A month after leading seaman Scott Murphy returned from Kandahar, he's able to visit his local Wal-Mart without having to scan the crowd for suspected insurgents.
In his case, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress were mild, he says. After leaving Afghanistan, mental health experts with the military had warned him about signs of psychological stress.
"There were certain things that could happen and they did, but my symptoms are all but gone now," he said in a phone interview from Lower Sackville, N.S. "I'm rather relaxed."
Murphy, 34, is based on HMCS Athabaskan but volunteered to fight in the landlocked Asian country, where he spent six months doing intelligence work for the military convoys that snake their way across Afghanistan's treacherous desert roads.
At Kandahar Airfield he faced sporadic rocket attacks, which picked up after Ramadan. On one September day, he said the base was struck 14 times.
Like many soldiers who have returned home after Canada ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, Murphy is now getting accustomed to life away from the intensity of that conflict.
"The hardest part would be coming down from the high of being in a war zone, where you're always being shot at, you're always cognizant of what's going on around you," he said in a phone interview.
"You have to come home and readjust yourself to being the husband and the dad, and you have to be much more patient and understanding with the way things work in civilian life. It's a much slower pace."
Since leaving the war, he has visited everyone from doctors to dentists to psychiatrists, part of the military's drive to ensure its soldiers are healthy -- physically and mentally -- after they arrive home.
While Murphy is one of the lucky ones, at least 1,859 members of the Canadian Forces had been injured in Afghanistan by the end of 2010, according to the latest government numbers.
But Senator Romeo Dallaire, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after commanding the United Nations peacekeeping operation to Rwanda in the 1990s, said he believes the number of soldiers wounded in Afghanistan may be significantly higher.
In his opinion, the criteria used by the Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs to diagnose "invisible" psychological injuries may be too stringent, and the actual casualty rate among Canadian forces could be as high as 20 per cent.
Part of the problem is the chaotic nature of the Afghan war, which it makes stress injuries more common.
"The enemy could be anyone, and coming from any angle and with no compunction about killing their own to achieve their aim," Dallaire said by phone.
"So the impact on the psychology of the soldier is extensive -- and there is an incredible proportion of those operational stress injuries compared to physical injuries."
Since Canada sent troops to Afghanistan, the number of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress has multiplied from 2,000 to at least 13,000, according to Veterans Affairs.
To help cope with the influx, the department now runs 10 clinics across the country to treat veterans with stress-related injuries. The Department of Defence operates another five such clinics.
According to a spokesperson for Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney, the department does "recognize the seriousness" of post-traumatic stress and offers medical services accordingly.
However, veterans' rights advocates like Sean Bruyea say the federal government has been doing too little to help soldiers disabled by psychological wounds.
"They don't have proper rehabilitation programs. They don't employ enough research," Bruyea said. "They haven't built in wheelchair ramps to help them navigate the bureaucracy."
He's also angry that Veterans Affairs is facing a projected budget cut of $226 million over the next two years, "when we're at the point of having a large influx of people using disability programs and rehabilitation programs."
The growing popularity of Veterans Affairs' 24-hour crisis line might hint at the demand for those programs. Calls to the line, which is manned by professional counselors, have increased by 50 per cent over the past four years.
The issue of stress injuries could even shape decisions about Canada's military operations post-Afghanistan, according to security expert Mark Sedra.
"This war has inflicted different types of psychological trauma on veterans and I think that's something to watch," said Sedra, who's a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont.
"In the short- to medium-term, I don't think there's going to be a lot of enthusiasm to deploy again to a foreign war."
