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

by Luis Carlos Montalvan

  It was an impossible situation, especially for a group of poorly trained men fighting not for their screwed-up government but mainly for pay. South Baghdad was a major ethnic and sectarian fault line, with a population split almost evenly between Sunni and Shia, but the local Iraqi Army was almost entirely Shia and it was impossible, after a while, to determine who was in the right. One day, there was a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque, complete with mothers screaming, bloody children, and innocent vendors dead in the street. Two days later, we raided a different Shiite mosque and found a cache of weapons large enough to arm a battalion. In a back room, we found photographs of Sunni men being tortured, beheaded, and bound in chairs with their eyes burned out.

  I was leading a patrol in downtown Mahmudiyah, accompanied by New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise, when I received word over the radio that a major clearing operation by the Iraqi Army was degenerating into sectarian aggression, with soldiers grabbing Sunni men out of buildings and beating them in the streets. I managed to keep those facts from the reporter, telling her instead when she asked: “These Iraqi troops aren’t ready for combat operations—they shouldn’t even be out here.”

  When that quote made the front pages of the New York Times, the commander of the 2-70th Armor Battalion demanded to speak with me. “We don’t need that kind of publicity,” he told me. “Keep it positive from now on.” I wasn’t sure what to think. I had asked Colonel McMaster for two extra months in south Baghdad to create a basic level of organization for the Iraqi soldiers and the next American advisers. I had believed in the American mission, even after discovering the depths of the problems in our “allied” Iraqi Army. But by the day of the street beatings, it was clear that there was civil war in south Baghdad. The Iraqi government, through the Iraqi Army, was engaged in a campaign of tribal and sectarian cleansing against the Sunnis, and the U.S. Army was aiding and abetting that effort. Didn’t the commanders know that? Or did they simply not care about combat readiness and morality among the Iraqis as long as the promised trained troop numbers were met? What, pray tell, did they want me to say?

  By the time I joined the rest of Colonel McMaster’s regimental staff in Nineveh Province, northwest of Baghdad, I was drained, mentally and physically. The regiment was taking significant casualties, and I could no longer understand what those men were fighting and dying for. Were we helping the Iraqis? Were we making the world more secure? Were we saving lives over the long term—the ultimate job of an army, not the killing soft-hearted liberals suppose? Violence was surging. American troops had never been held in lower esteem by the local population. The ultimate goals of the war had never been less clear. And yet the message from the top was the same: We have the right strategy. We have enough men. We’re winning this war.

  As the Third Armored Cavalry’s lead operations officer for our border region, I was high enough up, despite my relatively low rank, to travel to the Red Zone (the Iraqi government area next to the Green Zone) to participate in high-level meetings with General Petraeus’s key staff, as well as briefings with General Abizaid in Mosul and General Casey in Tal Afar. After returning home, in April 2006, I accompanied Colonel McMaster to the Pentagon for meetings with General Odierno and Secretary Rumsfeld, among others. By then, it had long been clear that the top officers in Baghdad, CENTCOM, and Washington weren’t asking combat officers what they needed; they were telling us what they wanted. And they wanted successes to back up their claims. Not real success on the ground—the brass had long since lost contact with the actual soldiers fighting the war. They were fixated on metrics, like the number of detainees captured and “enemy” KIAs, even if that meant taking time away from more important work or angering the local population. They wanted me to report a certain number of Iraqi security forces trained, even if I knew half those soldiers were “ghosts” who either never existed or never showed up—but still got checks from the American taxpayer. And, especially, they wanted us to say we had enough soldiers. Several times, I heard Colonel McMaster tell superior officers he didn’t have the manpower necessary for the mission. The next week, I’d hear those same generals telling the media, “The commanders have assured me we have enough soldiers for the operation.”

  When you’re a leader on the line (in a combat position), your responsibility is to the men and women beneath and beside you. You do everything you can for those troops, because they are your brothers and sisters and if you let them down, some of them might die.

  For the senior officers in Iraq, at least in 2005–2006, the responsibility was to the men at the top, the media, the message, the public back home—anything and everything, it seemed, but the soldiers under their command. And that’s the ultimate betrayal of Iraq, the one that disillusioned me in Baghdad and Nineveh and keeps me outraged today.

  I can’t vouch for the other regimental staff officers in the Third Armored Cav, but by the second half of my second tour I didn’t feel like I was working for the U.S. Army or implementing a higher plan. I was working for the men below me, both Iraqi and American, to keep them alive. I was a military attaché, spending most of my time at forward operating bases, but I had served recently as a combat leader and advisor, and I was close to the troops. I knew Pfc. Joseph Knott, who was killed by a roadside bomb. Our Regimental Command, Sgt. Maj. John Caldwell, whose skull was shattered by an IED, was a friend and the first person to shake my hand when I arrived in-country in 2003. The soldier I bailed out in Colorado Springs the previous summer suffered a devastating combat injury. We lost three officers in a Blackhawk helicopter crash, and I knew them all. Death wasn’t a number; it was something that crept up in quiet moments and stabbed at my neck, then reared back to strike again. It had a face, and a hot salty breath. I felt a tremendous responsibility to the troops of the Third Armored Calvary. Tremendous. I felt my work might save their lives, and I felt guilty whenever I took an hour off. So I didn’t drink. I didn’t socialize. I didn’t watch television or play video games. I don’t believe in being too tired to feel pain, but I believe in being hurt to the point that giving in to the pain, even for a day, will drag you down for good. So for six months I dragged my cracked back and throbbing head through twenty-hour days with the help of nothing more than a fistful of Motrin, then collapsed every night into a dreamless sleep.

  Eventually, I was promoted to Colonel McMaster’s adjutant, a unique position for a junior officer. The colonel worked from 7:00 a.m. until 1:00 a.m., seven days a week, and I was always with him. When he went to bed, I worked an additional four hours making sure the regimental headquarters was organized and efficient, and that every operational component that Colonel McMaster needed for the next day was ready. I was relentlessly driven, sleeping less than two hours a night, and I wasn’t surprised when the official assessment of my PTSD, compiled by a doctor I worked and roomed with in Nineveh, stated that I had “unrealistic expectations of others.” Nobody could work that hard for an extended period of time. Nobody could meet my high expectations. Including me.

  When my tour was up, I didn’t ask to stay. I had volunteered twice for extended duty, once in Al-Waleed and once in south Baghdad. This time, I was ready to leave. I had been, for as long as I could remember, just hanging on, trying to make it through the day without a breakdown, sort of like the American operations in Iraq. By the time I touched ground in Colorado in February 2006, I was burnt toast. That’s the image that always comes to mind when I think of myself then: a blackened, smoking hunk of bread, still jammed between the heated wires.

  Four months later, in June 2006, Colonel McMaster completed his command with the Third Armored Cavalry. As his adjutant, it was my honor to sprint across a field at his change-of-command ceremony. I hadn’t run for more than a year because of my injuries, but I figured one short run couldn’t hurt. Fortunately, there was a rehearsal the day before. I sprinted one hundred yards before stepping in a sprinkler hole, slamming my head to the ground (another concussion), and ripping the patellar tendon from my right kne
e. My kneecap was floating six inches up my thigh as they loaded me into a truck, wincing in pain. We were heading to Evans Army Hospital at fifty miles an hour when a fire extinguisher exploded and started whipping around the truck, spraying foam in all directions. The driver swerved violently, shouting “I can’t see!”

  “Pull over! Pull over!”

  “I can’t see to pull over!”

  “Do it anyway!” I yelled.

  When we finally careened to the side of the road, the two soldiers tumbled out, coughing and puking, leaving me lying in the back yelling, “Get me out! Get me out! I can’t breathe in here.” By the time I found the door handle and threw myself onto the street, my lungs were burning and my skin and uniform were toxic-white. I could taste the fire retardant in my mouth, and believe me, it was worse than Tuesday’s toothpaste. And more relentless. The more I tried to spit it out, the more it clung to my throat, choking me. It would have been funny, really, if it hadn’t been my life.

  CHAPTER 7

  HARD DECISIONS

  The most hateful grief of all human griefs is this, to have

  knowledge of the truth but no power over the event.

  —HERODOTUS, THE HISTORIES

  The reality of war wounds is that they’re worse when you’re out of the combat zone. That’s why so many psychologically scarred service members end up back for second and third tours, telling people they “couldn’t adjust” to civilian life. That’s probably why I volunteered to spend extra months embedded with Iraqi troops in south Baghdad, the point of the Triangle of Death. I had almost been killed by traitorous Iraqi allies, and yet I put myself back in Iraqi hands, in one of the most dangerous sections of Baghdad, partly out of responsibility and guilt but mostly to quiet my mind. I ignored my physical injuries, engaging in combat clearing operations and raids despite debilitating pain. I needed the adrenaline rush, the distraction of action, more than I needed personal security.

  The worst thing you can experience is time to think, and that’s exactly what I had during the two months I was bedridden while recovering from patellar tendon surgery. My body was a mess. My knee was immobilized. My fractured vertebrae had, in two years without treatment, developed “wedge deformities” that threw off my alignment and rubbed nerves, causing numbness, soreness, and shooting pain. Headaches from my multiple concussions developed suddenly and lasted for days. Sometimes I was afraid to move. Even opening my eyes in a lighted room could bring on stabbing pains.

  My mind was worse. Flashbacks, black thoughts, bad dreams. I woke up almost every night in a sweat, convinced I was back on the ground at Al-Waleed, awaiting the assassin’s knife. During the day, without duties to distract me, I dwelled on the war. I walked step-by-step through battlefields and relived my anniversaries: my first combat, my first dead body, my first kill the day I escaped death, and all the other dates that never leave a soldier’s mind. Eventually, I started researching. I was unable to turn away from the war, so I started reading everything I could about the war planning and objectives, from soulless Department of Defense (DOD) documents to combat reports to soldiers’ blogs from the battlefield. I was driving myself crazy, but there was no way I could stop. The search for answers was keeping me sane.

  After my two-month recovery, the Army sent me to Fort Benning as the executive officer of B Company, First Battalion, Eleventh Infantry. It was a recovery assignment, because it was clear by then to everyone that I was in bad shape, but like everything else in the Army, B Company was undermanned and the operations tempo too high. My job was to help train 650 newly commissioned officers for combat tours, but there were too few instructors to properly train that many leaders. I was hurting, most notably with a serious limp, and I needed to take care of myself, but it would have been irresponsible not to kill myself for those men and women bound for war, even though I no longer believed in the U.S. Army.

  No, that’s not right. I believed in the Army. I loved the Army more than ever, and I respected and cared about the men and women who fought for it. But I didn’t believe in the men running the Army or the civilians running the war effort. These junior officers were being sent to an undermanned and badly planned war; the least I could do was try my best to prepare them.

  I was angry. Looking back, that emotion probably defined that year of my life. PTSD is a dwelling disorder; it makes a person psychologically incapable of moving beyond the traumas of his or her past. The mess hall, the uniforms, the training exercises: they all triggered memories of my worst moments in Iraq. When I wasn’t distracted by work, I was lost in the past, trying to shift through the details and figure out where I had gone wrong. Betrayal and anger were my watchwords, feelings that never really left me, even in my best moments. But I also wheeled through cycles of outrage, frustration, helplessness, sadness at the loss of friends, guilt, shame, grief at the loss of my life’s work, and an ever-present bone-deep loneliness that seemed to entomb me like a ceremonial cloth.

  Alienated and haunted, I moved thirty miles away from my fellow soldiers to a trailer surrounded by a seven-foot-high barbed-wire-topped fence (it was already in place; the landlady had trouble with her convict ex-boyfriend). I was trying to wall myself off from the world, I suppose, but the present was already lost, and even in Salem, Alabama, the memories of Iraq came to bury me, triggered by everything from the smell of my dinner to a bird flying across the sun to the knife I kept always at my side.

  I didn’t run from the memories. Instead, I delved deep, continuing the research I’d started in Colorado, spending twelve hours a day training officers and eight hours a night studying government documents, a beer in my hand or a bottle of Bacardi on the desk beside me. Slowly, page after page, I turned my anger into righteous indignation, and then a call to arms to fight for justice and truth. I had been a warrior for sixteen years; this was a survival instinct. With a cause I believed in, a hidden part of me realized, I would never give in to hopelessness and despair. So I read thousands of pages of State Department and DOD reports, crunched thousands of numbers, and wrote out my thoughts, night after night, trying to figure out why the war I experienced in Iraq was so different than the one portrayed in the media—and so different than the victory we might have achieved.

  In January 2007, two days after George Bush announced the surge, a twenty-page condensed version of my assessment of what I had seen in Iraq ran in the New York Times as an op-ed entitled “Losing Iraq, One Truckload at a Time.” The essay focused on two things—tolerance of corruption within the American and Iraqi armies and lack of accountability by high-ranking officials—and caused quite a stir in the military hierarchy. I heard from dozens of active-duty officers who supported my conclusions, including several high-ranking officers I had served with. A faculty member at West Point suggested I apply for a professorship. I was invited to the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank “unofficially” developing the strategy for implementing Bush’s surge, where I participated in serious discussions with scholars and strategists like retired generals John Keene and David Barno and Gen. William Caldwell, currently in charge of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan.

  Most of my superior officers at Fort Benning were less supportive, however, and as my articles kept appearing in places like the Washington Times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, they expressed a strong interest in seeing me muzzled . . . or gone. And so that summer, by mutual consent, the American military and I officially ended our relationship. My honorable discharge date was September 11, 2007, six years after the terrorist attacks, seventeen years after I joined the Army at seventeen, and only a few days after Tuesday was released from his own period of exile at a prison in upstate New York. Even on my worst days, I can’t help but smile at that parallel in our lives.

  By then, I had accepted a position at the New York Office of Emergency Management. Within a month, I moved straight from a small trailer outside Salem, Alabama, to a small apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a
bustling immigrant neighborhood far from the yuppie enclaves to the north. I had no furniture; I had no more clothes than would fit in a small closet and a rucksack; I sat on the floor to use my laptop and slept on the carpet with only one blanket for warmth, much as I had slept in my sleeping bag at Al-Waleed. I looked into the closet days before I was to start my new job, saw the two new suits hanging from their wooden hangers, and knew it wasn’t going to work.

  It wasn’t the responsibility. I knew planning. I knew implementation in life-or-death situations. At Fort Benning, I had been responsible for hundreds of people and millions of dollars of equipment, and my evaluations had praised my “extraordinary performance” and suggested a promotion to major. I was a leader; I would rise to the occasion in an emergency. That was when I thrived.

  But the daily grind? I wasn’t in any condition for that. I limped; I used a cane; I experienced frequent bouts of vertigo that resulted in falls; I was in near constant pain. As I looked at those suits, I realized a job meant riding a subway during rush hour, walking into rooms full of people, and making small talk with the receptionist. The fact was, I hadn’t made small talk with anyone in a year. At Fort Benning, I had withdrawn, both physically and mentally, ignoring social obligations and invitations. In Brooklyn, I barely left my apartment. When I did, it was usually late at night, to buy necessities like packaged food. I wasn’t an alcoholic, but I drank every day to calm my anxiety and most of the night to put myself to sleep. There wasn’t any one thing I could point to—no recurring dreams or angry outbursts, no paranoid voices in my head. I just wasn’t myself. Some nights, it took me an hour to work up the courage to walk one block to the liquor store.