An Army Town Copes with PTSD
Navy Seal
Mark Waddell is a retired navy commander who endured one of the worst disasters in SEAL history, the crash of a Chinook helicopter filled with eight SEALS and eight Army aviators, shot down during an attempted rescue of four comrades. Waddell had the agonizing task of sorting through the remains of his dead comrades, young men he had fought beside, mentored and led into battle. Then he had to tell their families of the deaths. For him, the diagnosis of PTSD was a long time in coming. Several years earlier, his family had noticed that everyday things such as a whining vacuum cleaner or the smell of exhaust could trigger his rages. Even his kids riled him. "I'd come back from stepping over corpses with their entrails hanging out, and my kids would be upset because their TiVo wasn't working," he recalls. Arriving home from one combat mission, Waddell insisted on sleeping with a gun under his pillow. Another night, he woke up from a nightmare with his fingers wrapped around his wife's throat, her face turning blue.