve been trained to do for the past five years and it’s automatic.”

Every soldier coming back from Afghanistan will tell you about their hypervigilance, their reticence to stand in crowds, their constant searching for threats or for their weapon to repel those threats.

Davidson recalls that after the deaths of Pentland and Stewart in April 2007, he went from being a soldier trained for war to being a soldier at war.

“You pretty much shut off everything you don’t need, especially after that, because you have a job to do and you have to be diligent and you have to be very alert, because the Taliban is ruthless and they’re not dumb by any means.”

After the two deaths, it became more difficult for Davidson to relate to family and friends in telephone calls back home.

“You are conscious of it to a small extent, that you’re not feeling as much, but it’s not like you’re regretting it,” he says. “It’s not like a loss.”

Three-quarters of the way through his tour, Davidson’s relationship with a girl back home ended. That is a common occurrence among touring soldiers.

Then came Caswell’s death.

Davidson’s initial tears of grief were shed in dusty, desolate Kandahar. During the flight back to Canada with his best friend’s body, sleep was still far off, so the then-20-year-old watched movies on a laptop and let his troubled mind drift until the plane dipped below the clouds and the familiar green Canadian landscape came into view.

Upon arriving at CFB Trenton, Davidson was rushed past the assembled dignitaries and Caswell’s grieving family, then ushered into the back of the waiting funeral car under the groan of the bagpiper’s lament. A few minutes later the convoy began its procession down Highway 401, the Highway of Heroes, and Davidson’s devastation gave way to exhaustion. He fell asleep for the first time in days.

But it did not bring rest to his troubled mind. Davidson stumbled through the fog of the Caswell’s funeral and wake in Bowmanville and his burial at the National Military Cemetery in Ottawa, then found himself back in Petawawa for part of his three-week leave from Afghanistan.

That was when Davidson realized he was in trouble. Driving to Ottawa for dinner one night behind the wheel of a fellow soldier’s car, he was suddenly transported back to Kandahar, performing defensive driving manoeuvres at 150 km/h along a normally sleepy highway.

When a friend casually tossed a broken steel lock into a metal garbage can in Davidson’s barracks and made a loud clang, Davidson plunged to the ground to dodge an explosion that had occurred only in his mind.

When he returned to Afghanistan for the final month of his mission, Davidson was aware how much more reliant he was on his crewmates, the family that protect him and that he would defend with his life.

But he noticed that he was starting to take risks with his own safety. He would walk away from his vehicle with too few bullets for his rifle or without his tactical vest, which carries grenades and other equipment vital to a soldier under fire.

Concern for his crew mates remained high, but it was as if the measures to protect himself were pointless. What had they done to protect Caswell, Pentland and Stewart?

“I guess I was more inside myself at that point,” he says. “I wasn’t talking as much. My sense of humour was disappearing.”

When the tour officially ended on Aug. 13, 2007, Davidson — despite his grief — shared his comrades’ euphoria at having made it out alive. At a five-day stopover in Cypress that soldiers make to decompress before returning to Canada, the alcohol flowed and the party never stopped.

But the military was already taking pains to screen soldiers for problems that warriors from time immemorial have reported suffering after combat: withdrawal from friends and family, anxiety that bleeds from the chaos of war into the life of a soldier in the safety of his home, and alcohol, drugs, depression.

“When I got back from tour, I said I was fine,” Davidson recalls. “You fill out the paperwork and you know the answer should be D, but you circle A because you don’t want to look weak, or you don’t want to admit that something’s wrong.”

But something was wrong, very wrong.

There was anxiety and depression, panic in large crowds, terror at the sound of gunfire, a compulsion to look in the most mundane of places for the “telltale signs” of IEDs or enemy fighters.

Davidson watched as friends who had been beside him in Afghanistan started adjusting to their normal lives in a civilian world.

It took about three months for him to come realize that he wasn’t readjusting, and then only when he had a doctor’s appointment to schedule his release from the army so that he could return to school.

He had been sinking lower and lower into depression. He never touched drugs, but his anxiety was becoming too acute to handle.

“It would have killed me,” he says. “Was it driving me crazy? No. Just driving me down deeper and deeper into a dark, dark place where I felt more and more alone.”

He told Dr. Jason Bailey about the troubles war had inflicted on his mind. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder was quick, and Davidson’s long road to recovery — one that kept him under the military’s care for the past three years while he received psychiatric help — began.

“Dr. Bailey saved my life, along with numerous friends,” says Davidson.

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There was also a burning sensation in his lower body from the fractures in both his ankles and his right leg.

“The first thing running through my mind . . . was that there’s a fire around me and I was burning,” says Dicks. “I had no idea what happened or what was going on.”

The burly six-footer sits down at a picnic table in an isolated corner of CFB Borden, near Barrie, to tell his extraordinary tale of recovery in an understated, matter-of-fact fashion.

The injuries to Dicks’ 200-pound-plus body were so extensive that “when we first seen him we didn’t actually think that he’s going to make it,” recalls Cpl. Wade Wick, who was on one of the Coyotes that responded to the blast.

Dicks has fuzzy memories of being flown back to the Kandahar base by helicopter. He faded in and out of consciousness until doctors sedated him for surgery to put pins along his right femur to hold the bone together.

It was two days before Dicks, who had no recall of the explosion, learned what had happened and how his crew mates had been killed.

“That was the day of the ramp ceremony,” he says.

They had kept the news from him for fear of adding emotional pain to the damage his body had already endured. But once Dicks found out, he demanded that nurses roll his hospital bed out to the tarmac. He wanted to pay tribute to his fallen friends.

In the picture from that day that has been published in newspapers across the country, Dicks, wearing a red T-shirt and covered in blankets, is saluting. An intravenous tube is threaded into his scratched and bruised right arm. His face, partly covered by an oxygen mask, looks like that of a boxer after a long and losing bout. Both eyes are almost swollen shut, and there is a dark purple bruise on his right eyelid.

“It was very hard, very hard to grasp, because you never expect it to happen to you or happen to someone that you’ve trained with for the past year and a half,” he says. “It plays on your emotions a lot.”

Dicks left Afghanistan on a separate flight later that day, bound for the U.S. army hospital in Germany. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing when he stopped breathing, apparently because of stress and anxiety.

In Germany, where the soldier was met by his mother and uncle, doctors performed a nine-hour operation to repair his right femur. The surgery, in which they inserted a metal rod through the middle of the bone, left him with a 60-centimetre scar on the outside of his thigh.

Within a few weeks, the broken 24-year-old soldier was back in Canada, at Ottawa Civic Hospital. He spent three weeks there getting surgery on his knee ligaments and pins and plates screwed into his ankles.

Among the stream of guests, there was an unexpected stop by Christa Stewart, the widow of Dicks’ crew commander, Master Cpl. Allen Stewart, and mother of his two children. Dicks was in hospital during the funerals of his two crew mates, but Christa Stewart, whom the soldier had never met, came by to check on her husband’s former charge.

“He didn’t look like he was on the mend,” Stewart remembers. “He looked like he was in so much pain, even just sitting there.”

Dicks’ girlfriend at the time pushed him in a wheelchair through the parking lot to meet Stewart. They went back to his hospital room, where the visitors had to wear gowns and masks so as not to aggravate the blood infection Dicks had contracted in Afghanistan. Then they shared their memories of Stewart.

“Just talking to him and getting the feeling that he was close with Allan, it kind of helped me as well,” Christa says. “I was sort of selfish in that way.”

From Ottawa, Dicks moved to Pembroke Regional Hospital, a short drive down the road from CFB Petawawa. His stay there was another three weeks, and his convalescence was starting to aggravate him.

“Small things like getting up and going to the washroom,” he recalls. “You have to get out of the hospital bed, get into the wheelchair and wheel over to the washroom. It’s just the small things that really got to me.

“In (training) we’d go out and do three- or four-, five-kilometre runs a week and sometimes you’d complain about it. But after something like that happens you realize you take these things for granted.”

He was reliant on a wheelchair to get around and on the friends not deployed to Afghanistan to keep him occupied at night. The days he wasn’t in rehab he spent in front of a television. The pain of his injuries was one thing, something he could handle with medication, but there was no antidote to the boredom and frustration, not to mention the guilt that came with the constant thoughts of the friends he had left behind to fight in Kandahar.

At the end of the summer, while Dicks was still in physiotherapy and rehabilitation, he approached his regiment and asked to return to some form of work — anything to engage his mind. They found a spot for him in the quartermaster’s office in Petawawa handing out rations, supplies and other equipment. It was menial, and a far cry from firing guns and driving armoured vehicles, but it was work and it kept him close to his friends.

It was September before X-rays showed that his bones were strong enough for him to start walking again, and then only slowly and with a cane. But the range of motion in his ankles and knees was gone.

In January 2008, Dicks dreamed that he was back in control of the gun in his crew’s Coyote. Beside him was Master Cpl. Stewart. In another version of this recurring dream, Dicks’ crew was back together in Afghanistan, driving cross-country, but then he suddenly stopped everything and got out of the vehicle.

A roommate in Petawawa shook him out of his slumber.

“I was screaming and shouting,” Dicks says. “I’d actually woken him up a couple of times and he came over and made sure I was all right.”

Before long, it became clear that his career with the Dragoons was over.

In September 2008, Dicks requested and received a transfer to CFB Borden, near Barrie, in part to be closer to a girl he had met in Ottawa while recovering. He was first put to work first in the base’s imagery department processing photographs and doing administrative work.

Last December he moved down the road to the firing range, where he is a safety officer. He drives around in a big, blue pickup truck and ensures the rules are being followed by the troops and police officers who use the range.

He learned in the past few weeks that he will be allowed to switch jobs to one with less rigorous fitness standards, and to stay in the Canadian Forces. He will become a traffic technician in the air force or army, managing the movement of supplies and personnel across the country and around the world. He might drive trucks, handle luggage and cargo shipments or load equipment into warehouses.

Eventually Dicks hopes to become a loadmaster, the person who calculates and balances the enormous weights that are stuffed into military cargo planes to ensure the aircraft stay steady in the skies.

But Dicks isn’t just looking ahead to his new gig with the forces. Now married, he and his wife, Courtney, are also awaiting the birth of their first child in March.

“It sucks not being able to continue on with the job I was doing, and staying with your friends, because I did enjoy doing what I did,” he says. “But at least I’m still going to be able to continue with the military, and it’s great that I get to continue on with my career.”

But the stigma of post-traumatic stress disorder and mental illness still exists in the military, and that is one of the reasons he has decided to tell his story.

“Have I been treated differently? No. But sometimes, do I feel a little bit separated? For sure.”

Davidson’s separation from his fellow soldiers and from his former job in Afghanistan is partly by necessity. At first his superiors put him to work in a garage where the armoured vehicles are stored and repaired. But being so close to them aggravated his problems. He could climb into the back, just as he did each day in Kandahar, but hours later he would have an anxiety attack.

The constant explosions from Petawawa’s firing ranges had the same effect.

Now Davidson works in the relative serenity of his regiment’s carpentry shop, constructing buildings on the base. It’s low stress, even therapeutic. But it won’t get him back to the career he had coveted since seeing his first action movie as a young boy.

And Davidson’s psychological condition has ended his military career. He will be medically released from the Canadian forces as soon as the paperwork to be processed.

“I knew it was coming, but it still sucked to actually hear those words, because you kind of have that little glimmer of hope that you’ll get better and you won’t have to be released and you can continue to do this job,” he says.

He received a modest sum of money for his injuries from the government. He thinks it will see him through to a university degree, perhaps in business, whenever he is dispatched to life in the land of civilians.

“I’m getting there, but it scares the crap out of me, it really does,” he says. “This is all I’ve ever known. This is all I’ve ever wanted to know . . . It’s tough because I have to completely redefine my life and find a whole new path.

February 2007: The men of B squadron, the Royal Canadian Dragoons' armoured reconnaissance team at CFB Petawawa, begin arriving in Kandahar.

April 11, 2007, near 6 p.m.: A Coyote carrying Cpl. Steve Davidson and three others hits a roadside bomb in Zhari district of Kandahar province. The vehicle is destroyed but no one is seriously injured.

April 11, 2007, shortly after 6 p.m.: Four soldiers in another coyote race to the explosion site. Master Cpl. Allan Stewart and Trooper Patrick Pentland are killed. Cpl. Matthew Dicks is badly injured.

June 11, 2007, 6.25 p.m.: Trooper Darryl Caswell, Cpl. Steve Davidson's best friend, dies when the Coyote he's driving in Shah Wali Kot district in northern Kandahar province hits a roadside bomb. His friend Cpl. Wade Wick, also in the vehicle, sustains minor injuries.

June 15, 2007: Davidson arrives in Canada with Caswell's body.

Aug. 13, 2007: B squadron's tour officially ends.

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