When it came time for 2nd. Lt. Max Birkner to leave Afghanistan in the spring of 2010, he tried to stay.
For the most part, he had been enjoying his time overseas with Canada’s military. He wasn’t ready for his coming-home moment.
But the Canadian military told him it was time.
He had, after all, spent most of his tour “outside the wire,” in high-stress and volatile situations. Soldiers who had experienced what Birkner had weren’t typically allowed to extend their stays.
So, after brief stops in Dubai and Cypress to drop off equipment and receive training and support for transitioning back to civilian life, Birkner again stood on Canadian soil in his home city of Vancouver.
“I had kind of predicted that being home that summer probably wouldn’t be a good idea,” Birkner told KTW.
“So I had planned this bicycle trip where I bought a bicycle, flew to St. John’s and I biked home. That was my whole summer.”
Four years later, Birkner, 26, lives and goes to school in Kamloops and is an officer with the Rocky Mountain Rangers.
He returned to Canada in May 2010, after eight months in Afghanistan. He left that summer on his bike tour to, in a sense, see the country he had spent the last year of his life defending.
“I hadn’t thought of it that way at the time, but it was almost like a symbolic coming home,” he said.
“I had travelled throughout Canada with the military and it was cool to, first, bike across Canada, second of all, revisit a lot of places I’d travelled before, almost say hello again to my country.”
Birkner’s platoon had seen a lot of combat in Afghanistan. His was one of the last combat tours.
He had been in some dangerous situations and worked in some volatile areas.
He had engaged in firefights, he had come into contact with improvised explosive devices (IEDs — he saw about three every three days) and 13 Canadians died on his rotation.
Those memories, among others, remain vivid.
Birkner described his time overseas as positive, overall, and calls it a “collective memory,” which focuses not just on the combat and the carnage, but just as much on all the positives.
Though he felt the military had adequately prepared him to come home, there were still challenges.
“In my experience, when I came home, I would often have these, I guess you could call them a resurgence of adrenaline. I guess you could say I had a case of combat fatigue, which is different than post-traumatic stress,” he said.
“Basically, combat fatigue, described in my own words, is what happens when you’ve been under stress for seven months, constantly being shot at, blown up and constantly having to suppress any fear or doubt that you have.”
People would ask him about Afghanistan or from time to time he would think about it, and he couldn’t control his reaction.
He would begin to shake and sweat. His voice would change. He could feel the adrenaline.
“You would almost get annoyed with yourself because it’s this unexplainable thing,” he said.
“You’re like, ‘I’m just sitting in a coffee shop, I shouldn’t be feeling like this.’”
Now, a few years later, the occurrences are fewer and far between, but the memories are as vivid as ever.
“It’s a very powerful memory,” he said.
“You could call it a very highly amplified experience. Everything over there seemed amplified because it was so extreme. We were close to death every day, so you had this very high level of consciousness about your own vulnerability.
“Because of that, I felt like my perceptions were sharpened and I just observed everything to the max.”
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