Episode 13 – ‘Losing your life’s calling’ with Mark and Donna Campbell

MIND BEYOND THE MISSION EPISODE 13: LOSING YOUR LIFE’S CALLING WITH MARK AND DONNA CAMPBELL

Brian

You’re joining us again for another episode of Mind Beyond the Mission. I am Brian McKenna. I served in the Canadian Forces for 19 years, so that makes me a Veteran. It doesn’t make me a doctor. I’m certainly not going to be talking here about what you ought to do or giving advice on how to handle medical situations. What we do is we make sure our conversations are honest, they’re from the heart, and we’re talking about our experiences. Not just our experiences but how it went for our guests.

Laryssa

I’m Laryssa Lamrock, a proud Veteran Family member. This podcast talks about issues that are of interest to Veterans and Families, about Veterans and Families. I’d like to share a quote as we start off today’s episode, “The toughest part of Mark Campbell’s nine-year ordeal was being separated, not from his legs by a Taliban bomb but from the uniform and the life that he loved.” “Wearing a uniform for me was my life’s calling,” says Campbell. “It’s what I did from the time I was 13 from Army Cadets on straight through the reserves and into the regular army.” That’s an excerpt from Legion Magazine from March of 2017.

Brian

We’re joined here today in Ottawa and we’re actually taping this in the hospital where we work. Normally, we’ll do it off-site or in the studio. If you hear any hospital noises in the background, well, that’s part of the flavour today. Mark and Donna are both here, so thanks for joining us. Been a bit of a trip to come here from Edmonton.

It is a job. It’s a calling but it’s a lot of fun. Being in the Army is one of those things that I don’t think people stay in for the amount of time that either the two of you did for a paycheck or just something to do in the next couple of days. It really is in the soul, isn’t it?

Mark

I loved it. For me, it was everything, it was my life’s calling. They say some people are born to do certain things with their lives and I don’t know what I did in a past life, if I had a past life but I tell you in this life, I was meant to be a soldier because that’s what I was good at. That’s what I derived enjoyment from. I liked living rough, living in the woods, running around the mountains, jumping out of airplanes, doing all that good stuff. Yeah, you talk about enjoyment, Brian, and that’s the reason I stuck around for 34 years was because I was having a good time.

Brian

Today we are going to talk about how we got here and how we got here specifically for the two of you. A decade before, where I was wheeling you around Parliament Hill, you were deployed overseas advising the Afghan army. You’re a qualified paratrooper, former reservist, moved on to decades of honourable service in the regular force, accomplished soldier and accomplished leader. How did you become a medical patient and then how did we get here to where we are today?

Mark

One wrong move. That’s all it takes, one wrong step. Literally, that’s what changed everything for me. In the course of an instant, everything flipped on its head, 180 degrees. It was a complete unhinging of my life. All it takes is a zig when you should have zagged.

Laryssa

Tell us a little bit more, Mark. You served 34 years you mentioned. If it’s okay, tell us a little bit more about that wrong move for folks that might not be familiar with yours and Donna’s story.

Mark

Sure. At the time that I was injured, I was advising the Afghan National Army, basically teaching on-the-job training in combat operations. We’d done a village clearance operation that morning and the bottom line was we ended up on a rescue mission to save the life of a Canadian soldier who’d been shot and was going into shock and was likely going to die if he couldn’t be evacuated. For them to evacuate that casualty, we had to take over the fight.

That meant basically dispensing with what had been a deliberate operation and going to a hasty operation which accepts more calculated risk and then that’s certainly what we got. We literally turned left and steamed about 400 yards north towards the sound of the fighting. We stopped to get a grip on our Afghans so that we could enter the fight in an organized fashion, and we were ambushed by me being blown up. Then they hit us from three sides with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, which is a pretty typical Mujahideen tactic for what we call a complex ambush.

I was the one that they chose. They saw me as leadership, I’m sure they saw me talking on the radio and looking at my map and realized that I was leadership. I was wearing a different uniform, which we did for good reason over there because we also had to liaise and provide a point of contact for Canadian Forces on the ground with the Afghans. They saw who I was, what I was, and they waited about five minutes while we got set, and then when I walked across the bomb, they detonated it, they blew it up. That launched me through the air. Both femoral arteries were pumping blood to beat the band and I knew I had a couple minutes to live. That was my one wrong move and that’s what the result of it was.

I yelled out for help. The soldiers were brilliant. Under fire, they piled on me, got a couple of tourniquets on each leg to stop the blood, which saved my life. My senior medic saved my life again by giving me what’s called rescue flow, which tricks the body into believing it’s got more blood pressure than it actually has. That bought me about an extra hour to live with my reduced blood flow or blood pressure. Took about 90 minutes to evacuate us in a running gun battle under fire most of the way. To be honest with you, I couldn’t tell the legs were missing, but I could sure tell those tourniquets were cinched down on both legs.

The agony was indescribable to this day, I can’t put it into words for you. Just imagine the worst feeling you’ve ever had, hitting your thumb with a hammer and times it by 10, and then times it by 100, and then times it by 1,000 and you start to get close. Maybe. That was the start of a long, long process for Donna and myself. That instant in time marked a massive transformation in my life in terms of what I was going to do in the future and what I would be able to do in the future. It meant the end of a career that had been my life’s calling on circumstances which were not of my choosing. That was difficult to deal with.

Brian

That is a big deal, isn’t it?

Mark

That’s tough to deal with when it’s not your decision to leave. It’s not quite time for you to leave yet, and yet you’re leaving anyhow because you don’t have a choice in the matter. There were huge implications, not just for me on a professional sense, but huge implications for my family and for Donna and for our two children, massive.

It turned my life on its head. Well, it turned their lives completely upside down and three times around, because unlike them, I was trained to deal with adversity. That’s what the military does. It teaches you to deal with challenges. They throw challenges in front of your face continually to help you perform, learn new techniques, and do your job. I had been given that adversity training or for lack of a better term, I’d been exposed to that adversity in my life. Losing my legs to me was just one more mega challenge, but not so much for Donna and the kids.

Laryssa

Yeah, Donna, you served in the military for 30 years as well. You were a Veteran in your own right. Thank you for sharing that, Mark. I can’t imagine for you back home once you got word of the incident, did anything prepare you for that as a Family member? What was your mindset? Did you go into operational mode in that minute? What was going on for you?

Donna

The day before I was informed that Mark had been injured, I had this really weird feeling and I had to sit down for 15, 20 minutes. I don’t know what was going on. I was out with the kids, we were standing in line waiting to get in. I knew something had happened. I didn’t get the call. I didn’t have anybody coming to the door, that horrible feeling, that knock on the door that every military wife does not want to get. So I just carried on.

I went to work the next day and did my normal workout before work, and as I was coming into the building, I saw people looking at me weird and I knew something was up. My boss took me downstairs to ASU Edmonton and they opened the door to the conference room and there was the rear party CO and another warrant and I knew something had happened.

The very first thing I said to them was, “Is Mark alive?” and they said, “He’s alive but–” and then they carried on and told me. It was a big shock. I had to ask them three times exactly what happened. It took me a while to take it in, and they sent me home. I went home and I thought about it. “What am I going to do? How am I going to tell the kids?” They had told me that they would send the chaplain over afterwards. They wanted to know if I wanted them to come with me when I told the kids and I said, “No, I want to deal with this on my own.” I picked up my kids after school, we got home, and I told them that their father was alive but something had happened.

It was very hard, and the chaplain and the assisting officer came over shortly afterwards and spoke to the kids also, but I was left on my own still to deal with it all. A friend came over, she sat with me as I was preparing dinner for them. I didn’t want anything to be totally different for my children. She just sat there as I made them dinner and she said, “Why don’t we just order takeout?” I said, “No, I had promised them schnitzel that night, so we are making schnitzel.” It did seem like a bit of a dream or a nightmare if you want to call it that, because we never thought this would ever happen, or I never thought this would ever happen.

Brian

He’s a pretty tough guy, right?

Donna

He is.

Brian

Still a pretty tough guy, but these things, they have stages in which they provide us with difficulty. Mark and I have spoken about this before. The mental health challenges of physical injuries, I think sometimes people have a look at the event and they think, “Well, that’s what it is right there. It’s the mine strike, it’s the gunfire,” albeit past me to say it isn’t. There certainly are mental health challenges of that attack, then there are mental health challenges of adapting to the new life. There are mental health challenges when the system just doesn’t seem to have lined up with what we think we signed onto.

This is something that’s really common in the community is, there is an enrollment document. You raise your hand, you put your hand on the Bible, or you solemnly affirm or whatever. At the end of the day, whether or not you read that fine print, you probably signed on to something that sounds like, “If I get hurt, you’re going to look after me. If I’m gone, you’re going to look after my Family.” And when that unwritten covenant doesn’t get lived up to, that burns in its own way. Does that make sense to you guys? Is that your sense of it, too?

Mark

Dude, you just nailed it. For me, the effects of the gunfire, the effects of the bomb, the effects of losing my legs, those nightmares, the kicking with what’s left in my legs in the night, the screaming, the running, the shouting out, the striking out, that all abated after what would you say, two, three years? Yeah, but I’ll tell you what is never abated to this very day is my sense of betrayal because of the federal government of Canada failing to live up to its obligations with the social covenant that all soldiers serve under.

Brian

That’s what you’re calling it, the social covenant.

Mark

It’s a social covenant.

Brian

Right.

Mark

It’s a social covenant. [Sir Robert] Borden stood up on the eve of Vimy Ridge and told the soldiers that were gathered there that they would have no cause to want from their government were they to be injured or killed in the attack on Vimy Ridge the next day, and so they attacked willingly knowing that they’d be covered. None of this was ever written down. None of it was ever agreed to by the Government of Canada. When their feet were held to the fire after 2006 with the new Veterans Charter, what we got was fundamentally different from what people had gotten just prior.

I’ll give you an example. When they adopted the new Veterans Charter in April of 2006, you can take two different soldiers. Soldier A is in a vehicle IED incident, loses both legs, prior to 2006, gets financial compensation package A, which has big dollar signs attached to it. Soldier B comes along after the 1st of April, 2006, is dismounted, hits an IED, loses both legs above the knee, exact same injury, exact same war, exact same location, exact same army, and a fundamentally lesser financial compensation package. That to me is all about betrayal, it’s betrayal of our service.

Brian

When you’re back in Canada and I’m trying to imagine a point in your life after the injury where you feel like you’ve figured out how to use the chair, you’ve got the elevator in the house, you’ve got the hand controls on the car, you’ve got the things, but then there’s the reality of, “Okay, this is my life going forward. I’m a middle-aged man and I’ve got to live with these injuries forever.” That realization point, what’s that struggle all about? What is that like?

Mark

I think a lot of it’s a struggle of tempering expectations, expectations about what the rest of your life is going to look like. I thought maybe I’d have an opportunity to travel the world. Well, there’s a whole bunch of countries I can’t go to because they’re just not that wheelchair accessible. Things like that, you have to temper your expectations. You have to manage your own expectations and, to a certain extent, you have to manage your Family’s expectations if you’re going to be included in the Family’s activities, as limited as they may be going forward. A lot of it is managing expectations.

Laryssa

So many layers to both of your experiences. Donna, I see this as much your story, if I can use that word, as it is Mark’s. You are a remarkable woman. I’ve just met you. To look at both sides of the experience as well, you mentioned once that injury hits the Family harder than it hits the individual.

Mark

I believe that, yeah.

Laryssa

Tell me a little bit more about—

Mark

It goes back to the fact that I had 34 years of military training behind me in the infantry where they just keep throwing challenge after challenge after challenge at you, and they just make it harder and harder and harder. You overcome those challenges and it builds your self-confidence and you move forward to the next. I had the benefit of that resiliency training when I was injured and it served me very, very well. I just saw my lack of legs as another big challenge moving forward in life.

Brian

Right. The next obstacle.

Mark

The next obstacle to be overcome. There was never any question in my mind about giving up and rolling over and dying, although there were times when I couldn’t manage the pain properly where I wanted to die. The biggest concern was the Family and the reason is the Family does not have the benefit of that resiliency training, that lived resiliency training. It’s not a three-day course you can take and suddenly you’re resilient. It doesn’t work that way. You have to overcome obstacles in life in order to be able to overcome bigger obstacles later on. It’s a learned skill.

Brian

Do you think we could chip away at it though?

Mark

Maybe. It would certainly be worthwhile to try.

Brian

Interesting. One thing I wanted to ask— and Donna, you and I, we spoke about this probably about an hour ago before this taping. There’s Mark’s injuries and then there’s your ability to help Mark in whatever way that you can, but then there’s Donna, the Veteran, the individual, the woman on her own. When is the first time someone turned around and said, “How are you? How is Donna?”

Donna

Mark was the one that realized that I was suffering at the point of a nervous breakdown. No one ever asked me how I was doing. No one asked me if I needed help. It was always the focus on Mark opposed to myself or the children, the Family.

Mark

You’ve got to remember too, that was almost 15 years ago so the military was in a very different place with Families. Saw them as baggage as opposed to integral supporters of the soldier in his career or her career. It was a very different mindset.

Brian

Yeah, it’s a different time, but how was that time?

Donna

It was very hard. Even as a warrant officer with 30 years of experience, I was surprised and shocked that I had to fight the system. From the get-go, I was told Mark was injured so I said, “Okay. I want to go overseas to see him,” because I was told he wasn’t coming back right away. I was told, “No, you can’t go.” I didn’t know until afterwards— they initially had told me I couldn’t go overseas to see him because they didn’t think he was going to last. He was going to die. Well, why wouldn’t you let me go see my husband for the last time then?

I kept fighting. Finally they said I could go, but my children couldn’t go. I said, “No. My children have been told their father has been drastically injured. They need to see him also.” I had to fight again for them to go overseas. Finally I was told I could take the children over, but they might not be able to see him when they went. I said, “What’s the point in that?” I said, “Regardless, let’s go and we’ll fight for it once we get overseas.”

Mark

All this fighting is just corrosive to your mental health. Everything from the get-go was a fight for Donna because I was in the hospital. There’s a cost of being crippled. Let me tell you about that and we will. But I tell you that this was a bad, bad time. It was a rough patch and all of this fighting that Donna had to do on my behalf while I was in the hospital was corrosive to her mental health, to the point of permanent injury. Yet the system refuses to recognize secondary PTSD as a consequence of somebody else’s injury.

Brian

We asked you when was the first time someone asked you that question? Let me actually do it. How are you doing?

Donna

I’m okay now. I’m much better. But anytime Mark has a relapse or an injury, which he has, it all comes back again and becomes the beginning when he was blown up again.

Mark

Yeah, I have issues with my residual legs. I have to go for more surgery. I’m supposed to be in the hospital right now, but we had—

Brian

More surgery?

Mark

Yeah. Revision surgery. I got problems with edema and fluid in the legs and the circulation.

Donna

Over the last year, he’s been going to the hospital—

Mark

Once a month for an infection.

Donna

—to the emergency room once a month. Then he gets ill to the point that his legs are going to kill him basically.

Mark

Yes. It is based on edema and cellulitis and things like that.

Brian

Are you still revisiting that resiliency training that you mentioned? Is that still required?

Mark

Yeah. Oh, I’m tapping into it for sure. Absolutely. It’s no fun spending six days in the hospital at any time of your life.

Brian

Kids bear a lot in this circumstance. You’re doing some work here in the world of kids and you’re speaking about your resiliency and the fact that the kids weren’t trained in it. But they do seem to find some resiliency.

Mark

Well, I think kids are naturally resilient. They do rebound, but there’s only so much they can handle at one shot.

Laryssa

We were chatting earlier, your children were younger when the incident and the injury happened, and you have two.

Donna

Yes.

Laryssa

They’re both young adults now. As we were chatting prior to this session, you were saying that it almost seemed like it wasn’t until they became adults that some of the—

Donna

Issues came.

Laryssa

—issues came to the forefront and they have to come to terms with that.

Donna

Initially, we had them see a psychiatrist and see if they’re okay. They said they were managing. As they got older, things actually came out and our daughter had a lot of issues in the beginning. In the end, she was able to overcome it. Our son still suffers from anxiety, but to get them any access to mental health, we had to have Mark’s doctor certify that his mental health depends on theirs. Then they were allowed to get support through the system.

Laryssa

You did say that things happened quite a few years ago. It was a little bit of a different system then, you’d mentioned. How are you feeling as far as support goes now for your Family, for you, Mark, as an individual, Donna, for you as an individual, and for your Family?

Mark

We’re pretty much in a position of stability in our lives now. It’s been fifteen years since my injury. The first five were very rough years, bad years, like bottom-of-the-bottle years for me. Getting out of the bottom-of-the-bottle years and recovery and Veterans Transition Network and all that work, rehab, all that stuff. It was a rough five years. It was very rough on the Family. I’m not kidding myself. I put them through hell and that was a function of the career choices I made. It was also a function of just some of the individual personal choices I made when I was hurting.

It was a bad five years, but the last ten haven’t been all that bad. We live our lives and our lives are different because of my injury, there’s no question about that. Like I said, expectations are considerably lower for what we’re going to do with our retirement, but it’s not all bad.

Brian

We’re going to talk a little bit about the cost of being crippled.

Mark

Yeah, sure.

Brian

Before your injury, you’re driving your truck and it’s still driving fine, but you hear a ping coming from the engine, what would you have done?

Mark

Well, I’d have pulled over to the side of the road, opened up the hood, and had a look under and see if I can figure out if there’s a loose belt or something’s wrong or a fan is ticking against the shroud or whatever. I’d have tried to troubleshoot it myself. Now I can’t. I just phone CAA. I can’t get out of my truck, I’m in a wheelchair.

Brian

Alright, round two. There are only two rounds to this game. You and I are at Home Depot. We both see a discount ceiling fan for $50, a good deal. We both buy one, it costs me $50. What’s the cost to you?

Mark

Oh, probably $500 by the time I hire a contractor to come in and install that fan because I can’t climb a ladder and I can’t work with electricity on the ceiling because I have no frigging legs. Everything costs me money. Anything wrong with the house, I would’ve done it myself. I can drywall, I can do all that crap, I’ve done it all before, but I can’t do it now. I can’t physically do it. I can’t physically swing a hammer, but waist height, I’m pretty good for about a foot, but that’s about it.

I can’t do that regular home maintenance stuff, snow removal, cutting the lawn, getting up and cleaning the gutters on the roof, none of that. I can’t even hammer nails into a doorframe accurately and properly. I have to hire contractors to do all of that stuff, and it’s very, very expensive. Every time I have a problem with my house, I have to throw big wads of money at it. The problem is the government ain’t throwing big wads of money at me.

Brian

There’s money. There are some things that—

Mark

There is some money. I make about the same as I made when I was serving. Right now when you take into account all of my tax-free pain and suffering and then all the taxable items, by the time all is said and done, I make about the same as I made when I was serving. I’m in a good situation but I am the anomaly, I’m an outlier. I was a major when I got hit, a senior major.

Brian

The cost of being crippled for a corporal is staggered?

Mark

It’s a killer. You can’t afford it. How do you raise a Family, send your kids to university, maintain a household on $60,000 a year with no hope of improving your financial lot in life by virtue of your physical circumstances? That’s a pretty grim prognosis for the rest of your life. You can see how somebody facing the rest of their life with that, and me facing the rest of my life with a reasonable income—

Brian

You did mention earlier though, you made a point of saying this was a different era, it’s not all that long ago by the way, but it’s a different time ago.

Mark

Long enough for change.

Brian

Let’s talk about that change. Donna, have you seen anything that you could put your finger on and go, “This is better. They’re doing it better now than when I had to go through this.”

Donna

I don’t know. I can’t think of any that’s better.

Mark

I can’t honestly say that if this happened to me again tomorrow, that I wouldn’t have to fight most of the same fights. I honestly don’t know. I’d have to go through it again to be able to tell you how to answer that.

Donna

When Mark went through, one of the very first things I asked his case manager was, “Do you have a list of all the things that are available to us?” They said, “No.”

Mark

They didn’t. They didn’t even have a shopping list.

Donna

Basically it’s, “You have to ask when you have a requirement and then we’ll tell you if it’s available.”

Mark

Why is this a secret? For three years I went without a clothing allowance.

Donna

I happened to be searching their website and I found it one Christmas. I told Mark to put in for it, that he was eligible for a clothing allowance. We lost out on what, two years?

Mark

Two years’ worth because it’s only retroactive for a year, but nobody tells you about this. It’s only $150 a month, but that pays for the tailoring of my pants.

Donna

But we didn’t know. They told us that we should have known. How do you know?

Laryssa

I did want to ask, it sounds like you had to advocate for yourselves in a lot of ways and do research on your own but I’m curious to know, was there anything that was uplifting and comforting in the process? What worked well for you?

Donna

The Secret Santa that was put on by the community and I would say friends. We still don’t know who actually did it. People started dropping gifts off at the door.

Mark

Twelve days of Christmas.

Donna

Twelve days of Christmas, and it was very nice. They weren’t big gifts, they’re just little gifts.

Mark

Movie passes or something, right?

Donna

Yeah.

Laryssa

But just knowing that the community was thinking about you.

Donna

Exactly. It was the first Christmas after Mark got injured. It was nice to know after all this traumatic activity that somebody was thinking of you.

Brian

You’re really highlighting what small gestures could be like. You’re talking 15 years later against a movie pass, but you still remember it.

Mark

I’ll tell you one thing that was extremely uplifting for me and confidence-building and inspiring and all the rest of it was the Soldier On program. Absolutely 100% a fantastic program.

Brian

Give us your version of what the Soldier On program is. I know it, but it might not be common language so what is it?

Mark

It started out as a charity done by a search and rescue (SAR) Tech by the name of Andrew McLean who’s retired now, a warrant officer, ultra-marathoner, long-distance runner, a great guy. Out of the goodness of his heart, he started a charity called Soldier On. He used monies that he raised by going around hat-in-hand to corporations to take groups of disabled soldiers, sailors, airwomen, airmen and special operators nowadays, to go and do adaptive sports and better living through physical activity as a way of rehabilitating.

More than that, bringing together a community of disabled Veterans was important. Realizing that you’re not alone, that there are other people out there facing the same challenges. The ability to network and share best practices, when you’re not busy skiing your buns off or doing whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing with Soldier On that’s the main focus. Brilliant program, very pleased to see the Canadian Forces took it over.

Brian

You’re not the only one saying that, by the way. There are a lot of other good stories out there I’ve heard about it. I don’t know the program other than what I’ve been told, but I know…

Mark

All it is, quite honestly, they have a number of coordinators who go out and organize events, mostly group events, whether it’s a golf game or it’s a sailing event or it’s a fishing something, just opportunities. And based on your degree of disability and what type of disability you have, maybe you can or maybe you can’t participate. I don’t do particularly good on the cross-country skiing ones, but I can sit ski, so downhill skiing, yeah, maybe I can participate.

Soldier On’s pretty good about offering a wide variety of opportunities that just about anybody can find a spot for themselves on. I think it’s just a brilliant program. It’s opportunities offered to the disabled, both serving and Veteran and sometimes Family members. It’s a brilliant program.

Laryssa

You used a word as you were describing that, “community,” and even with a Secret Santa knowing that the community was thinking about you. I think there are different ways to establish community. Through COVID we learned different ways to make connections. We’re hoping through the podcast actually, and a Veteran and a Family member here having a conversation, we’re part of the same community. I’m going to put both of you on the spot a little bit.

Brian

That’s the best kind, we love it. [chuckling]

Laryssa

That’s the best, right at the end. I say that’s my modus operandi, I think, how I work. If you were to chat with another younger couple who were just experiencing what the two of you have experienced with a significant injury that impacts mental health, what would you tell them?

Mark

I tell them, “Come on over for a coffee and we’ll sit down, we’ll talk at length,” because it’s not something you can do in 20 minutes. It’s probably something that you would want to develop a relationship over and mentor that individual over time, as opposed to try to give them a shopping list of things of do’s and don’ts. That’s not that helpful.

Laryssa

I’m reading into this—

Mark

What’s helpful is a sounding board. What’s helpful is someone who’s been down that road that can say, these are the pitfalls, these are maybe the advantages of looking at it from this perspective. I think there’s great benefit to be had in people with like disabilities mentoring one another.

Brian

You’d offer them peer support.

Mark

Yes, absolutely. I think that’s the most effective.

Brian

You’ve experienced programs and treatments, and there is stuff you say is helpful, but you’d offer them peer support.

Mark

Yes. The Veterans Transition program I found very useful, very powerful.

Laryssa

Donna, how about for you, what would you say?

Donna

Well, I found with Soldier On it was great for Mark in the beginning, but I was jealous and envious because it was only focusing on him. Once they changed it and allowed Family members to participate, that was brilliant because then I was able to see him excel at a sport, say, for sit skiing. Something he’d done previously, downhill skiing, but still was able to continue sit skiing, changed my mind about the program. To actually see him do that opened my mind.

Brian

It also shows some growth on their part that they’re willing to adapt it, right?

Donna

Exactly.

Brian

We’re at this part now where we’re wrapping up. One thing that’s very apparent in the years I’ve known you and also certainly, in our conversations today, you’re still a soldier.

Mark

Well, thank you for that.

Brian

You want blunt answers, go ask people like this. They’ll tell you what they think, and yet there’s always heart at the end. They’ll turn around and say, “Yeah, I’ll help that guy.” I really appreciate you guys coming and doing this. It’s an endeavor to get out of Northern Edmonton, Sturgeon County. See, I know. [chuckling]

Mark

The endeavor starts here in Ottawa and the lack of handicapped cabs. [chuckling]

Brian

To wind up in Ottawa and to do this with us today. It’s been my pleasure to have you here.

Mark

Thanks very much, Brian.

Donna

Yes, thank you for having us.

Mark

It’s been our pleasure being here.

Laryssa

Thank you both for your service.

Mark

You’re very welcome.

Laryssa

Thank you.

Brian

Just like every other time, there’ll always be more episodes coming out from Atlas Institute. Every time we have a podcast, I get a couple of ideas of what the next podcasts have to be. We’re signing off. Thank you very much.