Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him

by Luis Carlos Montalvan

  And I felt an obligation to my brothers. Everyone knows the Army never leaves a comrade behind, but I was leaving behind Iraqi allies like Ali, Lt. Col. Emad, and Maher. They had trusted me. They were as brave as any American. They were as important to our success as my own platoon. They were my brothers in arms, and they were in a fragile position. They weren’t doing a tour in Iraq; they lived there. They had to be valued and protected. Without them, I reminded myself, you’d be dead. And you’re leaving them behind.

  My request was denied, and on March 15, 2004, I left Al-Waleed for the last time. Less than a month later, I was in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I stepped off the plane at Peterson Air Force Base, and I barely recognized my old world. I went to a restaurant and couldn’t believe the portion size. For six months, I’d eaten almost nothing but meager Iraqi food and Army rations. I drove around Fort Carson and was shocked by the buildings, so elegant and clean. For months, I’d seen nothing but concrete and mud hovels, leaning into a ferocious desert wind. For days, I couldn’t stop taking hot showers. I even called my mother to tell her how great they were. “Hot showers, Mamá! They’re amazing!” She must have thought I was crazy.

  In June, I was promoted to first lieutenant. I was also promoted in place, meaning I wasn’t just given a new rank but also a coveted assignment as a scout platoon leader. When I read my evaluation from that summer—“Carlos Montalván is the best tank commander in my troop . . .”; “Montalván is an outstanding officer and has proved he is a leader . . .”; “promote him rapidly and assign him to positions of greater authority . . . [he] has almost unlimited potential”—it is clear I was a junior officer on the rise. I had performed well in Iraq; I was being rewarded. And it felt great. At my promotion ceremony, I turned to my men and enthusiastically recited from memory the Army’s new Soldier’s Creed:

  I am an American Soldier.

  I am a Warrior and a member of a team.

  I serve the people of the United States

  and live the Army Values.

  I will always place the mission first.

  I will never accept defeat.

  I will never quit.

  I will never leave a fallen comrade.

  I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough,

  trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.

  I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.

  I am an expert and I am a professional.

  I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies

  of the United States of America in close combat.

  I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

  I am an American Soldier.

  I didn’t just recite it. I shouted it in front of the whole troop. I barked it like I would bark “Yes sir!” if a colonel asked me if my unit was ready to fight.

  I added to the tattoo on my left arm. After September 11, I started having powerful dreams, all featuring a spiraling, burning sun. Before shipping to Iraq, I had the sun image tattooed on my left shoulder. At Al-Waleed, I dreamt of hawks. They were a constant in that miragelike world. They always flew above us on patrol, and every time I looked up they seemed to melt into the burning desert sun. So I had a hawk tattooed into the sun on my arm, for Al-Waleed, with an American flag draped around the edges for patriotism and honor. At that moment, I was the American soldier in that creed.

  But even then, as I was pounding ahead, my injuries were pulling me back. For the first month, I slept like a baby in my comfortable bed near Fort Carson—after six months on a cot and in a sleeping bag. I drove to New York City to visit my infant niece, who had been born in November while I was patrolling the Anbar desert. Holding Lucia, feeling the warmth and purity of a newborn baby and family member, was cathartic. In that instant, the war was washed away, as if God smiled through Lucia’s beautiful baby eyes. Afterward, I went home to Washington, D.C., where I gave a slide show presentation of my tour in Iraq to my parents and their friends. They smiled and patted me on the back, telling me sincerely how proud they were. It felt nice to be appreciated, but after that night, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed awake for days, trying to shake the images, and when I finally did fall asleep I was troubled by dreams. I drove to Miami with an Army buddy but developed a splitting headache that kept me on edge. Silence descended; I felt separated from the world. When I recovered, I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to go out on the town. There were beautiful women walking around the pool at the Clevelander Hotel all day, but I was distracted by my thoughts. All I wanted to do was drink.

  Back at Fort Carson, I continued to drink. I was sucking down half a bottle of Motrin a day, but it was no longer dulling the pain. By the afternoon, I usually had a headache, and the migraines were sometimes so bad I threw up half of the night. Even on good nights, I only slept three or four hours, wracked by back spasms and vertigo. I started drinking at night, alone, trying to knock myself out, and waking up most mornings so sore and stiff I could barely get out of bed.

  My marriage died. We had dated for two years and were married by a justice of the peace in a park near Fort Knox, Kentucky, shortly before I deployed overseas. Amy wanted to be there for me and I wanted to be there for her, but in the stress of preparing eighty soldiers to deploy to Iraq, I sent her away. She was hurt and lonely and soon, she told me, fell into depression. I was obsessed with my work, and in particular with a refugee crisis: ten starving Indian nationals who had been beaten and robbed by the Syrians, and I was ordered to deny aid to them. The U.S. Army didn’t want to establish a precedent, but I was the one who had to look those men in the eye. I defied orders and saved the Indians by arresting and feeding them, but I couldn’t save my marriage. I received one letter from my wife during the first half of my tour; when I was wounded, I didn’t even call her. I called Mamá instead. I thought I could save my marriage when I returned to the United States. I spent the first few weeks in Colorado writing emails and calling. The day before the slide presentation with my parents, I traveled to Maryland, where my wife was living, and met her at the Applebee’s near Arundel Mills Mall. I was desperate to reconcile, but within ten minutes I knew it was over, and we ended up drinking our sorrows instead. I drank those sorrows for weeks, sucking them down with Motrin and regret.

  I wasn’t the only one in trouble. When we learned the Third Cavalry was on short rotation stateside and we were going back to Iraq in the spring, soldiers scattered. I mean, they just disappeared. They left the Army, or they transferred to other units, anywhere they could find a place. A few were cowards or shirkers, but most realized they weren’t in any condition to go back. There was no counseling in those days, no attempt to deal with the psychic wounds of war, and my troop was unraveling: fighting, drinking, splitting with wives and girlfriends, arguing about everything and nothing at all. There was a burst of thrill seeking—driving fast, jumping out of airplanes, rampant sex—anything to restart the adrenaline pumping. Pfc. Tyson Carter, one of my workhorses from Al-Waleed, lost a leg in a motorcycle accident. Another soldier was arrested in Colorado Springs; I drove there in the middle of the night to prevent him from being jailed. Being a leader of men in the Army is an honor, but also a responsibility. There’s no nine-to-five, home to the family and forget about the office, like the civilian world. My life was intertwined with my men, and their off time was my responsibility too. We joked about bad dreams, about drinking too much, about how none of us could drive under a highway overpass without switching lanes, even in traffic, because we didn’t want to give the bomber on the bridge an easy target. That’s not normal, to worry about bombers in Colorado Springs. A lot of guys realized that, and they wanted me, as their superior officer, to help them. I never turned them down, no matter how late at night or how much I wanted to drink myself to sleep.

  I am an American soldier. I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.

  I went to counseling, but I never mentioned the chronic pain
, stress, or swirling anxiety that had settled over my life. Instead, I talked about my problems sleeping and my wife. I quit after two sessions, which was all the Army provided without authorization. I wasn’t cured. I hadn’t even figured out I was sick. But authorization for more sessions meant explaining myself to my troop commander, and back then that would have jeopardized my career.

  I am an American soldier. I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough.

  In late July, my physical problems started to outrun me. First, I pulled an abdominal muscle. A few weeks later, I pulled my hamstring. I had been unconsciously compensating for my cracked vertebrae for six months, and my body hit the wall. I stayed out of PT (physical training) with my platoon, rehabilitating myself in the swimming pool every morning, but my recovery was slow and my mind a jumble of contradictory thoughts. I was proud of my service. I had a bright future. I believed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and, especially, in the Iraqis themselves.

  I am an American soldier. I am an expert and I am a professional.

  But at the same time, I was coming unmoored, my mind dwelling on the hand-to-hand struggle for my life, the Syrian ambush, the sandstorms, the riots, and Ali, Emad, and Maher, the men left behind.

  I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

  The wife of one of my best men from Al-Waleed had become pregnant during his midtour leave. The fetus was fatally deformed, but Tricare, the Army’s health service, doesn’t provide abortions under any circumstances, and she had no choice but to carry the child to term. I will never accept defeat. Little Layla was born without a nose and several internal organs. Her parents had no financial resources on a soldier’s pay to provide her comfort. It was heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking, to hold baby Little Layla in my hands. I will never quit. Her life was pain, and it tore her parents apart. I will never quit. She lived eight weeks, and the difficulty of her life, and the inhumanity of forcing that existence not only on her but her parents too—I will never leave a fallen comrade—fueled my downward drive.

  I was angry with the Army. Not on the surface, but underneath, in the depth of my mind. Why did Layla and her parents have to endure that pain, especially after everything they had already endured? Why were they forcing our regiment back to Iraq just ten months after our return? Why weren’t they helping us cope with our pain? We were badly banged up. We were undermanned and underequipped. The Army didn’t care. They were churning us through. They cared more about getting us back to Iraq and making the numbers than they did about our health and survival.

  It was the summer of 2004. Victory was slipping away. Everyone could see that, but the media kept pounding the message: “The generals say there are enough men. The generals say there is enough equipment. The generals say everything is going well.” It was a lie. The soldiers on the line knew it because we were the ones suffering. We were the ones who endured days of enemy mortar fire when we arrived in Iraq without weapons or ammunition, as my element of eighty troopers had in Balad in 2003; we were the ones going back in 2005 without adequate recovery time or armor for our Humvees. And that is the ultimate betrayal: when the commanding officers care more about the media and the bosses than about their soldiers on the ground.

  In August, I informed my unit I was leaving the Third Armored Cav. I was an American soldier, a guardian of freedom, an expert, a professional, but I was physically and mentally worn out. I was pursued by pulled muscles and black thoughts, and I knew I could never get the treatment I needed in the Army. Not if I wanted to rise above my current rank, anyway. I wanted to be that junior officer with unlimited potential, I wanted to be that warrior who had barked the Soldier’s Creed only two months before, but I couldn’t run. I could barely stand the headaches. And I was drinking, in private and alone, almost every day. In short, I could no longer exceed the standard, something I had always pushed myself to do, so it was time for me to go.

  One month later, in September 2004, I signed on for a second tour. I am, after all, an American soldier.

  CHAPTER 6

  ANYTHING

  BUT STABLE

  You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have

  a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful,

  or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.

  Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY,

  THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA*

  It’s times like this that I thank God for Tuesday. The last two chapters take me back to difficult times, to memories so strong they blot out my present life. Instead of reading or writing in the middle of my bed, for the last half hour I have been at Al-Waleed with the knife at my neck, or on a helicopter waking up to the sight of flight medics in night-vision goggles. I have felt the tension of sitting on my bed near Fort Carson in the summer of 2004 and acknowledging for the first time that something was seriously wrong, and I’ve been holding my breath against the long fall of the next three years.

  And then . . . Tuesday sticks his chin over the edge of the bed. He has come to me from across the room, where he likes to lounge on the cool bathroom tiles. He has plopped his head beside me and stared at me so intently and lovingly that, even in my agitated state, I can’t help but notice him. He was monitoring my breathing, scrutinizing my body language. He knew I was anxious, and he came to pull me back to the present.

  When I see that look—or even better, when he climbs all the way up on the bed and puts his chin across my keyboard—I know it’s Tuesday time. I never argue. Tuesday knows what I need more than I do, and besides, I love playing with him. When he interrupts my work, I know it’s not because he’s bored or lonely, but because I need him. So I’ll slip on his vest, the one that announces he is a working dog, and go out with him for a walk. Other times, I’ll toss the tennis ball. My Manhattan apartment is a tiny room, too small for an eighty-pound dog to chase anything, so we usually go into the narrow hallway and bounce balls off the wall.

  Right now, though, it’s the middle of the night and neither option is available. So I close down the document and give Tuesday what he really loves: YouTube. He loves dog videos: dogs popping balloons, dogs riding skateboards, and best of all dogs running around with each other having a good time. He follows the action with his head, twitching in crazy patterns and letting out a soft bark for the good stuff. He’s not as crazy about cats or hamsters, but frenetic squirrels make him lurch to attention and horses put him in an excited mood. He likes to put his head down, a boozy smile on his face, and watch them run.

  Tonight, I click a bookmarked favorite, then say, “Jump on, Tuesday,” to tell him to climb on the bed and watch. He’s big enough to lie side by side, or I can prop myself on his belly and drift off, using his body as a pillow. This time, I sit and watch him stare at the screen, aware that I might write this moment into the book because it’s so perfectly emblematic of what Tuesday does for me. As if reading my thoughts, Tuesday turns to look at me, a twinkle of love and thanks in his eyes, then turns back to the screen.

  “No . . . thank you,” I say, giving him a rough shake. “Thank you, Tuesday, for being my boy.” He rolls over slightly, allowing me to pet his belly, but he doesn’t take his eyes from the two dogs who are jumping back and forth over each other in front of a glass sliding door. I laugh, give him another shake, then walk over to refill his water and grab a glass for myself. In the cabinet is my knife. I carried a bigger one in Iraq, never putting it down after the assault at Al-Waleed. I carried this one, with a blade one millimeter shorter than three inches, the average legal limit, for three years after returning from my second tour. I put it down for the first time a few months after adopting Tuesday. It reminds me how much difference he’s made in my life.

  It’s also a reminder of why I went back to Iraq for a second tour. Even now, I don’t question that decision. I had to do it. Al-Anbar Province was in revolt. Abu Ghraib had hit the national news. Iraq was disintegrating and my friends, bo
th American and Iraqi, were in danger. We had shaken hands with the Iraqis, eaten with them, fought and died with them. I couldn’t have lived with walking away at that point; I would have felt empty and disloyal for the rest of my life.

  I wouldn’t have gone back, though, if I hadn’t believed in success—not that it was inevitable, or even probable, but that it was possible. One man made me believe: Col. H. R. McMaster, the new regimental commander of the Third Armored Cavalry. He didn’t try to convince me to stay; instead, he sat down with me and showed me what I could accomplish. Col. McMaster rarely gave orders, I soon found out; instead, he inspired you to lead. He made me believe I could make a difference. In short, he restored my faith. Then he offered me a position on his regimental staff as Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) liaison officer. How could I refuse?

  We deployed in March 2005 to south Baghdad, part of the so-called Triangle of Death, and it was everything you’d expect from a war zone: broken and abandoned buildings, shattered glass, charred rubble swept into piles; snipers, bombers, militiamen, spies, and men I had no idea whether to shoot, arrest, or congratulate for their fortitude. We drove through the street, scanning the buildings, and it was like Mogadishu or Saigon or Berlin or any of the other fractured places Americans had held in their grasp over the last sixty years.

  As the liaison officer, my responsibility was to embed with and advise Iraqi units in the area. Even in those surroundings, I was astounded by the Iraqi Army’s disarray. There were hundreds of men on the roster, and therefore the American payroll, who never showed up and might never have existed. Most of the troops had insufficient weaponry, and those with decent weapons often lacked ammunition, even though the level of violence was extraordinarily high. A day never passed without an attack, and often it was three or four incidents per patrol. Car bombs. IEDs. Snipers and armed gangs. Suicide attacks on living quarters, traffic checkpoints, and payroll lines, threats against wives and children, firefights in crowded streets. The Iraqi Fourth Brigade had been losing men for more than a year, and if they ever had any discipline, it had long since broken down. Men were deserting en masse. Others had the thousand-yard stare of the shell-shocked; still others looked like they wanted to hunt down every suspected “insurgent”—in this case, Sunnis—and beat them to death with their bare hands.