Something new and troubling seemed to be happening in the Canadian Forces, something to maybe keep in mind, the chief of Land Staff told Dallaire: “We are starting to see some issues with guys coming back from Cambodia and Yugoslavia,” said Reay, as Dallaire recounts in his memoir. Related: Roméo Dallaire on peace, child soldiers and retirementĭallaire was back home in Canada in September 1994, hard at work in a new job in Ottawa as deputy commander of Land Force Command, when his boss, Gordon Reay, called him in for a brief chat. So far someone-or, often enough, blind luck-has always come. But I wasn’t looking immediately to bleed to death so much as wanting to feel that release.” But someone came: his sister-in-law, Christine, whose role in keeping Dallaire alive and functioning can scarcely be overestimated. So I thought see how much more of that would help, knowing that, sooner or later, if nobody came, I would bleed to death. “I might have cut just once,” he says in an interview, “but the warmth of the blood and the smell of the blood, because there’s a sort of an iron smell, had an incredibly soothing effect. But bereft of one of his main supports-“the uniform,” as Dallaire calls it, meaning his tribe, his very identity-and overwhelmed with pain, he was willing to take what came. Deliberate, calculated suicide was a step too far for Dallaire’s almost lifelong military sense of duty, and he points out he did prudently hand over his guns to an old comrade, Gen. The cutting, perhaps the most arresting incident disclosed in Dallaire’s brutally revealing 2016 memoir, Waiting For First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD, was no different in kind, he insists.
As UN commander in Rwanda during the still tense days after that nation’s 1994 genocide bled to a halt, Dallaire would drive up, alone and at night, to checkpoints manned by heavily armed teenagers as skittish and traumatized as he was. Much of it, in Africa to start and later in Canada, involved driving, including reaching 150 km/h on a Quebec road with his young children in the back seat. It was another of Dallaire’s rolls of the dice, another in what has become an uncountable number of attempts, stretching over two decades, to kill himself “accidentally,” through behaviour so reckless it is a wonder he is alive now. Very slowly, he began to slice himself, first his thighs, then his arms. Roméo Dallaire drank most of a bottle of scotch in his Hull, Que., apartment before he opened a metal box containing his father’s medals and his 50-year-old razor. One night after he was medically discharged from the army in April 2000, former Lt.-Gen.
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