Veterans For America

Eric Newhouse, Great Falls Tribune

Federal Magistrate Keith Strong’s decision a year ago to offer help instead of punishment may have saved the life of Danny Ray Reed II, an ex-special forces soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder who hit rock bottom at about 20,000 feet in the air.

A former Army Ranger who’d been involved in the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch from Iraqi insurgents, Reed struggled to adjust to civilian life after three years of combat.

“When you come back, you’re either a workaholic or an alcoholic,” he said. “If I wasn’t working, I was drinking. It helps for the first couple of hours, but then it takes you back into that frame of mind you don’t want to be in. I drank so bad I could be on a two-day blackout, and that’s dangerous.

“Like that airplane incident, I can’t remember a thing,” Reed said. “I can’t remember getting on that plane, and I can’t remember getting off. I don’t remember that day at all.”

That day was Sunday, Jan. 7, 2007, and Reed was flying from his home in West Virginia to Great Falls, en route to enroll in a taxidermy school in Havre.

According to an incident report, when he boarded the United Airlines flight in Denver, “Reed had slurred speech, but did not smell of alcohol.” It states that an airline attendant served Reed two drinks, but a passenger sitting across the aisle from him, Jolynn Hamilton, a business owner from Lewistown, said she saw attendants serve Reed five bottles of whiskey.

“He drank all of it,” Hamilton said. “Within a few minutes, it was obvious that the alcohol took effect. He was very vocal.”

According to the incident report, Reed became verbally abusive toward other passengers and the attendant began to serve him nonalcoholic drinks, but “when Reed figured out that he was not being served alcohol, he threw his drink at (the flight attendant) and told her to ’shove it.’”

It was a tense flight. Police officers were waiting when the plane touched down in Great Falls, and Reed was carted off to jail. He was charged with interfering with crewmembers, a federal offense, which carries a maximum 20-year prison term and $250,000 fine if convicted.

“When I woke up in jail, it was like a nightmare,” Reed said. “I didn’t know where I was, why I was there or what I had done. I was scared to death.”

When federal authorities learned that Reed was a war veteran who needed treatment, however, Chief Public Defender Tony Gallagher requested a psychiatric evaluation, and Strong concurred.

The results of the evaluation remain sealed in the federal courthouse, but Reed remembers talking at length about his tours of duty with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Death surrounded him the entire time.

“The first thing I saw when I landed in Bagram was a little girl get blown up by a land mine as she was walking her dog,” he said. “After that, I saw kids with no arms and no legs. I can’t forget the carnage and the smell of war. I’ve seen people get shot. My friend got half his leg blown off. We got mortared every day.”

A special forces unit, the Rangers were given the tough assignments, many of which Reed can’t discuss because they’ve been classified as top secret.

“In Afghanistan, I was in a lot of firefights, doing search-and-destroy operations,” he said. “We were looking for missile launch sites, kidnappers and (Osama) bin Laden’s primary and secondary men.”

Reed feared the worst when the Rangers were ordered to protect an elite extraction team sent in to rescue Lynch, a member of the 507th Maintenance Co. who was captured by insurgents March 23, 2003, as her convoy made a wrong turn into enemy territory. The soldiers were ambushed near Nasiriyah, a major crossing point over the Euphrates River northwest of Basra.

Lynch was injured and captured by Iraqi forces, as were five other soldiers, who were later rescued. Eleven other American soldiers were killed in the ambush.

Reed, however, remembers that day as going smoother than he had feared.

“They pounded the objective really hard (with aerial firepower) before we went in,” he said. “I was with a weapons squad, providing security for all the buildings around the hospital.

“A group of highly trained soldiers, an elite extraction squad, went in and came out with her in no time at all,” he said. “We all thought it was going to be a gunfight at the OK Corral, but no bullets were fired.”

After Lynch was rescued from the Saddam Hospital in Nasiriyah, troops had to dig up the bodies of eight American soldiers buried behind the hospital.

“You could see them and you could smell them,” Reed said. “It was awful. It was like the ‘Night of the Living Dead.’”

After Reed recounted what he’d been through, it was obvious the ex-Ranger needed help.

“When I took their test, I answered all their questions to the best of my knowledge,” he said. “And they said my score was so bad, there was no way I could have that much PTSD.”

Prosecutors dropped their request for a prison sentence for disrupting the flight, and Gallagher arranged for treatment at the Veterans Affairs’ psychiatric hospital in Fort Sheridan, Wyo.

Strong accepted Reed’s guilty plea to a misdemeanor assault charge, put him on probation and ordered him to report to Fort Sheridan immediately. That turned out to be the best thing the government could have done, Reed said.

“If that plane thing hadn’t happened, I’d have probably committed suicide,” Reed said. “I’d had a gun in my mouth before. I was at rock bottom. I was so depressed I’d have probably killed myself if that hadn’t happened.”

Reed remembers Fort Sheridan as an aging Army outpost, underfunded and understaffed.

“They’re not prepared for the surge of troops that are going to come back needing help,” he said.

But the staff there sure helped him.

“Step one is admitting that you do have PTSD,” Reed said. “And step two was to quit drinking and drugging. They’re different in some ways, but PTSD and alcoholism are a lot alike in other ways. You have to admit you have those problems. You can’t be in denial about it.

“And you have to realize that it’s something that won’t go away, can’t be cured,” he added. “All you can do is learn to live with it.”

Reed began to realize he’d brought home a huge load of fear and anger with him.

“Things that didn’t bother me before I went through the military really bother me now,” he said. “People who do stupid things, airheaded things, really bother me because you can’t afford to do those things.

“Being in the military, you’re around people a lot and everything seems kind of normal, but when you get home and have time to think, it’s very different. I kept on thinking about the things that could have happened, a lot of what-ifs. You’re by yourself instead of with your military pals,” he said.

“My friends could see a difference in me, but they couldn’t understand it, and your good drinking buddies aren’t going to take the time to read a pamphlet on PTSD,” he added. “I felt like people didn’t want to be around me. They didn’t like me. They’re out to get me, talking about me. That went into more drinking, more depression, more seclusion.”

Then the anger started.

“I hated these people because they knew nothing about what I’d done, what I’d gone through,” Reed said.

In group therapy, he learned how to talk about his problems and reason them through to arrive at a solution. He learned that nightmares and flashbacks are normal and that neither is an excuse to pick up a bottle. He also learned that he has to readjust his thinking to a civilian world.

“Over there, you’re in a savage world. It’s not civilized. And then when you come back home, this seems out of the ordinary to me. I’m still trying to figure out how to adapt to it,” Reed said. “Right now, those savage responses are dormant in me, but I have to realize that they’re still there and they can come out if I let them. So I have to walk on a different road.

“I’d never laid a hand on a girl, but I was drinking and we were arguing and she slapped me,” said Reed. “I grabbed her arm, twisted it and got a choke hold on her. The next day, her arm was all bruised. This girl used to love me, but she told my mom I’m not the same man she knew.”

When Reed got out of Fort Sheridan, he went to Havre to study taxidermy. He then returned to West Virginia, where he moved in with his parents and opened his own taxidermy shop, Natural Image, in a shed beside the house.

Business is booming for him now, with about $15,000 worth of work on order, and he’s thinking about expanding.

On a personal note, since he quit drinking, his friends are beginning to hang out with him again and Reed is learning to live with a condition that will be with him for the rest of his life.

He doesn’t like to admit it, but he knows combat has changed the way his brain functions and the doctors have prescribed some medications for him that are helping him restore his brain’s natural chemistry.

He has been spared flashbacks, but the nightmares still plague him.

“Sometimes I dream that all those people who got killed are sitting beside the road, waving at me as we go by,” he said.

And he told his mom at one point that he dreamed the dead soldiers they unearthed behind the hospital at Nasiriyah were coming back to get him.

Reed isn’t the only member of his family to deal with the aftermaths of going to war.

“My dad told me the only two cures for PTSD are Alzheimer’s and death, and he should know. He did two tours of ‘Nam with the 101st Airborne, and he has PTSD too.”