There were the scandals of Somalia, and the proud airborne regiment that was broken in disgrace. There were inquiries into alleged coverups by senior officers. And there was growing anger within the military over outdated equipment, overworked troops and poor pay.

Canadians were fed up with media reports of secrecy, coverups, mismanagement, hooliganism, racism, sexism and pretty much every other -ism going on in the Armed Forces. Troops were feeling the economic squeeze on pay scales, increased family stress from longer international service on peacekeeping missions and – once they were overseas – morale-killing criticism from the folks back home.

"It was certainly very difficult," admits the camera-shy Baril. "I came out of a post… like all those who have served in operations in the early '90s: pretty badly traumatized also. And we were either going to walk away or try to do our best." Since he had been a career officer for 30 years by that time, "walking was not an option. But it was obvious to me we had to change, otherwise we were going to self-destruct."

In the early 1990s the Forces and the public were both in a mindset of demobilization. It looked like the decade would be a slack time in the army business. "I don't think we were expecting to see it that difficult," he admits, "but at the same time, the Canadian Forces were asked to go into the Gulf War, and go into Yugoslavia, and go into Africa."

Military operations might have been successful in these theatres, but on the home front, the political and public relations war was being lost. Change and spin control became top priorities when Baril got the job. The rift between the Canadian Forces and the Canadian public was growing, some of it based on misunderstanding, some of it on fact.

"We had to re-establish a close link between the Canadian Forces and the community," he says. "We had to re-establish this mutual confidence. We felt that we had been abandoned by the population and the population felt they could not have confidence in their forces. That was my aim at that time," he says, "to re-establish this link. You cannot have Canadian Forces in a democracy that are not believed by the nation to be the top."

Baril went about reinforcing and reiterating the Forces' core values: justice, truth, honour. "They were never lost, but they might not have been put up front as they should have been."

Nevertheless, Baril's marching orders came from the prime minister and the defence minister. It was up to Baril to advise them whether the Forces were stretched too far, perhaps at risk, if assigned new duties. They seemed receptive to his assessments: "Take Kosovo, for example. I had recommended to the government through our minister that yes, we could go, we could send a large battle group. We have airplanes, but the battle group on the ground, which was about 1,500 – I said, 'we will go for 12 months. If you leave us there for 18 months, we're going to hurt a lot.' And we came out after 12 months."

Many of the troops sent on these recent missions, however, have come back with serious emotional scars from the trauma and tragedy they've witnessed. "Five years ago, we were committing troops, assessing the risk of how many would be wounded, or killed or injured. Now we have to assess when we're committing troops, depending where it is and what kind of operation it is, we can have 10 to 20 per cent of people who are hurt in the head," he says. "This is what I call the new injuries of the new battlefield."

The most prominent psychological casualty is Gen. Romeo Dallaire, Commander of UN forces during Rwanda's 1994 genocide. He reported directly to his old friend, Maurice Baril, who was then a top UN military adviser in New York. For years controversy has swirled around a warning that Dallaire sent to New York three months before the genocide, urging a pre-emptive raid to forestall massacres.

Baril and his UN superiors vetoed the raid and did not pass the warning to the Security Council. This was an omission condemned by several Rwanda inquiries. For years Baril has insisted that UN confidentiality prohibits him from defending his own actions. That's a bullet he still dodges: "I don't have to speak about it. I lived through this thing, I was in Rwanda, I was there during the massacre with Dallaire. I talked to him sometimes hours everyday, for 94 days he was in combat there. It's one of the very difficult periods of my life, like a whole bunch of people who were involved very close to this one. And I don't have the feeling that I have to go and explain myself. There are a lot of people who are highly paid to do it and I don't need to do it."

Baril says the value of Dallaire's now-famous telex warning from Rwanda has been blown out of proportion. "Just across the border in Burundi," he says, "between 40,000 and 80,000 people were killed in 10 days. Nobody reacted." So if there was no reaction to real and reported atrocity, he argues, there would have been little, if any, support for an arms seizure designed to prevent a presumed attack. Dallaire, he adds, "was there for 94 days. He was under a lot of pressure before feeling it was coming in and… what he saw and what he felt, nobody can imagine that, they just can't. I mean, it's beyond imagination."