Turning down the position at Emergency Management was the right thing to do, but it was also the hardest. The night I paced my apartment before making the call was one of the most difficult of my life. I wanted the position. It paid well, it was interesting, and it was a great career opportunity. Turning it down felt like failure. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get another chance.
But when I made the call, I felt free. I felt more liberated, in fact, than I ever had in my life. For almost four years, I had ignored my problems. I had worked too hard, pushing myself too far, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with them. I had almost done that with Emergency Management, too. But I had stopped. I had been honest. I had summoned the courage to stop pretending and accept the reality of my life. Now, finally, I was going to get help.
My parents didn’t see it that way. Mamá shook her head, then walked out of the room. My papá got in my face—I had traveled to Washington by train to tell them, a harrowing journey in my agoraphobic state—and said, “You are not going to be one of those broken veterans.”
It wasn’t a threat. It was a statement of fact. My father thought I was doing this to myself, and he wasn’t going to allow it. He knew I was wounded in Iraq; my parents had received that horrible call from the Army in the middle of the night, telling them I was hurt. He didn’t realize those wounds were still with me, a poison in my life. He thought I was wallowing in misery, and if I was a real man I’d pull myself out of it. He thought my diagnosis with PTSD, which I received before my honorable discharge, was some kind of excuse.
I wanted to curse him right there, right to his face, but I wasn’t raised that way. And truth be told, I was too angry. It was, in many ways, the lowest moment of my life. The betrayal of the Army cut my heart; losing the respect of my papá ran a saber through my soul. It was the moment when anger took over and my memories of Iraq consumed me. I had been isolated from the world long before Alabama, but that night, for the first time, I felt terminally alone.
I spiraled downward, becoming anxious and paranoid. Without my family, there was nothing to keep me moored. I clung to my righteous indignation, but without my parents I lost hope. I scanned the computer nightly for war news, and I wrote frequently—sometimes obsessively—about my condition, but I essentially stopped going outside except to the liquor store, where I would buy a large bottle of rum and four liters of Diet Coke. I’d drink them to the bottom over the next few hours or days, then head back to the liquor store, numbed against the world. I skipped Thanksgiving, bottoming out alone in my apartment with Bacardi. There was no turkey, no mashed potatoes or stuffing, just a bottle of amber liquor quickly descending toward the bottom and a single lonely string of Christmas lights twinkling dimly in the dark.
Sometime early in the morning, blitzed on rum and sadness, I wrote an essay for NPR’s This I Believe. It talked about my feelings of abandonment, of betrayal, of being denied even basic medical assistance. It ended, “I hope I get help before it’s too late.”
I look at that essay now, and I don’t know what I meant. I wasn’t suicidal, that I know for sure. But I was, as I can see now, hurtling toward an end. Sometimes, as I lay on my bed after three days awake, having consumed too much alcohol for too long to be truly drunk, I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice if I could fall asleep? And wouldn’t it be even better if I never woke up?
I trudged on, too indignant to give in. Despite my official diagnosis with multiple injuries, there was a delay in receiving disability benefits, and my meager savings from seventeen years in the Army were running out. Still, I took a car service (like a taxi, but I could call and ask for the same driver) several times a week to my only standing obligation: the Brooklyn Veterans Affairs Medical Center. It cost $11 one way versus $2 for the bus, something I couldn’t really afford, but I had to do it, because I couldn’t ride the bus. The faces, the smells, the enclosed space. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I had to step off. I needed to be somewhat coherent, after all, when I reached the VA, because they were running me through the usual routine, making me fill out endless paperwork, making me wait for hours, making me see a different medical intern every visit who would walk in with a smile and say, “So what’s wrong with you today?”
I didn’t like talking about my condition. I didn’t like talking about Iraq. I didn’t like strangers. I was, in other words, a typical wounded veteran. What did the VA not understand? Why couldn’t they give me medicine or treatment instead of the runaround? They were understaffed and underfunded, probably because the government didn’t want to acknowledge the damage being done in Iraq and Afghanistan, but for me, in my state, it felt personal. They didn’t want to help me. They wanted me to just go away. They wanted to pretend I didn’t exist. It was a betrayal, just another betrayal by the U.S. Army I had loved and served.
That fall, I had been accepted to graduate school at Columbia University. I had told my parents I was applying when I turned down the job at Emergency Management, but I knew they didn’t believe me. So I sent the acceptance letter home without a word of explanation. For months, I had been stewing in anger, mixing my father’s betrayal with that of the Army, seeing in his face as he dressed me down the face of the assassin who came for my life. Sending him the acceptance letter was, to me, an elegant “Fuck you.”
I started classes in January. Columbia was on the upper west side of Manhattan, more than an hour away from Sunset Park, but moving closer was far beyond my financial or psychological means. The subway was a teeth-jangling, stomach-clenching experience, one that often left me with massive headaches or throwing up into trash cans on subway platforms. It wasn’t that I wanted to turn back to my apartment some mornings; I was desperate to turn back every morning. But I forced myself to endure. I may have been a broken soldier—and I say that now with pride, not shame—but I was not a failure. Columbia was my way out of Sunset Park and my truncated life. If I didn’t have graduate school, I realized somewhere in the back of my mind, I didn’t have anything to live for, and then I really would end up alone in my bed, dead and undiscovered for days.
I admit that I sometimes went to class drunk, and that I always went with a few drinks in me at least. I often walked out in the middle of class, looked in the bathroom mirror, and was surprised to find my eyes bulging and my face covered with sweat. Presentations for my seminar left me paranoid and anxious, and I cursed my own foolishness. I had given presentations to Colonel McMaster and his superior officers. I had stood before generals at the American Enterprise Institute and advised them on the war. I had held the lives of a thousand men in my hands. And I aced it every time. Why was I terrified now to present a graduate school project in front of fifteen of my peers?
Outside of class, I hardly spoke. My neighbors in Sunset Park, I found out later, were vaguely frightened of me. I still don’t really know what my classmates thought. I showed up; I sweated through class; I left and went straight to a bar or a convenience store, where I bought tall-boy Budweisers in a paper bag. Between classes, I was spending thirty hours a week at the Brooklyn VA hospital, fighting for a thirty-minute doctor’s appointment, a therapy session or two, and a few prescriptions. My back ached. My ruptured knee ached. My mind cracked and spun. I fell down a flight of concrete subway stairs, knocking myself out. The migraines crippled me. I was making progress, I was passing classes, but the effort was wearing me down.
It all came to a head on May 7, 2008, near the end of my first semester at Columbia. At the invitation of the Wounded Warrior Project, a support organization for veterans, I traveled to New Jersey that night for a Bruce Springsteen concert. Despite drinking rum-and-Cokes at the lobby bar to calm my nerves, I suffered a panic attack halfway through the show and, hyperventilating and physically sick, took a bus and then a subway back toward my apartment. It was miserable, absolutely miserable. I huddled in my coat, my hand on the knife in my pocket, wondering what had made me think I could endure such an event. A Bruce Springsteen concert? An hour from home? In my condition? It was absurd.
At least the subway was mercifully empty, even though it was not yet midnight. By the time we reached Brooklyn, there was only me, an elderly Asian couple, and one other passenger in the subway car. Then two young Latinos entered. They were looking for trouble, I could tell right away, and sure enough one finished off whatever he was eating and threw his trash right on the elderly woman’s lap. Then he started cursing at her in Spanish. I couldn’t stand that type of disrespect.
“That’s enough,” I said.
”What’s that, hombre?” the young man said, walking toward me.
“I said, pick up your trash and sit down.”
“You want to start something?”
“I think you already have.”
He came at me, but I knew he was going to, so I stood up and easily swept him past me into the back of the car. Then I lost my balance, either as the train lurched or my cane slipped or my back gave way, and with a blinding pain everything went black.
They found me later, unconscious on the F train platform at Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street with a broken ankle and blood pooling around my head. I woke up in Lutheran Hospital the next day. Another brain injury. Another bloody mess. I can’t think of a better image of my life at that moment. And this time, there was nothing funny about it.
Less than two months later, I heard about the dogs.
CHAPTER 8
THE THOUGHT
OF DOGS
You are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my
ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly
ill by it; but it is only a darkness, it is not an end, or the end.
—HENRY JAMES, LETTER TO GRACE NORTON
I can’t begin to tell you how much my life changed when I read the email on July 1, 2008. (A Tuesday, I just realized. I’ll have to add that to my list of fake reasons for Tuesday’s name.) The Wounded Warrior Project, the veteran service organization I went with to the Bruce Springsteen concert, forwarded the message. They forwarded messages every day, actually, but I usually didn’t read them. This tagline intrigued me: “WWP and Puppies Behind Bars.” Puppies behind bars?
The message was almost as simple: “Dear Warriors, please note below. Puppies Behind Bars has 30 dogs a year to place, free of charge, with veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan who are suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injuries or physical injuries. I’ve attached the Dog Tags brochure, which explains the program, as well as the Dog Tags application.”
As soon as I read the attached description, I knew the program was for me. I suffered from debilitating social anxiety, and the dogs were trained to understand and soothe emotional distress. I suffered from vertigo and frequent falls, and a dog could keep me stable. Because of my back I could barely tie my own shoes, and a dog could retrieve and pick things up for me. I was the perfect candidate. I was down, but I was working toward a future. I was a leader, so I could handle responsibility. I was a worker, so I would never give up. And I was lonely. Terribly, terribly lonely.
Most importantly, I loved dogs. At Al-Waleed, one of the most heartbreaking duties our troop performed was euthanizing dogs. There was a large loose pack of them roaming the area, and it was as if they’d been visited by a pestilence: thin, mangy, covered with boils, sick with tumors, and throwing up blood. It wasn’t safe, either to the local population or the healthy dogs. And it wasn’t humane to let the animals suffer. So we culled the most diseased and, with a heavy heart, shot them in the head. It was brutally dehumanizing work, made acceptable mostly by the continued trust and affection of Bruce, a white and gray former member of the pack adopted by Staff Sergeant Snyder, our hilarious and kindhearted mortar section leader. Bruce became our unit’s mascot, a cool alpha male that always appeared just in time for MRE handouts and naps in the cool midafternoon shade of the FOB. We were too busy defending Iraq to take care of him like a pet, so Bruce took care of us. His presence lifted our morale. After the assassination attempt, it soothed me to see Bruce standing guard or napping carelessly on our front walk. He was the only living thing I really trusted to alert me to danger. And it just felt better—more like a regular life—to have a dog around.
Then there was Max, the giant schnauzer I owned as a child. Like many Latinos, my parents were very achievement-oriented and strict. Mamá gave me lessons on manners; Papá told me to be tough and never quit. They were caring and kind, but I soon realized their affection was most available when I succeeded, and there weren’t too many arms to comfort me when I failed. I don’t blame them. They loved their three children; they wanted us to embrace our opportunities. They had each grown up without fathers, watching their mothers struggle, and they didn’t want that for us. We moved often, as my brilliant and driven papá worked his way toward the top of the Organization of American States (OAS), so I developed a work ethic, but I never forged many close friendships.
In junior high, I was badly bullied. Once a week, three boys waited to beat me up on my walk to the tennis courts, where I played for the school team. I think they first chose me because I was the new kid. They kept at me because I never told on them, and although it wasn’t a fair fight, I never backed down. I took my licks every day and kept swinging. Mamá would shake her head when I walked in the door and say sadly, “You got beat up again?” Then she’d go back to her chores. Papá never seemed to notice, until I borrowed his car when I was sixteen and the bullies slashed all four of the tires. He stopped it cold after that, but by then I had been beaten up for years.
My comfort, during all those hard days, was Max. I never hugged him or cried with him or anything like that. For most of my childhood, Max was simply my best friend, the dog that always wanted to play. As soon as I walked out the door after changing out of my school clothes, he came running. We went everywhere together, out in the park and around the neighborhood and tromping through the drainage ditches. Mamá hated having him in the house because he was filthy, or so she said, but Max and I didn’t care. We just played outside, even in the rain.
When Max disappeared in my teens, after eight years together, I was devastated. I put posters on lampposts; I made my papá drive me around the local streets every night for a week. I took a beating from my bullies, then rushed home to scour the neighborhood for my lost dog. For months, I thought I heard Max barking in the nearby Watts Branch Park in the middle of the night, and I tromped through the deep forest for miles in search of him. He never came back, but I never forgot, even twenty years later in my Brooklyn apartment, how important his companionship had been to me.
Twenty years later, I wanted that companionship in my life again. No, I needed that in my life, more even than I needed physical therapy and a steady job. As soon as I received the assistance dog email, I wrote to everyone I knew for recommendations: my professors, my old friends, my priest, my therapist. I compiled a record of my achievements and my medical evaluations. I called the Wounded Warrior Project and expressed my enthusiasm, asking if there was anything else I could do. Even before the first interview, I knew I would be chosen. That happens sometimes. I knew I would get into Columbia, so I didn’t apply anywhere else. I knew I would write a book. I know I will eventually live out west on a spread of land with a view of the mountains and a few horses in the back pasture. It’s not just that I set a goal. I know it will happen, then I work to achieve it. That, I suppose, is called faith.
I had faith in the assistance dog program. When I met Lu Picard at my second interview in the late summer of 2008, I knew she was going to change my life. I knew it. The training was supposed to start in September, and when the date was pushed back to November I was disappointed, but not disheartened. I wanted my dog. I wanted a new lease on life. I wanted it right now. But I didn’t need it now. The anticipation of a service dog had already saved me.
It wasn’t just the thought of Tuesday, though. I had made other changes, too. After eight months of battling for adequate care in Brooklyn, I switched to the Manhattan VA hospital. The subway ride was l
onger, but I finally found a great primary-care physician, a medical regimen that addressed all my physical wounds and PTSD symptoms, and a female former Marine and therapist who listened to me and understood what I was going through. Instead of reading only depressing news about the war, I spent that summer searching the Internet for information on service dogs and staring at photographs of golden retrievers. That’s how far gone I was: I stayed up night after night watching YouTube videos of dogs. By the fall, as the presidential campaign of 2008 ratcheted into high gear, I was feeling better than I had in years. “Hope and Change” was Barack Obama’s message that fall, and if you don’t understand why those words would mean so much to me at that time, then you don’t understand the previous five years of my life.
I arrived at East Coast Assistance Dogs on the night of November 3, 2008, the day before the presidential election. That first day, for many veterans, is not an easy experience. My friend Kim, for instance, whom I met at a wounded veterans retreat as I was departing the Army in August 2007, had been badly affected by her time in the Air Force. We kept in touch by email, often touching on the subject lightly, and at my urging she applied to ECAD and was accepted a year after me. When she arrived at the facility in Dobbs Ferry, though, she couldn’t walk through the door. She waited outside in the parking lot, pacing back and forth, almost in tears.
Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him Page 9