The road to becoming whole again is a long one, and the Invictus Games provide a key path for those like military veteran Danyal Beale.
The pain was rooted in lies. Lies to his friends, the lies he was told, and the lies he told himself.
And the lies eventually caught up with Danyal Beale.
In a distinguished 34-year career in the Canadian military, from artilleryman to special operations assaulter to physician’s assistant, he was deployed to hellish conflict zones that included Afghanistan and Rwanda. He is a military man from a military family — “it’s the family trade,” he quipped — and was even born in Madigan Army hospital in Fort Lewis, Wash.
And his service left him with an all-too-common affliction: post traumatic stress disorder.
It manifested in anger and outbursts, a state of mind “incongruent with serving,” ultimately leading to his medical discharge. Integration back into civilian life was challenging, and he said he would “press the Africa button” — to enter a state of seething anger he used to push people away.
In hindsight, he can see the signs. He would always stay a step ahead of it, surfing that barrel of trauma by jumping from job to job, from role to role. Keeping the mind busy kept him from looking back.
But he had the dreams, just like his father did after serving in Vietnam with the U.S. forces, where he won a Silver Star. Medals don’t stop nightmares. And what you go through to get the medal usually fuels them.
Like his dad, when the structure and the armed forces were gone, Beale was forced to reckon with his past, knowing he had denied the truth to himself for too long.
The difficulties of navigating the piecemeal mental-health support network for veterans in Canada made it easy to defer action, but with some extra urging from his wife Christina — herself a Special Operations Force veteran — Beale finally saw a therapist.
“I’d procrastinate, procrastinate, and the next thing you know, it had gotten so much worse, and here I go,” said the longtime Victoria resident. “Now I’m really angry at the world. So I finally broke down, had a chat and found out, yeah, I was actually reacting.
“I had a great program up here called PTSD+Plus … and it’s only for first responders. So everyone in that group knew what we were talking about. We were all talking the same language. And I think that is what turned me from survivor to activist.”
OBSERVE. REPORT. STAY SILENT. SUFFER.
A white lie is a trivial falsehood, one told to avoid hurt feelings. This? There was nothing trivial about this.
As a medic on one deployment, he remembers telling his friend — his comrade who was bleeding out after taking two rounds to his abdomen — a merciful lie.
“That’s one of the hardest things to do, is look down on your buddy and lie to them. To tell them that, ‘Oh yeah, we got this, man. There’s nothing to this,’ ” said the now-60-year-old. “And you know inside, that, ‘Oh man, this is a messed-up situation.’ ”
Beale’s anger and frustration over that time lingers, even involuntarily seeping out as he talked about it last week. His job as a medic wasn’t to save lives, it was to count bodies. It was to document massacres, take photographs of them, and make reports that more often than not were returned to sender from what felt like an overwhelmingly apathetic UN headquarters in New York.
“Africa was the hardest (deployment) because I knew we had armoured vehicles. We had the means to stop some of the massacres, but we were never allowed to,” he said. “We were told, ‘No, go back to base. RTB, RTB.’ And then the next morning, the general would come out and say, ‘All right, guys, go to this grid. See what happened there. People are complaining that the water is poison.’
“OK, off we’d go. Sure as s–t, there were hundreds of corpses in the well.”
He had to take photos. And count. If there wasn’t a complete body, he was told to just count the legs and divide by two.
“Go do some counting. Go find out why this church smells. Go see what those dogs are eating,” he said, jaw clenching. “Every morning, when we went to these places, we would just follow the dogs — the dogs were innocent victims too — because they would be walking away with body parts, and we’d have to take the dog down to get the body part back so that we could allow the locals to have some kind of a funeral.
“It was definitely not what a soldier is designed to do. A soldier is designed to stop that. And I think that was our biggest problem. We couldn’t understand why. ‘Leave it. Observe and report. Observe and report.’ ”
Even after 10 UN peacekeepers from Belgium, who had been protecting the country’s prime minister, Madame Uwilingiyimana, were hacked to death along with 12 Belgium civilians, there was no action. Beale and his compatriots would clear a village, only for opposition forces to declare it safe in radio broadcasts to lure Tutsis back — along with their valuables — to be slaughtered.
It was too much for one of his friends in the platoon, who took his own life on a Christmas Day.
“We picked up a smell after about a month, and we just couldn’t wash it out,” he said. “We couldn’t get it out of our trucks, we couldn’t get it out of our clothes, anything like that. We noticed that the Canadian contingent and UNAMIR (UN force) that we were tasked to, they didn’t like having us around when we’d roll in. We didn’t know, because we were so accustomed to (the smell), but it was us.
“A couple of the clerks came over and said, ‘Where were you guys today?’ That’s when we found out that we carried death as a scent with us.’”
THE ROAD TO BEING WHOLE
The technique of repairing shattered porcelain and ceramic by binding it back together with gold or platinum doesn’t hide the damage, but leaves a precious scar; one that tells a story of resilience and strength to make something whole once again.
There may not be a better metaphor for the Invictus Games. It forges people anew.
War and conflict has shattered countless lives, bodies and minds through history both ancient and fresh — families and souls left fragmented in its wake.
The Games are about that journey of healing for those souls who served in the military around the world, those who were left splintered as a result of their experiences, and their own unique path to healing that trauma. But there is a difference between healing and being made whole.
And for Beale, the Games are a major part of becoming whole again.
“When I’m with the Invictus team, I think I’m helping both them and me by explaining my situation to them, how I ended up where I am, and why I can look forward to tomorrow, and not sleep all night and freak out,” he said. “The team camaraderie is right there, right away. And you can see it’s already becoming ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and it’s playful too, between the staff, the coaches and the athletes. It’s quite impressive to see the banter. It’s just like being back in the military.”
The biannual athletic event was founded in 2014 by Henry Charles Albert David — known most widely as Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex — with the intention of recognizing the fighting spirit of vets who have been wounded or injured during their service, and how they can inspire and achieve in their pathway back to reclaiming their identity, purpose and future.
Prince Harry, who served two tours in Afghanistan, including once as a helicopter pilot, was struck by a moment watching the coffin of a Danish soldier being loaded onto a plane for repatriation along with three injured servicemen, and founded the Games after a visit to the U.S. Warrior Games in 2013.
The seventh edition of the Invictus Games will take place in Vancouver and Whistler between Feb. 8 and 16 — the second stop in Canada after Toronto in 2017 — before returning to the U.K. next year, where the first Games were held.
Whistler will be the site of the first winter events in Invictus history, including skeleton, alpine and Nordic skiing and biathlon, while wheelchair curling will run at the Hillcrest Centre in Vancouver. The Games will also include indoor rowing, sitting volleyball, swimming, and wheelchair basketball and rugby.
“I’d be hard-pressed to pick one (event) that I enjoy more than the other,” he said. “Mind you, I’ll qualify that statement when I’m in the process of the four-minute endurance indoor row. I might have different thoughts … like, ‘What did I do? Why am I doing this? Oh, is that my lung on the floor?’
“Even though I’m a master, I’m still competitive to the point that I’m going to kick some of those young guys’ butts. I’m looking forward to my events. I’m looking to finish in the top 20 people for skeleton, the top 20 per cent for alpine skiing. For wheelchair basketball … I don’t know that we’re going to win any games. My goal for that event … is to acquire five to eight new friends that I could talk to.”
He also can’t shake the mindset that comes with his medical background, of being there, being present, to help those who need it. He’s a Special Operations Sentinel (SOS) whose role is to be the first touch point for any military members who may be in crisis.
“I have personal goals,” he said, “But I want to make sure that I don’t miss anyone who’s down or being silent off in the corner, who can’t handle it. I want to just make sure I’m there for them to lean on.”