An Army Town Copes with PTSD
Sgt. Clinton Hollibaugh
A dog handler in the service, Sgt. Hollibaugh was the only survivor of a roadside bombing in Iraq that killed his four buddies and his dog; Hollibaugh sustained a traumatic brain injury. When he returned home, he sat through the obligatory briefings on PTSD with one eye on the clock. "It was the usual stuff — 'Don't kick the cat, don't kill your wife,'" he says. "I thought I was fine." But several weeks later, he woke up outside his house; he had been patrolling the yard while sleepwalking. He kept a gun above the door frame in every room of his house, and one under the mattress. When his neighbor started firing off a shotgun, he instinctively leaped off the porch and began low-crawling through the grass as his wife, since divorced, looked on in horror and pity. "It took my family to say: 'Hey, you're messed up. Fix it.'" After drugs for sleep and therapy, Hollibaugh began to feel better. "Yes, bad things happened to me. But life goes on. Took me three years and a good counselor to realize that," he says.