David Wiseman was born on a Canadian base in Lahr, Germany, the oldest child of a signal operator who moved the family across Canada from posting to posting. As a boy he dug trenches in the woods and crawled through long grass as if he were already a soldier. After 9/11, he knew it was only a matter of when. He enlisted in the infantry in 2007, thrived through basic training in waist-high Quebec snow, and finished infantry school in Meaford, Ontario. His unit made him a LAV driver, even though he didn’t have a driver’s license yet. Shortly before his 2010 deployment, he was reassigned to a military police team that would mentor the Afghan police, and he trained for war at Fort Irwin, California, where he also began taking mefloquine, the antimalarial every soldier was ordered to take.
Dave landed in Kandahar in the spring of 2010 and was sent to Forward Operating Base Masum Ghar, in the Horn of Panjwai. Within weeks, an unexploded Taliban rocket landed about 20 feet from him on Kandahar Airfield, the start of a ground assault on the base. Then came the ambush. His patrol commander warned them they’d be hit once they crossed a certain line, and in an open field outside the Panjwai bazaar, a machine gun opened up. Dave remembers rounds landing inches from his head. He ran for a mud wall thinking only of getting home to his baby daughter. Later that summer, he watched a Canadian Chinook take fire and go down about 400 meters away, then stood security over the burning wreck. His team came home without losing anyone.
The war followed him back to New Brunswick. He couldn’t sleep, his temper was new, and his family saw it right away. Diagnosed first with adjustment disorder and then PTSD, he went through talk therapy, group therapy and, over the years, 42 prescriptions before his medical release in 2016. Nobody asked whether he’d taken mefloquine. After finding videos from Canadian veterans of Somalia describing the same symptoms, Dave pulled more than 2,000 pages of his own medical records and found the prescription there. Eastern medicine, nature, ketamine-assisted therapy and writing slowly brought him back. A brain scan later showed lesions and nerve damage that he believes came from the drug and from blast exposure. When a psychologist told him to write the flood of memories down, those pages became his memoir, From the Sands of Kandahar.
Today Dave is off every psychiatric medication, works as a trained veteran peer supporter, and travels to Ottawa for the annual mefloquine rally to push for recognition. He has lost about 30 veteran friends to suicide, and his message to Afghanistan and Iraq veterans is simple: find your records, advocate for yourself, and never give up. He takes pride in his service. As he put it to Greg, it isn’t the terrible things that define you; it’s making something good out of them, and finding your true self along the way.
Watch Dave’s full episode, and every episode of Ask A Vet, on YouTube, or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1vnvypN6Kspck3NnBiUSxw
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4UvdMjkOkOgoHM2yIckhlh
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-a-vet-podcast/id1854840136
Get Dave’s book, From the Sands of Kandahar: https://a.co/d/0h5XLKTN
This episode is dedicated to the 158 Canadian soldiers who never came home from Afghanistan, to the more than 40,000 Canadians who served there, and to every veteran we’ve lost since coming home.
Content advisory: combat, killing in combat, childhood abuse, PTSD, brain injury and veteran suicide. Veterans Crisis Line: call 988 then press 1, text 838255, or visit VeteransCrisisLine.net. In Canada, call or text 988.