Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love | Lex Fridman Podcast #230

Kelsi Sheren recounts joining the Canadian military, training as an artillery gunner in a French-speaking unit, and deploying to Afghanistan in 2009. The conversation's emotional core is her account of an IED killing a young soldier she was with, leaving her gathering his remains by hand and triggering profound PTSD, suicidal ideation, and over-medication. She is sharply critical of how Canada handled veteran care and the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, including personally coordinating the rescue of an Afghan family. She describes her recovery through cannabis, an ayahuasca retreat with Heroic Hearts, and her husband's support, ending on advice about purpose, movement, and love.

• Sheren describes a tender moment giving candy to an Afghan girl and showing her a photo of herself, a memory that haunted her for years.
  01:34:30
• She recounts witnessing an IED explosion that blew her friend apart, the turning point where her 'light switch went off.'
  01:44:24
• Her dissociated response to seeing his perfectly-laced boot with leg still inside: 'we could reuse the boot.'
  01:54:08
• After the operation she admits she 'lost all humanity' and no longer saw the Taliban as human, considering boot-stomping a woman to death.
  02:07:40
• She was medicated 'out of my mind' and put back on the guns drugged, nearly shooting someone, with her sergeant unaware.
  02:38:46
• She reveals suicidal thoughts 'every minute of every day' for roughly six years and a self-hatred at the core of her depression.
  02:51:44
• She describes her January 2021 ayahuasca ceremony with Heroic Hearts, including seeing her daughter and being 'turned into a wolf.'
  03:16:34
• She calls herself a 'second class citizen' in Canada, watched by the RCMP and barred from her son's school during the pandemic.
  02:55:24

• The GPS-guided Excalibur artillery round costs about half a million dollars and requires permission from Ottawa to fire.
  00:38:28
• As a non-officer artillery gunner she was never issued a sidearm and never carried a handgun.
  00:49:18
• The barrel of an M777 howitzer alone is worth about a million dollars.
  01:01:46
• She learned all her weapons systems and gun commands a second time in French after being posted to a Quebec unit.
  00:53:28
• Combat Flip-Flops has provided literacy to 800 girls in Afghanistan through proceeds from its products.
  02:12:49
• Her trauma is so somatic she still cannot touch or eat meat with skin on it because it feels like holding human remains.
  02:01:28
• She used cannabis to wean off ten different pharmaceutical drugs under a doctor's supervision.
  03:08:50
• She cites over 22 veteran suicides a day as the epidemic driving her company's charitable mission.
  03:46:42
• The divorce rate among special-operations families she works with is around 95 percent.
  03:54:27
• Heroic Hearts had over 800 veterans on a waiting list for psychedelic treatment.
  03:51:21

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