PTSD Canadian Military: Wife talks of different husband coming home

Warrant Officer Roger Perreault and his wife Fran are open and honest about what sometimes comes home instead of how they were before they left. If you are a wife, try to focus on what she says about all of this and then maybe you'll understand your husband did not come home as a "wife beater" but a dream leaper totally unaware of where he is or what he's doing to you. Then maybe our own PTSD veterans will stop being sent to jail instead of treatment. It's not their fault and it's not your fault but if you understand what is going on, then you learn to deal with it differently. Mine? We have not spent an entire night together in bed in 25 years unless we were traveling and it was a king size bed leaving plenty of room in between us.

Home is new Afghan war front
Combat vets continue battle at home
(June 12, 2009)


More than 26,000 Canadians have served in Afghanistan. In the first of a three-part series, we tell the story of one soldier's troubled return


David Bruser
Staff Reporter


Warrant Officer Roger Perreault trained 20 years for his chance at a combat tour.

The army engineer knew how to blow up walls and bulldoze new roads – important work in a war zone where doors are booby-trapped and old roads are lined with hidden bombs.

Perreault took those critical skills and a good-luck charm aboard a bus full of soldiers departing CFB Petawawa on Aug. 1, 2006. His mission: to build a route for the Canadian infantry in Panjwai district, Afghanistan.

"My great-grandfather was an engineer in World War I," Perreault says. "I had his cap badge. I brought it over there for good luck."

Perreault's wife, Fran, remembers his departure day very clearly, because her family would never be the same again.

"On Aug. 1, I put one man on that bus. Nov. 3, a different man came home. He looked like my husband. He talked like my husband. But it wasn't my husband. Part of him is still over there somewhere and I don't know if I'll ever get it back."

Warrant Officer Roger Perreault hits his wife.

"He doesn't even realize he's done it, even though I wake him up at that point. He gets off me, rolls back over. The next morning he asks me why I have bruises on my neck, why I have black eyes."

On occasion Fran has had to rely on makeup and scarves so she can leave the house for the base, where she manages a cleaning company.

"I'm a pretty small woman. He's a pretty big guy. He would cry. He would be ashamed. I would say, `Don't worry about it. It's not your fault.' He really took it hard."

It's after 8 p.m. on a Tuesday in Petawawa. The Perreaults live a couple of blocks off base. She sits at the dining room table, the family collie, Sapper, panting nearby and the four kids padding about the small, two-storey house. In a few days, Fran and Roger will mark their 16th wedding anniversary.

"I did get strangled one night." Fran says. "I woke up, I couldn't breathe. I kneed him in the stomach. I had marks on my neck. I covered it up with turtlenecks and makeup. My closest friends understood. They've dealt with the same things.

"He wasn't doing it to be vindictive or mean. He was someone else in his sleep. He'd been dreaming he was under attack."
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Home is new Afghan war front