On a sweltering Friday night in Winnipeg, he is the handsome young blond sipping beer in the stands at a football game. Fit and wearing shorts and wraparound shades, he looks more like one of the players on the field than a war veteran.
Observe closely and you might notice he presses a finger into his left ear every time the home team scores. The loud cheers of the crowd trigger a flash of pain in his blast-damaged ear. Listen, and you’ll hear him swear occasionally. It’s the infantryman’s habit, one he is trying valiantly to keep in check, surrounded as he is by civilian fans. With his right eye damaged by shrapnel, he can’t read the program or see names on player uniforms. But he can follow the action with his left.
Like thousands of the 55,173 Canadians who served in the Afghan mission, Bruce Legree has gone to war and already returned to civilian life, where he is studying, wrestling bureaucracy and trying to carve out a new purpose.
For decades, the Canadian war vet was the aging father, the elderly grandpa, the old uncle. Today’s war vet is a psychology student living in a university dorm, like Mr. Legree, the firefighter, and a mother of five wrapping up maternity leave, the Ontario Provincial Police officer just coming off the night shift.
The identity of the Canadian veteran is undergoing a massive update while most Canadians have barely noticed.
An entire system has built up over decades to serve veterans into old age, infirmity and even death. But interviews with 10 new veterans, some of whom wish to remain anonymous, reveal that even revamped government services and benefits are too complex and often a bad fit for young men and women starting all over again.
Mr. Legree, for one, is grateful for two years of financial backing he’s using to go to school, but he’s lucky. It’s only because he previously studied at Royal Military College and got extra credit from the University of Manitoba for military training that he can squeeze a degree into his program’s 24-month limit.
Those credits are what landed him in Winnipeg, which adds another dimension to the veterans’ tale, one of social isolation as they struggle to fit into new civilian lives. It’s particularly difficult for those who had it thrust upon them by bad luck and army regulation.
Originally from Smiths Falls, Ont., Mr. Legree is in Manitoba for the first time in his life, living what he calls “this vagabond experience, where you just kind of wander around trying to figure out where you fit in now.”
He’s a highly motivated university student, but he is a stranger living far from his friends, girlfriend and family.
“I have virtually no identity,” Mr. Legree says, although subsequent conversation reveals several. Like any good brother, he brags about his two smart elder sisters. He is a working-class guy who will soon be the first man in 10 generations of his family line to get a university degree. He’s proud of this, but later worries the small boast might sound like he’s diminishing the hard work of his dad, a school caretaker, and his mom and stepfather, who both work in a packaging plant.
Five years ago this summer, Mr. Legree and comrade Mathew Belear were with Bravo Company of the Royal Canadian Regiment battle group on the front line of Operation Medusa, a deadly and defining battle of Canada’s war in Afghanistan.
Mr. Legree, a reservist who spent most of his eight-year career serving full-time, had been in country barely a month. Mr. Belear was a regular forces soldier on his second tour in Afghanistan. Their crew sat with their light armoured vehicle in the Kandahar desert, waiting to join the action.
