Brian McKenna served for 19 years in the Canadian Army, retiring as a Warrant Officer. In that time, Brian served in Bosnia twice, and Afghanistan twice. His first tour overseas was as a platoon signaller in the infantry, in a group that was tasked with weapons seizing, weapons control and the monitoring of refugee movements. The second tour followed two years later and Brian was then a section commander in the same environment, but now in charge of the wellbeing of 8 soldiers. Years later he would serve in Afghanistan both as a soldier for Canada, and then as an instructor for NATO. Brian works at the COE for PTSD and provides advice both on veterans themselves, and also the realities of being a person with lived experience with PTSD. During 2012, he was working for NATO as a civilian instructor teaching European Police officers counter improvised explosive device techniques to train those officers to work with the Afghan police. During that time there were many items of criminality and injustice that were common place in Afghanistan, yet had to be ignored in order to carry on with the job they could do. This particular situation involved how the goal of searching for explosives put people in situations were they became aware of child endangerment and abuse, but couldn’t do anything about it. Brian is here to speak to us about his experience with this situation in regards to moral injury, as he sees it.

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