This oral history highlights the life events that led to Mr. Woolfolk suffering from PTSD, being unemployed and experiencing homelessness. Mr. Woolfolk is a Denver native. Born in 1964, he attended Park Hill Elementary School, Smiley Jr. High, and George Washington High School, graduating in 1982. He grew up on Glencoe Street among seven brothers, two sisters, a loving mother, and a father who had worked forty-three years for the Santa Fe Railroad. At nineteen, fresh out of high school, Rodney joined the Navy with the dream of becoming an air traffic controller. Although he trained in the Quartermaster Division and was supposed to have shore duty in Guam, he instead deployed to the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War. He served on the USS Waddell, a guided missile destroyer, when an Iraqi jet fired on another ship, the USS Stark, killing thirty-seven Navy personnel and injuring twenty-one others. Rodney witnessed burning sailors jumping three to four stories to their deaths into the ocean below. The USS Waddell and the USS Enterprise both participated in the rescue and recovery of the dead and injured. This event and the constant fear of being attacked had a profound impact on the rest of Rodney’s life. He began experiencing panic attacks. After his tour, Rodney was diagnosed by a military psychiatrist has “having difficulties”—what we now refer to as PTSD. The trauma of this event and his perception of having been deceived by his recruiting agent, was too much for him to bear. He left the military with an Other-than Honorable-Discharge. The consequences of that decision reverberate to this day. Despite three years of service in the U.S. Navy, the military denies him all veteran’s benefits. He has never been able to afford health insurance on his own and has never been able to receive any kind of treatment for the PTSD that he still experiences. Rodney returned from the Persian Gulf broken, broke, and lost. He worked as a carpenter when he could get the work until he began self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. It cost him two marriages, as well as until recently, his three children. He was homeless by age thirty, and selling the Denver Voice on street corners when I met him.
Digital audio file available on SoundCloud. Length: 25 minutes.