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

by Luis Carlos Montalvan

  And when Brendan thought that about Tuesday, he started to think that about himself, too.

  Tuesday, as always, responded to the attention. The leash goes both ways, and he could feel Brendan’s confidence in him. But he also felt Brendan’s lack of confidence in himself and his strong desire to succeed. I’ve met Brendan, and there is something about him that makes you want to help him. He’s a good kid, but he is so vulnerable that if he ever asked for anything I can’t imagine letting him down. Tuesday picked up on that vulnerability. When he asked himself, Why? Why bother with this training? he now had an answer: for Brendan. That answer was magic, because helping others was the only thing that ever seemed to matter to Tuesday.

  It was a positive cycle. The more Brendan embraced Tuesday, and saw in Tuesday’s success a reflection of his own, the more Tuesday wanted to please him. Soon, Brendan was excelling, but for the first time in his life he didn’t need to brag. Instead, he took joy in his success, and he put that joy back into his affection for the dogs. After training, he stayed to clean their kennels and brush their coats. He came in on weekends. He became the morning feeder, waking up early and trudging across the Children’s Village campus to give the dogs their breakfast. He was feeding and grooming all the dogs, of course, but he came for Tuesday. On Best Friend night, when the kids could come and watch a movie, Brendan and Tuesday always sought each other out. At the end of each training session, the children were given ten minutes to sit quietly with the dogs. Brendan and Tuesday didn’t always train together, since rotating trainers was still ECAD’s basic method, but no matter which child he had trained with that day Tuesday laid his head on Brendan’s lap. Most of the time he fell asleep, while Brendan smiled and whispered, “Good boy, good boy, good boy.”

  They got along so well that the two of them, the former problem children, started going on regular outreach trips to local hospitals and nursing homes. Brendan became a demonstration handler for public events, and he appeared prominently in an ECAD promotional video still available online. When a new litter of puppies was born, Brendan was one of the children selected to name them. It was autumn, so there were several seasonal names like Harvest. Brendan, still just a kid at seventeen, chose Mac ’n Cheese.

  Their parting was emotional, but not as difficult as Lu had feared. They had both grown accustomed to being passed off by this point, and they had each held something back. Tuesday respected and liked Brendan, but I don’t think he was emotionally attached. Not like he had been to his first raiser in prison, or even to Tom. He had hardened himself against that kind of heartbreak.

  And Brendan, while he loved Tuesday, had always known he was training him for someone else. The completion of that mission—the knowledge that for the first time in his life he had been trusted with an opportunity, and he had succeeded—was more valuable to him than keeping Tuesday. As Tom put it, knowing he was helping others “got his mind right and focused on the positives.” By the time I arrived, both Brendan and Tuesday were ready to move on.

  But that doesn’t mean they forgot each other. A few months after being partnered with Tuesday, I returned to ECAD for a fundraising event. Tuesday was so excited, I decided to ignore Lu’s advice and let him off his leash. He ran right to a group of kids, jumped on the biggest boy, and gave him a lick in the face. The boy laughed and hugged Tuesday, ruffled his fur, then pushed him off and told him to return to me.

  “Would you look at that!” I said to a trainer standing nearby. “Tuesday is never that way.”

  “Yeah. Straight to Brendan,” she said, as Tuesday came back to my side. When I looked at her with a puzzled expression, she smiled and said: “Brendan fixed your dog.”

  Later, I talked with Lu about Tuesday. He had been through so much. His heart was broken so many times. How was it, I wanted to know, that he had come out so perfect?

  “Perfect?” Lu said with a laugh. “Tuesday’s not perfect, Luis. Far from it. He’s just perfect for you.”

  PART II

  LUIS

  CHAPTER 4

  AL-WALEED

  I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

  I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

  Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

  I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

  Let us sleep now . . .

  —1ST LIEUTENANT WILFRED OWEN,

  “STRANGE MEETING”*

  This is the hardest part of the story. The part that starts the memories churning. The part that makes me sweat and keeps me up for days at a time. A few years ago, I thought a probing NPR interview about my combat service had only left me drained and sick. When I listened to the broadcast later, I was surprised to hear myself stuttering and stopping, then getting up from my chair in the middle of the interview, limping to the bathroom, and throwing up. I listen to a recording of myself talking about Iraq last month, and I’m surprised to discover minutes of silence in the middle of sentences. Where did I go? What was I thinking about? And why don’t I remember that?

  I wouldn’t put myself through this, of course, if I didn’t think it would help. It’s therapy for me, sort of pulling out the shrapnel and applying a field dressing, battlefield-style. More importantly, I think it will help other veterans, and especially their families. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) isn’t something you just get over. You don’t go back to being who you were. It’s more like a snow globe. War shakes you up, and suddenly all those pieces of your life—muscles, bones, thoughts, beliefs, relationships, even your dreams—are floating in the air out of your grip. They’ll come down. I’m here to tell you that, with hard work, you’ll recover. But they’ll never come down where they once were. You’re a changed person after combat. Not better or worse, just different. Seeking or wishing for the old you is the worst thing you can do.

  So I want to be precise. In the last section, I imagined much of Tuesday’s early life. I had details, but I didn’t have a mental picture, so I looked at his smiling mug sitting right here beside me and imagined him smaller, more needy, less sure of himself. I thought about what broke him and how special the people were who put him back together. I asked myself, why does this dog make such an impression on people? Why, no matter where he goes, does he change lives?

  With Iraq, I have mental pictures. The emptiness of the desert. The terrible decimation of entire city blocks. A dead American private. The charred body of an Iraqi boy. The rows of Sunni men sitting quietly in a jail cell, staring blankly ahead like souls in purgatory, waiting to be cast into hell. I remember the smile of my Iraqi friend, Maher, only a few months before his death. The smell of his apple tobacco merging, like a bad dream, with the awful stench of the town of Hitt. I am haunted by the way a man stepped into an alley, and why I almost shot him, even though I didn’t know him, and why that kind of experience, day after day, breaks you down.

  I wish I could make you hear the whizzing of tracer rounds when Syrian soldiers ambushed us along the Iraqi border. It was four in the morning; there was nothing for miles but a flat line where the dark earth met the black sky. And then the Syrians were there, rising over the edge of the dirt berm that marked the border, firing machine guns and heavy munitions from a Soviet-made BTR tank. I was so outraged I just stood there and stared at them through my night-vision goggles. “I can’t believe we’re being fired on!” I yelled, watching their dismounts reload. “I can’t believe we’re being attacked by the Syrian Army!”

  We returned fire. We pushed them back. I wish you could hear that sound, too, the steady det-det-det-det-det of Pfc. Tyson Carter’s M240 machine gun and the hammering of our .50 caliber machine gun, because it was all instinct, all adrenaline and discipline, and that was our cadence. Luckily, we didn’t take casualties, and when we returned to base later, just as the sun was burning off the night, we were flying. I mean, I was angry. I was pissed off that we’d been attacked from across the international border. But I was exhilarated, too. A firefight is one of the most intense feel
ings in the world. It was only later that the weight of the encounter hit me, when the high was followed by the low, like the cold ashes after a fire burns off.

  And that’s the contradiction of Iraq. For many of us, it was the greatest time of our lives. Iraq is the country where we found our purpose, where we did the work we are most proud of, and where we encountered people and places we can never leave behind.

  But it was also a complete disgrace. The place where we lost our ideals; where the Army we loved sold us out for careerist brass, a war-porn-fixated media and military-industrial-complex corporate greed; where the only honor and integrity seemed to exist among the troops on the line. If I could give you one word to describe why I came back wounded from Iraq, it wouldn’t be combat. Or fear. Or injury. Or death. It would be betrayal. Betrayal of our troops by their commanders. Betrayal of our ideals. Betrayal of our promise to the Iraqis and to the people back home. Where does incompetence become criminal? Where does selfishness become moral failure? How many lies can be told before it all becomes a lie? I don’t know for sure, but in Iraq a line was crossed, and I’m outraged as hell. I can’t get over it. Because good people died, and they’re still dying for the same reasons today.

  “Why do you want to tell that story?” Mamá asked me when she heard about this book. “Why do you want people to know you have problems? Who will ever hire you?”

  I understand her concerns. I am very private, much more so since Iraq, and very ambivalent about sharing my life. But I don’t want to tell her that. I don’t want to admit to her that working on this book has already caused months of pain, but that I feel compelled to tell the truth nonetheless. Who in their right mind wants their mother to worry?

  “I have to finish it,” I tell her. “It’s something I have to do.” It’s war and healing, I want to tell her. It’s pain. It’s triumph. “Don’t worry, Mamá,” I say finally. “It’s just a book about Tuesday.”

  And to tell Tuesday’s story, for better or worse, I have to tell my own. Because to understand Tuesday’s impact on my life, and why he matters so much to me, you have to understand who I used to be and how far down I’ve been.

  In 2003, when I arrived at Al-Waleed, Iraq, a tiny outpost three hundred miles from Baghdad and sixty miles beyond the nearest American forward operating base, I was strong. I could bench press 350 pounds, do 95 push-ups, plow through an Army obstacle course, and run ten miles before breakfast with hardly any effort at all. But more than that I was confident, strong-willed, a leader of men in the U.S. Army. And I loved my job.

  I wasn’t raised in a military family. My father is a respected economist, my mother is a business executive, and they raised me in a comfortable, deeply intellectual environment. They expected me to attend college, like my sister and brother, but I grew up in the Reagan years, when optimism and nationalism were fundamental aspects of American ideology. I believed in “the Evil Empire,” as Reagan famously called the Soviet Union, and wanted to do my part to topple it, even though I was only eight at the time of his speech. When the United States invaded Grenada in 1983, there was talk among my father and uncles, all Cuban refugees, that maybe Cuba was next. Not militarily, at least in my father’s mind. He had been very much against the Vietnam War; he believed in economics and ideas, not blunt-force weapons. I believed sacrifice and hard work were required to change the world, and that meant action. So I defied my parents and enlisted in the Army on the day I turned seventeen. I spent the summer after my junior year in high school in boot camp. I was there when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the U.S. military, along with a broad coalition, drew a line in the sand. I was hoping to serve in the first Gulf War, but by the time I turned eighteen and graduated from high school in June 1991, the “100-hour war” was already over.

  I spent the next decade in the Army as an enlisted grunt, graduating from college and getting married, training my body and mind. I knew we were going to go back to the desert. There was unfinished business, and Saddam was a wild joker in the Middle Eastern deck of cards. I just didn’t know how we were going to get there. I was enrolled in the officer training corps at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., when the answer came in a cloud of smoke rising from the direction of the Pentagon. I called my infantry National Guard unit and told them, “I’m ready to go. Just tell me what to do.”

  It took two years, but when the fight arrived I was ready. More than ready, I was eager. I believed: in my country, my Army, my unit, and myself. Defending my country and securing freedom for the people of Iraq? That was my purpose in life. My task? That was Al-Waleed and Iraq’s border with Syria.

  Al-Waleed was the largest of only two functioning border crossings (known as ports of entry, or POEs) between Syria and Iraq and a notorious cesspool of corruption. For months, foreign fighters and weapons had been pouring across the border into Sunni-dominated Al-Anbar Province, which by the fall of 2003 was on the verge of revolt against the American occupation. So, in late September 2003, command sent my platoon—White Platoon, Grim Troop, Second Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment—to staunch the wound at Al-Waleed. Our job was to establish a forward operating base (FOB), secure the port of entry, and neutralize the flow of contraband and enemy fighters across more than one hundred linear kilometers of border and thousands of square miles of Anbar desert. To do the job right, it would take a few hundred troops. But the overstretched Third Armored Cavalry didn’t have a few hundred men to spare. As platoon leader of White Platoon, I was given three Humvees and fifteen cavalrymen.

  We tore into our assignment, working from the basics out. Our first task was to establish a base of operations, which meant commandeering a building at the Iraqi border compound, establishing a defensive perimeter, and jerry-rigging basic amenities like electricity. I had great men, like Staff Sgt. Brian Potter, Sgt. Carl Bishop, Pfc. Tyson Carter, and Pfc. Derek Martin, an indefatigable twenty-year-old who could hump more stone than most mules. But we had inadequate supplies. In the end, we strung our only roll of concertina wire, which we scavenged from an old Iraq Army outpost, and then spent weeks filling sandbags and wire mesh baskets with dirt and rocks so that suicide bombers wouldn’t have unimpeded access to our post.

  When we weren’t improving our defensive perimeter, we patrolled the ramshackle villages and flat endless desert that surrounded us, usually nine men per patrol in three Humvees. It was like America’s Wild West out there. When Saddam was in power, he had issued “shoot on sight” orders for anyone traveling or living within twenty-five miles of the border, so the small towns that had grown up near the POE in the fading years of his reign were 90 percent male, 60 percent smugglers and criminals, and 100 percent armed. There was a certain thrill in that, I can’t deny. I remember my gunner, Spc. Eric Pearcy, sticking out of his turret yelling “Yee-haw, Carlos Montalván’s Bedouin Assault Force rides again!” each time we went racing across the desert in pursuit of smugglers in pickup trucks. We discovered numerous small caches of weapons and ordnance, such as five brand-new AK-47s hidden under a haystack in a Bedouin camp, but ultimately the patrols were little more than a high-intensity, low-efficiency grind. The villagers, most of whom were members of criminal syndicates specializing in various smuggling schemes, were too sophisticated to hide weapons or anything else of value in their houses.

  Our success or failure, I knew, depended on controlling the port of entry—a combination customs office, passport control center, and paramilitary base that straddled the main road just inside the Iraqi border. The port was in theory operated by our allies in the new Iraqi government, but in practice it was controlled by Sunni tribal leaders in Ramadi—the leaders who, almost assuredly, were supporting the burgeoning insurgency. The man in charge was a Ramadi-born official known as “Mr. Waleed”—that’s what everyone called him, even me—and nearly all the police and border officials were his tribal members. They were little more than a mafia, operating more for monetary gain than ideology, but undermining the stability of Iraq nonetheless.
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  My goal, as a local American commander, was to shift the balance of power at the crossing: to send home or detain the corrupt officials, empower the honest ones, turn the Bedouins into our allies, and cripple the smuggling operations in the area. For this, we used a combination of hard and soft power. My men stopped trucks that had already been checked by Iraqi customs inspectors and police. When we found contraband, the officials were held responsible. We went on joint patrols and insisted on confiscations. We arrested Abu Meteab, known within the American military as the Tony Soprano of western Al-Anbar. He came quietly, despite his armed militia, but not before we searched the hundreds of U.S. Army–owned containerized housing units (CHUs) stacked behind his compound. The CHUs were supposed to provide comfortable housing for American troops across Iraq enduring the sweltering Mesopotamian heat. Abu Meteab was holding them until the United States paid a “toll fee” for their transportation from Al-Waleed.

  We took on the benzene smugglers, the most brazenly corrupt aspect of Al-Waleed culture. Benzene, the Iraqi form of gasoline, is supposed to be free. It is given to government-sanctioned gas stations, including one in Al-Waleed, for distribution to the public. But the gas station in Al-Waleed was never open. Instead, the benzene was piped out the back of the station into barrels and sold for black market profit on the side of the road, often right in front of that very station.