MILITARY: When the war comes home

MILITARY: When the war comes home
Military wife recounts couple's journey through post-traumatic stress
By MARK WALKER - Staff Writer | Tuesday, August 12, 2008


SAN DIEGO ---- Michelle Carter Waddell is an unlikely casualty of the war in Iraq.

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She's never deployed, she's strong in her faith and she's surrounded by friends and family.

Yet Waddell struggles with the emotional baggage of a combat veteran, sees a counselor on a regular basis and relies on prayer and a support network to make sense of the war.

Waddell's journey into darkness was not of her own doing; it was the result of her husband's post-traumatic stress disorder.

A former Navy SEAL, an elite warrior, Cmdr. Mark Waddell was diagnosed in 2005 following multiple tours of duty in Iraq and numerous covert operations around the world, she said. In their first decade of marriage, 19 of her husband's comrades were killed, she said.

Her husband's demons first emerged during a Fourth of July celebration on a Virginia beach in 2003, she said. Mark Waddell had just returned from the invasion of Iraq. When the fireworks were set off, he fled her side. She later found him standing alone in a dark and quiet spot far from the pyrotechnics.

"He just asked if we could go home," she recalled Tuesday.

Her account of her husband's illness and its impact on her and their three children came during the opening day of a three-day Marine Corps conference on combat stress, traumatic brain injuries and the effects those illnesses have on family members.
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Be sure to view my two videos with the same title. When War Come Home, Part one and When War Comes Home Part two, over on the side bar toward the bottom.