Tuesday's Promise

CHAPTER 1

Tale of the Dog

WHEN TUESDAY FIRST CAME INTO MY LIFE, I WASN'T IN MUCH BETTER shape than the Airman in the wheelchair at the Manhattan VA, though I'm sure he had a good fifty years on me. I was at least as glum as he was before he met Tuesday. Life-or-death combat can do that to a person. I wasn't sleeping well. I had frequent headaches and panic attacks. I was drinking too much and gobbling pills. My marriage had been a casualty of war. It was a struggle to keep appointments, and all my friendships were strained. I walked with a limp and, even worse, I was too wracked with anxiety to really go anywhere. Day and night, I sat in my cramped Brooklyn apartment and phoned down to the local deli for food. This wasn't living. It was barely existing. I was back from Iraq and out of the army and more or less waiting around to die. I would not have called myself actively suicidal. Suicide takes initiative. Bummed out and distracted as I was, I didn't have the focus to end it all. But somewhere inside of me—thank God!—was a little voice that kept whispering, "You can do better than this. You can do better than this."

People who know me know this story. One day, I got an email from a veterans' organization about a nonprofit group called ECAD, which stood for Educated Canines Assisting with Disabilities. ECAD was looking to match disabled war veterans with service dogs. Even in the heavy darkness, I figured that might be worth a try.

I met a woman named Lu Picard, who ran the organization. She trained service dogs for people with physical disabilities—amputees, the visually impaired, people with muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis. But Lu didn't see why her work should stop there. She was convinced that a well-trained dog could be immensely helpful to someone who needed psychological assistance as well. Lu wasn't entirely alone in this belief, but she didn't have much company back then. Her timing couldn't have been more perfect, for me and for a whole generation of other men and women returning to America from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us—no one could say exactly how many, but hundreds of thousands for sure—were suffering from an array of conditions that experts lumped under the term post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. After decades of misunderstanding, downplaying, and denying these "invisible wounds of war," military officials, veterans' advocates, psychologists, and even a few dog trainers were coming to recognize PTSD as the massive epidemic it was. "We have to do something about this," quite a few of them began to say, though not quite sure what that something was. Among the many approaches that seemed worth trying was the idea of partnering highly trained service dogs with men and women affected by the intense stresses of combat.

The dog Lu paired with me, an instinctively loving and exquisitely trained golden retriever with the mysterious name Tuesday, would help me change my life in dramatic and profound ways. But why should anyone be surprised by that? Dogs have been assisting human beings almost since the beginning of time.

The next time you hear someone say, "It's a dog's world," or "We're all going to the dogs," just agree. That's been true since the days when human beings were grunting instead of talking and still dragging each other around by the hair. Dogs aren't only our best friends. They are also some of our oldest and most talented companions.

There's a reason 40 percent of households in America now include at least one dog. Many reasons, actually. Dogs are our pets, our children, and our caregivers. They love us, teach us, entertain us, work with us, protect us, and help in more ways than most people imagine. Dogs are doing a whole lot more than fetching the newspaper from the front lawn and rolling over on command, though I certainly don't minimize either of those.

The close relationship between humans and canines goes back at least 40,000 years, well before history was written down. Modern genetic testing has proven that, at about that time, dogs diverged from an extinct wolflike canid in Eurasia, and they've been with us ever since. Yes, cave men and cave women had cave dogs, and I'm almost certain those cave dogs had their own names. Why wouldn't they? The cave people had to call them something.

Cats have been around a while too. House cats are clearly depicted in Egyptian paintings from 3,600 years ago. That's about the time Mesopotamians were busy inventing the wheel. And cat-loving archeologists were practically purring a decade or so ago when a Neolithic grave excavated in Cyprus contained two skeletons laid close together—a human and a cat. That ancient skeleton was no slinky feline. It more resembled a large African wildcat. But still. From that evidence we know that the feline-human relationship extends at least 9,500 years—about one-quarter as far back as humans and dogs.

Sorry, Fluffy! It's dogs over cats… again!

If it weren't for the dog, human civilization couldn't possibly have evolved the way it did. Early humans had very few tools and no developed language or writing. We were not the dominant beings we are today—the undisputed alpha predators. We were fighting against the elements and many other alpha predators for food, shelter, security, and all the basics needed to sustain human life. We often lost. Then, the dog came along. All of a sudden, we had a creature who could alert us to threats we couldn't detect ourselves—human threats, other animal threats, weather threats. Dogs enabled us to hunt better. They were uniquely able to help us track and kill for food. That is not surprising. Running with four legs beats running with two legs. Dogs could also smell things we couldn't. Their sense of smell, scientists now calculate, is 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute than ours.

There's a reason for this. Dog noses aren't like human noses, which have to inhale and exhale through the same narrow passages. Dog noses exhale through slits in the side, keeping those smells separate from the new smells that are coming in. Basically, they never stop sniffing new smells. Compared to dogs, we might as well be walking around with clothespins on our noses.

Dogs also enabled us to start keeping livestock. Have you ever tried to catch a chicken, a pig, or a sheep when it's running away from you? One trip to a livestock farm or a petting zoo will teach you that human beings are not very good herders. For eons, and still today, most of the livestock on the planet is herded by dogs. From Anatolian shepherds to Australian cattle dogs, from Belgian sheepdogs to Bernese mountain dogs, herding breeds are hard at work. There's no reason to believe they will ever be replaced.

Dogs have played a direct role in many other human endeavors—especially agriculture. For as long as we've grown our own food, dogs have protected our harvests against rodents, birds, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, and many other critters that could wreak havoc on a field of crops. Understanding all this, our forty-millennium relationship with canines makes perfect sense. Dogs have been essential to our becoming civilized.

Fast-forward to the present: Dogs are as vital to human beings today as they've ever been, if not more so. Canines work with the United States military in more than one hundred countries. We have dogs at our borders protecting our agriculture against insects and other pests, not to mention keeping illegal drugs and human threats out. Right now, wherever you are, dogs are patrolling in your community, helping the police. And don't forget the countless businesses and residences with "Beware of Dog" signs warning assorted human predators they'd better stay away.

And why stop there?

Dogs today are doing things to help people that canines have never done before, things cynologists have long suspected dogs to be capable of. Cynologist is not a word most people know, but it should be. Cynology is the study of things related to canines. These studies have proved that dogs are able to help humans in ways far beyond herding and hunting and protection. Everyone has seen dogs guiding the blind or the hearing impaired. They still do plenty of guide work, but the world is finally learning that their talents go far beyond that. Dogs are outsmarting high-priced medical machinery. Dogs are doing things that doctors can't. Dogs are helping people with diabetes by detecting whether their blood sugar is too high or too low and alerting them to take their medicine. We have dogs who prompt humans with epilepsy to the symptoms leading up to seizures. They do that by smelling the chemicals and minerals secreted through sweat, then warning their human companions to take medicine or to sit down so they don't fall and hurt themselves. It's said that one in sixty-eight children is born with autism, a condition that has isolated children from their peers and families. Today, dogs are improving the lives of those kids, teaching them to communicate and interact with the world. And other service dogs, dogs like Tuesday, are helping more and more people every day to mitigate disabilities of every sort. No one has a complete list of all the disabilities that dogs help with. No one ever will. Once compiled, it would have to be continually updated. Therapy dogs visit hospitals and schools and retirement facilities and nursing homes, bringing a cold, wet nose, and a furry spirit to comfort the sick, help the dying, and bring joy to children and adults from 3 to 103.

I can hardly believe how far I have come over the past eight years, and I can't give enough credit to that one special dog who remains at my side every step of the way. Those early cave dogs had nothing on Tuesday. He has proven himself over and over again to be a genius and the truest kind of friend. The change in me since Lu paired us could hardly have been any more dramatic. Instead of sitting inside a small apartment all day, an anxious prisoner of my own PTSD, I took to the road with Tuesday and never looked back. Not as occasional travelers. Not as two-week vacationers. Together, we became creatures who've traveled to many, many places but still have a long list of stops we are eager to get to. And though there are days and weeks that the road can feel like too much to handle—times I still struggle to cope with the lingering vestiges of my PTSD—we press ever onward, knowing we really can't afford to stop.

Given the darkness I was coming out of, who would have predicted how full our lives could be? Certainly not me. I could not have conceived any of it. That I would earn a master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. That my relationship with Tuesday would become a New York Times best seller (plus a pair of award-winning children's books) and a celebrated documentary film. That I would work with a U.S. senator to get service dogs some of the respect they deserve from the Department of Veterans Affairs. That Tuesday and I would appear together on The Late Show with David Letterman. Do you have any idea how many people watched that show? I don't know exactly. But I know it's up in the millions. Dave is well known as an avid dog person. His own beloved dogs included Spinee, a yellow Labrador retriever. One of his show's longest-running segments was "Stupid Pet Tricks." He couldn't wait to call Tuesday into his arms for a nationally televised hug. Being such a people dog, Tuesday happily obliged.

Who would have believed that we would receive thousands of cards, letters, and emails from people across the country and around the world, sharing their own inspiring stories and sometimes seeking our help? Most of all, for myself and anyone who knew me during those darkest of times, who would have believed that Tuesday and I would leave our isolated lives in New York City and begin traveling full time as road warriors for the causes we believe in most? From Shut-Ins to Open-Roaders, from Inward Looking to Outward Bound. Going from city to city and town to town. Meeting people everywhere—and lots of dogs too. Traveling to forty-nine of the fifty U.S. states. Get ready, Hawaii! It won't be long! I can hardly explain how big a change this was for us. Advocating for disabled veterans, service members, and many others in need. Educating adults and children about the many wonders of service dogs.

I've never sat down and calculated the thousands and thousands of miles we've traveled together, but I do know this much: The longest journey of all was the one inside my head.

I'm not cured. But thanks to Tuesday, I'm permanently on my way. I am a profoundly different person as a result. Wasn't I the guy who once had trouble leaving his own apartment? Wasn't I the person who hated interacting with other people, even in the simplest ways? Sure, I was—but not anymore. I'm half of "Luis and Tuesday" now. It didn't happen overnight. In some ways, it's still a work in progress. But day by day, I've become the man who goes places and does things and has come to see what a glorious adventure living can be.

Until Tuesday told the story of my grueling battle to get here. Tuesday's Promise reveals the amazing world that Tuesday and I discovered once we arrived, a place I could hardly have imagined even existed. And none of this would have happened were it not for a certain rambunctious and furry creature with two golden floppy ears and a constantly wagging tail!