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

by Luis Carlos Montalvan

  So I asked her out. I hadn’t been on a one-on-one situation with a woman since my last girlfriend left me with an apology and a picture she had drawn of me with half my face stripped off and replaced with barbed wire, guns, and grenades. I hadn’t gone out with anyone, anywhere, even for a coffee, in more than a year. That’s the size of the difference Tuesday made in my life. He changed everything in me, right down to my heart.

  She agreed to meet me at my apartment in Sunset Park, a necessity since I would never make it through an evening in a new neighborhood. I planned a night at a Lebanese restaurant I knew in Bay Ridge, a short bus ride away. The trip was complicated, at least in my condition, but the evening was special. It felt like a turning point, an entry back into normal life, and as always I went all the way.

  The date started out perfectly: The woman was fantastic. She loved Tuesday. And after a day spent steeling myself for conversation, I was my old sociable self. She made it easy, and so did Tuesday. I didn’t even have to be entertaining because Tuesday handled that part for me. He gave us something to talk about and filled the awkward silences, and that helped me relax and enjoy myself. By the time the bus pulled up on Fifth Avenue, we were laughing and having a good time.

  I let my date step up first, like the traditional gentleman my mother had raised, then stepped into the small entryway with Tuesday.

  “No dogs,” the bus driver barked.

  “Oh, this is my service dog,” I said with a smile, expecting her to let me pass.

  “I said no dogs, sir.”

  “But this is my service dog.”

  She looked Tuesday over, her lips pursed. “That’s not a service dog.”

  “What?”

  “I said that’s not a service dog, sir.”

  “Yes, Tuesday is my service dog. See his vest. See my cane.”

  “Service dog don’t wear a vest like that. Service dog has a big handle you hold onto.”

  “That’s a guide dog for the blind,” I said, trying to hold myself together. “This is a service dog for the disabled.”

  “Sir, I know a service dog when I see a service dog, and that ain’t no service dog.”

  I pulled out my cell phone. “Then call the cops,” I said angrily, “because I am not getting off this bus.”

  I was sweating. Big Time. It was winter in New York, probably 30 degrees outside, but I could feel the sweat dripping down the back of my neck. I was trying to impress a beautiful, intelligent woman, the first woman I had talked to in a year, and I couldn’t even get on a city bus. I mean, it was bad enough having to bring Tuesday with me. I love him, but it doesn’t exactly say “boyfriend material” when a man has to bring a golden retriever on the first date just to keep it together.

  I looked the bus driver straight in the eye. I held out my phone. There was nothing else to do. I couldn’t look at my date. I couldn’t even look in that direction, because I knew every passenger on the bus was staring at me, and that thought made my PTSD-addled brain reel.

  “Please,” I said quietly. “I’m on a date. Please let me on.”

  “No, sir,” she said loudly, trying to embarrass me.

  “Then I’m calling the police,” I said angrily, “because you are violating my rights. I hope you are ready to explain to your boss why you wouldn’t let a disabled person on your bus.”

  She gave me a nasty look, waiting for thirty seconds to see if I would back down, then let me pass with a grunt. I felt like throwing up and I was probably shaking, but I had won. I had made it onto a city bus.

  Hold it together, Luis, I told myself, as I took a seat beside my date and Tuesday settled between my knees. Hold it together.

  “Are you all right?”

  I took a deep breath and petted the back of Tuesday’s head. “I’m okay,” I said. “That happens sometimes. Right, Tuesday? Right, good boy?” I talk to Tuesday when I’m nervous, even in the middle of conversations.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. I looked at her. Smart, beautiful, understanding. She smiled, patted me on the arm, and . . .

  “That ain’t no service dog.”

  I looked up. It was the bus driver. She was talking to a woman in the first seat, presumably a friend, but she was intentionally talking loud enough for the whole bus to hear.

  Keep it together, Luis. “I think you’ll like this restaurant . . .”

  “I’ve been driving this bus a long time,” the bus driver continued, clearly trying to embarrass me. “I know service dogs.”

  My mind was crumbling. “I think you’ll, um, I think you’ll like . . .”

  “Service dog’s got a handle.”

  She was like the voice of PTSD always playing inside my head, bringing up the betrayals.

  “Ain’t no service dog. I know a service dog.”

  She was harassing me, and she wouldn’t stop.

  “He thinks I don’t know a service dog. I know a service dog.”

  “I’m not deaf,” I said in a raised voice. “That is not my disability.”

  Some of the other bus passengers laughed. Tuesday turned and nuzzled me with his snout. I grabbed him around the neck, and he leaned into my chest. I could tell by Tuesday’s reaction more than anything that I had been shouting. This bus driver was pushing me, harassing me, trying to make me snap.

  “Sorry about the dog,” she said sarcastically to the people at the next stop. “Man says it’s a service dog.”

  I went inside myself. I held Tuesday and tried to beat down the anger. I could feel a migraine coming, but I pushed it away. Just a few hours, I thought. A few hours and it will be over.

  We made it to the restaurant, but the host who knew Tuesday wasn’t working that night, so I had to explain that he was my service dog, that he was not only allowed in the restaurant but it was illegal to keep him out. I got angry, more so than I should have, but nothing happens in isolation. I was deeply embarrassed by the time I walked into that restaurant. My head was pounding, and I was nauseated from the stress. This was a big night and it was all going sideways. There was no way, at that point, I could separate the restaurant’s polite refusal to seat me from the mean-spirited harassment on the bus—or being thrown out of a dining room halfway through my hamburger, or having shopkeepers I trusted tell me they didn’t want my business anymore, or being violently attacked with knives by my supposed allies in Al-Waleed.

  I wanted a normal life. That’s all. A normal life. Tuesday made me believe I could achieve it. And I could have. Easily. But the presence of Tuesday, the very thing that made it possible, was also taking it away.

  I never saw that woman again. I said good-bye after the meal and, unlike the gentleman my mother had raised, took a car service home. She was polite and understanding, but a few days later she emailed to say she would rather not go out again. It was hard enough to open myself to human companionship for the first time. After crashing and burning on a bus ride? After barely making it through a meal? After rejection? No way.

  The atom bomb exploded in my head, fueled by frustration and disappointment, and the migraine was so severe it kept me in bed for days. Even Tuesday couldn’t comfort me. But he stuck with me every minute, until I was finally able to make it out of bed in the middle of the night and walk him down to Rainbow Park, where I flung tennis balls against the concrete wall as hard as I could, for as long as I could, until both Tuesday and I were completely smoked.

  It was more than a year before I asked another woman on a date.

  CHAPTER 18

  TUESDAY’S HANDLE

  And I remember . . . I . . . I . . . I cried, I wept like some

  grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what

  I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to

  forget it . . . I never want to forget.

  —COLONEL KURTZ, APOCALYPSE NOW

  I guess I should explain Tuesday’s handle, since that’s what caused the fracas with the bus driver. After all, she
didn’t look at me and assume I wasn’t handicapped, as some people do. Or that I’m not “handicapped enough” to warrant “special treatment.” That’s part of the challenge of PTSD; the wounds don’t leave visible scars, so some people assume they don’t exist. I suppose I’m “lucky” that my back and knee injuries force me to walk with a limp and a cane, two outward symbols of the damage done in Iraq.

  Tuesday’s outward symbol is his red vest, known as a cape, which he always wears when he’s in public. That’s what marks him as a working dog. I’ve added three patches since I purchased the vest after completing the training at ECAD: one from Disabled American Veterans (DAV), one from the Military Order of the Purple Heart (MOPH), and one from American Veterans (AMVETS). I’m proud of my service, and those patches are a show of support for my fellow veterans.

  Some assistance dogs also wear harnesses that have a large solid handle, intended for use instead of a leash. The handle is shaped like the top of a crutch, with two bars on the side, a large bar across the top, and a gripping brace across the middle for extra stability and control. This is what the bus driver was looking for. This type of handle is excellent for those with vision impairment and physical disabilities because, since it is only a few feet long, it keeps the dog at your side. From there, the dog is able to accompany its owner through tight obstacles and brace her against possible falls.

  I never used the handle, even though I had serious balance and coordination issues. After the assault at Al-Waleed, I had gone from a coordinated Terminator to an injury-prone man, much to my enduring frustration. Most of it was physical. I was compensating for my disabled back, which threw my entire body out of alignment. That caused my training injuries in the summer of 2004 and contributed to my devastating knee injury in 2006. My traumatic brain injury was also a major contributor. Just as serious, though, was my loss of confidence. The world no longer felt benign, and I no longer felt natural in it. I felt like I needed to watch every step, but with my mind usually reeling from hypervigilance I was unable to focus on my feet. My legs stopped trusting my brain, and my body rebelled. I had taken a dozen serious falls since Al-Waleed.

  Tuesday helped with all these issues. He realized pretty quickly I didn’t like broken sidewalks, so he pulled on the leash to alert me to changes in the concrete. He slowed down on rough ground, letting me set the pace. As soon as I felt dizzy, he sensed my distress and moved against me, allowing me to grasp him around the neck and support myself until the episode passed. With Tuesday so attuned to my needs, I regained confidence. I knew he was going to be there if I stumbled and that knowledge, along with Tuesday’s vigilance for cracks and other hazards, caused me to fall less. He was my stabilizer; he helped me gain control of my mind and body, even without a hard handle to hold.

  Stairs were still a problem, but there was a cloth handle on Tuesday’s vest for that. Since stairs never surprised me, I simply stopped, ordered Tuesday to my side, and used the cloth handle to balance myself. After a few weeks, I didn’t even have to order Tuesday to my side. When he saw stairs, he moved against me and waited for me to grasp his vest, then carefully supported me up or down.

  The rest of the time, a hard handle would have been a nuisance, or even worse, a hindrance. While balance and falls were a problem, my most pressing issue was psychological. Public spaces often brought on intense periods of anxiety, and any sort of unexpected social interaction—even someone bumping into me by accident—made me jumpy and paranoid. The sidewalks of New York were usually filled with people, so I needed Tuesday as my buffer. A leash allowed him to walk a few steps in front of me, so he was the one to meet oncoming pedestrians, driving them to the side and away from what my mind perceived as possible confrontation. Ironically, the trait Lu Picard worried about most—that Tuesday often walked slightly forward of his trainer—turned out to be a valuable asset.

  It was even more important with crowds, which were unavoidable in New York City, especially since I rode the subway to the VA hospital and Columbia. A New York rush hour subway crowd—oh man, that was bad. The space on the platform was tight; it was underground; there was a vague sense of agitation among the commuters; and there was no real way to avoid it. Those crowds gave me a flashback to a particular moment in Iraq: the first time I faced a riot at Al-Waleed.

  I don’t want you to misunderstand when I say flashback. I didn’t think the multiethnic, semipatient crowd of New Yorkers was a mass of rioting Iraqis. The tunnel didn’t turn into the desert, as it would in a movie, and the drop-off to the tracks didn’t turn into the dirt berm that marked the border of Iraq. As I pushed through the crowd, I sometimes saw flashes of faces from the crowd at Al-Waleed, but I didn’t turn businessmen into smugglers or mothers into enemies. It wasn’t a visual flashback; it was a psychological one. What I experienced was the feeling of standing in front of that crowd in Iraq, thinking my life was over.

  This was in January 2004, shortly after the attack on me at Al-Waleed. Saddam Hussein had been captured a few weeks before, but the American occupation was fraying. When the order came to close the border, we locked it down within minutes. There was no explanation, but the reason could have been anything—a blocking maneuver while raids were conducted in Baghdad, a large cache of unexploded ordnance (UXO) missing from a former Iraqi Army ammunition supply point (ASP), the sighting of a high-value target (HVT) from the deck of cards. I mean, most of us believed there were weapons of mass destruction. We thought it was only a matter of time before they were discovered or, even worse, used, and that the fifty of us at Al-Waleed might be the last and only line of defense against their free movement into or out of Iraq.

  Nothing dramatic like that happened. Instead, within a few hours of blocking the gates, there were hundreds of cars and trucks in line at the border. For an entire day, these people waited patiently, accustomed to bureaucratic delays. Around dusk, some started to leave their vehicles to ask for an explanation. Would they get through before nightfall? What about the next day? There was no cell phone service this far out in the desert; Iraq was a dangerous society rife with sudden violent death; their relatives would be worried. They were polite, but unfortunately there was nothing we could tell them. We didn’t know why the border was closed. We had no idea when it would open again. We were merely following orders.

  I’m not sure how long the border was closed. I’d estimate a couple of days, although some closings during our time at Al-Waleed lasted longer. There would have been a riot in the United States after ten hours; believe me, I’ve seen it in airports. The Iraqis were relatively calm. They endured a hard life under Saddam, and it had made them resilient. They always carried enough food and water for a few days because they were so used to having their lives interrupted.

  On the third day, though, the mood turned ugly. We suspended our patrols and stuck close to our base, aware that the primary source of trouble was at the border checkpoint. By then, there were thousands of people piled into the two-kilometer-wide no-man’s-land between Al-Waleed and the Syrian border station. Most had been living in their cars for days, in cold desert temperatures. Food and water were running low, and those with compromised health—small children, the elderly, the sick—were suffering. People’s financial futures were spoiling on trucks. Dead bodies were rotting. The Muslim faith calls for the dead to be buried within three days, and dozens of people came to the gate every day, weeping, telling us they were trying to take their relatives home for burial. I knew it was true, because I could smell it; the bodies were decaying in plywood coffins.

  “Ana aasif,” I told them, “I’m sorry. I’ll see what I can do.”

  I radioed squadron headquarters at FOB Byers, asking for permission to open the border, but the orders came from the top, without explanation or time line, and they were not subject to change.

  “Ana aasif,” I told the increasingly frantic Iraqi border guards, who were tasked with holding back the crowds. “Don’t let them through.”

  By then, the Iraqis were
leaving their vehicles en masse. Hundreds of them, it seemed, were pressed against the barrier that marked the border. They shouted at us, shook their fists, but I had no idea what they were saying, and I had no choice but to turn my back and walk away.

  It must have been the third night, or maybe the fourth, when I received a frantic call from the Iraqi border police asking for reinforcements. I grabbed four of my men and raced down to the crossing. The scene was chaos. Enormous, close-packed chaos. It looked like one of those big outdoor concerts with a sea of people surging en masse, but instead of being raised above the chaos like a rock star we seemed to be running below it, with the whole crowd shouting from on top of us. It was so clear the crowd had reached its breaking point that two of my men ran straight to the barrier and started swinging their rifle butts to drive people back. It was the faces on those men in front, the ones screaming and clawing a few feet away, that I glimpsed sometimes in the crowds in New York.

  “What should we do, sir?” one of my biggest guys, Staff Sgt. Danhouse, yelled over his shoulder, still swinging his rifle.

  I looked at the Iraqi border policemen. They were standing back from the barrier, frozen in fear. When trouble started, they would run. I knew it, and so did the crowd.

  Then I looked at the four men from my team. There was no doubt. They would stand and fight.

  Having been through riot control training as an infantryman, I knew exactly what to do: snatch the two or three biggest troublemakers and drag them off to detention. That took the boil off a crowd. But we didn’t even have enough men for a snatch team, let alone riot control. I looked into the face of the rioter nearest to me. He was a typical middle-aged Arab, except that he was dirty, hungry, and enraged. I saw his desperation, and I knew the rioters were going to breach the gate, and when they did, they were going to trample us to death. For a moment, it was that clear. I saw the chain snapping and the crowd descending on us, and I knew I would go down firing.