Until Tuesday (19 page)

Sure, there were terrorists and smugglers crossing the border at Al-Waleed, truck drivers and entrepreneurs, con men and jihadis, but when I’m in a crowd in New York or Washington, D.C., or some small American town hall, I always remember that a vast majority of the people at that riot were ordinary citizens coming home enthusiastic, optimistic, and ready to work with us to create a new Iraq. Instead of freedom, they found chaos. Instead of an ally, they found an American occupation overstretched, confused, and incompetently run. They found armed foreign soldiers allowing corrupt Iraqi “allies” to destroy ordinary lives. We tolerated our own corrupt contracting process, figuring nobody would miss $10 billion in a war zone. We coddled overpaid and arrogant security contractors, then shielded them from their own crimes. We paid and protected unscrupulous Iraqis whose existence poisoned the country against us, because there was too little planning and too few soldiers to seek out and empower the honest citizens.

We lost them. Whatever the reason, that’s far too clear. I have no doubt that many of the Iraqi exiles kissing the ground and hugging me at Al-Waleed were shooting at us two years later in south Baghdad.

That too was part of the cocktail shaken up in my brain when I encountered a crowd: not just the memory of almost being trampled, not just the knowledge that I was capable of killing innocent people, but the guilt over our failure to protect and empower those honest citizens, the betrayal of our efforts on their behalf by corrupt and incompetent leaders, the pointless spiral of violence that got so many of my friends and fellow soldiers killed.

In New York, unlike Iraq, I often fled. I didn’t run, but there were dozens of times when I simply turned around and left the station.

Tuesday, though, changed the calculation. With Tuesday, I could say, “Go forward, Tuesday.” I used a six-foot leash, and the “Go forward” command told Tuesday to walk to the end of it and keep going. Tuesday didn’t have any qualms about nosing through a crowd; he would part people like the Red Sea and guide me along in his wake, safe in the comfort zone he created.

“Left,” I’d tell him. Or right, or wherever the crowd was more manageable, usually at the very end of the platform.

“Stop,” I’d tell him, pulling on the long leash. “Side, Tuesday. Side.” He’d come back and sit down beside me, supporting me just as he would have with the wooden handle, while I waited for my heart rate to slow and Tuesday’s ears to perk up, the first sign of an approaching train. It wasn’t salvation, because the train was often worse than the platform, but I always knew that, in a pinch, I had the extra six feet of leash, and the safe zone only Tuesday could provide.

That’s why I used a leash instead of a guide dog handle. That’s why I don’t look exactly like a typical disabled person with a service dog. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to explain that to the bus driver.

CHAPTER 19

TUESDAY TALKS

Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind
me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

—A
LBERT
C
AMUS

Nothing is entirely bad. Good can come out of abject
failure, which is one reason I press so hard for accountability in Iraq. We can do better, and we will, if we’re honest and learn from our mistakes. The incident on the bus was an abject failure on many levels, and it had a serious impact on my confidence. After the humiliation of that date, I was hesitant to talk to anyone new for most of the spring, and it took six solid months, at least, to work myself out of my shell.

But the incident was also an awakening, the moment that finally forced me to acknowledge, publicly and privately, that I was part of something larger than my personal circumstances. I’m a joiner by nature, a pack animal that loves to be part of a group. In my life, I had thought of myself first as a son and a brother, then as a Cuban American, then as a soldier, then as a wounded veteran, always with a responsibility to speak for others like myself. In the spring of 2009, I realized I was something else as well: disabled.

That may not sound like much, but it’s an important self-realization. Most wounded soldiers never use the
d
word, preferring to say things like “wounded” or “recovering” or “struggling to adjust.” It’s hard for the newly disabled, whether the cause is a car accident, a disease or an IED in Iraq, to admit just how much their lives have been altered. The word “disabled” acknowledges the seriousness of that change.

This is especially true for PTSD. Most soldiers spend years denying they have it, or being told by loved ones it’s all in their heads. It
is
in their heads, but it’s a real wound nonetheless. Even if they accept the diagnosis, most veterans assume PTSD is temporary.
I’m going to beat this
, they say.
In a year, I’ll be fine
. Everyone knows you don’t grow back a leg that’s been blow off by an IED, but everyone assumes you can heal a brain that’s been scarred. You can’t. You can restore trust. You can reconnect with the world. You can live a full life. But the experience is with you forever.

It doesn’t have to be a burden. You don’t have to give in to the opinion of people like my father, who wrote to me that vets who admit to being wounded are “deepening their own disability and strengthening their desire to live on the dole.” I am not a charity case, and I am not weak for addressing my wounds. The truth is the opposite. I lived for three years in denial of my problems, burying them under an avalanche of effort and work. It only made me sicker. When I finally acknowledged that I was disabled, I discovered a fractured back, a traumatic brain injury, and PTSD weren’t just limitations on my life. They also offered new challenges and opportunities. My life was not the same after the attack in Al-Waleed and the subsequent betrayals and traumas, but it didn’t have to be worse. Being disabled offers each person something different. For me, it was a new way to serve.

My activism started as therapy. When I began writing about the failings of the war effort in 2006, I was trying to find a way to explain my feelings of guilt, betrayal, and anger and make my sacrifices and those of the American soldiers and Iraqis I respected—no, that I loved and admired—worth the effort and loss. If we turned our strategic problems around, I felt confident we could succeed.

In 2007, when I moved into veterans’ issues, I was working through feelings of betrayal and neglect from the Army I had served and battling the creeping fear and isolation that were tearing apart my life. By grouping myself with hundreds of thousands of other wounded warriors (350,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are currently being treated by the VA for PTSD), I felt less vulnerable to the system—and less alone.

Tuesday, I now realize, was my first move beyond veterans’ rights. By adopting him, I was acknowledging that my condition would continue for years, and that I needed help beyond the counseling and medicine the Department of Veterans Affairs provided. I didn’t think about that consciously. At the time, I was desperate for a way to survive on a daily basis. But underneath, in my subconscious mind, I was moving into a different category. Service dogs weren’t for veterans; they were for the disabled. Period.

So when Tuesday and I faced discrimination, I fell back on my usual therapy: writing. The Army expects its leaders to make on-the-spot corrections and write memoranda to identify problems and recommend solutions. Why would I stop this practice just because I no longer served in uniform? If the offender was a local business, such as a laundromat or a small convenience store, I simply tried to educate them. If the offender was a corporation, I wrote to its regional office or headquarters, letting people there know what happened, its physical and psychological consequences, and how they could improve their treatment of the disabled with service dogs. Like my life in the Army, the emails were purposeful work intended to better the lives of others. They also helped me relax and, by getting my feelings down on paper, stop dwelling on individual incidents and move forward with my life.

The bus was different, though. After that humiliation, I was too stressed and sickened to write. I lay in my bed for days, even after my migraine subsided, lost in my own mind. Tuesday, as always, was stalwart at my side. On the worst days, when I couldn’t even communicate my desires, he crawled onto the bed and, with a soft sigh, curled up beside me. It reminded me of my childhood dog, Max, and how his happy presence took me away from my weekly bully-beatings. But with Max it had been accidental. With Tuesday, it was intentional. His dedication and loyalty were more than I could ever ask from my parents or my siblings or any human being. It was something only a dog could give. When he lay beside me with his dog-breath sighs, it was as if he was saying,
Give me your sadness. I will take it, as much as you need. If it kills us both, so be it. I am here.

As part of my public advocacy, I was scheduled to speak around that time at Hunter College in Manhattan. The conference was for mental health providers, mostly therapists and staffers at community outreach centers. The focus was “hidden clients”: those who need help but were reluctant to come forward, a category increasingly dominated by veterans as the sixth anniversary of continuous war approached. It was an important subject, and after the setback on the bus I wasn’t sure I was up to discussing it. In the end, encouraged by Tuesday’s patience and strength, I decided to attend.

I can’t remember if my remarks were planned. I remember being in front of the audience and feeling the crushing return of my PTSD symptoms: nausea, anxiety, a pounding in my head that made the room swim. As always when I was in trouble, I looked down at Tuesday. I could see his concern, but also his confidence in me. There was something about his eyes, when he looked at me, that always said,
I believe in you, Luis
. I looked back at the audience, a shadowy faceless crowd. Then, instead of talking about veterans’ issues, I talked about Tuesday. I had been an alcoholic, I told them, trapped in my apartment and nearly suicidal before Tuesday arrived. But this dog stood by me. He helped me with my anxiety and phobias. He kept me from falling. He monitored my breathing. He knew 140 commands . . .

I paused. “Does anyone want a demonstration?” I asked, surprising myself.

“Yes,” someone yelled through the clapping and encouragement.

I had spoken before gauging Tuesday’s feelings about performing, but one look at his eyes, upturned as always toward mine, and I wasn’t worried. He was ready for anything. So we started with the basics: sit, jump on, shake, retrieve, tug. We must have gone through sixty or seventy commands, and although the audience clapped for each one, it soon felt like Tuesday and I were alone together enjoying our regular practice session. When I finally gave Tuesday a piece of paper, and he delivered it to a volunteer with her hand in the air at the back of the room, the audience gave him a standing ovation. When he trotted back to the stage, I greeted him with my most enthusiastic hug. He put his head on my shoulder, and I think the audience saw the true affection we had for each other because the clapping went to a higher place. I know they saw the affection, because after the session several people came up to us with tears in their eyes.

The Hunter College conference led to other “Tuesday Talks,” where I used public appearances to demonstrate what a service dog could do. I remember several high schools and a lot of discussion panels. Most of my appearances, though, were at community outreach organizations and independent living centers for the disabled (ILCs). These organizations ranged from large church-sponsored gyms to hole-in-the-wall storefronts, but they shared one thing: they were the first point of contact, the place a psychologically troubled or disabled person was mostly likely to seek help, and the staffers knew all too well the extent of the suffering in the veteran community. But they had never really watched an animal like Tuesday before. They had never considered how much good a dog could do.

My appearances were uneven experiences because PTSD is an uneven condition. Some days I felt great, and my talks were energetic and optimistic. Other days I was sick and anxious, and I dwelt on the negative aspects of my life. It wasn’t just the bus; dozens of incidents of discrimination had shaped my interaction with the ordinary world, and some days I couldn’t shake them. Tuesday and I would demonstrate his abilities for half an hour, until the audience was completely in love with him, and then I’d ask, “Now how could anyone discriminate against this dog?”

They would murmur shake their heads,
No, not possible
.

“It happens,” I told them. “It happens all the time. In fact, it happened ten minutes ago when I was getting a coffee around the corner.” This was depressingly true; I usually stopped for a coffee or tea (alcohol replacement) to calm my nerves before an appearance, and there was often an objection to Tuesday.

Slowly, though, as I talked more about Tuesday, my perspective changed. Veterans groups had always been responsive to my message—they were incredibly supportive, in fact—but the civilian disabled community was different. The disabled people who used the independent living centers often came to my talks, and many of them had guide dogs or service dogs. Among veterans, I was unique; there were at that time, I suspect, fewer than fifty wounded veterans with service dogs in the United States. But at the ILCs, there were people who understood and had experienced similar challenges. Clearly, the disabled community had a vast network of outreach and support, because within days of my first “Tuesday Talk” I started to receive emails from people with service dogs from all over the country who had faced similar discrimination.

Soon, I recognized a pattern in the responses: while I was angry about discrimination, most of the writers were desperate or resigned. Not everyone with a service dog has a difficult time in social situations, of course. Some owners, especially those who are blind (because society is accustomed to guide dogs) or who have been disabled for a long time, are able to shrug off discrimination as simply part of their lives. But others are not so lucky. People with service dogs are by definition in a fragile mental or physical state; that’s why they need the dog. Fighting discrimination is tiring, especially for a group for whom ordinary chores or social interactions are often physically and emotionally draining. I received too many letters, far too many, from people with service dogs who had all but given up. Their history of confrontations, and the thought of another one, kept them essentially housebound. They were writing, for the most part, to thank me for taking a stand.

I felt energized by their letters. Suddenly, I wasn’t alone with Tuesday in Sunset Park, trying to convince storekeepers to let me buy a microwave pizza; I was part of a large group of people struggling for acceptance. When I wrote emails, the best outcome wasn’t an apology and a coupon for free food but a promised change in training methods and business practice. I’m an organizer and a pack rat by nature. By this time, I had about forty letters to companies, chronologically filed, detailing our interactions. Quite by accident, I realized, I had created a record of underlying discrimination, the kind easy to dismiss as minor—“Oh, they didn’t mean it, they just didn’t understand”—when talking about one store, but in its totality was clearly the kind of harassment that wears people down.

I knew this record was important. It showed, in a concise visual way, why I so often lost my patience with store clerks and restaurant hosts. In that sense, it made me feel better about my inability to control my feelings of helplessness and annoyance, especially on my worst days. But it also made me feel I was contributing to a cause. I believed—and I still do—that one day there will be a serious discussion in our country about service dogs. When that time comes, I am going to put a stack of letters a foot high on the table and say, “Here, ladies and gentleman, is what life with a service dog looks like.”

It was a gratifying time. Intensely gratifying. It was also simply intense. With PTSD and TBI, my mind forced me to relive, in vivid detail, the worst moments of my life. Now my advocacy was forcing me not just to remember but to talk about those traumas. In essence, I was taking one of the worst aspects of my disorder and incorporating it into my daily life. I was giving my memories a purpose, and that was empowering, but I still had to relive them, and my public appearances often left me stewing long after in my own private hell. I walked away many times in a mental and physical fog, with only Tuesday to guide me home. I didn’t have as many flashbacks or migraines, though, because Tuesday recognized the symptoms. No matter where we were—on the street, in my apartment, in the middle of a talk—he nudged me as soon as my eyes glazed and my breathing grew shallow, not stopping his banging and pawing until I looked down into his concerned eyes, then leaned forward, tussled his neck, and told him, “I’m here, Tuesday. Don’t worry. I’m here.”