Always the first one to know
“Sometimes it’s going to be a smell. Sometimes it’s going to be a sound,” says Hélène LeScelleur. “And then it reminds me of the horror that we’ve been through.”
Story and photography by Stephen J. Thorne
“Seeing people decapitated, it’s not that usual for anyone,” says former army medic Hélène LeScelleur. “I saw a lot.”
It wasn’t an image she had contemplated when she signed up for the militia and fell in love with the military.
LeScelleur had challenged authority her entire youth, so when military brass told the newly minted lieutenant and by then 12-year army veteran that she was “too junior” to carry out her duties in Afghanistan, she went on the offensive.
A Bosnia veteran with aspirations for more, the former master corporal and administrative clerk had ret...