This veteran found healing through driving a Porsche — fast
By: Experience Magazine
Tags: PTSD, Military, War, Driving, Veterans

After dozens of interactions with Clifton via phone, email, and text, I was eager to meet him. I’ve written hundreds of stories about racing and dozens about soldiers, but zero about a racing soldier. He agreed to let me ride shotgun for a day of high-speed driving.

Before I met him, I had seen him in pictures; most showed him in battle gear with a grizzly beard and a chest like a Buick. Based on his life story, I expected him to be eight feet tall. When he climbed out of his Porsche on a calm July morning in my Columbus, Ohio hotel parking lot, he was 5'9", wearing athletic clothes, with a neatly trimmed, grey-flecked beard … and a chest like a Buick.

With joking earnestness, he said, “I’m supposed to meet a journalist here,” as if someone else would be standing outside at 5:30 a.m. I climbed into the passenger seat. The first thing I noticed was a red button on top of the car’s cigarette lighter that says, “FIRE MISSILE.” He said it was a gift from his sons.

Clifton prepares to drive his 2006 Porsche 911.

On the way to the track, he drove like a perfectly normal person, though I would not swear in court that he followed the speed limit. He was so deft working through the gear box that I didn’t realize the Porsche had a manual transmission until we stopped at a gas station an hour into the trip.

Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, which runs 2.4 miles and has 15 turns, hosts races for NASCAR and other circuits. On this day, it was open to hobbyists looking to improve their driving skills. The cars ranged from Clifton’s used Porsche to mid-six-figure supercars to beaters that made me wonder why their drivers had bothered.

Drivers were separated into first timer, novice, intermediate, and advanced groups. Clifton was in intermediate. Drivers weren’t racing each other, but they were on the track at the same time.

His instructor, Eduardo Collazo, told me Clifton has the rare ability to drive, listen, and apply instruction at the same time. He credited that to Clifton’s intense military training. Using a textbook analogy, Collazo said most students start on Chapter 1, but Clifton reached Chapter 6 on the first day and had improved consistently since then.

As we waited in line before the first of five 20-minute sessions, I was nervous. I wasn’t afraid about his driving, or at least not very much. I was more worried about ralphing in the Porsche. He said if I wanted to bail out I should smash the “FIRE MISSILE” button.

He hollered when we hit 120. I looked out the windshield. The cars in front of us grew bigger as they slowed for a turn and we kept accelerating. Clifton waited for his braking point … the cars got bigger still … waited … now they were HUGE … my heart yelled BRAKE, DAMMIT, BRAKE … my mouth kept quiet … finally he mashed the brake. The car shook and squealed as we slowed into the right-hander.

By lap 5 of the second session, my stomach believed we were on lap 105, and I asked Clifton to drop me off. He drove the rest of the session and then joined me at his parking spot, where we had lawn chairs, drinks, and snacks. I had to look into the distance to keep my equilibrium. I was still woozy when I stood up an hour later.

Clifton with his wife, Sarah, and their sons, Scotty, Stone, and Seth. Photo courtesy of Sean Clifton

As he drove another session, I talked with his wife, Sarah. Their three boys, Stone, 12, Seth, 10, and Scotty, 8, played on bleachers. They cheered as he sped by in his silver Porsche with a magnet placard reading “531” on the side — a reference to the date he was injured, May 31. The Porsche’s license plate spells APREC8 — appreciate — a reference to everything that has happened since.

I asked Sarah if Sean’s high-speed driving made her nervous, and she politely laughed. She took that horrible phone call after he got shot. She put her life on hold to put his life back together. Her identity was absorbed into his as she nursed him back to health with small children in the house, toggling between changing diapers and changing his ostomy bag. She lived through him being at war three times … so, no, watching him drive fast is not a big deal.

And anyway, she said, it beats the hell out of the motorcycle he used to ride, which he sold to buy the Porsche. “I always tell Sean he’s a different breed,” she said. “These types of guys, they need that adrenaline rush every day. He doesn’t get it in his life anymore. He’s back in the action, in a way.”

Always an active person, Clifton used sports to drive his physical recovery in the early years after he was wounded. He didn’t want to just survive and scratch out a meager existence. He wanted to create a new future for himself, Sarah, and the boys — that future he saw as he lay dying on the battlefield, only better. He wanted to live a life worthy of the efforts to save him.

He competed in CrossFit events and triathlons. He treated training for those events like training for a mission. He sets up almost everything he does like a mission, from cutting the grass to cleaning out the garage to spending a day at the racetrack, because the structured approach comforts him. Goal-oriented preparation appealed to him; it wasn’t just exercise to get in shape, it was a task to be completed. He knew CrossFit and triathlons would help him get better physically and that his improvements would be measurable. He had to re-learn to walk, then run, then run far.

There was no such intention with the Porsche. The healing he found in it caught him completely by surprise. He had no idea that driving fast would bring him such powerful relief from his stress and anxiety.

I want to be careful about labeling that stress and anxiety. PTSD is a common diagnosis for soldiers who have been through what Clifton has been through. When I ask him directly if he has it, he hedges. He says maybe his stress and anxiety are just common complaints of a man in his 40s with a house, wife, three kids, and a crazy work schedule.

He acknowledges that the “the noise in my head” — stress, anxiety, depression, anger — is triggered by events commonly cited as triggers by people with PTSD. Elevators, big crowds, boxed-in traffic, and other situations in which he has no control all turn that noise on and then up.

Is that PTSD? He doesn’t know, and he’s more interested in changing the national conversation about PTSD, which he sees as an unhealthy label. He would rather use his struggles and recovery as a connection point with others who are suffering, soldier or not, than be put in an “ex-soldier with PTSD” box.

While the symptoms of PTSD have been evident for thousands of years, the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” is relatively new. It was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980.

After years of ignoring PTSD, leaving soldiers to suffer in silence as their lives fell apart, the medical establishment and veterans’ infrastructure finally focused in recent decades on the physical and psychological effects of trauma. They identified PTSD as a condition that needed to be addressed. That’s a good thing. But Clifton contends that course-correction went too far, with too much focus on the problem and not enough on fixing it. Clifton feels PTSD has become a label, a trap even, one that leads people to assume its victims’ suffering never goes away.

His hope in telling his story is to help create what he calls PTG: a post-PTSD mindset centered on growth. He wants his recovery to prove there is life after trauma, joyful life, full of energy and passion. He chooses his words carefully. He doesn’t minimize the struggles he or anybody else goes through. He instead says those struggles are part of the story, not the end. He’s re-writing his own end, in part with the benefits he gets by driving fast.

“Everybody, at some point in their lives, has witnessed, or been part of, or shared a traumatic experience that they reflect on to some degree. It’s nothing that’s ever going to go away,” Clifton says. “But it shouldn’t be detrimental. That trauma, be it combat or sexual trauma, near-death experience, auto accident or surviving cancer, should not keep you from moving forward.” That, he says, is why he tries to “change the narrative a bit on post-traumatic stress, to get people to focus on post-traumatic growth.”