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

by Luis Carlos Montalvan

“Do you want to pet him?” I ask.

  I’m a pretty good judge of affliction; I know when a veteran wants to be left alone or when he’s completely around the bend. (Too common, I’m afraid, far too common.) I can’t remember a single time when the man or woman didn’t want to pet Tuesday. Usually, that leads to a few questions about him and then, “He reminds me of my dog.”

  Maybe it’s the dog back in their apartment. Maybe it’s a stray their unit picked up in Da Nang or Tal Afar. Maybe it’s a dog from their childhood. Whatever the link, Tuesday’s a conversation starter, a way back to the human side in a dehumanizing institutional waiting room.

  Not often, but a few times, I’ve noticed someone sitting alone on the other side of the room and walked Tuesday over to see them. It’s always a younger veteran, one who reminds me of the soldiers I had the honor of serving with. Maybe they remind me of myself too, not so long ago, sitting under those drab lights, trying to hold it together until I received my next round of meds, feeling like a number, a high one, and not one anybody cared too much about.

  “Do you want to say hello to Tuesday?”

  I’ll never forget the way one young soldier hesitated, then reached out and rubbed Tuesday on the back of the head without saying a word. Tuesday started to lean toward him, then thought better of it and sat back. The young man petted Tuesday for what seemed like minutes, without ever looking at me. My back was stiff and sore, my weight pressed onto my cane, by the time he took his hand away.

  “Thanks,” he said, glancing up. Then he retreated, almost visibly, back into himself. Maybe he was thinking of his combat tour. Maybe he was thinking of a dog he’d known. Maybe he was thinking of a buddy he lost. I don’t know. As we crossed the room, Tuesday and I glanced at each other knowingly, then looked away as we plopped back into our seats. Neither of us said a word.

  That’s confidence. That’s trust in your service dog and belief in his value. I think moments like that developed out of Tuesday’s kiss that spring, and that first day at the dog park, and the knowledge that after months of hard work I had earned his respect. It’s funny, because when I say that I think of young Tuesday, the happy puppy at ECAD. Like him, I never realized something was missing in my heart. Then Tuesday assured me, as only a dog can, that he loved me unconditionally and would never leave my side.

  It’s the little things, in the end, that create that bond. Removing the rock from his paw the second he limps. Finding him a sheltered place to relieve himself as soon as he drops his haunches. Throwing tennis balls and playing tug-of-war and biting his ears when we wrestle, even though they fill my mouth with hair, because that’s what he likes, the rough dog-play of the pack. It’s the way Tuesday picks up an object as soon as I drop it, then holds it up to me with a gentle look in his eye that says, Here you go, buddy. I’ve got your back. As soon as I feel bad, Tuesday is at my side. When I notice he’s uncomfortable, I drop everything and give him Tuesday time.

  I remember when Tuesday was attacked by a pit bull in Sunset Park. It was a typical morning; Welly and Mike were with us, and Tuesday was running with Welly like a halfhearted forward blocker for an overexcited Emmitt Smith. I saw the pit bull arrive with a young Puerto Rican guy, but I didn’t think anything of it until the owner released the catch on the leash and his dog sprinted down the hill and dove straight at Tuesday’s throat.

  I started running immediately, digging my cane into the ground. There is a difference between play-fighting and aggression, and I’d been around dogs and Tuesday enough to know this wasn’t a friendly greeting. The pit bull was driving up underneath Tuesday’s chest, snarling and maneuvering for a clean bite at his neck, but if the dog thought Tuesday was a soft target, it was badly mistaken. Tuesday may have been well-trained and handsomely groomed, a follower not an alpha, but he was a powerful fighter. He launched into a snarling defensive attack of his own, and the dogs were twisting at each other’s throats and snapping wildly when I threw down my cane and dove into the pile, grabbing the pit bull around the throat.

  The dog was still lunging and snapping its jaws when another hand reached in and grabbed it by the collar. The pit bull lashed forward, pulling its owner down, and for a second we were all grappling and pushing until the young man found enough leverage to hold on to his dog. I released my grip around the pit bull’s neck, and as he began yelling, “Calma! Calma! ” I turned my attention to Tuesday, who slid over and lay in my lap, his chest heaving.

  I ran my fingers through the thick hair under his chin, inspecting him for wounds. My bloody left hand left red streaks in his golden fur, but I couldn’t find anything wrong with his neck or throat. I felt his snout and his ears, then his head. Tuesday watched me, his eyebrows drawn down. I could tell he was coming off an adrenaline rush because his body was shaking, but his eyes weren’t concerned. They kept staring softly at me, without turning away, as if to judge his own condition best by reading the reactions on my face.

  “I’m sorry, man. Perdóname. It’s my wife’s dog.”

  I looked back briefly. Blood covered the pit bull’s snout and dripped down the young man’s arm. I turned back to Tuesday, running my hands over his body, flattening his fur and feeling for cuts. Nothing. Either the dog had bitten its owner, or Tuesday had gotten a hard strike on his attacker, because the blood wasn’t ours.

  “It’s all right,” I told Tuesday, running my hand over his body, soothing him. “It’s over.”

  He lay his head on my leg. He was trembling, but I could tell he felt safe.

  “Are you crazy?” a voice said. I looked over my shoulder again. The young man was gone, but Mike was standing in his place. “You don’t jump on a pit bull!”

  I wasn’t crazy. I was a soldier. A soldier never lets a fellow warrior down, no matter the situation, no matter the odds. Jumping to Tuesday’s defense was instinctive. In the Army, the smallest unit is a buddy team, two soldiers who look out for and are responsible for one another. Tuesday and I were a buddy team, and there was no way in hell that pit bull was going to harm my buddy.

  But if that was the moment that proved my devotion to Tuesday, as I’d like to think, it was the situation with my old friend from ECAD, Sgt. Mary Dague, that proved how indispensible he was to me. In the spring of 2009, about six months after we received our dogs, Puppies Behind Bars accused Mary of not taking good enough care of Remy. She was overweight, they said, and too social for a service dog, so they threatened to take her back.

  The news made me sick. And I don’t mean metaphorically. When I heard Mary might lose Remy, I threw up. Her arms had been blown off by an IED less than a year before, and in the six months since ECAD she had been through four painful surgeries and extensive rehabilitation therapy at Brooks Army Medical Center (BAMC) at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. I know that was probably hard on Remy, to see her friend laid up like that, and the dog probably hadn’t gotten the exercise she needed, but it had been harder on Mary. Far, far harder. Remy was her lifeline. I know that from seeing them together for two weeks, and from the loving way Mary bit dog treats from the tape on her stumps and fed them to Remy with her teeth. Losing her service dog, at that stage of her recovery, would have been devastating.

  I wasn’t just sick for her, though. The thought of that happening to me, of losing Tuesday, completely emptied me inside. In the summer of 2009, I had received an unexpected opportunity to travel to Cuba to engage in, let’s just say, anti-Castro activities. The trip involved slipping into the country and traveling light, so there was no way to bring Tuesday. I almost didn’t go for that reason, but in the end, I decided to do it. I left Tuesday in Lu Picard’s loving and capable hands and slipped off to fulfill a dream of my youth. The trip nearly killed me, not because of our actions—there was no violence, either planned or accidental—but because it took me from Tuesday. In fact, I suspect the separation, and its psychological toll, contributed to my breakdown that fall.

  And that was only ten days! To lose Tuesday forever? No, it was inconceivable. I may
not be able to quantify everything Tuesday does for me, but I can tell you the sum total is this: I can’t live without him.

  (And don’t worry, Mary kept her dog. I am proud to report that she and Remy are still living happily together.)

  CHAPTER 23

  FOR VETERANS

  EVERYWHERE

  The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy

  is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet,

  alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then

  does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes

  to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.

  —ANNE FRANK

  As the end of the year approached, I was feeling better about my move to Manhattan. I had a new primary-care physician, a new psychiatrist, and a new course of medicine. I took a break from my advocacy for veterans and the disabled, and I would soon have a winter break from classes. An episode with a professor, in which we heatedly disagreed over whether reporters should be allowed to do whatever they deemed necessarily in a war zone, turned out to be the turning point of my fall. After that, I hugged Tuesday and, over the course of a few days, felt my tension ease. I became more comfortable in my classes and more familiar with the rhythms of my neighborhood. By Thanksgiving, I was frequenting the three restaurants along Broadway with outdoor tables, where I could keep an eye on traffic and pedestrians while relaxing with a cup of coffee. Tom’s Restaurant, the beloved Seinfeld restaurant on the corner of 112th Street, had practically become my second home. The Greek waitresses would always shout, “Hey, Tuesday” as soon as we walked in the door, then usher us to a tight Formica booth, where Tuesday would curl at my feet, invisible to the other customers except for the tip of his nose, which he would push above the table to ask for sausage. Tuesday loved Tom’s sausage.

  He loved it so much, in fact, I sometimes ordered him a link. Sure, it was greasy, but it was only once or twice a week, so I figured it couldn’t hurt, and Tuesday deserved a treat. It was important to gain his respect, as I had that spring. It was joyous to discover that we could spend time together in public parks and dog runs, as we had that summer. But it was life-changing to test his love with a major crisis, and for Tuesday to sacrifice his own health and happiness to stand by my side. When I told him to rest, at the depths of my anxiety, he wouldn’t leave me. When I tried to call out in despair, he was there before the words, as if he had read them in my mind. The real battle wasn’t with the pit bull in Sunset Park, when I came to Tuesday’s aid. The real battle was with myself in my apartment in Manhattan, when Tuesday came to mine.

  So maybe the timing of the AP reporter was unfortunate. Or maybe not. Maybe it was better that his phone call occurred during a good period that winter, because while as an outspoken veteran I received calls from reporters all the time, many of whom questioned some of my policy positions, I had never received a call from a professional this hostile or personally insulting. I had never met or spoken to this reporter, but he acted as if he knew me—and “knew” that I wasn’t injured in Iraq.

  So I hung up on him.

  A few hours later, he sent me an email acknowledging that I was attacked, stabbed, and wounded at Al-Waleed, but claiming that Spc. David Page, who had finished off the wounded attacker, and officers in my chain of command had given differing accounts of the incident. (Not surprising, given the circumstances.) He even questioned whether two attackers were present, although the official report and sworn statements indicate there were. He then used the fact that I “returned to duty within days, with little apparent difficulty,” to jump to an accusation of fraud.

  “Without a doubt, PTSD is a subjective thing,” he wrote. “Two people standing side by side can be affected in vastly different ways by the same event. But I am also told that it is one of the easiest psychological disorders to feign.”

  In my years of advocacy, I have been called many derogatory names. My articles have been attacked and my website befouled by pornographic rants against my opinions and ideas. These days, that’s just part of putting yourself out there for a cause you believe in. There will be critics, which is fine, and many of their criticisms will be vindictive and personal, which isn’t. A traitor for being critical of the war effort? A commie? Okay, I know where you’re coming from, and I respectfully disagree. But a faker? That I didn’t understand. Why would an AP reporter make such wildly unfounded accusations? Had we really, as a culture, sunk so low?

  I learned his intentions four months later, when he published an article on May 1, 2010, entitled “In Tide of PTSD Cases, Fear of Fraud Growing,” which insinuated that veterans were perpetuating a massive fraud against the VA. The article, which did not allude to me in any way, included no proof of any systematic fraud, but simply stated that “experts” claimed fraud could possibly occur. The reporter’s only “proof” was a 2005 report that one-quarter of the 2,100 PTSD disability claims studied by the government lacked proper documentation of a stressor. In fact, as Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) pointed out in a rebuttal to the article, the official government press release on that 2005 study stated: “The problems with these files appear to be administrative in nature, such as missing documents, and not fraud” (italics mine).

  “In the absence of evidence of fraud,” the release continued, “we’re not going to put our veterans through the anxiety of a widespread review of their disability claims.” And yet the AP article used the report to state exactly the opposite, going so far as to say if the findings were extrapolated to the whole VA “questionable compensation” payments that year would have totaled $860 million.

  Even the inclusion of Dr. Dan Blazer from Duke University, the “expert” quoted as saying PTSD was among the “easiest [psychiatric] conditions to feign,” was dubious. As Veterans Today pointed out in another rebuttal on May 7, Dr. Blazer is a geriatric psychiatrist specializing in mental and physical problems among the elderly, and he has no public affiliation with the armed forces. He was a fringe figure at best, and not one of the hundreds of reliable experts on PTSD that could have been consulted.

  I don’t belabor the point for personal reasons, although the reporter’s accusations were deeply hurtful and would have no doubt, in another period of my life, sent me spiraling into outrage, anxiety, paranoia, and despair. The consequences are still with me today. In my anger, I’d posted his email on my Facebook page and somehow it found its way onto Gawker.com. In a post from Mara Gay on AOL.com that identified me as a Huffington Post blogger—I am proud to have had published articles on that site, but my articles appear in numerous other publications as well—it was claimed that “[AP reporter Allen] Breed seems to be on the verge of revealing Montalván as an outright fraud.” The original title of the article, now labeled as “War, Lies and HuffPo: Vet’s Tall Tale Coming Undone,” even contained the word “hoax.” The word was removed from AOL.com the next day, but not before other websites picked up the original version.

  Far worse than the personal attack, though, were the damaging attitudes inherent in Breed’s article. Veterans Today was correct, I believe, when they called it a “deliberate hit piece on America’s veterans” from a reporter with “a fetish for Stolen Valor.” The article’s underlying premise was that streamlining the disability process made fraud by the rafts of malingering veterans almost inevitable (if not yet provable). I’m not saying there isn’t fraud. The Inspector General’s report for 2008–2009 found about one hundred cases of fraud per year, out of about one million veterans receiving disability benefits (or only 0.01 percent), and this report covered the end of the Bush administration, which was vigilant in its effort to deny claims.

  In fact, the real problem is the opposite of the one speculated about in the article: the difficulty of the VA system means tens of thousands of veterans give up on receiving the help they need, with devastating consequences for their lives. While the article dwelt in loving detail on the cases of three veterans convicted of fraudul
ently claiming benefits, none of whom had served in the military or filed claims for disability in the last fifteen years, it dismissed the suicide of a veteran from New Mexico, who had placed a letter from the VA beside his Purple Heart before killing himself, as mere emotional manipulation. It’s a tragedy when a veteran claims to have been in the Tet offensive in 1968 when he didn’t reach Vietnam until 1969, the article implies, but to care about a Purple Heart recipient who committed suicide after being turned away by the VA during our country’s most recent war? That’s for soft-hearted crybabies.

  This fixation on fraud—even in the face of hundreds of suicides from veterans who cried out for assistance, not to mention rampant alcoholism, isolation, homelessness, and anonymous death—is an outgrowth of the attitude exemplified by my father when he told me that seeking help for my disabilities meant I was descending to the “lowest common denominator” of humanity and associating myself with people whose real purpose was “helping each other take maximum advantage of disability benefits.” It’s a belief that those who suffer from PTSD are malingerers by nature, and that if they were just stronger, like real warriors, their affliction would be cured. It was a damaging attitude from my father, because although I never seriously considered suicide, his words sent me into the valley of death, where I contemplated my end often and, on too many nights, welcomed its coming.

  It’s far more dangerous, though, when that attitude poses as news from a venerable association like the AP, because it legitimizes those views. It emboldens the old school officer who abuses his soldiers for the “cowardice” of their psychological damage. It inspires the loving mother or father, terrified by the change in their child, to show them the “tough love” of dismissal and disbelief rather than helping them with their suffering. It encourages the young veteran to believe that his problems are a matter of weakness, that real men don’t suffer pain, and that admitting to nightmares, anxiety, and antisocial behavior would be an embarrassment to himself and his family.