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

by Luis Carlos Montalvan

  Andrew had never been like that with Blue (although I admit he was right, Jackie’s ears were ridiculously soft). I don’t think he’d ever been like that in his whole life. I swear, I think he and Jackie spent the whole movie making out. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

  Lu had known Andrew’s relationship with Blue wasn’t right, but Puppies Behind Bars, the sponsor of the veterans program, had limited her choices to dogs they had trained. She waited patiently and hoped for the best, but in the end she ignored the limitation and chose another animal. She risked her funding, and possibly the program, to give Andrew the dog he needed.

  “I can’t promise you a Ferrari, then give you a Volkswagen,” she told me later. “That’s not how I work.” It was a typically unromantic image from Lu, but the next sentence is the one I remember. “I can’t tell you I’m going to make your life better, then not do everything I can to make that come true.”

  Shortly after the switch, we were riding in the ECAD van to an outdoor training session when I felt something jiggling my hair. I looked over and Andrew, whose prosthetics often rubbed him the wrong way, had his leg bent backward and was scratching under his artificial knee. “Get your foot out of my face, man,” I said, knocking his toes away. He looked at me and smiled. I’m not saying he came out of his shell—he was a quiet guy by nature—but after that, you never knew when you were going to get a metal foot in the face.

  I appreciated Tuesday more, I think, after seeing Andrew struggle with Blue. Even at ECAD, I realized the relationship won’t work with the wrong dog. Not a bad dog, mind you, just the wrong dog for that particular person. Andrew wasn’t an alpha by nature, so he needed a dog that would chill with him while he played video games, not butt heads with him over control. I must have given Tuesday a dozen hugs after that, thinking how lucky I was to have a dog I could love.

  That doesn’t mean we didn’t struggle. I had intentionally chosen the complicated dog, after all. The smart one. The goofball. The one that figured out after sitting between my last row seat and the back wall of the movie theater that the space was too small for me to come in and get him out. So what did he do? He ran back and forth behind the seats while I grabbed for him, refusing to come out. Occasionally he stopped, and I don’t even want to think about what he was finding to eat back there, but he loped off again as soon as my fingers grazed his collar. Eventually, we had people guarding each end of the row and four of us reaching over the seats trying to grab him. It took several minutes for Tuesday to tire of that game. He finally trotted out with an insouciant air and a giant grin, as if that was the most fun he’d had all week.

  That behavior was fine at ECAD, I suppose (although Lu would hasten to disagree with me), but the closer we came to the end of class, the more anxious I became about Tuesday’s attention lapses and playful episodes, as minor as they were. My frustration culminated, finally, on a trip to downtown Dobbs Ferry. A photographer from the local newspaper wanted to document the first class of wounded veterans to receive service dogs, so the four of us paraded up and down in front of the store windows of Dobbs Ferry’s quaint downtown with our dogs. The rest of the dogs walked calmly, as instructed, but Tuesday was . . . well, being Tuesday. He was showing off, bouncing around, and focusing on the other dogs and the photographer instead of me.

  One of the trainers, perhaps out of embarrassment at Tuesday’s foibles, started barking suggestions. I was determined, though, to solve this problem on my own. I had a whole toolbox of motivational tricks, from a sharp command to repeatedly telling Tuesday to heel until I focused his concentration, but the trainer (who is no longer at ECAD) was a real drill sergeant, and she kept insisting I jerk hard on his leash to regain his attention. Well, I’d had enough of drill sergeants, and Tuesday had too. I didn’t have any interest in choking him, but with Tuesday refusing to behave, and the trainer chirping at me, and the photographer waiting, my pulse began to pound and I felt a familiar PTSD-like anxiety creeping into my mind.

  So I took a time-out. I got down on one knee, right in the middle of the sidewalk in downtown Dobbs Ferry, grabbed Tuesday around the neck, and put my forehead against his. I waited until he stopped glancing around, then started talking to him in a calm, quiet voice. I don’t know what I said exactly, but I was telling him that he was my dog, that I was his person, and that we were a team. I wasn’t going to hurt him, but he had to listen to me. And if he listened to me, I would love him for the rest of his life.

  After a few seconds, I knew Tuesday was listening. He locked into my eyes, and a calm came over him that I had never seen before. Maybe the part of him that wanted love opened up. Maybe he realized, finally, that this wasn’t like any relationship he’d had before. He had been on a treadmill, racing toward each new handler but always ending up in the exact same spot: alone. He didn’t know I was the mission he’d been training for, but at that moment, at the very least, he realized I needed him. And maybe I realized, in my heart and in my head, that this was a two-way relationship and he needed me too. All I know for sure is that when I looked up, everybody was staring at us. Staff, dogs, veterans, everybody. Even the photographer had lowered his camera. Lu Picard told me later we were together for five minutes, although I could have sworn it was thirty seconds at the most.

  “What was that about?” she asked, as Tuesday and I walked past, side by side.

  “We’re okay now,” I told her. “We reached an understanding.”

  Two days later, Tuesday and I rode the Metro-North Railroad together to our new lives in the city. I cannot describe the elation I felt that day, the ease with which I handled every step of the process, and the optimism I felt about the future. Everything was different. Everything. And it was all because of Tuesday. He had a little trouble with the turnstile into the subway—so low and loud, such menacing arms—but for more than two hours he sat or walked beside me like a perfectly trained service dog, calmly assessing the world around him. But I could feel his excitement, too. I could feel his joy. This was what he had been training for his whole life; New York City was his Al-Waleed. I knew I wasn’t supposed to distract him when he was on duty, but I couldn’t help myself. At Grand Central Terminal, I reached over and hugged him.

  “It’s just you and me now, buddy,” I told him. “We’re free.”

  CHAPTER 12

  THE FIRST TEST

  I understand a fury in your words. But not the words.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, OTHELLO

  Life was better with Tuesday, there was no doubt about that. It was nice just having someone with me in my apartment. Lu had stressed many times the importance of bonding with our dogs, which meant not letting anyone touch Tuesday or interact with him for the first two months we were together. This was far from a hardship; in fact, it was ideal. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my apartment anyway, and now I had the perfect excuse. Instead of going out, Tuesday and I practiced commands. Whenever either of us grew restless, whether it was noon or the middle of the night, we’d work on sitting, heeling, retrieving, carrying, snuggling, fronting, speaking—everything but “Get busy,” which meant now was a good time for Tuesday to relieve himself—until I wound up on the floor hugging Tuesday and telling him what a good boy he was. For the first week, it was the primary way we interacted. If it was my choice, I would have lived in that cocoon for months.

  Unfortunately, the real world was still out there and I still had to interact with it. The trips to the VA were significantly better since I had changed to the Manhattan hospital and found a good primary-care physician, psychiatrist, and therapist, but classes at Columbia were still a grind, especially Reporting and Writing 1.

  There were a number of reasons for my dissatisfaction with that particular class, and in true PTSD fashion I obsessed about them all. The assignments were glorified crime blotters, I muttered, not journalism. The professors were too focused on local New York news. The planning was muddled and contradictory. The objectives were unclear. The two-hour-long discussions were
n’t worth the heart-pounding, claustrophobia-inducing three-hour round-trip subway ride.

  Those were all true, but I’d also put myself in a difficult spot by essentially refusing to follow the course syllabus. For two years, I had been obsessively immersed in foreign affairs and defense policy. In the last year alone, I had written editorials and opinion pieces for major newspapers like the Denver Post, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle on war issues and veterans affairs, and with such big things on my mind I found it difficult to switch to local zoning laws and disputes over how much car horn honking was too much. My god, I wondered, don’t these people understand we are at war?

  The war had also, once again, become deeply personal. After I left Al-Waleed, Al-Anbar Province had collapsed into sectarian violence, and I had lost track of my Iraqi friends there. I heard a few times from Ali: short notes to say the border was in chaos and Iraqis I had known were dying. In 2005, he wrote that his life was being threatened, but I had no way to contact him and lost touch after my official Army email was shut down. In the spring of 2008, he resurfaced again with a desperate plea. Under constant threat and fearing for their lives, he and his family had fled Iraq. Since 2006, they had been living in squalor in a slum area of Amman, the capital of Jordan. Jordan issued six-month work visas to Iraqi refugees, but they refused to extend them, and Ali’s visa had long since expired. He was scrounging day labor to feed his family while the United States repeatedly denied his request for immigration. I hadn’t filled out the required paperwork, officials told him, so there was no proof he had ever worked for Coalition forces. It’s true I never filled out paperwork for Ali. He wasn’t a paid consultant; he worked for free because he believed in us.

  All through the summer, I wrote letters and made phone calls on Ali’s behalf, calling in every favor I had earned in seventeen years of military service. I received letters for Ali from Col. Christopher M. Hickey, my squadron commander in western Al-Anbar, and Sgt. Eric Pearcy, my Humvee gunner. I won support for Ali’s petition from Gene Dewey, assistant U.S. secretary of state for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration during President Bush’s first term, and from Fred Schieck, a friend of my father and former deputy director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the government organization that provides U.S. economic and humanitarian assistance around the world.

  With former U.S. Marine Capt. Tyler Boudreau, a friend from my work on behalf of veterans, I established a nonprofit organization to aid Ali and other Iraqi refugees. That August, a few months before meeting Tuesday, and while my classmates were writing reports on neighborhood issues in New York, I flew with Captain Boudreau and two professional journalists to meet with Ali and highlight the refugees’ plight. I was stunned by the number of refugees—750,000 people scattered in substandard squats in the worst parts of Amman, forced into scavenging, prostitution, and sex slavery on a massive scale by a lack of work papers and basic human rights—but I was more stunned by the American officials who lacked any coherent plan to deal with the crisis.

  Ali was lucky. Thanks in part to our efforts, his special visa and request for asylum had been approved. By the time I arrived, he was awaiting his final paperwork. He was so magnanimous and gracious, so thankful for our efforts. It had been a difficult four and a half years since we parted, filled with terror and deprivation, but he was getting out. The invasion of Iraq had not turned out as he had hoped, but he had no regrets. He still believed in America. He still appreciated the effort, even after our reckless failures.

  I wasn’t as magnanimous. Ali was receiving his reward, after several years’ delay, but there were many thousands of others who worked with us still suffering. They had risked their lives and the lives of their spouses, children, parents, siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews (yes, the revenge killings went that far) to help us. Their efforts had been vital. We welcomed them, until we needed to reciprocate. Then America turned its back. What I saw in Jordan wasn’t just a betrayal of a friend but of the American way. We had made promises to the Iraqis—explicit promises. Help us, and we will stand by you. Now our goal as a nation was to break those promises and keep our Muslim brothers out.

  My multimedia presentation on Iraqi refugees, titled Saving Ali, is still available at Flypmedia.com. I watch it now, and I can see the strain of those times. Ali’s face is obscured in his interview because he was still a target of reprisal. In my interview, I am clearly in the grips of PTSD, stuttering and looking away from the camera, unable to collect my thoughts. My eyes are popping, glazed, and unfocused, and I am sweating profusely, even in an air-conditioned room.

  It wasn’t just Ali’s plight. During our conversations in Jordan, I learned that Maher, my brother-in-arms in the Iraqi Border Police at Al-Waleed, was dead. He was my best friend among the Iraqis, a funny guy who loved to tell a joke, and in my opinion the U.S. Army’s most valuable intelligence source in the western Anbar desert. He went on patrol with us all the time, since he understood the tribal and ethnic fault lines in that part of the world; he showed us dozens of caches of arms and ammunitions. It was a stressful existence, especially away from the base, but Maher always made us laugh. I remember an Enrique Iglesias song coming from a radio in our Humvee one afternoon, and Maher and I singing together like two college buddies on our way to the beach. Fifteen minutes later, we were holding guns on a roomful of men while we confiscated their weapons cache.

  Maher got married in 2004, just before I left. He wanted me to attend the wedding, but the Army wouldn’t have allowed me to leave my post. He showed me the pictures. Shuruq (which means “shining” in Arabic) was a beautiful girl from Ar-Rutbah, his hometown, and they looked incredibly happy. They were young, they were in love, they were planning to start a family. A few weeks later, someone threw hand grenades into their house, collapsing the roof and blowing the walls apart. It was an assassination. Retribution for helping us at Al-Waleed. Both Maher and Shuruq were killed.

  Every time I went to that investigative journalism class, I was reminded of that fact. Every time I was given an assignment to explore a local issue in some inward-looking New York neighborhood, I was reminded of the big stories, the suffering and betrayals that were being ignored. Oh, your co-op board isn’t happy about the schedule of garbage removal? Well, we’re at war! A society is collapsing. Thousands are dead and 750,000 Iraqis are living in Jordan without garbage removal . . . or houses . . . or visas that would allow them to work.

  And Maher is dead.

  So needless to say, I wasn’t in the best frame of mind for my investigative journalism class that fall, and especially for the last gathering of the semester, a party at the professor’s apartment with food, drinks, and the presentation of our final group projects. It was exactly the kind of event I dreaded: social, claustrophobic, requiring a public presentation. Before Tuesday, it would have left me a quivering mess. I would have drunk for two days to work up the courage to attend, and even then I doubt I would have gone. With Tuesday, I was apprehensive, but I was confident I could make it through. We had been together only a few weeks, but already my mental outlook had changed.

  Tuesday and I were the first to arrive. This was intentional, so that I could case the apartment and choose a safe location to hole up for the night. I was completely sober and, with Tuesday at my side and my knife tucked in my trousers, reasonably secure. The second person to arrive was a cute girl in a red tube skirt and, to my complete horror, the first thing Tuesday did was stick his nose up her skirt. I mean, we really need to hold it together, the two of us, not make unprofessional moves. Plus, it was embarrassing, especially after I pulled Tuesday aside and told him to behave, only to have him stick his snout straight back up her skirt, his face flailing wildly as Kristina blushed as red as her skirt.

  We laughed about that. She was a good sport, thank god, and Tuesday is such a charmer with those sensitive brown eyes. I even talked to her for a minute, I think, and felt strengthened by surviving Tuesday’s gaff
e. Unfortunately, the night went downhill from there. As I watched in horror, the apartment filled with people I barely recognized, even though I had spent a semester in class with them. I could feel the heat rising by the minute, and the chatter buzzed in my ears, making it impossible to focus.

  Even worse, two of my classmates brought dogs. I guess the thinking was, If Luis gets to bring Tuesday, then everyone should be allowed to bring their dogs. I hate that. Absolutely hate it. That’s like saying that if someone is coming in a wheelchair, than everyone else gets to ride motorcycles. I don’t care how well-behaved a pet dog is, or how loved; it’s not the same as Tuesday and me. Don’t get me wrong, I know how much dogs mean, but a pet dog’s presence is a luxury. You may want them to attend a party with you, but it isn’t a necessity. I require Tuesday. I cannot survive without him.

  The dogs were a disaster. They were clearly agitated by the noise and the crowd—what untrained dog wouldn’t be?—and they kept barking and nipping at Tuesday. He had grown up around dogs, of course, but those were exquisitely trained golden retrievers, and these little nippers completely disoriented him. He didn’t know what to do with them. He kept turning and giving them looks, but they followed him around the apartment, even after he started pushing at them with his head, trying to make them go away. I needed Tuesday to be calm and focus on me, because I was panicking in that crowded room, but he was anything but calm.

  By my group’s presentation, I was gone. Anyone could have looked at my eyes and seen it. They were bulging and glassy, unable to focus on anything in the room. Think of it as being bombed on alcohol, although my wine consumption had nothing to do with it. I was so overwhelmed, I experienced near blackouts, and my mind was so consumed with anxiety that the apartment was reeling wildly around me as thoughts pancaked in my mind: yippy dogs and Ali and hot apartments and Iraqi assassins and unruly Baghdad crowds and suicide bombs and our dumb presentation and Maher dead, and for some reason, when I got up to give the first part of my group’s report, I started into a stumbling explanation of how our presentation wasn’t that good because we hadn’t been given enough time to prepare.