THE MENTAL TOLL OF WAR HAS THE ARMY SEARCHING FOR NEW WAYS TO HEAL BROKEN SOLDIERS. THEIR BEST THERAPISTS MAY BE ONES THAT TRAVEL ON FOUR LEGS
THE WORD SPREADS IN LOW VOICES: "He made it past the sushi!"
Soldiers from the Warrior Transition Battalion have gathered in a parking lot at Fort Stewart in Georgia. They're watching through the windows of the base PX, where Caroline, a psychiatric service dog, is guiding Sergeant Jeff Mitchell past the Asian takeout and down the crowded cereal aisle.
No big deal, you say? Maybe not for you.
The last time Mitchell attempted to enter the commissary, he had barely made it past the plate glass doors before dropping to the linoleum, folding into a fetal ball, and melting down.
NOT LONG AGO I spent time with some of the bravest men and women in the United States. They were all veterans of overseas wars and had returned home physically and mentally battered. Some, like Mitchell, were so traumatized that they could not leave their barracks. Others would become spooked by, say, a fireworks display, or the shadows cast by a highway overpass, or the bright lights of a crowded grocery store. Still others had lashed out with words and fists at their fellow GIs or even their officers. War had changed them, beaten them down.
Then they met their psychiatric service dogs.
At Fort Stewart, the U.S. Army has been pairing specially trained dogs with soldiers suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. On the face of it, the pilot program seems to be working: I watched haunted men brighten as canine trainees bounded toward them. Lieutenant Colonel William Reitemeyer, a buff, hard-bitten combat veteran and the commander of the base's Warrior Transition Battalion, told me, "It's almost like there are electric currents coursing through the leashes, connecting the minds of the soldiers with the minds of their dogs."
Reitemeyer realizes that the army's medical community has, as he puts it, "made mistakes." It's made plenty, in fact, as evidenced by reports in 2007 about care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. So to do a better job at healing bodies and minds, the army created 29 Warrior Transition Units (WTUs) here and in Europe. The dogs are an experiment within the WTUs. "I was skeptical of this dog idea at first, but I'm willing to try anything," Reitemeyer says. "I want to help thousands of wounded soldiers. But if I help just one, I'll consider this program a success."
And many soldiers need the help. According to a 2008 Rand Corporation study, nearly 14 percent of the 1.6 million soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan may have PTSD. Without treatment, the study notes, combat veterans experience increasing trouble with social interactions and their ability to maintain relationships. In that sense, Jeff Mitchell's story is tragically typical.
A member of the howitzer battery of the 2nd Squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Mitchell was twice deployed to Iraq. In 2003, he described his first firelight in a letter to his mother: "The first explosion shook everything and the shock waves caused ripples in the ground as if you threw a stone into a pond. I saw a civilian running from the blast; he was hurled 200 feet into the air. [There were] earth-rattling explosions, huge balls of fire and mushroom clouds, and red, white and orange pieces of burning metal blown into the sky. We are all lucky to be alive."
He encountered roadside IEDs hidden in deflated soccer balls and dead animals. And then he went through it all again, during a second deployment to Tal Afar, north of Baghdad. More combat. More IEDs. Mitchell returned to the United States in 2006 plagued with flashbacks and hallucinations; he battered his girlfriend when she woke him from a nightmare. He became too anxious even to leave his barracks.
After his medical discharge, he returned to his parents' home in Atlanta, entered his old bedroom, shut out the light, and locked the door. He found a liquor store that delivered. He became, in military jargon, a "cave dweller." And he remained that way until he met Caroline.
"ARE YOU GOING TO TRAIN THAT DOG or just play with it?"
It is not a question; it's a human bark, directed at a petite National Guard specialist. She's supposed to be training a dog named Drake to sit and stay. But she's clearly just enjoying the interaction. That in itself is a relief; I've barely heard the young woman speak. In Iraq, she had become separated from her unit and ended up spending several days alone in the desert before being rescued and returned to her comrades.
The man barking at her, Terry Henry, is the executive director of Paws4Vets. He's a retired military man with a history of PTSD himself; his first career was as an air force counterintelligence operative. Henry's manner is 100 percent drill sergeant, right down to his salt-and-pepper brush cut, thick as otter fur. And, okay, he can seem like a real prick, especially in his manner with these vulnerable people. He admits that his first loyalty is to his service dogs.
The idea to launch the organization came a dozen years ago from Henry's daughter, Kyria. The 12-year-old had been visiting nursing homes and geriatric hospital patients with her golden retriever. Suddenly the frail, ill senior citizens were engaging with the dog, with one another, and with staff, as they never had before. In what Henry calls "a blindingly idiotic idea," he quit his lucrative job as a telecommunications executive and threw himself into uniting dogs with people who needed them.
His first visits were to children's hospitals and schools. The work was so successful and rewarding that Henry began buying and breeding puppies, training them especially for these sorts of interactions and then introducing them to kids with mental or physical disabilities. Demand for trained therapy dogs was high, so he reached out to prison wardens for inmate volunteers to teach the dogs rudimentary commands. More than 75 inmates in five facilities are now training Henry's dogs.
Henry saw miracles. A child with severe learning disabilities learned to count and recite the alphabet when she had a dog for a companion; another with cerebral palsy began to walk with a dog's help. Why couldn't his dogs help combat vets with physical and/or psychological disorders? In early 2010 Henry received the go-ahead to unleash his dogs at Fort Stewart.
Drury, B. (2011). THE DOGS OF WAR. Men's Health, 26(8), 168-195.
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