CHAPTER 4

Marine Mom

To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.

MAYA ANGELOU

TUESDAY AND I WERE AT HOME IN NEW YORK CITY WHEN I GOT AN email from a woman in Connecticut named Karin Marinaro. She had a son she was worried sick about.

“Hi, Luis,” she wrote. “I think your book was put into my hands by divine intervention. My son, Rob, has been suffering from severe PTSD since his return from Afghanistan. He is a 1st Lt. in the Marine Corps and is a Human Intel officer.”

Many of the emails we get start off very much like this one. They’re written by moms and dads, wives and girlfriends, husbands and boyfriends, children, friends and, of course, veterans themselves. Someone has an issue. They are frustrated and don’t know where to turn. Somewhere between confused and desperate, they reach out to Tuesday and me, not quite sure how we can help but hoping that we can.

Some days, it feels like I never left the military. I’m taking care of soldiers, taking care of families, taking care of people with disabilities. It’s like being an officer, just without the commission I used to hold. I’m still leading people. I’m still trying to influence them in a positive way. The main difference is now I have a trusted and formidable ally at my side.

In the best cases, we don’t only address their individual issues. We also make a dent on macro issues that affect thousands or millions of other people. What Karin Marinaro told me about her son was both familiar and outrageous. Rob could so easily have been me. “He went through a similar situation like you, where he was ambushed and almost died,” his mother wrote. “One of the young infantry Marines died in his arms.”

As anxious as she was when Rob was sent to Afghanistan, that’s how relieved she was when his deployment ended and he returned to American soil, to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California. “I have to tell you, Luis, I was so happy to have my son back,” she said. “But as the year progressed after his return, I knew the beautiful, pure child I raised was gone. He’s had a few issues in the last year: a DUI and an unauthorized visit to Mexico. One of his Marines committed suicide. Rob was so distraught he didn’t care if he lived or died and went to Mexico because he wanted to be in danger.”

Rob knew he could no longer serve in the military, his mother said. He just wanted to leave with an honorable discharge and get on with his life. Unfortunately, he got caught in a dispute between two three-star generals. “The three-star general at Camp Pendleton said that due to his incredible service and PTSD stress, he should be discharged honorably and be let out in April,” Mrs. Marinaro explained. But what should have flown through without question had been unexpectedly blocked. “Long story short, my son received notice that when his paperwork hit the Pentagon, another three-star general wanted to Administratively Separate him,” a less-than-honorable discharge. “Upon hearing the news, my son lost the will to live. He tried to commit suicide and has been in the hospital twice and is now in a rehab program. Rob’s doctors know that the best thing for him is to be out of the Marine Corps, but the bureaucracy is holding him hostage.” Karin had been told it might be many months, or even longer, before he got out. “I cannot watch my son slowly die. I am reaching out to you to see if you know of anyone that will help me.”

How could we not help?

Karin and I spoke on the phone and agreed to come up with a plan. She didn’t seem at all reluctant to confront the military establishment, if that’s what it took. We agreed we would find a time to meet in person in the not-too-distant future and sort through what came next. Tuesday and I would be on the road for the next week or so, I told Karin. We had several appearances, one at a senior-citizens’ community near the Aberdeen Proving Ground, home of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, where much of the bombs and ammo are made. But I looked forward to speaking with her after I got back to New York.

Tuesday and I arrived an hour early at the Glen Meadows Retirement Community in Glen Arm, Maryland. This is open farm country. Before we went inside the meeting room, I parked the car, began pulling my things together, and let Tuesday out to run off his leash in a nearby field. The corn had already been harvested. Spread into the distance in three directions were acres of open fields dotted with piles of cow manure. We’d been in the car for more than three hours. I knew Tuesday was eager to do his business and work off some of that pent-up energy of his.

I pulled on my jacket, tightened my tie, and collected my papers and my business cards. I could see out the car window, about one hundred yards away, that Tuesday seemed to be romping happily in the field. He was almost dancing out there. He was flopping his shoulders and his back against the ground, while he held his hind legs up normally. He was doing little half-somersaults and rolling in the grass. Watching him I couldn’t help but smile. I was glad he was getting some exercise. I knew we’d be inside for three hours at least.

Then, it hit me.

“Oh, no,” I mumbled to myself. So that’s what Tuesday was so giddy about? He was doing more than dancing away the long car ride.

He’d found a pile of cow manure and was rubbing the poop all over his body. What I took to be somersaults I now realized were his way of smearing the cow manure all over his coat. If this was really a dance, it was his manure dance. He was literally rolling in it and sliding through it and pressing into it and having the time of his life, right before we had to go inside for this event with the nice people of the Glen Meadows Retirement Community.

“Jesus, Tuesday!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Stop that!”

He definitely heard me and came running back to the car. I could see right away what a horrible mess he was. He had three huge splotches of manure on his back and God knows what else buried in his fur. And he smelled awful. Of course, I hadn’t brought much in the way of cleaning products in the car. I did have his brush and a container of baby wipes, but this was a dog who desperately needed a head-to-tail bath. I couldn’t imagine how I would make him presentable to the people inside who were eager to meet him. And pet him. And hug him. And get up-close-and-personal with my well-behaved service dog, as audiences so often like to do.

I did what I could with the brush and the baby wipes. I got the stuff off his vest the best I could, but the mess was everywhere—places a simple wipe couldn’t reach, in the seams of his vest and where the straps connected to the nylon. I stepped back and looked at him as objectively as possible. I was relieved, at least, that he looked vaguely passable. The smell was evaporating and a lot less offensive. I didn’t yell at him. I understood. He’d been in the car for hours. I’d seen how much fun he was having out there. This is what dogs do. They like rolling in smelly things. And, anyone with a dog understands: Surprises like this one invariably hit at the worst possible moment.

I let out one, last, exasperated, “Tuesday!” and we went inside.

Tuesday’s roll in cow manure, I’d soon learn, wasn’t the only surprise of the day. Tuesday and I said hello to the organizers. A good-size crowd was already waiting for us—quite a few vets included, from Vietnam and Korea and a full row up front from World War II. That’s one of the pleasures of events with older audiences. We get to meet members of that Greatest Generation, whose number is dwindling fast. The place could have been a Norman Rockwell painting. It was that American and that pure. Everyone stood for the Pledge of Allegiance. The women’s choir sang the National Anthem. Many of the veterans had on caps and other military gear. No one said anything about Tuesday’s questionable hygiene, though I’m not sure if no one noticed or they were just too polite to bring it up.

We had a great event. I told about the day I got Tuesday and how I never stopped learning from him and about him. I spoke about the invisible wounds of war and how easy it is for many people to overlook them. People asked a lot of questions—about Tuesday’s favorite places and favorite foods, about the sprawling and maddening Veterans Administration bureaucracy, about our lobbying efforts in Washington and across the nation. I told stories about our many adventures and all the many surprises we’d experienced as we traveled around and the one particular surprise we’d encountered in a field right outside. Hopefully, that answered any unasked questions about Tuesday’s slightly musky odor. I signed several dozen books. And just as things were winding down, I got my second surprise of the day. A friendly, blond woman came over to say hello.

“Karin Marinaro,” she said, holding out her hand. I was suddenly face to face with the concerned mother who had written to me about her Marine son.

“When I saw on your website you’d be speaking in Maryland,” she said, “I figured I might as well drive down from Connecticut. It’s not that far.” A quick mental calculation and I realized she’d driven almost 300 miles. Just as I had expected. This was a woman who was focused on getting things done.

Karin and I grabbed some coffee and found a table in a quiet corner where we could sit down and talk. We spent the next three hours figuring out how we could best help her son. Thankfully, this had been an afternoon program and we didn’t keep our Glen Meadows’ hosts up all night.

As Karin and I spoke, I could see Tuesday reacting to her many strong emotions. He could feel her sadness, her stress, and her pain. He naturally gravitated to her. He stood there, nuzzling her and snuggling her underneath the table. She pet him, and she didn’t stop. He became her de facto service dog. It was gratifying to watch him help this woman he’d only just met. For one thing, he’s so good at it. For another, she needed it so badly. And of course, I wanted her to feel relief from the grieving it was obvious she was experiencing. I could do what I could do. But Tuesday, he had an entirely different set of tools. He was bringing Karin into the circle. He’s trained to support, but he also has an intuitive understanding of how to comfort and connect in ways that very few humans, myself included, ever can. He goes to people, as he went to the Tuskegee Airman and now Karin, out of a pure heart filled with pure love.

There is an innocence about the way Tuesday feels a person’s needs and then acts on his instincts. It’s magical. Or more accurately, I could use the world divine. What Tuesday does is so much more than most humans do for so many reasons. Maybe it’s because they don’t know how to or they don’t want to. Maybe it’s because they don’t feel it’s appropriate or they don’t believe they have the skills. Here, Karin and I were, having a conversation that evoked high emotions. It wasn’t inconceivable that I might reach out and hold her hand or give a quick, gentle hug. But as humans, we are socialized to do that only in the most highly restrained ways. We don’t want to make the other person uncomfortable. We don’t want to violate anyone’s personal space.

Dogs aren’t saddled with all that. A dog, especially a highly trained dog, has none of that baggage. A less well-trained dog might invade a stranger’s space, possibly frightening that person with a gregarious welcome, ultimately creating a wall of suspicion between them. A well-trained dog can pierce our human aura to get to the core. A dog can help a person take a deep breath, to really be raw, to be herself.

With Tuesday easing the emotionally difficult parts of Karin’s story, we kept talking. “We have to be smart about this,” I told her. “We have to find the techniques that will be effective.”

She explained to me that Rob’s honorable discharge was formally approved by Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, the three-star commanding general of the 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton and the Marine Corps Forces Central Command. And that should have been that. But General Waldhauser’s decision was promptly overturned by another three-star general in the Pentagon, someone who didn’t know a damn thing about Rob and his case.

“Frankly,” I said to Karin, “this is horse shit.”

“You’re telling me!” she said, shaking her head.

“I have zero qualms going out to Camp Pendleton with you and meeting with the commanding general,” I told her. “I’ll happily go eyeball-to-eyeball with him. But that might not be enough,” I cautioned. “We may need to take this to the Secretary of the Navy. And honestly, a little pressure from Congress and some media publicity wouldn’t hurt.”

These weren’t empty suggestions. I knew I could deliver here. “Never kid yourself,” I told Karin. “The U.S. military is a highly political organization. A decorated army-captain-turned-advocate-turned-New-York-Times-bestselling-author has some leverage to make people pay attention, even at the highest ranks.”

Even as I said the words, I was struck by the sad realization that common sense and decency sometimes have to be prodded. “None of this means the Pentagon will immediately snap to attention,” I warned Karin. “But I do know that the Pentagon brass like avoiding trouble as much as every other bureaucrat. They can’t be sure what we might do. We might call NPR or CNN. They don’t like any of that.”

We finally agreed we’d take a two-pronged approach. Karin would fly to Camp Pendleton and see her son. We agreed we would work together to respond in writing to the Marine Corps and the navy. I would help her and Rob put things in ways that might be clearer or could be expressed in the military’s preferred lingo, which is another way of saying ridiculous legalese. I would also interpret whatever it is they said back.

At the same time, we agreed to launch our second prong of attack. We decided we would work together writing a column for the biggest paper in her home state of Connecticut, the Hartford Courant, explaining exactly what was going on from the clear-eyed perspective of the loving mother of an honored and suffering Marine.

That would get noticed. I was sure of it.

Karin went to be with her son in California. Initially, she stayed several weeks at Camp Pendleton and then returned as often as she could after that. When you are in a situation like this one—and believe me, I know—it feels like it’s you against the Marine Corps or the navy or the army or whatever branch of service it is. It’s a lonely place to be. Any kind of support is comforting. You feel small, unappreciated, misunderstood, inconsequential, in danger. You feel like an ant about to be crushed by a giant shoe. I was glad Karin had the means and desire to be with her son as much as possible.

Karin and I got into long back-and-forths with various military lawyers, commanders, and other officials. It’s amazing how many people get involved in a case like this. She was a great natural advocate for her son—firm, focused, reasonable-sounding, and utterly dogged. She didn’t seem to be scared of anyone.

Meanwhile, we began working on that newspaper column. I helped her focus on the details of her son’s battle with the bureaucracy, while she wrote the words that only a mother could. “To lose a child is one of the worst tragedies in life,” she wrote from her heart. “I have almost lost my son, Marine 1st Lt. Robert Marinaro, 26, twice—once in Afghanistan and once here—by suicide.”

The column we came up with was pretty moving, I thought. It was written in a clear, mother’s voice.

“My son was raised with strong morals,” her piece began. “He received a Navy ROTC scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University and excelled. Rob was commissioned at the top in his ROTC class, received honors from Carnegie Mellon in 2008, and graduated with distinction from the Marine Corps’ Basic and Intelligence schools.”

She went on to describe his deployment in Afghanistan, his excellent leadership skills, and the firefight where one of his Marines was lost. She told about his return to Camp Pendleton and the issues that began to appear.

“I watched my beautiful, bright, loving son wrestle with his mental demons and implored him to get help,” she wrote. “Sadly, Rob did not receive the help he needed until it was too late.” She held nothing back, describing the alcohol, the drugs, the suicide attempt, and the run-ins with the law. She asked why a clueless military bureaucracy could not grasp the causes of this, preferring to turn a hero into a pariah.

“I will do everything in my power to save my son and others like him,” the mother wrote. “They are not ‘worthless,’ as one of the colonels at Camp Pendleton referred to Rob, but human beings who need help. As the mother of a Marine, I stand true to the Marine Corps motto, ‘Semper Fidelis.’ It is sad that there are those in the Marine Corps who do not.”

At the end of the column was a simple author’s description:

“Karin Klarides Marinaro lives in Cheshire,” it said.

The editors, I thought, might have added one more line to that. “She is a mother who helped save her son’s life.”

Our one-two punch sparked immediate momentum for Rob’s case! It’s amazing what media publicity and motherly pressure can achieve. Almost overnight, rational people inside the Pentagon took a second look at Rob’s situation and, without anyone admitting error, things just changed.

Rob received that honorable Marine Corps discharge he so patently deserved. He moved back east to get on with the rest of his life. He seems to be doing well. He still doesn’t like to relive the final parts of his military experience. But he gets well-deserved satisfaction knowing how honorably he served on the battlefield. His mother, Karin, is glad to have her son back and glad their ordeal is over. That’s exactly what Tuesday and I are traveling the country for.