The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Real Life Hurt Locker: Defusing a Live Suicide Bomber in Afghanistan

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

His colleagues described it as one of the "greatest single acts of bravery" they'd ever seen. In 2009, while deployed as part of an anti-explosives team in Kandahar, Bruno Guevremont became the only C...anadian Armed Forces member to defuse a live suicide bomber. In episode two of Forgotten War, Guevremont describes the day that changed his life, the "cat-and-mouse game" between him and the Taliban during his second tour in Afghanistan, the difficulty of coming home, and how he healed from the psychological wounds that have been ignored throughout most of the history of war. This video was made in partnership with Canada Company. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You know, a lot of people talk about PTSD, but that's a normal reaction to a normal situation. You're thinking you're going to fight some bad guys, and then you get there and you go, okay, where's the backing? Well, he's everywhere. This is Bruno Gavremont. He was deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan for his second tour in 2009. When we got to Kandahar, right away the tempo was different. Although the Taliban government had long been toppled,
Starting point is 00:00:39 this was the most dangerous phase of the war for Canadian troops. Gavremont was part of an anti-explosives team. My first, first call in country, like we had just gone to the camp, unloaded everything, started talking with the team that we were replacing, and it was three suicide bombers that had detonated in a live full market in the middle of the day in front of the governor's palace
Starting point is 00:01:04 because they wanted to get the governor. I started walking in observing the scene and the first thing I've noticed was my boots sticking to the ground. And I was like, why are my boots sticking to the ground? And I looked down and I'm literally standing in a pool of blood with body parts and
Starting point is 00:01:27 flesh and stuff like that everywhere So it's kind of like this thing that kind of hits and then I can tell you that when you come back up from looking At that the scene is different The smells are different like your body your brain starts registering all of that stuff. Right at that moment, my brain switched for seven and a half months on to be focused on gas. In the hide and seek guerrilla war being waged by the Taliban, the improvised explosive device, the IED, had become their primary weapon.
Starting point is 00:02:01 I would do two to three bombs a day personally myself. Most of them were IEDs designed to catch us or to catch coalition forces. It's this game of cat and mouse that goes on. Some calls involved decoy bombs meant to lure his team into a booby trap. To stay a step ahead, Gavrement needed to get into the mind of the bomber. For seven and a half months, I needed to think like a big guy, think like a bad guy, think like a good guy, think like a bad guy. And that starts playing with your head a little bit. By 2009, the Afghanistan war had entered its second stage.
Starting point is 00:02:44 The goal now was reconstruction. In 2009, the Afghanistan War had entered its second stage. The goal now was reconstruction. But Taliban attacks were a constant concern, with the IED a source of daily destruction and the cause of the most Canadian casualties in the region. The suicide bomb, although rare, had taken the lives of many, including a Canadian diplomat. Most of the time when we get a suicide bomber call, when you get there, they usually have detonated
Starting point is 00:03:10 or they've been shot. And in each of these situations, you pull out the robots, you go down range, you undo whatever's on him or whatever's left. But that day what happened was we got a call for a suicide bomber, so you always prepare for whatever, so as you're rolling down, I was listening to Nora Jones. what happened was we got a call for a suicide bomber. So you always prepare for whatever, right? So as you're rolling down,
Starting point is 00:03:26 and I was listening to Nora Jones, and we get there and I get out because it was my call and it was a point of contact. So I get out, I'm like, where is he? Where's the blast zone? Where's this thing? And then the interpreter goes, oh, they haven't caught him, he's running around.
Starting point is 00:03:41 And I'm like, oh, okay. So I turn right away and get on the qualms and I said, everybody into your vehicles right now. Because we're the target. Gavrement and his unit immediately got back into their vehicle, unsure of where the suicide bomber was. When we started rolling down and we looked to the side and we see three guys,
Starting point is 00:04:00 two guys are holding each arm of this guy. And I said, whoa, let's go over there. The bomber had been tied to a fence by Afghan security forces. Gavriment instructed everyone to leave the area. So basically I went down range with gun tapes, with some electrical tape, some scissors, and some wire cutters. And basically I get to this guy.
Starting point is 00:04:23 There was this strange box of energy, and I'll just leave it there and you can make your own assumption of what it was, but this big strange box of energy that kind of starts building up around me and him, and it's this warm, energized kind of feeling. And I noticed that, and then once again I just snapped back in and said, okay, let's go look at the circuitry and everything. Gavrement was concerned the suicide vest may have an anti-removal device that would explode the moment he removed it or a chicken switch, which means it could be remotely detonated by someone watching from afar. When I got to the vest, it's just burlap sack with the fabric strings that hold it there.
Starting point is 00:05:11 It's like a vest and it's got all the rebar in there and the explosive and the batteries were here inside the vest and then the switches were going through his sleeves. So I checked with my fingers, all good. Checked there, I looked behind him for a receiver for a chicken switch. I found the other battery, removed that. So I cut up the strap on his shoulders. I slipped off the whole thing. He tried to talk. I put my glove over his mouth and I said, I basically told him, I said, listen, man, we're both going to get out of here. Just shut up. Let me do my job. Once Gavrement got the bomb to a safe area, he quickly dismantled it. Had it detonated,
Starting point is 00:05:44 the damage would have been extensive. That probably, well, felt like an eternity. Probably took 10 minutes. Gavrement is the only person in the Canadian Armed Forces history to disarm a live suicide bomber. This day remains prominent in Gavramon's mind. June 6, 2009 is when the picture of my world came undone. Because what I learned was that the guy had Down syndrome. And then he had been fasted for two weeks or something like that.
Starting point is 00:06:20 But the biggest part here is that he was told that if he didn't do this, they were gonna kill his family. So now we're talking about, we're fighting unwilling participants here. I can tell you now how much that impacted me. However, it was very kind of like a small moment at the time of going like, wait a minute, what? Like, oh man, that's messed up. And then back onto task.
Starting point is 00:06:48 Gavrement stayed in Kandahar until the end of 2009. His team diffused more than a hundred roadside bombs and booby traps. Between six to eight months after coming home, Gavrement noticed something was wrong. Then I started noticing that I wasn't sleeping as well. The sleep is the first thing I think that sets us into that downward spiral. Because from there you get exhausted and from getting exhausted you have a harder time to deal with
Starting point is 00:07:20 your anxiety and that stuff. And then you start having night terrors. And that's when everything starts going sideways and at first you brush a lot of that aside you're like okay okay I'm gonna be all right just temporary whatever right is this because you can't put your finger on anything and then it started to get really really bad and then when you don't get sleep then I didn't want to go to work and then the suicide ideation comes in right even if you don't want to there's just this pain this this you're not sleeping you're tired you're exhausted then you get anxiety and panic attacks and you don't know what those are so I went to see the
Starting point is 00:07:58 unit doc and she says oh okay well you know maybe you know just reintegration and kind of like the first time I saw her I was like okay let's look's look at this and just you know, you go back Do you work and we'll do that and then the second time was getting even worse I wasn't sleeping and now we're talking about weeks and months here, right? We're talking about, you know things at home just going down and then you're you're short tempered There's way more screaming and we're more arguing with everything, right? And then you see all this aggressiveness around you. And then the doc said, well,
Starting point is 00:08:30 Bruno, you're exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. My answer was like this, and I'm not lying, doc, I don't know which school you went to, but this guy doesn't get PTSD. It got worse, way worse. And then I had a spot, I had a way I was gonna do it, and a way to make sure that, you know, my family is going to be taken care of and all this stuff. Like, you know, you want to do it as an accident and, you know, all this stuff.
Starting point is 00:08:52 And you think about that stuff and it's really, really dark. And you just want to get it over with because there's so much pain that of a pain you don't understand and that you've never felt. of a pain you don't understand and that you've never felt. The way that I describe it, it's like this big weighted steel knot on your chest that just squeezes and squeezes 24 seven and it hurts so much. As long as there has been war, there has been PTSD. That fact has not changed, but how we understand it has. In the 18th century it was known as nostalgia. After the American Civil War
Starting point is 00:09:33 it became the soldier's heart. In World War I the focus shifted to the damage done by the concussive blasts of exploding shells, and it was recast as shell shock. In World War II, concern pivoted to the long and grueling deployments, and those suffering were said to be experiencing battle fatigue. It wasn't until the fallout from the Vietnam War that in 1980, PTSD became an official diagnosis. You made a plan. What stopped you? My son. My son. That's why I have this tattoo here.
Starting point is 00:10:15 So in the morning I would wake up and I'd be like looking down and say this is my reason. Basically because I didn't want, I grew up without a father. He wasn't present and so I didn't want, I grew up without a father. He wasn't present. And then, so I didn't want to do that for him. From there, Gavramon found healing in a number of places. At first, it was medication and talk therapy. Then, meditation helped. He also found exercise to be a form of therapy and became a captain for Canada's Invictus Games team.
Starting point is 00:10:44 And he also made an expedition to the North Pole. So my first advice for anybody that's out there that's looking at healing and getting better, help other people feel. Because it makes you, one, feel important and valued. At a time where you're thinking you're broken, you're no good, you're not good enough, you're more of a burden than helping your families, they'd be better off without you. It's actually not true. It's the other way around, right? Suicide doesn't end the pain, it just reassigns it. Gavrement sees a
Starting point is 00:11:17 culture of stoicism in the military as a major obstacle to treatment. One of the first commands that we hear is, suffer in silence, I don't want to hear you. So you become accustomed to being in pain. Although it became a formal diagnosis in 1980, Gavrimont thinks it wasn't until the Afghanistan War that we started to properly acknowledge and treat PTSD. As of 2022, more than 20% of Canada's Afghan veterans have been diagnosed with PTSD.
Starting point is 00:11:53 This war that's unspoken of, which is the war that the veteran faces when he comes back home, whether that be reintegrating their family, whether that be looking at what it is that we're going to need, or getting access to the services and I think that that's the that's the war that you're talking about is the war at home. This video was made possible by the generous donation of Canada Company.

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