For Caledonia resident MCpl (Ret’d) Berk Sagocak, a Turkish immigrant who came to Canada at the age of 12, mental health awareness has become something of a personal mission.
Sagocak joined the armed forces in 2007, following a childhood love of armoured vehicles that began when he saw a leopard tank at the age of 6 in his home country. Once enlisted, he found himself training as part of the armoured core, working toward his goal of joining an armoured vehicle crew. He managed that goal, spending 11 years as a member of the Royal Canadian Dragoons, an armoured regiment based out of Petawawa.
Shown above are members of the Royal Canadian Dragoons posing together prior to their deployment to Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2010. —Photos courtesy of Berk Sagocak.
During that training and eventual deployment, he described the bond he built with his fellow trainees as “impossible to find anywhere else. You find it in the services, the ‘Warrior Nation’. It’s a dysfunctional family, but a dysfunctional family with a job and a mission that gets done.”
Sagocak served his first and only tour of duty in Afghanistan from May to November of 2010, serving with taskforce 1-10 out of Kandahar. He described his time there, and the mental toll it ultimately took on him.
“A tour is a very, very complex situation. It is one of the most difficult things a soldier does,” said Sagocak on being deployed in an active war zone while also worrying about your family back home. “It’s hard to compartmentalize what they (your family) are feeling.… The difficulty of the tour and the threat to your life is there, but you put that in a nice box…. That’s your job.”
On the May 24 weekend in 2010, Sagocak was helping with another project when his vehicle was sent out. It hit an IED, injuring members of the crew and killing its driver, Trooper Larry Rudd. Sagocak was then assigned the role of driver for future outings: “As a driver in the armoured core, you know that if you hit an IED, you are most likely going to die.”
KANDAHAR—A tribute to Sagocak’s brother-in-arms, Trooper Larry Rudd. Rudd was killed when an IED hit an armoured vehicle he was driving on May 24, 2010.
He described a ritual he and another driver did each time they prepared to head out, giving each other a “double tap on the heart, then peace sign” salute, meant to honour each other in case of the other’s death in the line of duty that day.
Upon returning home, Sagocak found himself feeling that same sense of impending dread every time he sat behind the wheel of his car: “I love driving, but for the first couple years, there was a subconscious part of me that always felt like my life was under threat…. You’ve been wired to work efficiently in a high-stress environment. We don’t get taught to tone that down when it’s not required.”
He said that stress is baked into the initial combat training cycle all soldiers undergo. Friendships are formed during that training, and Sagocak lost some of those friends as they deployed ahead of him.
“I had a buddy that came over during his home leave.… We partied, and then literally a month later he hit an IED and was dead,” said Sagocak. He called these losses the unspoken part of service, adding that he buried a roommate as well. “I have very close friends that have PTSD without a deployment, because of everything they’ve been through.”
After years of training and deployments together, experiencing those losses together, Sagocak said of his crew, “You love each other, you hate each other, and then all of a sudden, we came back.… The unit goes through a re-organization process, and they tear the family apart.”
During this coming-home period, Sagocak’s marriage “went to shambles…. In my heart and mind my highest priority was the uniform,” he explained. It wasn’t until his daughter was born in 2012 that he realized his mental health was suffering.
“I’m f****d up,” said Sagocak. “I say that jokingly as well as truthfully…. My generation of veterans, the ‘Afghanistan’ generation, don’t really have a public voice. A lot of the guys don’t talk about stuff.”
CALEDONIA—Berk ‘Sago’ Sagocak is a military veteran with 11 years of service, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2010.
Recognizing the “downturn” in his mental health was only the first step: “I’ve been in therapy since then, working on my mental health.”
He said that while the military offers a variety of services to veterans targeting mental health, “It’s left up to you.”
He admitted to lying through the questionnaire he was given after coming back from Afghanistan, and knows he wasn’t alone in hiding his true state of mind: “You don’t want to get labelled…. You internally don’t want to admit to yourself that you can’t do your job.”
Sagocak, who ultimately left the military in 2018 for medical reasons, said even after accepting help and seeing a social worker, it took “two or three years to open up the deepest layers of the onion.”
He continued, “I still speak to a mental health specialist on a weekly basis, I rely on my combat buddies, my blue circle of friends almost daily to help me process stuff and go through stuff and be the best version of myself for that day. It will never end.”
Sagocak still struggles with certain triggers and depressive cycles that can last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks: “It has been years since I’ve had a month or two months of absolute depression, but I recognize that’s never going to change, for the rest of my life. The trauma is there.”
While it’s an ongoing fight, he urged fellow modern-day veterans suffering from similar issues to follow suit in seeking help.
“I am 100% better off having done mental health work. If I hadn’t started, I would be in a much worse place in life,” explained Sagocak. “That’s why suicides happen, because guys didn’t take care of their mental health, or they tried too late.”
“You get switched on, and you get left on…. That becomes a huge problem,” concluded Sagocak on the impact of serving in the military and the need to raise awareness and reduce stigma surrounding mental health. “There’s a long, long way to go.”
Sagocak recommended the book Parade State Zero: Leaving Military Leadership to Survive, written by his commanding officer Christian D Lillington, which he called an outstanding resource to veterans seeking help with PTSD.
For a list of services available through the Federal government, visit veterans.gc.ca/eng/health-support/mental-health-and-wellness, or contact your local Legion to be connected to local service opportunities.
