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

by Luis Carlos Montalvan

  If anything symbolized the depth of corruption at Al-Waleed, it was the benzene trade. So I refused to tolerate it. On my orders, anyone seen selling benzene was arrested. Their benzene was confiscated and their plastic barrels knifed. The offenders were then forced to stand outside the gates of the compound, where we could watch them, and pump free benzene to the thousands of trucks and cars that passed through Al-Waleed every day. We eventually had to requisition a giant tank to store the confiscated benzene, a symbol to both the criminals and the general population that we were serious about creating a legitimate, affordable economy for the Iraqi people.

  The soft power was community outreach. White Platoon had been sent to Al-Waleed without a translator, a disastrous oversight in a strategically important place where trust was built on conversations over cups of hot chai. Fortunately, a customs inspector named Ali volunteered to translate for us soon after our arrival. Without him, we never would have succeeded. Ali allowed us to interact with the Iraqis at the POE, because I trusted what he said. Along with Spc. Pearcy, my gunner and right-hand man, Ali attended our nightly meetings with visiting dignitaries and local tribal leaders, a traditional honor important to gaining support. Formal yet relaxed, lasting well past midnight, and requiring the drinking of more chai and the smoking of more cigarettes than any person should endure, these meetings were our opportunity to reach compromises and bring rogue elements into our efforts. Often, I left the meetings to find dawn breaking over the desert, the morning call for prayer from the POE’s mosque (the only decent structure for fifty miles) rolling beautifully across the vast desert, feeling utterly tired but as if we had accomplished more in eight hours of talking than we had on our last eight patrols.

  Initially, I met with Mr. Waleed, who was as gregarious and friendly as he was corrupt. But when it became clear our intention wasn’t to bandage the old corrupt system but to tear it down, Mr. Waleed became less interested in our chats. Instead, we met with other Iraqis, including Lt. Col. Emad, the incoming commander of the port’s border police battalion, who had been a major in Saddam’s Army but was an honorable man. The sheiks in Ramadi didn’t approve of his cooperation, especially after Lt. Col. Emad began to significantly curtail corruption, so they sent a steady stream of new commanders to replace him.

  We were polite at first, but after a month we’d had enough. “Leave now,” I told the new men, when they arrived with their “credentials” and politician’s smiles, “or I’ll have you arrested. You’re not going to undermine Lt. Col. Emad’s authority and destroy the good work that is happening here for Iraq and its people.”

  Our real find, though, was Maher Thieb Hamad, a junior officer in the local Iraqi Police Service (IPS) who had picked up passable English from American movies and often joked about moving to Las Vegas to live the good life. Maher wasn’t from Ramadi, so he wasn’t part of the mafia clan, and like many Iraqis, he saw the fall of Saddam as a chance to end the twenty years of corruption that, even more than Saddam’s brutality, had destroyed the fabric of Iraq’s more than one-thousand-year-old society. Once we gained his trust, Maher often invited my men over to smoke apple tobacco and discuss tactics, describing the habits of corrupt officials or telling us, “Don’t worry, you can trust him, he’s a good man.” This was in the midst of the first wave of reprisal killings, before Saddam Hussein had been captured, and it took a great deal of courage to side so openly with the Americans. The first time Maher guided us on a desert patrol, in fact, he wore a shemagh—a traditional Arab scarf that covers the face—so that he couldn’t be identified. He showed us a water culvert where foreign fighters and smugglers were known to store weapons. It was less than two kilometers from our compound but contained twenty-four rocket-propelled grenades, six fragmentary grenades, four AK-47s, three machine guns and eighteen hundred rounds of ammunition, enough to destroy our austere FOB and do serious damage to our small platoon.

  Even with Maher’s help—and with plenty of hilarious talk about juggling five girlfriends (Sgt. Willie T. Flores, a great soldier and ladies’ man) and using Army hazardous-duty pay for a penis extension (name withheld, since I don’t know if he actually got the operation)—the tour was a grind. During the day the temperature was often hotter than 110 degrees, and the sandstorms felt like they could eat through skin. Gunfire was commonly heard and more mentally draining, on a daily basis, than the Syrian ambush on November 3, which almost sparked an international incident. It’s not the fear of death that damages the mind in the combat zone. I never thought about that. It’s the constant state of watchfulness, the hypervigilance necessary to survive day after day as a small unit among thousands of possible enemies. After a while, my body stopped understanding that it was under stress and started thinking that watching for death, always, was simply the way to live. When you can laugh about gunfire and mortar rounds, instead of ducking them, your mind has changed.

  Other American commanders, I know, tolerated corruption. By accepting gifts like lavish meals from corrupt officials—a huge temptation when American soldiers ate mostly cold military rations for months—they essentially condoned it. My men and I pushed against it, refusing to let any form of contraband or illegal activity slide. And it worked. When the Iraqis realized we weren’t going to chisel meekly, but were going to stand our ground no matter how dangerous or difficult the situation, it gave the honest men courage to step up beside us. It gave ordinary Iraqis reason to believe in us. And when that happened, we started making progress against the smugglers. We were tipped off to hiding places and told how Bedouin guides use the extensive wadis, a complicated canyon system not well marked on any of our maps, to move valuable contraband like foreign fighters across the border. We learned about night movements and weapons caches. When the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) started confiscating more contraband, we used it to make improvements to their woefully antiquated offices and systems, which helped them confiscate more contraband.

  It took a tremendous effort. Tremendous. Everyone worked themselves ragged, seven days a week, in brutal conditions—spotty electricity, little running water, often no shower for days on end, not to mention the threat of enemy fighters, armed smugglers, and IEDs. I was pulling eighteen-hour days, easy, without a second thought. That’s why they called me Terminator. Not because I could bench press 350 pounds while bellowing near-perfect imitations of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but because I never stopped, not even in our operations base. The main road passed straight through the compound at Al-Waleed, since it was more a border checkpoint than military installation, so trucks and cars had relatively easy access to our FOB. We had a gun position on our roof and razor wire on our perimeter, but beyond that the members of the unit relied on each other. Even in our living quarters, we were always on guard, because we knew we were outnumbered and susceptible to being overrun.

  But it worked. I want to state that fact again, because I’m proud of it: our efforts in the Anbar desert worked. By December 2003, word had traveled up the American chain of command that Al-Waleed was coming under control. The Iraqi Border Police and its American partners were confiscating more contraband and weapons, and arresting more foreign fighters and smugglers, than any other port of entry in Iraq.

  Word also traveled up the Iraq chain of command, through Ramadi to Baghdad. The sheiks were our allies, supposedly, but they were considerably less pleased with our success. Squeezing Al-Waleed meant squeezing a major source of funding for the struggling Sunni power base. That’s why they tried to send more loyal—in other words, corrupt—officers to replace Lt. Col. Emad. That’s why nobody seemed too pleased when Red Platoon joined us at Al-Waleed in early December, bringing our American troop level close to fifty men. When I informed Mr. Waleed soon after that 250 American-trained Iraqi border police were being sent to help him, he was clearly disturbed. The new border policemen, combined with Maher’s hand-chosen men in the regular Iraqi police and two active American platoons, would destroy the old way of business at Al-Waleed.

  So
on after, in mid-December 2003, Mr. Waleed was recalled suddenly to Ramadi. A week or so later, at nine thirty in the evening on December 21, 2003, I headed to the Iraqi border police headquarters for my nightly meeting over cigarettes and chai. The desert had turned cold with the coming of winter, and I could see my breath as Spc. David Page and I walked 250 yards down the wide road that ran through the complex toward the border. Outside the chain-link fence, the world was silent and black, a vast unpopulated emptiness; inside, a feeble yellow light threw shadows over the Iraq Ministry of Transportation office and the thirty or so tractor trailers still parked outside. Even from a hundred yards I could see the red tips of cigarettes, flaring and subsiding in the darkness, and the puffs of smoke from the drivers stuck in the compound, unable to complete their paperwork before the office closed for the night. I heard Page adjust his pistol as we approached the trucks, a reassuring gesture we often made unconsciously before walking up on Iraqi civilians. The scene was peaceful and monotonous, ominous and explosive. That was Iraq. You just never knew.

  “Take the left,” I said to Page, as I veered toward the men gathered in front of the trucks on the right. It was a nightly exercise. We had to push the truckers back into the desert; it was too dangerous to let them stay overnight inside our defensive perimeter, waiting for the customs office to open again after morning prayers. I spoke to the first group of drivers in my limited Arabic, and they nodded, flicked out their cigarettes, and reluctantly climbed back into their rigs.

  Further on, however, a driver shook his head. “Mushkila,” he said (“problem” in Arabic), and then in broken English: “No good.” He signaled toward his trailer hitch. I knew this game; it was a nightly exercise, too. Nobody wanted to spend the night along the desolate desert highway, where murders and kidnappings were common, when they could stay inside the safety of the compound fence.

  So I shook my head no.

  “Ta’al,” he said (“come here”), flicking his cigarette across the concrete. He walked into the shadows between two trucks and pointed to the rigging behind his cab. I should have sensed something then, I suppose, but I followed him. As soon as I bent to inspect the coupling, the man pushed me from behind, slamming me into the metal hitch and wiring.

  I turned immediately, instinctively raising my right arm to ward off the next blow. That’s when I noticed the second man approaching on the run, a long knife in his hand. I remember a short barrage of body punches and elbows in the confined space of the rigging before the second man hit me full force, with his knife drawn viciously above his head. His momentum carried him into me, an inch from my face, and I tasted more than smelled his breath and felt more than saw the hatred in his eyes as he stabbed downward toward my neck. I shifted my weight, and the knife hit the top edge of the body armor covering my left shoulder, deflected outward, then ripped through my uniform and across the tricep of my left arm. I pushed off and, in the second of space that followed, pulled the pistol from my thigh holster and fired one shot center of mass into the first attacker, who was charging from my right. A ghastly cry, a scream of primal pain and loss, ripped across the emptiness, and then I was twisting and falling, the man with the knife on top of me, driving me downward. I fired two more shots before my spine hit the concrete, my head snapped backward, and the world, like the desert around me, went totally black.

  CHAPTER 5

  AN AMERICAN

  SOLDIER

  I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

  —KURT VONNEGUT*

  If I wanted to pinpoint the moment my life changed, it was no doubt during the attack and the days that followed. I have spent years dwelling on the decisions I made then. I have dealt every day with the physical pain, both in my head and my back, and I have spent countless nights awakened by the faces of my attackers—the hatred in the eyes of the man with the knife, the wretched cry of the man I shot.

  It has been a long road, filled mostly with downs, from there to Tuesday. I think of the quirks sometimes, the happenstance and detours. What if I hadn’t tried to continue with my military career? What if I hadn’t seen the email to veterans announcing the service dog program? What if Tuesday hadn’t been sent to prison? Because of his unorthodox upbringing, Tuesday spent three extra months at ECAD. What if we had missed each other and Tuesday had been matched with someone else?

  The truth is, I was lucky. I was lucky to find Tuesday, and I was even more lucky in the hours after the attack. Spc. Page finished off the wounded attacker—the second man disappeared before Page arrived—and I was able to call for help into my radio. I was in and out of consciousness for the next twenty-four hours, so I remember bits and pieces: Staff Sgt. Len Danhouse bending over me saying, “It’s all right, sir, it’s all right, you’re going home”; waking up nearly naked and freezing, strapped to a EMS spine board; the glowing night-vision goggles of the air medics as they worked in a dark Blackhawk Medevac; my buddy 1st Lt. Ernie Ambrose smiling widely as he gave me a Playboy and a Diana Krall CD when I woke up on a cot near an Army field hospital. I felt paralyzed from the waist down, and I was poundingly sore, but within a few hours I regained movement in my legs. By the third day, the worst visible wounds were the knife laceration and the bruise on my left arm, but the dried blood on the white bandage assured me it wasn’t serious. No permanent damage, only a minor scar. I looked at the black blood and thought, That’s it? That’s all I got? I thought I was dead.

  The real damage was inside: three cracked vertebrae in my back and a traumatic brain injury from the concussion that knocked me cold. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know about either for years. The medical team wanted to send me to Baghdad, since there were no X-ray machines at the field hospital, but I refused. I was in tremendous pain—just moving sent blinding flashes through my head—and I knew a trip to Baghdad meant the end of my tour. There was no way I was going home. Not after waiting thirteen years. Not with the job left unfinished at Al-Waleed. Not with my men in the middle of the desert without me, only a few days before Christmas. I had an obligation: to my platoon; to Iraqis like Lt. Col. Emad, Ali, and Maher who had risked their lives to help us; and to the nation that deployed me. I could leave Iraq having helped achieve a victory, or I could leave in a body bag, but I wasn’t leaving for a sore back, a pounding headache, and a cut on my arm. So four days after the attack, on Christmas Day 2003, I arrived back at Al-Waleed to cheers from my men and a note on our platoon acetate mission board that read, “Grim Troop 1, Syria 0.”

  That’s probably when my psychological issues started, although like my physical injuries I didn’t notice the extent of them at the time. The soldier who left Al-Waleed on a stretcher was determined; the soldier who came back, I can see now, was angry and obsessed. That was no random attack. No way. That took planning and information. Maher told me later the order had come from somewhere in the Iraqi chain of command, possibly Ramadi, but that only confirmed what I already suspected: I was the target of an assassination, and it had been ordered by so-called allies that didn’t like White Platoon’s aggressive approach to combating corruption.

  So we went after them. I didn’t know who the perpetrators were, but I knew they had a vested interest in the smuggling operation at Al-Waleed, and I was determined to break it down, to prove that the cynical corruptors of the new Iraq had messed with the wrong Army, the wrong troop, and the wrong man. We pushed hard for the remaining three months of our tour. We pushed with extended patrols. We pushed with more stringent truck inspections. We pushed back when Iraqi officials tried to stop the American-trained border policemen from being sent, and we struck hard when Lt. Col. Emad’s second-in-command, Major Fawzi, attempted an armed insurrection. The more the Ramadi boys squirmed, the harder we clamped down. I wasn’t the Terminator anymore. I was no machine. This was personal. There was no way we were letting those bastards win.

  My body started breaking down: searing pain, slee
pless nights, and a malfunctioning digestive system that left me dehydrated and raw. My head and back hurt so bad I popped Motrin by the handful—we call them Ranger Candy in the Army, since so many soldiers self-medicate with them—but still the pain often made me grit my teeth and, when my men weren’t looking, drop to my knees. I couldn’t lie on my cot without discomfort, and when I did manage to drop off to sleep I had nightmares, wild mishmashes of the Syrian Army ambush, mortar fire, and the assassination attempt, always accompanied by shadowy figures and fire.

  Meanwhile, my mind was racing so fast it left me with vertigo. (The vertigo was actually from the brain injury, but I didn’t understand that at the time.) I had been cautious before, but now I was hypervigilant, acutely aware that one sloppy house inspection or patrol could be my last. I started sitting away from the door with my back to the wall, even in our FOB. I started questioning the look on every Iraqi’s face, searching for the flicker of intention before the attack. I felt my finger above the trigger of my M4 carbine more often, and my mind snapping to judgment more quickly, calculating a long string of possible moves and countermoves. When I sat down for my nightly chai with the local sheiks, I chose my seat carefully, holding a knife by my side, calculating the best way to kill them all, if and when the need arose. My digestion got so bad I was ordered back to FOB Byers in Ar-Rutbah for treatment,* but I refused to stay for more than a day. Once again, I came back more angry and determined. Al-Waleed was breaking me down, but it was my place, my war, and I wouldn’t let it go.

  When my tour ended in late March 2004, I didn’t want to leave. I asked permission to stay for a few extra months and help with the transition to the Marine Corps, who were taking over responsibility for Al-Anbar Province. In fact, I begged for it, numerous times. If I could have, I would have dug in and not left until they dragged me out, my fingernails cracking as I clawed at the rocks and sand. When the traitors tried to kill me, they left a piece of my soul in Al-Waleed. I couldn’t leave without knowing it was in good hands.