Tim Daugherty retired from the military in 2012 but couldn’t quite leave it behind.
“I’m still dealing with some challenges from having been through three deployments, two of which were in combat zones,” said the Signal Mountain resident, 51, who retired as a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy.
“There are very positive aspects of being in the military — the leadership training I got in the Navy was exceptional,” he said. “But there are things some veterans deal with that don’t appear immediately, and you have to factor that in.”
Daugherty grew up near Detroit and knew the military was the only way he could go to college, so he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1989, he said.
He spent 12 years in the Army, both in the reserves and on active duty, he said. He did a stretch in Germany and finished his Army career at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he worked as a public relations liaison for the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team — and earned his undergraduate degree at nearby Fayetteville State University in 1997, he said. He added a master’s degree in education from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga six years later.