Last week I was at the CAF Transition Unit NCR Expo in Ottawa. We set up our booth, put out our materials, and got ready to have conversations.
What I didn’t expect was how consistent those conversations would be.
Fifty to sixty people came through. Service members still in uniform. Veterans weeks or months out. Some a few years removed. Staff who work in transition support every day. And at every level, without prompting, the same thing kept coming up.
Members leaving the Canadian Armed Forces still feel alone on the way out.
Not because the resources aren’t there. There are more resources today than there have ever been. The issue isn’t supply. The issue is that no amount of briefings, pamphlets, or referral lists can prepare someone for what it actually feels like when the structure disappears.
Two phrases stuck with me from that day.
“I don’t know what I don’t know.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
These weren’t said by people in crisis. They were said by people who were functional, capable, and in many cases preparing for a successful transition on paper. But underneath that, there was something unresolved. Something that civilian life doesn’t have a word for yet.
Who am I now that I’m no longer military?
That question doesn’t show up on a checklist. It doesn’t get addressed in a transition seminar. And it doesn’t go away just because someone gets a job or moves into a new city.
This is the lane Camp Aftermath was built for.
We don’t replace clinical care. We don’t run a crisis line. What we do is create the peer community and the continuity that fills the space between leaving and landing. A space where veterans can process the identity shift alongside people who have been through it and came out the other side.
Nine rotations. 47 participants. A 98 percent completion rate. Zero critical adverse events.
That record didn’t come from a treatment protocol. It came from veterans showing up for each other, guided by people who understood the terrain.
By Farid Yaghini, CEO & Founder, Camp Aftermath June 2026
