Canadian Afghanistan war veteran finds music helps soothe battle with PTSD

Dennis MacKenzie released his first album, 'The Guardian Angel Platoon', on Wednesday.

Despite dabbling in music since he was a teenager, it was only recently that Afghanistan war veteran Dennis MacKenzie came to appreciate its power to ease the mental turmoil he has struggled with since returning to Canada.

Dennis MacKenzie was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder soon after finishing a seven-month deployment in the war-torn country in 2007.

In a recent interview, the former infantry soldier with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment based in Gagetown, N.B., described a mental descent that saw him lose a career he loved when he was medically released in 2013.

“I just didn’t have the same patience. I felt different right away,” MacKenzie said. “You are in a combat-ready fighting unit, and now all of a sudden, you are throwing up coming in the main (base) gate.”

In the years after his release from the military, the Bonshaw, P.E.I., resident tried just about everything to help quell an inner conflict that has made it hard to keep a job and led to a period where he needed alcohol just to function.

“I can’t even count how many therapies,” MacKenzie said. “From clinical eye movement desensitization and reprocessing-type therapies, all the way to yoga and breath work, you name it. The biggest thing for me has been music. I’m using it as a means to release what’s inside.”

A large step in that expression is the release Wednesday of his first album, “The Guardian Angel Platoon,” available through Bandcamp, Spotify and TheGuardianAngelPlatoon.com.

The concept album made with music producer Dennis Ellsworth takes the listener from a soldier’s recruitment, through a tour in Afghanistan and the loss of comrades there, to a return home and the loss of more soldiers to mental torment and suicide.