Veterans return to Balkans to make peace with wartime memories

A quarter of a century after their first deployment to Bosnia, two Quebec veterans of the Canadian Forces joined Wounded Warriors Canada on a bike tour of the places they last saw ripped apart by war.

Linda Chouinard and Daniel Fortin were medics with the Forces who took part in a United Nations peacekeeping mission in 1993.

They came back from that deployment with unshakeable images and memories that stayed with them for years.

Both retired now, earlier this year they joined other veterans and pedalled over the hills and down the roads past the fields of Bosnia and Croatia, stopping in several locations that have special meaning for veterans of the Canadian peacekeeping effort there.

The scent of war

For Daniel Fortin, it's the smell he can't forget: the retired army sergeant, originally from Saints-Martyrs-Canadiens, 200 kilometres east of Montreal, began the first of three tours of Bosnia in 1993.

He remembers arriving in the country, and even though he couldn't see corpses, knowing that death was nearby.

"For me, the first impression was the smell — the smell of dead flesh," Fortin said. "I think it's even more real than all the images. The smell is something that, still today, is something very real, in my mind anyway."

Fortin had been in training with Linda Chouinard, a reservist originally from Pohénégamook in the Témiscouata region, about 450 kilometres northeast of Montreal.

Chouinard signed up to volunteer as a medic in Bosnia and saw it as a chance to see some of the world and do good work at the same time.

On her very first night, Chouinard was assigned to the intensive care unit where a Canadian soldier arrived with a gunshot wound.

"Your first night, your first patient, somebody takes a bullet. It's like, 'OK, it's a dangerous place.'"

The mission would only grow more intense.

Locking images deep in the brain

On June 18, 1993, Cpl. Daniel Gunther of the Royal 22nd Regiment was killed near Buci, about 40 kilometres northwest of Sarajevo, while he was on observation duty in an armoured personnel carrier.

He took a direct hit from an anti-tank rocket.

Gunther was only 24 and had a one-year-old son and a wife back home in Quebec.

Chouinard says the worst part was knowing that this had been a direct attack on a soldier, not an accident, but a targeted killing.

"It was like, I just can't believe they do stuff like this."

Fortin was also shocked when he learned the news.

"Literally, it was a murder because it was an intentional thing to say, 'You don't belong here. We want you out of here.'"

Chouinard said for years she was unable to recall the sight of Gunther's body.

"My brain removed it or shut down or whatever," she says today.

'It still hurts'

Chouinard returned to Canada after six months. She says she buried her memories, finished her counselling degree, and joined the regular forces.

Years later, while training for her deployment to Sudan, she started having flashbacks and nightmares.

By then a major, Chouinard says she was treated in hospital and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and eventually discharged from the Canadian Forces.

But even nine years after her PTSD diagnosis, she struggles with those four letters.

"It's like I failed something, you know. It's like I was not strong enough to survive that. And that I was not good anymore. For the CF, not good anymore for a job, and at the same time my spouse left me," she explained.

"I lost everything I had, so it was a challenge, and it still hurts."

 

Chouinard, who now lives in Magog, was awarded a medal at the National Assembly on Remembrance Day this year.

Daniel Fortin, who now lives in Quebec City, has not been diagnosed with PTSD. But he says some experiences are impossible to forget.

In July 1993, on a patrol near Fojnica, west of Sarajevo, he and his team arrived at a hospice to reopen it.

When they arrived they found many disabled children and adults who had been left on their own for a month. Some had died. Others were barely alive.

"The stench. I mean everything was horrible in there, when we walked in there. I have friends that still deal with images from that day."

Return to the Balkans

Last May, Fortin and Chouinard joined a group of two dozen cyclists, including other veterans from Quebec and across Canada, on a trip to the Balkans.

The Battlefield Bike Ride was organized through the Wounded Warriors Canada, as both a fundraiser and a chance for veterans to come to terms with some of their experiences.

They travelled through Bosnia as well as Croatia, stopping in several communities where Canadians had served.

Fortin wasn't able to ride because of an injury, but he acted as photographer.

 

Before the trip, he was uncertain about the impact the return journey would have on him.

"Deep within I was wondering, 'Am I going to be sad? Am I going to be scared? Am I going to get some flashbacks?'"

But after seeing the villages and countryside transformed from wartime to peacetime, he said it was an uplifting experience.

"People moving around, they're running, not trying to hide. They're just living like we are. That was an instant healing."

For Linda Chouinard, the big moment of the trip came when she and Fortin took a side trip to Buci, the place where Cpl. Gunther died. Someone in the village still brings flowers to the small monument that carries his name.

"For me it was like, OK, we didn't forget. And he's somewhere now, where, he probably is resting in peace. And people from his family are now at peace, I think. So now I can be at peace."