Daugherty faces ‘challenges’ post-military
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.
Daugherty said he switched branches in 2001.
“That happens more often than people might imagine,” he said, adding he joined the Navy Reserve, remaining on reserve duty until 2006, when he was deployed to Iraq.
Daugherty worked as an intelligence analyst, specializing in interrogations, and often found himself uncomfortably close to some of the worst of the worst, he said.
“I sat knee-to-knee with terrorists,” he said. “In some cases, they’re just trying to make a living. But there was one guy, in his late 20s, who was a stone-cold killer.”
Daugherty was promoted to chief petty officer in 2010 and soon caught another deployment, this time to Afghanistan the following year, he said. He led a team that assessed mission risks when personnel had to move from one point to another.
He was never “shot at directly” but nonetheless sustained a different, far deeper sort of wound, he said.
“I’d come back from some R&R and was in the process of getting back to my unit,” he said. “I met up with Raymond Border, a fellow chief I knew from training. We spent an evening smoking cigars and watching a movie on an old projector.
“That was September (2011). The next month, he was on a mission when he stepped out of a vehicle and onto an IED (improvised explosive device). It went off and killed him,” Daugherty said, eyes glistening.
When Daugherty came home in 2012, he made it a point to take some time before returning to his civilian job, he said.
“I made a mistake when I came back from Iraq,” he said. “I didn’t take enough time to decompress — only a week. After Afghanistan, I took a month, maybe six weeks. Best decision I made.”
He said he knew two things when he came home from Afghanistan: He would likely retire from the military after 23 years, and he wanted a new challenge in his civilian job.
“I didn’t tell anybody, but when I came back from Iraq, my values had changed drastically,” he said. “Everything I’d done at work that I’d valued before I left had less meaning. So when I came back from Afghanistan, I told my boss that I was going to need something different, a new challenge.”
Daugherty got a promotion and retired from the military. In 2018, he signed on at the Tennessee Valley Authority and was surprised by what he found.
“TVA has about 10,000 fulltime employees, and 20% are veterans,” he said. “There’s a deep appreciation at TVA for the veteran community and an instant camaraderie (between veterans).”
Daugherty is now in senior management at TVA, leading a marketing and communications team. He’s also called on to speak to onboarding employees, an exercise he reckons helps him at least as much as the new employees he addresses, he said.
“What I convey to them,” he said, “is that service is a coping mechanism. For me, the act of serving keeps me going, keeps me focused and gives me a higher sense of appreciation for what I do.
“But you don’t have to be a veteran to feel that,” he added. “I encourage (new employees) to think of the people they’re serving — 10 million in seven states. If you can make that connection, you’ll have a much better appreciation for what you do every day.”
Daugherty is a huge advocate for veterans at TVA and is sometimes sought out by individual veterans there, he said. Doing what he can to help his fellow veterans is nothing less than therapeutic, he said.
“When you’ve been deployed, especially when your life is at risk, you start looking for deeper meaning in a lot of things,” he said. “That was a challenge for me, and I’m still dealing with that.
“I’ve come across some veterans still facing some pretty serious challenges,” he said. “Having conversations with them, and understanding that their challenges are similar to mine, is helpful.”