She Picked Up a Perfectly Laced Boot and Said They Could Reuse It

Kelsi Sheren did not grow up around guns. The family property in Ontario was a safe patch for deer; her mother put out salt licks so hunters would leave them alone. What she did grow up around was Remembrance Day. Her parents made November 11 non-negotiable, rain or not, and after a ceremony in Ottawa she missed her bus stop talking to an elderly World War II veteran in an air-force uniform, one of the first women to fly. Walking back into a college apartment she already disliked, the self-talk was simple: join the army.

She wanted infantry because that was the work that seemed to change something: door-kicking, trench-sleeping, hundred-pound packs, the people who show up in the middle of the night. Recruiters did not cite a hard cutoff, but at about 103 pounds, with a license that still said 4'11", they did not want to run her through a course she would fail, then recorse her into another job. Armored — tanks — had the big gun she liked, until she pictured a closed metal box and felt herself panic. Artillery was what remained. She took it, she tells Lex Fridman, because the gun was bigger.

The piece she would later fire in Afghanistan was an M777, a 155-millimeter howitzer she still describes as a work of engineering that makes her heart skip. The round weighs about a hundred pounds. Accurate fire, she says, reaches about 40 kilometers, farther if you stop claiming the extra. The barrel alone is worth a million dollars; you do not haul that thing on a truck if you can hang it under a Chinook instead. A gun troop is five to seven people, and guns travel in pairs. A solo gun, she says, means something has already gone wrong.

She calls artillery the hand of God: it reaches out and touches you from wherever the crew wants, and you will not know it is there until it is. There is an Excalibur round that costs about half a million dollars, comes in a sealed tube, and needs permission from Ottawa; GPS-guided, it is reserved for VIP targets and, in her telling, was used only a handful of times in Afghanistan. Ordinary work is high explosive, illumination, and air-burst shrapnel. Forward observers embedded with infantry call the grid and tell the guns which patch of earth not to erase. When she later stood under a danger-close mission with the British, it did not sound like the World War II whistle. It was a crackle, a whiz, and the ground shaking through her.

Before the howitzer, there were the small weapons she had never fired as a civilian. The Carl Gustaf sat on the shoulder with a sight that felt, to her, as flimsy as a toy soldier; the blast behind it will kill you, and firing it felt like being punched in the head on repeat. The issued C7, cousin to an M16, dragged its barrel on the ground when she slung it. She preferred the short-barrel C8, not because special forces used it, but because she could run without plowing a furrow. As a non-officer in her unit she never drew a sidearm. Grenades she loved and later tattooed; outside the wire with the British she taped the spoons, picturing herself grabbing the wrong thing while searching someone.

Canada was scaling into a combat role after 2007, and the pipeline was compressed. She enlisted in November 2007, started basic in January 2008, ran weapons training and trade school, and was posted to her unit by September — an English speaker dropped into a French-speaking regiment in Quebec. Five anglophones went; they were split across different guns. She had to relearn every command she had just memorized, shouting the breach open and closed in a language she did not yet own. On graduation day, men in uniform from Quebec told a handful of them they were posting and deploying in April. That was how she found out.

Watching a gun troop fire, she says, is a symphony: everyone yelling, everyone knowing why. The sergeant takes the fire mission and nobody moves until he says move, nobody fires until he says fire. She was not tall enough to run the GPS sight on top of the gun. What her sergeant could train was the body. He took her to the gym and drilled how to get a hundred-pound round off the dirt — knee under it, legs not back. On the charge-bag side she learned to step onto the trail, lean in, and kick the bag up the tube. On the lanyard she hooked the rope, put her right hand on her hip, stared at him, and turned her whole body when he pointed and yelled fire. A wrist yank was how you got a misfire.

The Canadian insult for a useless soldier is "shit pump." She did not intend to be one. Day-to-day at the regiment, before anything like a war, was 5 a.m. PT — 10-kilometer runs, floor hockey, lifting, ruck marches — then showers and sitting around mopping floors and cleaning weapons until, suddenly, there was a whole lot to do. She still talks about the gun the way some people talk about a Formula One car. When the sergeant finally said mission accomplished, target hit, that was the feeling she was chasing.

Workup started in Texas, chosen because the ground looks a little like Afghanistan: hot, empty, nowhere. They flew onto the tarmac and were told not to touch the snakes, then sat in a classroom for a slideshow of local wildlife and a warning not to squat outside to pee because it was snake season. She remembers thinking she still had to pee. It was the first time they wore tan boots and tan kit. It was also the first time she ran the full live-fire loop on the big gun: trucks, ammo, a fire mission on the speaker, fuse screwed onto the round like a timer, then "fire when ready" and the dance. The water and sanitation on the base were bad enough that half the camp got gastroenteritis. She got it near the end.

The closer rehearsal was Wainwright, Alberta, a vast training area the troops called Wayne-cock because it was miserable. Tents, cots, full mission mode for a month or two. On an exercise she remembers as Operation Maple Leaf they wore haptic suits with a screen on the chest; a simulated gunshot wound offered buttons, and the wrong choice killed you. Soldiers not on the deployment rotation played Taliban and hit them in the middle of the night. Fire picket, canteen food, plates and ammunition on the body — this, finally, felt like the army rather than breakfast and mopping.

Fridman asked whether the tactics on the other side were taught clearly. They were, she says. IEDs, suicide bombers, vehicle-borne bombs; a backpack charge dressed with toys so someone would pick it up; women used as the approach because a burka looks non-threatening until an AK comes out of it. That logic later stopped being a slide. She was excited more than anxious. Up to then the military had been marching, saluting, and working out. Wainwright was the first full taste of the job she thought she had signed up for.

They loaded their own bags onto their own plane. The stopover — she will not name it — was where the war became heavy in a literal sense: bulletproof plates for the first time, weapon, magazines, helmet, vest. It was humid enough that she was still wet after a shower; she asked if Afghanistan would be like that and was told no, it was dry. Then a C-130, and before Afghan airspace the call to make weapons ready, barrels down, helmets on. The pilots started flying in the valleys. She was 19, and that was the first moment she understood that they were jinking because an RPG could take them out of the sky.

Kandahar Airfield did not feel like a war. There was a boardwalk, a Tim Hortons, a Subway, a Pizza Hut, gyms, and floor hockey because the Canadians required ice in some form. British, American, and Canadian sectors sat beside Italians, Germans, and French in uniforms she did not know how to salute. You carried a weapon and you could still live a life. The base was large enough that explosions stayed at the edges; what you felt was helicopters shaking the ground and the occasional rocket siren that put everyone on the dirt until the all-clear.

The forward base was the other country. FOB Ramrod was American, 101st Airborne as she remembers the patches, a few kilometers around, mesh walls filled with gravel, five towers. The Americans ran four; the Canadian gunners, a tiny corner of the map, ran one, because people still had to be on the guns at all times. She did four-hour shifts and looked at mountains in the distance, sand, a few compounds, and a road everyone knew got hit. The M777s arrived under Chinooks and were dropped to stay. The outgoing troop left a noose hanging at the tent door as a welcome. It was funny then. She does not post the photo now.

She was borrowed by the British because she was a woman and the front had almost none. Taliban hid material on wives and children, counting on no one searching them. On that operation she was eating British ration sweets when a little girl edged close; Sheren gave her the candy, the brother slapped the girl and took it, and Sheren slapped him back, stood with the rifle, and pointed until the girl ate every piece. She asked the interpreter if they could take a photo. The camera was her officer's, fluorescent pink. The girl stared, then grabbed it after Sheren flipped the screen, ran inside, and everyone assumed it was gone. She snuck back. Inside, the mother lifted her burka and showed that she had shaved her legs to look more Western. Sheren says she could not have known, in the moment, how much that scene would weigh later.

The same movement, compound to compound, she waited with her back to a wall while a few people went forward to clear a road and a grape hut — the tall mud drying-house with rectangular holes that fighters liked to pack with explosives. Open ground in front of them was the kind of space soldiers hate: too much sightline, too easy to seed. She happened to turn left. The ground shook before her eyes caught up. A torso went through the air and landed in the field. An IED under a pile of sticks had met a British metal detector. A second man, kneeling in the doorway, caught the blast from the side; helmet and kit were torn off him.

Radios screamed. KIA numbers went out. Mortars and small arms opened because that is what the ambush is for, and because someone will film it. She said they had to go now; someone told her to wait; she said they were going. She held the wounded Scot while he asked where the other man was, eyeballs huge, accent so thick and fast she could barely parse it. She told him his friend was fine. Then the uncleared road, tunnel vision, the sound of her own breathing, legs in slow motion. At the hole she saw a boot. The lower leg was still in it. The laces were perfect. She picked it up, turned, and said they could reuse the boot.

That, she says, is when the light switch went off. She felt it shatter. There was no humor in it and no anger yet — no emotion. Someone told her what was there was there, start grabbing, they needed to move. She pulled tissue from the rectangular holes with bare hands; gloves were for searching. They would not leave a piece of a person to be dragged behind a truck. She slung a twisted rifle, tucked helmets under an arm, ran a flimsy stretcher that dumped into a ditch, heard rounds going by — a different sound incoming than outgoing. She has no memory of handing over a bag of intestines; a man who was there reminded her later. "War is subjective," she says. The brain remembers what it wants, and allows what it allows. For ten years, including at the ramp ceremony where she lost her mind, she carried the sentence that they had not gotten all of him. The week before sitting down with Fridman, she was told they had gone back and recovered the rest.

When the operation ended she went back to the Canadians as someone her unit did not recognize. She got quiet in a way that, given her usual volume, terrified people. Hate and anger, she says, are not large enough words. A woman came at her with scissors and the thought that crossed her mind was that she could stomp her to death in front of the family and the children and feel nothing. One event had been enough. She no longer saw those people as people. Jocko Willink had shut down a similar argument with her by refusing the Dire Straits line about fools making war on brothers in arms: in his war, the enemy raped, tortured, and put evil in the world. She still thinks both things can be true later. As a soldier she could only carry one. She lost her humanity there, and only later got it back. She still holds a hatred for the Taliban, she says, that could set a building on fire — and she knows they survive by dissolving into civilians, including children.

Because people had died, she spent three or four days on the British side reciting the event word for word to a military policeman who wrote it by hand, again and again, so the stories matched and nobody had been shot in the back. After-action reports have a purpose. Repeating a slaughter until it etches deeper, she thinks, does not. That night someone was supposed to pick her up to cross Kandahar. No one came. She humped her kit back to Canada House, sat on the shower floor for thirty or forty-five minutes in a place with a rule about short showers, and cried without knowing why.

Doctors loaded her with medication and sent her back to the FOB. Nobody told her sergeant. When the gun fired at night and the crew ran, she stayed asleep in the tent with the piece beside her head; they thought she was goldbricking with the Americans. On a night shoot Sergeant Mark LeBlanc looked at her eyes and asked if she was okay. She said she was good. She was, in her words, medicated out of her tree. He later saw the bottles and told her she should never have been there. On May 23, 2011, she left the Forces on a 3B medical honorable discharge. For six years after Afghanistan the thought of suicide did not take a minute off. She avoided every Middle Eastern face, swerved from roadside trash, and for a long stretch did not leave the house.

Asked whether twenty years in Afghanistan were worth it, she answers as one person with a narrow view and still will not dress it up: the war began on false pretenses, which is a bad start. The anger that landed in 2021 was less about leaving than about how. Canada, she says, skated. A snap election was scheduled for September 20, which she reads as a bid for zero accountability; a Canadian outlet asked her for an Afghanistan interview, she checked with people still on the ground, told the outlet what she knew, and the interview was canceled. Ottawa gave every Afghan holding a Canadian visa a single email address and put two people on it. She says Canada sent no more than seventy people, forbade them to leave the airport, and pulled them on the Thursday before the Tuesday deadline of August 31. High-value visa holders remained in the country, on kill lists, with no one coming.

She helped move a nine-person family that had worked in government and in prosecuting the Taliban, people at the top of the priority list. A three-year-old in that orbit was beaten by the Taliban; the call came to her in Vancouver: they could not get back to the gate, what now. Active-duty operators she will not name stepped outside the chain of command to pull the family. British contacts stayed on the ground long enough to confirm biometrics and passports. Without those people, she says, the family would still be there. She does not think the American government is a model. She does think some Americans showed up.

At home the ledger looked the same. A veteran named Brock, trying to replace a prosthetic that was destroying him, was told by Justin Trudeau in a meeting that he was asking for too much. Less than six months later, she says, the government paid $10.4 million to an Afghan in the Canadian prison system. Her own hearing-loss claim was denied as not military-related. "We're disposable numbers," she says: recruited out of high school while still stupid enough not to understand the deal, then told the suffering was a choice they volunteered for. She remains, in her own account, among the most patriotic people in the country. She is proud of the flag she represented. She does not like some of the people who sit on top of it.

On the mechanics of the exit she is contemptuous in a domestic register. Why not hold Bagram until the people who needed to leave had left? Why shift to a civilian airport nobody controlled, with one road in? "My five-year-old could have done it better." She will not hang that on the soldiers on the ground; she thinks the operators were among the best in the world. The failure, in her telling and in Fridman's, sits with civilian leadership that wanted a binary, a mission-accomplished photograph, instead of the full mess of geopolitics. Education for girls, she argues, was the part of the twenty years that actually changed a life — Combat Flip Flops funding literacy is the example she likes — and the Taliban's return of honor killings and stonings is what you get when that is abandoned. Force without that work just manufactures the next fourteen-year-old with an AK.

Fridman asked what, assuming the invasion happened, would have been a better way to do the job. She answers only as an executor. Nobody gave her a usable picture of the culture. A man in a compound grabbed the back of her vest because her hair was tucked into the helmet and he thought a male was walking into a room of women; she did not understand the attack and had no drill for it. There was no brief on why the society worked as it did, or how to handle the moment. That, she says, is the cheap kind of preparation the military skipped.

The expensive kind is mental. No one in training told them they might watch a friend blown into pieces, or what to do with the image, or what tools belonged in the kit. Medics use that word, toolbox, and she has borrowed it. Dr. Greg Passi, her physician, later asked whether a leader sitting her down after the grape hut and saying, Burns, what you are feeling is normal, is what happens in this, would have changed the path. She thought for a long time. Probably yes: she would not have been sent back to the gun sedated past the point of processing anything.

The reporting system, as she describes it, trains the lie. A soldier says the last stop is getting to him, he is not sleeping. The doctor asks how bad. The soldier hears the pen and immediately downgrades: not that bad, no treatment needed. Once the note is in the file he is dead red — no more deployments, no more of the work and the people he loves. So everyone lies. The military already knows PTSD, anxiety, major depression, the precursors and the signs. "Why are we not building enough of a toolkit?" she asks. She does not mean a new pill. She means meditation, yoga, peer groups, and a promise that walking into sick call will not end a career. Those things are not hard to teach and do not cost much. Medication costs money, and it is what the system reaches for.

Some of the hardest people she knows already do the uncool work. Special operators she has sat with go to yoga, sit still, drink ayahuasca, because they have learned they cannot live at that temperature forever. The baddest dudes, she says, will tell you they have to go meditate. Crossing the line in training is not the scandal. Crossing it and refusing to teach anyone the way back is.

She is not a doctor, and she says so twice. From her own chart she can list what a clinician looks for: insomnia, anger that flies off the handle, avoidance, triggers in sound and smell. Plenty of veterans cannot do fireworks; the adult move is to leave. After she got home she avoided every Middle Eastern face no matter what it cost the day, including events that should have been among the most important of her life. PTSD did not arrive alone. About four years after that diagnosis she was given major depressive disorder, a pile of things stacked until they had a name. Asked what the illness is, she has no theory. She was told she had it.

At the worst, suicide was not an episode. It was every minute. The arguments in her head were specific: no one would have to endure her, she would not have to feel this, she was a burden on family and on the military, she was weak, she was a bad soldier, she had not done her job, she did not deserve to be alive or to take Veterans Affairs money, her parents should not have to watch, the man she was dating should not have to absorb it, the people in her car should not have to survive her swerving from a bag of trash. Skin on food still ends the meal; she butchers meat at home with gloves and utensils. She got spit on. Trying, she says, was harder than breathing. A highly motivated person found the act of lifting her head to roll over daunting. The reason she stayed, for the longest stretch, was the person she woke up next to.

Patriotism sits in the same conversation as the wound. She calls herself one of the most patriotic people you will meet, and then describes being a second-class citizen in her own country during the pandemic: unable to cross a province to see her parents, barred from her son's school, kept out of restaurants, watched, neighbors ready to report. The woman who went to Afghanistan could not walk into a classroom at home. The contradiction does not resolve. She just sets it on the table.

Fridman asked how an ordinary person helps. Her method is small and stubborn. Say you are here when they want to talk, then watch. If the beers at night become four or five, ask why. If they look unrested, ask how they have been sleeping — nightmares, insomnia, sugar before bed — instead of "that sucks." Care enough to ask one follow-up. In a grocery line she will compliment a dress and ask about the day, and people drop the fake fine. During a brief unmasked window in Canada an older woman grabbed her arm and said she loved the hat. Sheren's first thought was pandemic, age, contact. Then she said she loved her too. Fridman had his own version in an Austin Walmart, a stranger telling him he looked handsome in a suit, with nothing else attached. That was enough, he said, to make him want to live there.

She cycled through about ten pharmaceutical drugs. One would make her talk all night about the worst things she knew if she failed to fall asleep at once; she has no memory of getting up to cook on a live stove. The turn began with Dr. Greg Passi, a veteran of Bosnia and Rwanda, a medic, a Harley rider, the man she calls her old man. He asked how she felt about cannabis. Family lore said do not touch it. She went anyway, landed in Women Grow circles, and noticed sleep coming back without the groggy truck-hit morning. She also wanted a child and did not want a body full of prescriptions. From around 2014, under supervision, cannabis became the constant while she tapered the rest. She does not call it a miracle. She calls it the thing that made "you must stay on this forever" negotiable.

January 2021, after a bad spell and a company that almost died in Covid, Griff from Combat Flip Flops asked how she was really doing, then offered a seat with Heroic Hearts, the ranger-founded group run by Jesse Gould. They run vetted psychedelic work — ayahuasca, psilocybin, ketamine, ibogaine — with preparation, integration coaches, and locations in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. She had to come off her last SSRI; her doctor preferred summer, she informed him rather than asking. Withdrawal felt like a rock concert in a still body. She arrived as the only woman in a room of special operators, bronze stars and purple hearts, and for the first time sat with people who did not interrogate whether she had really been outside the wire.

Three nights. The first, she drank and vomited three times within about twenty minutes, decided she had ruined it again, then went into dark, a crack, and colors she still cannot name. She met the daughter she had not carried to birth, who told her this plane, this life, was a blip. She woke up the next day not wanting to die, for the first time in more than a decade. The journal Heroic Hearts handed her filled with lines her husband and her doctors swear she does not write: *you can choose, now breathe, now be present, you are warrior, you are the strength.* On walks a voice told her to pick up leaves and keep them in the book. She still carries it.

The second night she was, in her account, a wolf from head to toe. She sat for the shaman's prayer, announced the problem, and felt a hand yank her ponytail as if something were being pulled out of her throat. The lesson she took was that she had been trying to lead by biting. She only needed to show her teeth. Chronic pain in a wrecked shoulder — failed surgery, a collarbone that specialists will not touch, a daily bottle of CBD — loosened as if someone had pressed on it. The third night she almost missed after a false-positive Covid test pulled her to a clinic; the group waited. The takeaway she brought home was not that she was cured. It was that the path exists, it will be brutally hard, and if she keeps walking the right direction, the things written in that frantic notebook can happen.

Asked what love is for, she does not reach for a slogan. Love, she thinks, is a large part of why the species has not finished destroying itself; at the root of anything good she can still see, it is there. Brady, a professional supercross and motocross racer she met before deployment, is the practical version. He kept her alive and treated her as worthy until she could believe it. He had enough of his own family trauma and therapy to handle a partner who could not cook certain foods in the house, could not do crowds, and for a long time could not say the word love because she was, in her phrase, dead inside. His parents took her in anyway. He goes to treatment with her. He waited four years to get engaged, she jokes, to be sure the crazy was not too crazy.

Passi had suggested art therapy. She bought beads, a pipe cutter, a hammer, and a drill, ruined the kitchen table, and taught herself jewelry because Brady said she could. The first name was Her Wearables, a tiny thing that was not supposed to be a company. Her mother, a long-haul trucker then driving for Kevin Hart's tour, harassed her way into a meeting. Hart's advice was practical: if you want everyone to wear it, you cannot call it Her Wearables. That night he tweeted her to an audience she puts at 24 million. Brady said they should make it real, then coined Brass & Unity, because the point was to put people together. Covid nearly killed the business; she pivoted the factory into 200,000 masks for Ontario hospitals, including the community she grew up in, and kept the lights on after losing hundreds of retail doors she had walked into one by one.

The company sells jewelry and sunglasses and routes most of the profit to rehabilitation for veterans and first responders. She is a poor fundraiser and will not pretend otherwise. A product people want to wear, a bullet on a wrist that makes a stranger ask what it is, lets her move money without a speech, and gives the buyer something other than a tax receipt. She is strict about partners: no six-figure salaries on the nonprofit side if she can see them, and she wants actual resources, not a pitch deck. Heroic Hearts, she notes, had more than 800 veterans on a waitlist. Honour House is a free home-away-from-home in the Vancouver area, later expanded to Honour Ranch, 140 acres in Ashcroft, with equine therapy and operational-stress clinics. All Secure Foundation, run with Tom Satterly of *Black Hawk Down* and Delta, works special-operations families and the secondary trauma spouses carry; she cites a divorce rate in that world that should embarrass anyone keeping score. Children of Fallen Patriots funds education, including for children not yet born. One More Wave teaches amputees to surf.

She is not trying to solve everyone. Focus, she argues, is how you send enough money to buy the right tools so a marriage might hold and a child does not watch a father drink himself to death, yell, and walk out the door. Twenty-two veterans a day is the number she uses. The present wave is worse, she thinks, because two decades of people who served in Afghanistan and Iraq are asking at the same time what those years were for, and the outreach groups are already overloaded. A mug she made with Good Fucking Design Advice sold out; it said "fucking help somebody," and under that, kindness as a wealth that grows as it is given, the return felt between hearts rather than passed between hands. She asked if every other word could be a swear. They said one would do.

Advice for a high-school or college student comes out of her the way the rest does, fast and unsweetened. Live a life you can be proud of. If you wake up hating what you do, change the station; the loop of work you despise, drink, sleep, repeat is not why you are here. Move your body. Run, walk, or take three extra trips to the fridge, but move. Pay attention to what you look at. She thinks this generation is being force-fed one-sided information from both directions, none of it coherent, all of it chaos in the skull. Learn to make time that is not eighteen-hour days, and if you take the time, do not spend it as six hours of chips in front of a television. Walk. Listen to something that teaches. Volunteer — Honour House, she says, runs on one paid staffer and a lot of people who just show up. Put some drive into the life. Pick a career that will make you happy, not one that only clears six figures. She has, by her own inventory, everything, and what she wants is less: woods, quiet, a small circle who know there is someone on the other end of the phone who will actually have the conversation.

Death looks different to her now. She does not think you die so much as move to another plane, another vibration; this is a blip. Before the military she had an irrational fear of being taken from her room, the kind of fear a truck-driving father installs when he watches you into a rest-stop bathroom and a mother says, people take people, that is the reality. Afghanistan taught her a person can be in the middle of a sentence and leave the surface of the earth with nothing you can do. She made a truce: when it is her time, it is her time. The difference is that if she goes, she will have lived in a way she hoped she would be proud of.

Fridman asked the dark question about Robin Williams and Anthony Bourdain — people who looked, from the outside, as loved and successful as a life can be. She calls it loaded. You can talk biomarkers, serotonin, bipolar, schizophrenia; the brain is still mostly unread. From her own life she has no clean reason she survived and others did not. Things do not make you happy. People do not always know why they feel as they do, and they are not always willing to say so. They put on a good front. If nobody sees past it, what do you expect? Material life guarantees nothing. Fridman finds that terrifying. She agrees, then adds the other half: when it is good, that is the whole point — that amid the absurd and the unpredictable you nevertheless feel genuinely well. She has always been able to find meaning in almost anything, a little engine her parents never understood. That is also why she can talk about herself with a hard laugh. It makes the days more interesting, and more productive.

She still carries the ayahuasca journal, leaves and poppies pressed from a 600-kilometer ride to the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day on Juno Beach. She cannot explain the handwriting. She only knows a part of her that had not been contacted came online. Fridman closes with Herbert Hoover: older men declare war, but it is the youth that must fight and die. In this conversation the line lands on a specific picture. Committees write the reports. Politicians sign the timetable. On an uncleared road in Helmand or Kandahar, a nineteen-year-old girl is the one holding a perfectly laced boot and saying it can still be used.