After 13 years as the spouse of a Navy SEAL, Amber Capone was looking forward to a quiet life in Texas. Instead, a lifetime of ghosts and war trauma threatened to take her husband, just as they were finally settled.
This is a story of a spouse who never gave up and saved not just her own husband, but hundreds, in the process.
“I grew up in a very small town in southern Illinois. It is primarily agricultural, if you will. I grew up on a retired dairy farm,” Capone told We Are The Mighty. “My dad was the football coach at a college not too far away, and he recruited Marcus, my husband, to play football for him.”
Though her connection to the military was distant, she was raised in an extremely patriotic household. Capone knew the stories of her great-uncles who’d served during World War II; five of them were brothers, and three would lose their lives in theater while one would become a POW. When her husband enlisted, she was ready to follow him.
From her tiny town, Capone made her way to Coronado, California, for Marcus’ SEAL training.
“I was only 21 at the time. It was one of the most exciting times of my life. Once I got over my fear of driving across the Coronado Bridge,” she laughed.
He graduated from SEAL training in October 2001.
“9/11 happened during the final phase of SEAL training, and I had no idea how much life would shift,” Capone said. “I think that naivete is probably what protected me.… I had feelings of extreme pride and patriotism and really wanted Marcus to serve our country and do what he was training to do.”
After more training, her husband was assigned to Virginia Beach for the next decade.
“During that time, he was deployed seven times. It became very hard for me to get used to those deployment and training cycles, because I grew up in such a small town with a very close-knit big family,” Capone explained. “I was also weirdly afraid to stay at home alone overnight. I just felt this immense responsibility for having now two other lives under my care, and I had a series of really debilitating panic attacks.”
Capone described white-knuckling herself through it and learning to lean on the military spouse community for support.
“Our kids started to make friends with the other military kids, and I joined a gym with other military spouses. Then I became really, really, really rooted in our life,” she added.
But while his family was settling in, her husband was struggling. Each deployment and reintegration had him becoming more and more distant, Capone said.
“He’s lost—oh my gosh—like well over 30-35 friends and former teammates. And a lot of those teammates of his had wives who were friends of mine and fathers to our kids’ friends. So it felt like every deployment cycle, there was someone who was not coming home,” she explained.
“It had come to a point where there were so many deaths in such a short period of time. Then he lost one of his best friends, and after his death, I started to see Marcus spiral in a way that felt new and dangerous.”
Capone described the cycle of him being gone, coming home and drinking heavily, and her resentment building, continuing on repeat.
“We thought OCS would be enough of a break, but what we didn’t think through was that it was a horrible idea for him to come home from his seventh deployment cycle and, like literally within two weeks, be on a plane to Officer Candidates School,” she shared.
“We had these tremendous losses, and he completely cracked. He basically said to them, ‘I can’t go forward.’”
Leadership removed him and reassigned him as an instructor at BUD/S from 2010-2013, and the family had to relearn each other. But her husband struggled going from a high-temp environment to teaching.
“It felt like we had a stranger in our home,” Capone said.
Recognizing he couldn’t go on, her husband got out after 13 years, and the family relocated to Texas.
“That’s where the wheels really came off. I was contemplating leaving him because the kids had already been through so much in their young lives. I knew he was contemplating suicide, and I worried that every time I came home, I’d be walking in on a scene,” Capone said.
“I realized I am the last source of stability that he has; he’s lost so much.”
Her husband tried a cocktail of prescriptions, many brain clinics, and even alternative therapies. Though Capone had approached her husband about ibogaine treatment, he was adamant about not doing “drugs.” Seeing they were at the end of the road, she tried one more time.
“When I said, ‘I will fight for you every day for the rest of my life, but you’ve got to fight with me,’ he agreed to go,” she shared.
Days later, when she picked him up from the airport, Capone was floored. In front of her was the man she fell in love with at just 17.
“The first thing he said to me after his treatment was that this is exactly what his friends needed and his former teammates needed. We began raising money in a grassroots way and sending his friends and helping them, and they were having the same outcomes,” she said.
“His neurological functioning had returned so significantly that it was marked. It was really incredible, and I was calling anyone and everyone that I thought would care or should care, like military leaders, foundations, doctors, pathologists to just tell them that something was happening here.”
In 2019, she and her husband founded VETS (also known as VetsSolutions). After endless calls and advocacy, Stanford listened.
“I was finally connected to a researcher at Stanford, and he said, ‘If you can raise the money for the research project, I will take a look at this,’” she shared.
Though there were studies done and published, it was the 2024 Stanford Study, which proved what she and her husband knew: Ibogaine was a game-changer for the treatment of PTSD.
“What started as a mission to help our friends and Marcus’s former teammates became their friends and their friends’ friends. Now we’re serving all military,” Capone said. “Every year, VETS tries to help more veterans than the year before. So this year, we’re on track for 300. Next year… 10% more than that. But that is a drop in the bucket to those who actually need it.”
At this time, VETS is involved with the research into ibogaine, ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MeO-DMT. The organization is also involved in federal and state-led implementation of support for these treatments.
“We believe these treatments are effective. We also believe that veterans shouldn’t have to leave the country they were willing to die for to access these treatments. They should be available here, and they should be available here in a subsidized manner,” Capone explained.
What started as a mission to save her husband has morphed into a lifeline for America’s warriors. Today, Capone’s husband is thriving.
“I look at the power of one life and how the ripple-out effect of one life—the fact that he’s still here—has impacted so many other lives.… It’s such an honor to be his wife and to be doing this work with him,” she said.
“I’m just so humbled and honored to have come through the fire and turned around and used it for good to help ease suffering for people that I don’t even know.”
To learn more about the work VETS is doing, head over to vetsolutions.org.
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