Description
Officer Hickey speaks about the sometimes difficult transition back to home life after deployments.
Transcript
Interviewer: And with all those experiences and those deployments, coming back home, is it difficult to return to civilian life? Because you have another job to do as soon as you get back here.
Yes and no. Yeah, it takes a while. It just takes a while. It’s difficult, but I guess achievable. You’re so used to doing things on your own and when you come back, you’ve got other people there that depend on you and so forth and so on. And you just sort of want to, you’ve been on your own for the past six months or eight months whatever the case may be. You almost want that little space off to one side. Not that you don’t want to see anybody, it’s just that… leave me alone for a while. And you know, I’ll be good like that. Yeah, I can remember when I came home from, I think it was, Sierra Leone. Yeah, I had a fairly big frontyard and backyard and I got four loads of topsoil filled in to re-sod it and I was up ‘til midnight spreading it all. “Are you coming in for the night” and I said “No, I just want to get it done.” You know, I wasn’t finished. I wanted to stay out and do it. And something like that, yeah. It can be difficult. I guess it depends on your make-up. It just depends on what you did, what you’ve seen and how you’ve absorbed it all in.