Living Through the Hell of War | Kelsi Sheren | EP 446

The reason you need the same standards is because if we go outside the wire, and I expect you to do something for me, you expect me to do the same damn thing. If a guy comes out of that building and he's coming at me and I'm compromised, you better pull the trigger, or you better jump on him, or you better do whatever it takes. Because we have lowered the standards, we are putting people in places that are going to get others killed. Full stop. You and I go outside the wire, okay? You get shot; I'm beside you. Who's picking you up? It's that simple.

Hello everybody, I'm speaking today with Kelsey Sharon. She's CEO of Brass and Unity and author of "Brass and Unity: One Woman's Journey Through the Hell of Afghanistan and Back." She's a distinguished Canadian veteran. We walked through her story; she was a martial arts champion as a child. She joined the Canadian military when she was very young. She served in Afghanistan and had a series of what you might describe as extraordinarily rough adventures there.

We talk about that; we talk about the state of the Canadian military, talk about the state of Canada for that matter, talk about her pathway back to something approximating happiness as a consequence of her experimentation with psychedelics. For example, we cover a lot of territory. So welcome aboard for the ride.

Let's start when you're a kid. Okay, what do you like as a kid? Tomboy, aggressive. I started fighting at four years old, fighting Taekwondo.

You started? Oh yes. And why did you do that? My mom saw a demonstration at the Cob Mall in Ontario, and it was kind of what you see in all these crazy YouTube videos, where it's like people jumping around, kicking boards, breaking boards, and doing all this big kind of demonstration to bring people into their club. My mom called me on a pay phone, and my dad was like, "Oh, talk to her about it." So he told me, and she said, "Look, if we sign you up, you got to stay for the time we signed you up. That's just how it works. So do you want to try it?" I said, "Sure, let's try it." So I did, and that was the rest of my existence. So it was wonderful.

Were you a little four-year-old? Yes. So I am only 5 foot and about 110 pounds on a good day, so I've always been really small. But what we did find out later on is that because of how aggressive I was in Taekwondo, and how I was fighting, and how often I was fighting, I actually stunted my own growth. I was doing two-a-days by the time I was 12.

What does that mean? So I was training in the morning and I was training at night. I was training during the day if I was not at school, and I was a second-degree black belt by the time I was 12 and a national champion. So I took it really seriously, and that meant weight classes as soon as you hit a certain age.

By working in the sauna and skipping and doing those types of things, constantly having such a low body fat, my puberty didn't come on till later. So they think that my height didn't quite go with it either.

I see. Yes, I see. Yeah, so what did Taekwondo do for you? Discipline, drive, belief in myself, the ability for self-reliance. You know, it's an individual sport for the most part. Taekwondo is something that's really fascinating to me. Martial arts in general I think are by and large one of the most underutilized activities for kids for discipline and for ownership and for responsibility.

I think a lot of people are afraid of the violence tendencies with it, and like I get it. It's a striking sport; you don't want to kick somebody in the head too many times. We understand head injury now much better than we did before. But what it gave me was this idea that if I showed up each and every day, and I did the work, and I put in the time and I trained and trained and trained, I could be the best at something. And because of that, it was really the self-reliance piece of it. It doesn't matter what's going on around me; if I'm solid and I go into this fight, then I'm going to be just fine.

And so that's kind of how my life went. It turns out I got pretty good at it pretty quick, so I became highly addicted to it. And it not only gave me a self-reliance piece, it also gave me that identity within myself very young.

So when I started to go through the bullying phase, where I cut my hair about this short, and I wore tear-away pants and I wore a wife-beater tank top because I was always training, when the teasing came along and all that traditional stuff that happens to kids, it helped me handle it better. I got bullied a ton; lots of girls would pick fights with me and whatever. That's fine, but I never fought back unless I was hit first. I was always taught that you never hit first, but if you are hit, you make sure they don't get back up.

And so I do remember the one time I did get in a fight at school, and I was not afraid of my parents at the school; I was terrified of my master because he was coming in from Toronto that weekend and he doesn't like when you fight in school. And I found out what happens when you fight in school; he puts you in the ring and puts you through a wall, so yeah, Taekwondo was fun.

So why were you bullied, and when did that start? That started really early. I was always more of a tomboy; I didn't really fit, and I always did a lot of activities with the boys, and I didn't really want to be around the girls. It didn't make sense to me because I trained with boys; my coaches were men. I was just always in that environment where you had to be a little harsh, a little harder.

I also grew up in the middle of nowhere in Campbellford, Ontario, so I grew up in the woods. I come from my mother's side; they came over from Hungary right when the Soviets came in; they made it. And then my dad's side of the family, you know, had no running water 'til he was 12, and he was like this baby of seven kids. So I come from this really hard-pared parents environment, and so going into that sport made sense.

But that also created the identity of who I was, which was a little harsher maybe. And in case you haven't noticed, I don't have a problem using my voice, so I would use it, and that's irritating for a lot of people.

So how old were you when the bullying started? I would probably say like six, six-ish. It was mostly girls, yes. And what did it consist of? At first it was just vocal, and they would tease me for my hair because I used to wear—you're gonna love this—I'm sure my psychiatrist is going to watch this and laugh.

So I used to wear, my hair used to be really, really short because it was easier with a helmet all the time, right? Just constantly sweaty; you just always have a helmet on. And so I used to wear bandanas when I was going through the grow-out phase, but I also only used to listen to Eminem. And so like, I, at really young, was exposed to like this, I say like angry music. But like Eminem back then was, you know, not sober Eminem. And so I went through this phase where I was like, I was training around a lot of music like this; I was around really hard people; I went into school.

And so I just kind of went into myself because I didn't relate with anyone in school, and I was at a Catholic school, and I didn't understand. And, you know, they do their best to kind of teach you what God is and all of these texts, and, and, but they weren't really making it applicable to life. It was “this is what God says, this is what you do, this is what you don't do, this is why you do it,” and there was no room for discussion, there was no room for explanation or asking the question why.

So that's something that didn't work well with me. I wanted to know why I had more questions and I just wasn't getting answers. So I just kind of went into what worked for me, and once I did that, that's when the pattern of behavior started. And then, you know, then it got to a little bit of violence when I got a little older, probably 9, 10, because then once I got my black belt, people were like, “Oh, you think you're hot shit?” and I was like, “No, I really don't.”

In this weight class, around somebody around this height for sure, but outside of that, you know, Taekwondo is not really Jiu-Jitsu; it's not really applicable in real life, I feel like, unless you're really good. Where was the bullying almost all from girls? I had, for a little bit there, there were boys. And I remember a distinct incident where I was on the soccer field, and I was wearing tear-aways, and they ripped my pants off. I just thought they were not being nice; I didn't think anything of it. And at that point, I was used to it a little bit. I mean, I had little cliques of friends, but again, I was at the club; my elementary school was here and my club was right here, so I would walk it. So I was always there; I was there in the mornings; I was there after school; I'd be there late; I used to teach once I had a certain belt level.

Did you have friends at the club? Oh yeah, oh my gosh, that was everything for me. I didn't, that's the problem; I didn't care about anything outside of it, right? Nothing mattered, right? Yeah, right. With that masculine attitude of yours that young, what do you think would have happened to you in a school now? Oh, I would have been transitioned.

It's funny that you say that; I had Natalie Eva Marie on the show—she's a WWE superstar with pink hair and she's very girly now—but we're having this exact conversation because she was the same: tear-away pants, you know, slides, the whole thing. She grew up around boys, and I said, “My God, thank God we don't live right now, 'cause we would have been put on puberty blockers. I would have had my breasts cut off; I would have been told I was in the wrong body.”

I knew I was a girl; I was good at being a girl. I grew up cutting and splitting wood. That, to me, is what it meant to just be a girl. I could clean the house; I could cook; and I could cut and split wood. So what, why can't I do all of that? Why do I have to be the opposite sex to do those things? And so, yeah, I would be transitioned, and it's really tragic.

What was it like for you when you hit puberty? Strange. I went from flat as a board, both sides, no body fat at all, to just like disproportionate chest. It was a very strange, uncomfortable feeling. But it somehow, at the same time, I was going through a whole other level of what I would consider trauma.

Now looking back, doing a decade and a half of therapy, I've realized where a lot of that anger stemmed from in high school. And it came because my coach, who was my guy since I'd been four, started sexually assaulting people—say, sexual assault, raping my teammate—and she was 14.

And my entire world exploded when that all got exposed, and I stopped training, and I stopped having an outlet, and I stopped having a community, and I stopped doing the thing that made me who I was. And because of that, I became radically angry, but with no place to put it, no understanding why and how to even fix it. And my parents didn't know how to fix it; they just were grateful it wasn't me.

What came of that with him? He went to prison. He was at a minimum-security prison; it was statutory rape is what he got. I think he did two years. He has since been remarried to another one of the girls we trained with and has twin daughters, which makes me real uncomfortable because that behavior isn't by accident and that behavior doesn't go away, right?

Yeah, so I could imagine that was extremely hard on you because you said you lost your community at that point as well. Yeah, we couldn't. We tried to take me to a new club to train because my goal was the Olympics from, like—I can remember it from like the moment I saw somebody come in with Olympic rings on them at the gym. I was like, “What’s that?” They were like, “That’s the Olympics.” I went to the Olympics; I was like, “Hold up, you can go to the Olympics for Taekwondo?” And they were like, “Yeah.” And it was over after that.

That was the only path I could see for my life. I didn't see anything else ever— not once. And so once that was ripped out, I couldn't train with anyone; I couldn't trust anyone; I couldn't trust men; I couldn't trust anyone around me 'cause what if, what if it's going to happen again? And then that became, that also then became a part of my identity—just this very angry, raw child.

No fault to my parents, but my dad's a long-haul truck driver; my mom is now too. And my dad was gone a lot, and my mom had my brother and I, but you know, she did the best she could. But sometimes, like comments would come out like, “There’s something wrong with your head,” you know, those types of things—those like borderline gaslighting conversations that happen, like there’s something wrong with you.

It’s like, “No, I know there’s something wrong with me, but I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know how to fix it.” So at that point, you know, I had gone through an interesting childhood. The school had called child services on my mom because one time they were passing out Timbits and I said I couldn't have it because I had to lose weight, right?

Yes, I saw that in your book, so that followed me 'til I was 18. I had to see a pediatrician to make sure that my mom wasn't abusing me, which was ridiculous, right? But I understand it; I understand it.

But do you think that that event, that betrayal when you were a teenager, tilted you towards post-traumatic stress disorder later? I've really thought on that. I've really meditated on that a lot. The reason I would say more likely no is because I think that when you watch someone die the way I've watched people die, you're going to have a mark anyway. So whether or not it was more severe because of it—so maybe yes, it tilted, but I don't—yeah, well, it was a pretty fundamental betrayal.

No, for sure it is, 100%. I don't disagree with you on that at all, but you don't see an obvious connection? I think where the connection lied for me more than that obvious connection would be—so that happened, then I went on deployment, and a major authority figure after my injury threw all my chit paper in Afghanistan at me and told me it would have been easier if I died.

So it's like the authority figure here—that was a male, the authority figure here—that was a male, compounding on the injury that already happened and telling me I was worthless. Because when you look at this situation, and this is where it's, this is a little convoluted, and it can seem really weird for some people to hear, so just bear with me.

The person that was assaulted was my training partner; her and I were hyper competitive, though; don't get that twisted even for a second. This is an individual sport, and I wanted to be like her; when she cut her hair, I cut my hair, right? So when it happened to her, there was almost this weird thought of like, was I not good enough to even try? Like, you know, it's really, really messed up to even think that.

But you get the connection and where I'm saying it; like I was never good enough there, I was never good enough here, and then I was never good enough in the service. So there's that, that kind of identity that runs through it, and it's unfortunate, but I think that was a big part of my life for a long time. It's not anymore; I know I'm very good; I know my worth now.

But looking backwards, you know, that's been the beauty of the psychiatrist I got in 2011. He's probably about your age, very similar to you. He dresses very similar, same attitude. In Canada, he was one of the first to do post-traumatic stress research on post-Rwanda veterans; he served in Rwanda and Bosnia as a medic.

And this, I call him my old man—this guy, he has put up with everything, but he's been the only person outside of my father who has never told me that I'm not good enough. Even when I went through all of the things with him since 2011, the amount of times I called him and told him I'm going to kill myself, I can't do this anymore, and the response would always be, “I have treated you veterans for 40 years; you're not doing this to me. I've never lost one; I'm not losing one today.”

And that was always the conversation, and he was always telling me the truth. So I think a lot of the healing came in a lot of different ways after the deployment. I think it was a blessing in disguise. That's why when Constantine asked if I regret it, I said no. I don't regret any of it. I needed to go through those things to come out the other side and be who I am today, and I like who I am today; I love who I am today. I couldn't say that before; I couldn't say that five years ago.

So you've pushed yourself really ever since you were a little kid, ruthlessly? Yeah, and I got the sense when I was reading your book too that—I don't want to say that you were trying to prove something, but because that's a cliché—but you obviously were pushing yourself up against your physical limits in martial arts, and then you decided to enter the service. So let's talk about that.

So why did you decide? Why did you—and you picked a hard route too; you went into the infantry, which was probably the most infantry by accident, artillery by trade. So it's very strange. So about 200—I think it was 2015—the United States started to integrate women into combat arms roles, so I was Canadian. And when I deployed, my unit went to an American fob, so we were working for the 100 verse, we were working for Americans; we were the only Canadians that were with an American set of human beings.

We were firing for them, and that was in Afghanistan. So that was different, and then I ended up doing infantry because the British called and they didn't have a woman to do the job, so they pulled me, right? So I worked with all of them. But before that, I joined the army because I went to college in Ottawa. I went to Algonquin for about a month; I tried to get out of the town as quick as I could, and out of the town you grew up in?

Yeah, well, I grew up in Cobourg, and then we moved to Campbellford, and I went there at grade 11. So up until that point, I'd gone to Catholic School my entire life, and then I went into a public school for the first time, so that's a fun transition point. And I went to like this farm town of this really like, you know, really small town vibe, hockey team, kind—how big was Campbellford?

I don't even know; I don't know the number, but it was tiny. We had one bridge, and we had a Tim Hortons, yeah, and we invented the tuny; that’s our claim to fame. There you go. It's massive. Tuny, not relevant at all, but ridiculous nonetheless. And so, yeah, we went there, and then I left and I went down to the Remembrance Day ceremonies. I always go for Veterans Day in America, and that was one thing my mom always taught me is we always go on Remembrance Day.

And so we went, I went, and I took the bus back to Algonquin, and there was a lady on the bus that was in an Air Force uniform with like a plethora of metals. You don't really see that in Canada too much; you see it a lot in the states. They're everywhere; they're hanging off of them, but in Canada not so much. So when you see that, it kind of sparks a little.

So I went over and had a conversation and just kind of asked her about what she did, and she was a—I think she was a pilot or she had flown—one of the first females to fly a whole kind of thing in Canada. So after that, I got off the bus, and I just said, “I think I'm going to join the Army.” So I went to the recruitment office in right outside the Rideau Mall. How old were you? I was—I just turned 18; I left at 17.

Yeah, and had you graduated from high school? I had, yeah. I had; I went early to Algonquin to try out for the soccer team first, and then I went. So I started school in September, and then I went there right around like November 15th, and then I got paperwork that I was accepted in December, and I got sworn in in December, and I was in basic training on January 3rd.

So it was a quick? Great. Yeah, right. Was that a shock? I don't think I even had time to be shocked; I just made the decision, and we were going, and that was how it was going to go. You signed on the dotted line, so we went, right? And so tell me about your basic training; what was that like?

I loved basic training. Basic training sucked, but I loved it at the same time. There’s something about collective sucking together; that when you call it a trauma bond or whatever you want to put on it, but I liked the competition within the group. You have men and you have women and everyone's in a different trade: Air Force, Army, Navy, and then who's going where, and I, again, loved the idea of being underestimated; it worked for me.

It's something that just drives me because normally, I’m the smallest, or I’m the woman, or I’m the whatever kind of like title you want to put on it. None of it matters to me at all. And so we had a couple of women, so immediately there was a clash with that because what happened was we would go down and do the 10k run in the morning, and then we— 'cause we weren't allowed the elevators—and then I would sprint up the stairs, but I was first, so I got to the shower first. It's like, “Okay, you want to be first, be faster.”

So they didn't like that I was just standing out. I started to stand out a little bit. I mean, it was good for the most part. It was a little rough; I had a little bit of the same sort of stuff from elementary school kind of happen there, and it's like, “Okay, if it's happening everywhere, you're the problem,” but I didn't know at the time that it was a thing that I was doing. Turns out I’m just way too masculine, and I’m way too aggressive for a lot of women, and that rubs some women the wrong way.

And so now knowing that I understand that; then I didn't. And so we went through basic training and it went well; graduated on time. Nothing went crazy. How many women in basic training compared to, like, what was the mix? We had like five women in our group and the rest were men. How many men? Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah, so we had—

What did the men think of the women? It depended on the woman. Okay, explain that. Some were sleeping with the women, some were competitive with the women, some other women were a lot smarter than all of these guys put together; they were like doctors that came in and were like, “I’m going to join the Navy,” you know?

So we had some switched-on women, but then there was a different level of physicality because we all have the same PT tests. Because this is when we didn’t lower standards, we were all one standard, which we should always be. Some women didn’t pass the push-up test the first time. I think the push-up test was five or ten push-ups; some you couldn’t pass the beep test.

You couldn’t? Beep is beep. So, you know in a gymnasium, they put like one of the lines over here, one of the lines over here, and it would beep, and you would go beep, and you have to run to the other side before the next beep and go beep, and then you have to run, and it would get faster and faster. And it was a long drawn-out activity, and you had to hit a certain amount of beeps to be able to qualify for the physical, and a lot of people couldn't hit it. People were just overweight, and so if you failed a certain amount of times, you went up to the 13th floor, which I believe is called fat camp, and you go up there until you can do it, and then you get put back into a new group.

So that was always a fear for some people. I didn't struggle with that because I came right from sports into that, so I was in great shape. Right, so you didn't have any trouble with the physical element? No, no, no. Because basic training isn’t the heavy stuff; it's the cardiovascular work; it's the ability to be yelled at and not break; it's the ability to learn tasks on sleep deprivation. Can you function with little sleep? And so for me that was not too bad 'cause my dad would wake us up at some ungodly hour to go cut wood; I was pretty used to it. So it worked out.

And then after basic, we graduated, and then we all got posted to our trade specific training. I was an artillery gunner, so I went to Gagetown. Gagetown is where you do your SQ and your DP1 grenades, machine guns, all the major weapon systems that you get the opportunity to shoot; you learn them there.

Once you're done that, then you go to your hyper trade, like artillery. So then I went to the 105 guns and the mortars. Did you have any familiarity with weapons before? Oh God, no. I had never been exposed to guns. My dad had a .22 for raccoons, you know? I never hunted; I never shot anything—nothing at all. So it wasn't like a draw to the raw, raw of the weaponry or the violence of it. It was more of a, "This looks cool; I think I could do this."

But I think everyone knew I was either going to be a cop or I was going to go do something else. I just didn't know at the time, and so we went through training there, and that was fantastic. And how did the women do when the standards were equivalent?

Like I said, some women failed—yeah, yeah, for sure, 100%. Just, I presume some men failed as well? Oh, there was definitely a few. We had a couple individuals—you'll find this comical—who joined because they said they were good at, uh, what's that—like not Halo, but it’s a video game, it’s like a war video game, and I couldn't help but kind of do one of these, and yeah, they were just overweight.

Because, again, if depending on the floor you live on, that's how you get up and down. Well, if you think about how many sets of stairs you had to do in a day—we're on the ninth floor; we have to go down for breakfast 'cause you have to swipe that card; if you don’t, you get in trouble; then you have to go back up. So there's two; then you have to go back down for PT, there's three; you got to go back up—there's four. Now you're going a 10k run; you're doing log stuff, and you're doing all this stuff—now, you got to go back up and it, and then they would just run you just 'cause they felt like it—and then you would do the same thing at night.

And then if they decide to toss bunks, you do the same thing again. So if you're not in shape, that's hard for anyone to do all the time, and so when we got to Gagetown, they kicked it up a notch, right? Because now you're dealing with real guns, real weapons, and how do you handle them?

I remember the first time I shot a Carl Gustaf, which is just a massive big guy here that goes on your shoulder, and it feels like you’re just getting sucker-punched by Mike Tyson in the face when it goes off. So it's a run by two people; one person holds it, one person loads it. And so we went to shoot. My girlfriend and I, who was one of the tiny ones as well.

My sergeant looked at me and went, “No.” He just went over and wrapped both of us together and did one of these, and I remember shooting that for the first time and it was like, “Oh, okay, okay, I get it now; this is not pretend.”

These things are for real. And then we switched to artillery, and once we went to artillery, that was a whole new animal. We were on 105s, so they only have a 40 lb round.

Explain the difference—the weapons. So Carl Gustaf is a, you know, shoulder-propelled rocket launcher. I don’t—has an explosive head; it does have an explosive head. I didn't shoot any of those overseas, so I'm not hyper-familiar with them; we just did those in training.

Then we have—for me, the things that I shot the most of was my C7, which was a long barrel, shoots a 5.56 or 7.62 round. And then we had hand grenades. They don't look like the pineapples; they're round like a baseball—the modern ones. And then we had mortar rounds that shoot pretty somewhat accurately—5 km, within—m.

So we had those, and then we had the 105s, which, how does a mortar work? So to the best of my recollection, so it’s run by—it’s run by two people; it’s got a round plate in the ground that sits there that can hold it down, and it’s a long tube. At the bottom is a firing pin, and then you've got a site on it; it just kind of looks like a metal-off piece here.

And then what you do is somebody lines up the site with the grids they’re given, and then the other individual comes with the round, and they hold it on top of the tube. And then they say “fire,” and you just drop it, and you duck your head to the side of it and then it shoots; it goes down, hits the firing pin, and then propels out.

And so we did a lot of those because that's our job—artillery is also mortar man. And then when we went to the 105s, those are what I kind of described to people like if you've seen any war movie with like the horses—or you've seen them with the boom—that’s what that is. The 105 is a 40 lb round; it goes about 20 km, I’m probably give or take on that.

And it's got the big brass casing that you kind of see those big round guys—that’s what that one kicks out at the back end. That’s what I deployed on, and when I got posted from Gagetown, I went to a French unit, and that only happened because another individual was struggling with some kidney problems from heat exposure.

He was taking too much creatine and had really been one of those guys in the gym that was not looking after himself appropriately with all of the supplements, and so his kidneys crashed out in the heat. And so at that point, they said, “Okay, he can’t go to Valour, and you're going to go to Pahoa.”

And his dad’s at Pahoa, and I was like, “Well, I’ll trade.” So I went French, and I'm like, “Yeah, we’ll learn; it's our second language, isn’t it?” And so I went to Quebec, and then I got there, and no one spoke English, and I had a female officer, and that was about it.

And so I deployed with those guys. I got there in September of 2008. Did you learn to speak French? Just by being around. I don't speak it anymore 'cause BC doesn't speak French, right? Yeah, it’s every other language.

So I don’t practice, but I learned kind of as I went. My first interaction with my sergeant was “I don’t want you,” and I went, “Nice to meet you.” And so it was a good start.

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So you deployed to Afghanistan with a French-speaking group and you couldn't speak French? Speak of. Yeah, mhm, yeah. It was yes, no, toaster kind of stuff. So I would ask him like use him as a human translator; I would be like “glass,” and then he would just translate words, and eventually, I would start to pick up little sentences here and there, and then it was franglish.

Then it got to a point where I could understand, and I was the remote weapon system gunner for the Tav, which was a turret tank—like a tank that we have that has a turret that shoots—shoots a—I believe it’s a C6, puts a machine gun—and it's a computer system. So I learned that in French, and then I went and learned all the trip 7s in French and the commands in French and the radio commands in French and the motor systems in French.

How did your fellow soldiers react to you on the French side? You’ve been to Quebec, right? Yes, I lived in Montreal for a good—that's right. So you know when you hit like Quebec City and you go north, they don’t really like English people as much.

Yeah, so it was about that. And then when you look at the gun troop and then you get one of your gun troop members as five foot and 100 pounds at the time, you go, “Oh great; now I'm going to have to do twice as much work,” right? And so, it just, again, it's that prove yourself; here we go again.

And so I was fine with it and we did it and it was all good, and once they got a little confident, once they could see I could load around, once I loaded around it was like, “Okay, she’ll lift things at least,” and it was strange.

There had to have had some conversations—my sergeant, now we're friends, now and we've spoken since; he goes, “Yeah, we had to have constant conversations about them leaving you alone just like sexually.” 'Cause that stuff was just rampant.

It's still rampant; it’s just not ever prosecuted. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, let's—I want to for sure wander into the Afghanistan territory and your experience there, but I'm also curious about your feelings about women and men in the military.

Yeah, so you were in early, obviously, and you were in before there were differential standards, and you made reference earlier to the fact that you think that the same standard is appropriate—100%.

Okay, so tell me why you think that. Perfect example: You and I go outside the wire, okay? You get shot; I’m beside you. Who’s picking you up? Right? It’s that simple.

Okay, so what do you think that implies for women in the military? Like, I mean, the idea is that women can do anything men can do—that's not true. Yeah, I know, I know it's not true, and it doesn’t, it even doesn't seem to me that it’s particularly appropriate. But it isn't, like I exactly know how to deal with that.

I mean, you obviously worked yourself, you know, half to death in order to be able to manage this, and you did manage it. And so it’s hard to say—well, it’s hard not to say, well good for you, right? But by the same token, it seems to me odd that we're insisting as a society that—especially in, I would say especially in direct combat—that men and women can play the same role.

And so what do you think about all that? I think it's really complicated, and I'll tell you why. If we were fighting on average an enemy that played by the same rules or had similar respect for women—yeah, well, that’s also a big problem.

But that's the problem; that’s the main problem, right? Well, okay, so we could talk about that a little bit too. Well, it seems to me that women are at risk if they're serving in the military in a way that men aren't.

Not sure. Okay, I can count on all my fingers and toes right now the amount of men who have been assaulted by other men in their units, by like special operators too. I’m not just talking about like say grunt people, you know? What if you're captured? You take that risk.

Yeah, but God, that—oh yeah, it’s hell. We’ve seen it; we’ve known women who have—we have videos of Israeli women who were captured who were tortured to death and raped to death, and we have that on every platform. So I get it, but at some point, it's—you have to make the decision.

I was willing to risk it because I genuinely—the people that I was with did. You know what you were risking when you were willing to—? No, I don't that was the thing; you know what? That's funny that you said it—Constantine said the same thing. He’s like, “Do you really know like what you got into?”

No, I don't think so. Anyone, you could say that about life in general, but this is a very extreme situation, and I can’t imagine what would have happened to you if you fell into the hands of the wrong people in Afghanistan, let's say.

You know, I've never thought about that. But I don't know; I don't think they would have been able to keep me very long. I would have been a problem. Problems get eliminated fast; like honestly, I’m that person. And in that time of my life, if you said, “I need you to go run and jump over that wall and you're probably for sure going to die,” if I knew someone was on the other side of that wall that needed to get pulled over that wall, I’m risking it; I’m risking it every time.

I hate that about myself sometimes because it’s like the sacrificial, like I will—I’ll risk it if it means getting somebody who needs something or somebody needs help; I’ll risk a lot. It's probably not a great trait on some levels, but I will and I have, and I do it again.

What about the standards now? The standards were in place, okay? And what's changed? Okay, so standards were in place—push-ups, sit-ups, yada, yada. The reason you need the same standards is because if we go outside the wire and I expect you to do something for me, you expect me to do the same damn thing.

And if a guy comes out of that building and he's coming at me and I'm compromised, you better pull the trigger, or you better jump on him, or you better do whatever it takes. Now, women become a distraction. I don't— they become a distraction because two reasons: men act different when women are around; we know that. We know that! They just respond differently.

If a woman's getting hurt, doesn't matter if he likes me or not, he's going to respond differently; he could put himself in danger; now, he's going to react differently. And secondly, because we have lowered the standards, we are putting people in places that are going to get others killed—full stop.

We are actually making it more dangerous for people in service on planes in other areas by lowering the standards in society together, and we’re doing it and we’re seeing the repercussions and we’re not stopping it.

So where's the line? I've been asked, do you think women need to serve? If you want to respect the rights of the people we are fighting, unfortunately, I need to be there; women have to be there because the Taliban and ISIS and God knows how many other enemies we've continued to make there are women on the battlefield and they will use them.

If they are covered head to toe, they will put men in those burkas with AK-47s and suicide vests and they will think a woman is walking up to them who's not a threat and they will detonate, and they've done that.

And they did it time and time again. The Taliban got smart and realized that we, as Westerners, to a fault will follow the rule, but they don't have to. And when that started to happen, people started getting killed more because they would hide themselves in women's positions.

So they're like, “Okay, they're not going to bring women on the front lines with them,” so the women and children would flee and that’s how it would be. And then we started going, “Well, we have to do something about this,” because they were hiding weapons, money, jewelry, indicators that they were working with the Taliban in, like, women’s hair, and like under their burkas and under their breasts and like things like that.

So when I finally started going out there, you're finding all kinds of things 'cause all of a sudden there was a woman there to actually search people, and we had never done that before 'cause a man cannot touch a woman.

And so, as long as we want to fight fair—as long as we want to fight up against the current individuals we're fighting, whether that's Hamas or ISIS or the Taliban, you name it, speaking of the Taliban—side tangent here, two seconds. Have you seen the new article that came out? They're like, “Oh my God, did you know the Taliban have started stoning women again? That doesn't really shock me."

When did it stop, Jordan? I'm sorry. And also, all of these people who have something to say about it—where were you for 20 years when we could have done something about it, when we were standing there watching it and you said, “We can't do anything about it,” so why do you care now?

You don’t care; selective outrage—I’m over it. Sorry. Who are you speaking about particularly with this elective outrage? Oh, you name it! Anybody on social media with a face, anybody who's an influencer or a political commentator, or these people who have made their careers off of just adding more negativity to the world.

It's constant nihilism for young people to click on and become obsessed with the next new rage event; it's really hard to watch. Now, you had a particular role in Afghanistan; you said, for example, that you were searching women? I was searching women, right. So, and that's a specific role for women?

And you believe that that's a useful role? What now? What do you think has been the consequence in general of introducing women into the Armed Forces? I mean, there’s obviously continual sexual scandals in the armed forces in Canada. It's always been there; we just haven't reported it.

Okay, meaning it’s always been there in what way? Because there has been women in the Army, right? Just not in combat arms roles in other countries; for us, there has been. So those assaults have been going on for—the individual, for example—I won't say his name; he's got a world of hurt anyway—who told me that it would have been easier if I died; he's been charged with seven sexual assaults, but he made it to major, and he's not being arrested or put in jail, and he’s getting to leave with a pension.

So what does that say to everyone else below him? It just makes sure they're quiet about it, and that's why it keeps happening. We don't actually take accountability for our actions; we never have, because if we did, it would stop.

Okay, so I read an article in the Canadian Military Journal; I don't remember the name of the journal, but it was their DEI, uh, issue, right? And their—what would you say—the recommendation for decreasing the frequency of the sorts of things that you're talking about was a retooling of the entire culture of the Canadian military.

Well, I don't exactly understand what that means, because the culture is going to be a war culture, right? And I presume that there are downsides to that as well as upsides. I don't know how to understand the downsides in terms of the relationship between men and women, but if you have a lot of young men together who are single and a lot of young women together who are single, then there’s obviously going to be sexual interactions on a nonstop basis, and I have no idea how that can be reasonably regulated.

I suspect that the DEI approach is not going to work very effectively. No, yeah, so DEI—that's a trip. Canada's lost its mind. Okay, so I spoke to Buck Angel recently, and I was asking him his opinion on how the Canadian military has just put tampons in the bathrooms.

Yeah, yeah, and then made it a particularly punishable offense for the young men to take the tampon dispensers out of the bathrooms, which is obviously exactly what they should do; they should never have been in there in the first place—well, yes, that's for sure!

Yeah, so bad leadership, right? You might say that already! We can go with bad leadership that rolls downhill. We have a saying in the military: “rolls downhill,” and so that's obvious—so DEI is rolling downhill, and it's rolling down to a already crippling military.

Our military complex in Canada is shrinking astronomically, and not only that, it's shrinking because veterans aren't being looked after. People at Gagetown are having to rely on food banks to eat because they're not being paid enough. No weapon systems are coming in; people are having to pay for their own flights to come back from where did they go? Was it Lithuania? They were over there.

Excuse me, they were playing war games, i.e., they were just trying to be a show of force or Putin, anyway. So, and then we bring in DEI, so here’s what’s happened since I got out. This was a trip I got to go back in 2021 to New Brunswick to go shoot my last round as a gunner.

I didn't know this was a thing, but when you're like super old or something really bad happens, they bring you back to shoot your last round. You’re super old or something bad happens—you're going to be 35, this Jordan! So we're going to go with something bad happened, and they really messed up, and they know it, and there was a book written about it they didn't like, so what happened was I went, and I shot my last round, and it was this, you know, all the bigwigs came out, and it was amazing because there was actually a female there that was a colonel that I actually respected, and so it was a really big honor to get to shoot with her.

And so I’m there, but what I saw was really troubling to me—disheveled beards, long nails, piercings, jewelry, weird-colored hair, and beards. We had lost the standard; we stopped doing the standards of what it meant to be in the service.

Men have to be clean-shaven; women have to have short nails; you have to have one earring; you can only wear your wedding band. You can only wear those things. Their hair was a mess; they just looked a mess. And I said, “What am I looking at here?”

So this is the new standard. So if you start to lower the standards, people who have served like my friend Dallas Alexander, who got slapped by the government for going on Shawn Ryan—people like that leave, right? The experienced people who you need to teach these standards—the best people leave.

Oh, 100%. And so this is what's happening. So now you've got DEI. So what happens with DEI? Well, basically, we know men now are in women’s spaces, vulnerable spaces. Men now are allowed around women in environments that they just shouldn't be in service in general.

Meaning we normally get our own shower time, right? And where we get our, if we have enough women, we get our own tent. If you didn't, you're just with the guys, and you're used to it; it’s fine. And so what was happening is people say that it's an assault issue; it's a control issue; it's a leadership that has been told time and time and time again, “You can get away with it; it doesn’t matter. You're going to get away with it.”

If you're high enough rank, you've got the right people around you, you're going to get away with that. So what does that say to women? It says, “Well, I don't really want to be in the service.” So now you're losing women, or you’re having women transition to men so they’re accepted in men's spaces and they're accepted as a male, so maybe they won’t get raped because you had a Navy ship just have to come back recently in the United States because there were like 30 assaults in 30 days and women were just pimping themselves out early so they didn’t get raped; they said, “Well, I’ll just do it now because then that way I won’t get assaulted.”

So it won't be like traumatic; it will be my choice. And so people are saying, “Well, why are we—why are we allowing women?” How about you just stop raping people, guys? Where is the accountability on the man? Where is the accountability on the staff? Where is the accountability on the leadership to go, “Hey, if I catch you doing an assault, this is what's happening to you; you're out; you're gone; your job is over, and you're going to have a dishonorable discharge for sexually assaulting someone? Then you're going to get a criminal charge.”

Why aren't we doing that? Well, why do you think? Because we already have no one, and also there’s a lot of people that are old school that are still in that are going to cover because, oh, what if a guy's like one year away from his pension, Kelsey?

Let's just let this one slide; you don't want his family to not have any money, right? You don't want his family to lose his pension; you don't want them to have that name in the school—do you? Like, it is a—it’s a hypocrisy. There are the service is filled with some of the best people that we have to offer, and then it’s filled also with some of the worst we have to offer.

Because it attracts a type personality; there are bad eggs in everything; you know with the police, yeah, there’s some bad eggs, but they're not all bad, and that's kind of what's happening with the service. Bad eggs, not all bad, removing funds—what happens? Shittier people.

So it's happening in the police now; it's happening in the service, and we already have one of the smallest armies, so we're being bought and paid for by the CCP left, right, and center, approved by CUS on paper. And then now we have weak borders, no military, no weapons, running out of artillery rounds and giving how many billions of dollars somewhere else.

Why would you want to join the service? Why? What, you can be patriotic, and I applaud that. I have people come to me all the time, “My daughter's going to join; can you talk to her?” So I’m not going to talk anybody out of anything. Their path, if they believe they need to go do it, they will go do it.

But at the same time, I’m sorry, this is not the country I fought for. So why do you think this is happening to the military in Canada? So it's really easy to control people when they don't have somebody to stand up for them. Look at the protest, okay?

So when our own police turned on people at the protest, you mean the trucker protest? Yes, so I was involved with that in NBC, and my parents are truck drivers. Who do you think I'm going to support? And also, my business was crashing because of them, and I was losing everything that I had just built post-Army because of them.

You actually think that I'm going to stand for this? And watching what I was witnessing, anybody in their right mind was not okay with this. So I came out and I did a sign and I said, “I stand with the protest,” and everything just went.

And I started talking to some friends, and then next thing you know, we got like a leaked WhatsApp chat from the RCMP, and it was like saying some really nasty stuff about how they were going to like take their jack boots to the protesters' faces. They were using Nazi comments; they were doing some really nasty things.

And what I realized right there is: who is going to stop us? Us! When the police turn on us, it's like at least we have the service; at least we have the veterans. It's not the military that's going to stop it because they're weak-minded at this point.

If you're a DEI believer in that service—I'm sorry, you’re not. If you believe in DEI for the Army or the Navy, or maybe the Navy, but, or the Air Force, I’m sorry, you've lost the plot; you forgot why you joined; you forgot what real war looks like, you're delusional, and you're going to cause harm.

People are not going to like that comment; I'm going to get all the hate. I don't care, because that's the truth. You’re not a free thinker. Your job—I get you've been told that you're supposed to follow in suit, but there's also a point in your life when you come to a fork in the road and you go, “Do I believe this?”

If you go, “No,” it's going to suck, but you have to stick to what your truth is, and mine is that behavior is not acceptable. So, who is going to stop us? Well, it looks like the veterans. See, it's not the military because the veterans are the ones that know what war is 'cause we've all been there for the past 20 plus years, and now we're all rocking into it again.

The military doesn’t look after its people, doesn’t equip them properly, doesn’t feed them properly, doesn’t look after the families, and puts you on an increasingly dangerous amount of pharmaceutical intervention instead of actually solving the problem. So why would you serve? I'm sorry; never again. Not for Canada.

So what happened in Afghanistan? You went to Afghanistan; you were with the French unit. I was with the French. We went to FOB. This was when I went. So I went, uh, so I got to Valor in September. We deployed in April of 2009.

2009? 2009. How old were you? I was just turned 19, and so we went—my battery, our troop Alpha, we went to FOB Ramrod. So they go two guns at a time—so two gun troops, so we had two triple sevs and then two people, two troops filled with enough people to run both those guns, the comms and the officers.

So we got dropped off there in the middle of the Mayan District; it's just like a 3 kmet FOB, really small, in the middle of nowhere, and that was the first time I had been outside the wire and went, “Oh, there are people out here that want to kill me.”

It was very shocking. Immediately, we transitioned with the other Canadians, and we started right away. And so we got to know some of the Americans. The French didn't want the Americans on our side, and the French wouldn't speak English to the Americans, but I did.

So I wasn’t chummy with everyone here because I couldn't really talk enough to have full conversations. So I started talking to the Americans, and there were a lot of guys from Texas and from all over the place, and it's wild because everyone thinks the military is racist, but it's like the most welcoming group of people I've ever met.

There’s people from everywhere, all walks, it was crazy, and so that was great. Loved the FOB. When we were shooting, it's boring; otherwise, you're just working out or you’re—you know, you said love the FOB? Tell me, FOB—Forward Observation Base.

And so that's just where our little home was; we had our tent—that's where we slept; that's where we shot guns. How did you understand your mission? Like, what was it that you—I wasn't given a mission set? I wasn't given a mission set.

That was a gunner; it was you go here, you shoot the guns, when you hear the fire mission, run to the gun, follow orders, right? Yeah, right, right, right. And the only other time is we would go up onto the OP Tower, and we had a bunch of OP towers, and Canada's Tower was this one.

So OP—oh my gosh, it was the something post—OP Observation Post. Holy brain, get it together. We're going to get there. And you would do four-hour shifts with the machine guns, and you would just watch; that's what you did, and then you do radio calls.

So I liked to mess around with the Americans and do them in French; it was just fun for me. Anytime there was a fire mission, you ran to the gun. So that was like my life for a long time.

How long? I think for that was like the first couple of months, and then after that, I got a call came down to the tower and said, “Kelsey, you need to come into the tent.” And I went into the tent, and Sergeant Leblon was there, and he said, “Hey, so there’s about to be a big operation and the British need you to go with them.”

I've told them no, and I was like, “Hey, man, I want to be infantry; don't take my dream; let me go do this, dad; like I want to go do this; like let me go live my life,” you know? And he goes, “I don't want you going.”

I said, “Why? Why?” And he goes, “Because you don't understand.” He had deployed to Bosnia and he had deployed before, and he had used his weapon in combat, and that wasn't artillery, right? So it was small arms.

And he's like, “I don’t want you going.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “But they're not going to say no; they're not letting you stay.”

So what he did is he said, “Come with me,” and we went and got my rifle kind of sorted out. He stripped his rifle down because he had deployed before; he had all the Gucci kit, and I just had this, like, old sight that doesn’t work unless it's at like 400 km; it’s not going to work for close combat at all—like it’s terrible.

And he got me, you know, the tack light and all the cool things and gave me all of his—this is where it scared me a bit—he emptied his vest and took all his extra mags and went, “You're going to need these.”

And he laid it out in front of me, and it was a lot of magazines. And I was like, “You really going to need that?” He goes, “Okay.” And then he took me to the little range we had there and I zeroed my weapon, and then he said they’re going to come get you tomorrow.

So they were taking small arms fire on the way and they couldn't come get me, so they said, “If they don't come tomorrow, you're not going.” So he was all happy; they came; they picked me up. There was a bunch of TPPs on there and a bunch of other individuals—interpreters, sorry.

And within that, there was just a bunch of random people on the Chinook, you know, bits and pieces from all over different places of Afghanistan—people going to the hospital, some interpreters, some of the military. And they dropped me back off at CAF, which is the—it is essentially the massive base within Kandahar where everyone flies in and out of.

If you hear about the Tim Hortons or the Pizza Hut, it’s there. And so that's where the British were, and they dropped me off, and then they dropped me at the British gate, and they said, “Here you go.”

And I walked into the British, and I introduced myself. I don't know how to read the ranks, so I don’t know who I’m talking to. They just have all different little, you know, we had chevrons at the time; they had different stuff.

And so I must have been talking to someone high up, and I think it was a command calhon—Commander, no idea, just terrible. And I said, “Hi, I'm going to work with you.” And they said, “Okay, you're going to be our female at—so just female searcher; you're going to come with us.”

You’re going to go see the RCMP here real quick; they’re going to tell you what you can and cannot do; they’re going to give you some zip ties and some gloves, and we’ll come get you. So I went to the RCMP; they gave me a quick overview of what I could and could not do.

And what could you and could you not do? I could not put duct tape on them but could zip tie their hands. I couldn't put them in certain positions; I couldn't put a bag over, but I could tie their eyes. If I was removing things from the women, they had to be set down in front of them so they could see that we weren't stealing it—that we were just removing it from them.

And then, you know, just pressure points; I wasn’t allowed to push—I said, “Okay.” And then I got gloves and a bunch of zip ties, and then I went back to the British, and they said, “Okay, we're going out tonight at 1:00 in the morning, and this is what we're going to do; you're going to go from house to house to house to house, and anytime there's women, we're going to call you, and you're going to follow that guy right there with the bomb dog.”

He's got a black lab named Benji, and you're going to follow him everywhere he goes. Don't lose him; he's with you the whole time. I said, “Okay.” And then they said, “You can go sleep,” and I said, “I don't think I can.”

And then we set off in a little school bus over to the airfield and then hopped on a Chinook, and I sat on the floor, which was a bad idea, and people stacked around me. And then we took off, and we went out—it was the first time I used NVGs, so nods to see at night and all of that, so that was interesting, and that was about it. To be honest, that’s all I got told, and then we went out on foot, and we had a hot LZ, and we landed.

Yep, so we—I’m going to get—I’m so sorry. No problem. We were taking some small arms fire when we came in, and they dropped us off really quick.

The problem was people were sitting on my legs, so I couldn't feel them. So when they—I stood up; my legs—I went to run—they gave out, and so a Brit, a Scottish guy, just grabbed the back of my vest like this and did one of these and just kicked me in the butt, and it was like, “Off you go,” and I was like, “Here we go.”

And so we went out, and then we waited until morning prayer because of the respect we have; we wait until they're done their morning prayers and we kick their door in. And then I was told they're not going to use me; you know, Burns, we haven't had people—women and kids around a lot; they've been leaving.

I said, “Okay.” They told me we’re going to be out there a week; I was like, “Okay.” First house, we need her, and I go; it was my first experience of what 12 women and kids screaming and crying in a room by myself looks like.

And that was—I, being a mom now, I really wrestle with some of that stuff. I didn’t then; I had no reference point. But being a mom now, I really wrestle with what kicking people’s door in in the middle of the night with your baby screaming and terrified—the level of trauma I've left in that country and the women and kids I encountered.

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What were you looking for? All we were told is we were looking for caches, you know, weapons, a lot of money, anything that would indicate people were working with the Taliban or anywhere near sort of IEDs, which are improvised explosive devices—any of those farms, and that's all I was told.

And so if I were to find big wads of money or I would find cell phones and any of those things, I was like, “Bring them to them; like, okay, this is what I found, who I found it on.” Did you? Yeah, yeah, we found a lot.

They hid stuff in women because they didn't think I'd be there to search them, and so does that help you reconcile yourself to what you did? No. Why not? Because I still did the thing; I still inflicted the trauma; it was still a part of the pain.

It doesn't erase it; it's there though, so it's an uncomfortable feeling. Something I've definitely worked on a lot, but it's definitely there; like, “K, my door in the middle of the night?” Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean?

It’s very immediate, hey? What you're involved in is very immediate and it's like bang, it’s just like it’s just like screaming and like madness and chaos, and you know, it's right after they're praying—it just feels dirty.

I get why—I don’t get me wrong, I'm not saying like we shouldn't have done it that way, but like shock and awe is how you don't get killed, right? It's like my buddy used to say to me, “I'd be like, how did you guys, like how did we lose so many more people than the SF?” He's like, “We move at night, quiet; we get the job done and we leave.”

Conventional forces, we roll out at the same time every day; we go down the same road every day, you know? We're sitting ducks; it's different. So anyway, so you gotta be quick and you gotta be shocking awe a bit, right?

So that’s the tactic, and so we started doing that for a while, and that was going okay. I had a couple scuffles with men in the family thinking I was a boy going into a room. So we dealt with that a little bit, which is always fun.

The interpreters didn't like that I was there; there's not a lot of respect for women, especially a female soldier. So that was an interesting relationship to kind of work around, if you will.

And then we had a couple situations. So situations—wow, I would have. So that's an additional difficulty of being female in the armed forces in those countries? Yeah, absolutely, because if you're fighting a country that has little to no respect for women by and large across the board, depending on your level of extremism.

Yeah, you’re going to be dealing with a different trust issue, right? Yes, well I would imagine that you're particularly hated too. Oh yeah, you could feel it; it burns through.

Yeah, you can feel that, but that’s okay; I equally hated them just as much, and I made sure they knew it. So again, this is where that masculine side switched on, and there was no feminine left.

So within a couple days of being out on our foot operation, I was with—except you said that it bothers you now that you're a mother. It does bother me. I mean, I think it should bother anyone. You’re a—I’m not disputing that.

Oh no, for sure; I just think that feels natural to me. I feel like if I were to say, “Oh, I had no problem with what I did to those women and kids,” I think that would be slightly sociopathic.

Yeah, right? And I’m in—I consider myself a painful empath for a lot of people, especially, you know, post-psychedelics and really opening and doing work on myself— that kind of shell and heaviness isn't there anymore.

That need to protect my heart is not there anymore; now it's like painful all the time. Like right before we came here, there was a woman at lunch just yelling at her child, and I could see that she was stressed, but it was like watching the child take it.

Oh, I just—I stopped eating; I felt nauseous, like I’m painfully empathetic now. It’s almost a—I almost wish it was a bit the other way; it’s easier.

How much of that do you think is a consequence of becoming a mother? I mean, that's a big change? Oh yeah, I don't think it's as much as I thought it would be because when I had my son, I wasn't well yet, so there was still that hardened part there.

And thank God it happened so early where he couldn't remember what I was like; he gets to see happy Mommy now, he doesn't see Mommy crying on the stairs like he did when he was 2 and 3, right? So how long did you search? We only did a week. We did a full week of just nonstop.

And because it was nonstop, I went from Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and I was shifted between every single unit. So if they were kicking a door and there was women, okay, then I would go over there and then if they—they would kick and wait and then they would go, “Okay, wait, we got women,” and they’d put them in a room and then they would wait for me to come over here and then I would search over here and then it would be the same sort of thing over here.

There’s not many of us, so you’re used a lot. And so how did you get along with the Brits? I loved them. How come? They didn’t question me; they didn’t make me feel like I needed to prove myself.

I was handed to them, and they said, “Do you know what you’re doing?” And I said, “Probably better than some of you.” And because I immediately fired back and didn’t just cower into my shell, they're like, “Oh, she's lippy, is she?” And then they started calling me “The Seward” in a good way, and I was excited about that because I was like, “Oh, I’m starting to be one of these people.

Okay, okay, I can do this.” And then you’re still only about 19 at this time? Yeah, I was 19 the whole time, yeah, and it was just—they respected me. If I said stop, everyone stopped. They weren't like, "Oh, why should we stop?"

They were like, "Stop, Burns said stop!" Something felt wrong, and so they respected me. And so I got on with them just fine, and it was really lovely.

There were South Africans, English, Irish, who else is it—Fijians—and they were just this amazing eclectic group of people, and they all just were good with me. There was no questioning it at all. No one was weird; no one pulled any sexual stuff; no one said anything offside that I considered offside. It was a really respectful relationship.

And I liked it. So when they respected me, I was happy to be there. And so we were out, and we were all on hold. There was a road to clear, and I was—had my back up against a wall, and on the right-hand side there was a road, and then there was another compound.

And then they had a second story on that, so we put a sniper up on the roof and a spotter over there and we had some guys over here waiting, then we had all of us up against the wall, and we had an interpreter beside me.

Then just down the road there was this road and it kind of went from a big open field on the right-hand side, and then off the road was like a deep ditch, but was like super green in that ditch. Like they like really tall trees—people don't think Afghan is like really green, but it shockingly is.

And then at the end of it, there was this massive grape hut, and they're like, “Okay, we want to clear that before we go down this road.” What did you call it? A grape hut? So essentially, it's like a mud hut with a bunch of holes in it so if you hang things through it, it aerates so it'll dry things in there.

I see. And so we sent two guys out and one had a metal detector and one was a machine gunner, and he was just going to watch his back. And so everyone's kind