Steve Gagnon can never forget the faces of the dead. Or, in the worst cases, their bodies.
There was that time when IEDs blew three soldiers out of a Humvee. The bodies were flown from Iraq to Kuwait, to be processed by a Mortuary Affairs unit. Steve, a Marine staff sergeant, opened the first casket and unzipped the body bag. He reached into the bag with gloved hands and shoveled out as many ice cubes as he could. It always struck him as odd that they packed bodies in the kind of ice you put in your cocktails and sodas.
When enough ice was gone, he and a colleague lifted the body bag to a steel table. They gently coaxed the body out. The soldier had been badly burned in the explosion. In death, his hands were raised above his head, one higher than the other, palms forward. Steve realized the kid had died trying to crawl away from the inferno.
The other two soldiers came out of their body bags in similar desperate poses. The smell of burned flesh filled the small, hot room. In later years the smell of burned chicken would bring him right smack back to days like this.
Sometimes just a body part would arrive in a casket. There was the corpse that had been in the Euphrates for over a month. And then there was the time he had to count all 243 bone fragments that arrived in Ziploc bags within the body bag. Everything had to be accounted for.
While those who were killed in action had fought so tenaciously for their lives, some who came through his doors had taken their own lives—victims of undiagnosed depression, PTSD, spousal abandonment, lonely holidays.
Lives fought for and lost, lives not fought for and lost. In the end, they all came to him.
Nothing had prepared Steve for this job as logistics chief at this theater mortuary evacuation point. He had spent the majority of his career in logistics. It was pretty much a paperwork position. When he was told he’d be in logistics in Kuwait and Iraq for this deployment from fall of 2007 to spring 2008, he figured he’d be doing the usual business of tracking personnel and equipment in and out of country. Bodies were never mentioned. But Mortuary Affairs, a service within the US Army Quartermaster Corps, was understaffed at the time. They asked the Marines to pitch in, and Steve and his small logistics team got volunteered. He became logistics chief.
He thought that if he looked at his job as a logistics job, it wouldn’t be so disturbing. It was another form of taking inventory—something he’d been doing for years. He looked at it as an honor to be able to get the deceased one step closer to their loved ones back home.
The dead often arrived with tourniquets, bandages, IVs, and other last-ditch medical equipment attached. The freshness of their deaths rattled him. But he tried to keep on task. He looked for ammunition, unexploded ordnance, and anything with sensitive or critical information. That meant going through pockets. Why did uniforms have to have so many pockets? He inventoried everything from personal protective equipment to personal effects: wedding rings, photographs, good-luck charms, rosaries, letters.
Of all the possessions, letters were the worst. Every time he searched a body, he prayed he wouldn’t find a note. “If I don’t make it . . .” they often began. He didn’t want to read them. The idea that this person had felt threatened enough to write this letter, and that the letter would soon be in the hands of a devastated spouse, mother, father, or child, was too much. But reading everything was part of the security aspect of the job. He learned to scan, to look for possible unintentional security concerns while ignoring everything else—or at least trying to.
He wished he could have just scanned the faces rather than truly looked, but it was as if his mind took photographs of the faces. Even when he was relaxing away from the job, he’d close his eyes and see them.
He couldn’t wait until he could go home and put it all behind him.
The images knew no international borders. They had worked their way deep into his memory and hitched a ride home with him after his deployment. Back in Wilmington, North Carolina, he couldn’t sleep more than two or three hours a night. When he did sleep, he saw the carnage that had surrounded him for seven months. Sometimes an active shooter would storm into his dream and wake him up. It was a relief to be awake. He had no desire to go back to sleep.
A year passed. Two years. Three.
Steve was tired all the time. At home he was irritable. He fought with his wife and distanced himself from his children. His wife would tell the kids, “Be careful because you don’t know Dad’s mood when he wakes up.” It made him feel terrible because he knew it was true, but it also made him angry.
He couldn’t understand why he was always so angry. This wasn’t like him. He’d tell his wife he wanted to stop feeling angry, to go back to the way it used to be. She tried to tell him it was the war that had changed him, that she thought he had post-traumatic stress disorder.
He was sure he didn’t have PTSD. He hadn’t gone through anything like what those poor souls on his steel tables had. He was just doing a job, far from the front lines. And besides, after his first deployment to Iraq in 2003, he was fine. His wife reminded him that he was doing regular logistics then, not performing inventory in hell.
It wasn’t until 2011 that the VA diagnosed Steve with PTSD. He’s among the 11 to 20 percent of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans who have experienced PTSD. (The Vietnam War saw even more PTSD casualties—30 percent.)
Even though Steve realized he was far from alone in his diagnosis, he still didn’t want to admit it. He’d been able to hide it until then—even from himself.
It took him two years to realize the diagnosis was right. He was writing a paper on PTSD for an English class, and as his fingers tapped the keyboard, it became clear that he was writing about himself. He went back to the VA and was put on some medications and started receiving counseling. It didn’t work. He felt the counseling wasn’t so hot, and the drugs were sucking the life out of him.
For a while he was taking eight prescriptions for his condition. “I’m being medicated to death,” he’d complain. “I feel like a zombie.”
One sleepless night (which could have been any night in his life at that point) he searched online for information on local organizations that provide psychiatric service dogs for veterans with PTSD. He didn’t understand how a dog could help him. How could a dog know he was having nightmares or feeling anxious? It didn’t make sense. But he couldn’t go on like this anymore.
Three years later, Steve is having a nightmare. From the outside it doesn’t look like much, just a little rustling and kicking, like someone getting more comfortable in his sleep. But somehow his dog, Siler, knows the difference. The golden retriever gets up from his dog bed and pops his front legs onto Steve’s bed. The dog finds Steve’s face and bumps him with his nose.
Steve doesn’t wake up, so Siler bumps him a couple more times. He licks his face. Steve opens his eyes. He sees Siler’s outline and realizes he is not in the mortuary room or on the road with the bombs. He is next to his wife, in his comfortable home, with his dog peering at him and wagging his tail. He rubs Siler’s ears and lands back in reality. He tells him he’s a good boy. When Steve seems more relaxed, Siler lies back down on his dog bed. Steve rests his hand on Siler’s head and goes back to sleep.
Siler is trained to wake up if Steve is having a nightmare. The training was intensive and took months, with volunteers pretending to have nightmares—first while Siler was awake, and later while Siler had been asleep a few minutes, and finally when the dog had been asleep a couple of hours.
As Siler and Steve bonded, Siler learned that nose bumps aren’t always enough to wake up Steve. Siler does not let his sleeping veteran lie. He’s been known to get up on Steve’s bed and lie on his side facing Steve. He’ll push him hard with all four paws, shoving him until he awakens. No one trained him to do this. He just knows what he needs to do.
There are nights Steve doesn’t even try to sleep in his own bed. On rough days, he knows he needs to be right next to Siler. The bed gets crowded with his wife and a seventy-pound dog, so he bunks on Siler’s dog bed. With Siler next to him, he feels calmer and falls asleep more easily, despite being on a dog bed on the floor. If Steve still can’t sleep, he’ll go to another room to do some work or watch TV, and his canine shadow always follows.
Steve is down to two medicines. With Siler at his side, he doesn’t need the others.
“This dog is my best medicine.”
Siler goes to work with Steve most days. He sleeps under his desk. If he senses Steve is stressed or aggravated, he’ll wake up and put his head on Steve’s lap, or come out and lean against him. Something so simple, but it makes all the difference. Anger evaporates. A wounded veteran can breathe again.
There’s no doubt that psychiatric service dogs for PTSD can help fix lives broken by the hell of war. Stories abound about how they diminish the depression, anxiety, anger, negative moods, reckless behavior, sleep troubles, and disengagement that plague many veterans with PTSD.
Until recently the success of these service dogs has been largely anecdotal. That’s usually good enough for anyone desperate enough to seek out a service dog. But for years there’s been a call for more empirical evidence to see if specially trained dogs really do effect measurable clinical changes in veterans—and, if so, to determine how to best use the dogs.
Why is this data-driven evidence needed? In part because the Department of Veterans Affairs has covered certain expenses for service dogs who help veterans with physical impairments be as independent as possible. If the VA pays for some of the mobility-assistance dog expenses for vets with physical disabilities, the argument goes, why not do so for veterans with mental health issues?
For that to happen, the VA wants proof—or something close to it. This has inspired a number of studies.
A small study published in 2018 in the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal found that PTSD service dogs reduced veterans’ hypervigilance, suicidal impulses, and medication use, and improved the quality and duration of sleep.
As of this writing, a large-scale National Institutes of Health clinical trial has been going on for about one and a half of its three years. A preliminary study by the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine, which is also leading the NIH-funded study, showed promising results.
That study, published in 2018 in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, looked at 141 veterans with PTSD. Half were on a waiting list to get a psychiatric service dog for their PTSD, and the other half already had their service dog.
“We found that the group of veterans with service dogs had significantly lower levels of PTSD symptomology than those who did not have a service dog,” Purdue’s Maggie O’Haire, PhD, who coauthored the study, said in a Purdue news release. “They also had lower levels of depression, lower anxiety and increased social participation, meaning a willingness to leave their house and go engage with society in different activities.”
The veterans with the psychiatric service dogs also had higher levels of life satisfaction and resilience, and less absenteeism from work due to health problems.
“The results of this study demonstrate not only the impact of this unbreakable bond, but that these service dogs are so much more than service dogs,” wrote David Van Brunt, of Bayer Animal Health, which co-funded the research. “They are able to bring the joy of living back into veterans’ lives.”
One small step for dogs, one giant leap forward for the veterans they serve.
There are dozens of organizations around the United States that train dogs for veterans with PTSD. It’s a big industry that’s been growing for years. There are some top-notch organizations—large and small—that train great dogs and give their veterans the support they need. And there are some not-so-great organizations. They’re often well-meaning, but the dogs and/or the veterans are sometimes not prepared when they’re paired.
I learned that Steve’s dog, Siler, had spent several months of his young life learning his impressive skills from inmates in prisons in West Virginia. Their crimes ranged from prescription forgery to robbery to murder. I reached out to Paws4People, the organization that brought Siler and Steve together. Danielle Cockerham, deputy executive director, told me that inmates, using positive training, taught Siler about 120 commands. They do this for all the dogs they train, regardless of what the dogs’ future jobs will be.
Gus knows maybe twelve commands, and that’s a record for any dog I’ve ever had. I wanted to meet these inmates who were training dogs with such big vocabularies. I asked Danielle if I could visit one of the prisons to see how the organization’s Paws4Prisons program works. She said it would take time to secure a visit. The prisons were not as open to journalists as they had been, and there were a lot of hurdles.
Prisons have become common training grounds for training dogs since Sister Pauline Quinn, a Dominican nun, started the first inmate dog-training program in 1981.* As demand for service dogs increases, many organizations across the United States are launching their own prison programs in order to provide more dogs to more people more quickly. Everyone benefits, from the prisoners chosen for these programs to the budgets of the organizations to the people getting dogs who will change their lives.
Paws4People is based in Wilmington, North Carolina, but works with four prisons in West Virginia—a good ten-hour drive away. It’s a haul, especially with dogs in tow. Why so far away? The organization launched in West Virginia years ago, when its founder was living there, and West Virginia’s Department of Corrections has been supportive, so they’ve maintained the relationship. Cece McConnell, who oversees the Paws4Prisons program, makes the drive about every six weeks, checking on the prisoners, picking up their homework, sometimes bringing dogs back or forth and matching recipients with dogs.
A few weeks after making my request to check out the prison training program in person, I got a voicemail from Danielle.
“How would you like to go see some of the prisons with Cece? You can spend a couple of days up in West Virginia prisons and drive back with her and a bunch of dogs in a van through the Appalachians.
“It’s a long drive, but it’ll be an adventure.”
Just my kind of business trip.
The road Cece and I take from our hotel to the first prison we’ll visit follows the muddy Ohio River through deep-green land studded with mobile homes past their prime. Signs encouraging the acceptance of God and Jesus—“Every Knee Shall Bow” and “Jesus is your Lord and Savior”—are nailed to trees and leaning against rusty cars that won’t be going anywhere until they’re hauled off or dismantled. A skinny beige dog ambles along the railroad tracks with a scruffy salt-and-pepper companion. An occasional smokestack puffs into the gray sky.
Our van weaves through this land of stark contrasts. Rich natural landscapes like this back in California would be home to multimillion-dollar houses and restaurants with one-word names. Instead, West Virginia’s beauty bears witness to high rates of unemployment, poverty, and drug abuse.
The inmates we’ll spend the day visiting* are often the collateral damage of this dilapidated economy: The coal miner who lost his job and got in fight after fight until one day he didn’t know when to stop. The man who was protecting his twelve-year-old brother from bullies when he was nineteen and went too far. Hardscrabble childhoods leading to dead-end roads where opioids and meth and booze seem like the only way out.
Paws4Prisons is a coveted program among inmates. The only ones who won’t be considered are those who have committed crimes against children, animals, or the elderly. It helps to have a decent prison record, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Cece says if someone seems like they’d be a good fit, she does what she can to make room.
Paws4Prisons is a six-month-long academic program. In addition to training the dogs using positive reinforcement, participants attend classes, take tests, and write essays. It’s not all about dogs either. Essays are several pages long and designed to help the inmates gain insight into their lives. Topics include “Addiction—why do you think you have it?” And “There’s someone in your life you have to apologize to. Please write about this.”
“The program helps the inmates to connect to the outside world. They are doing something bigger than themselves,” Cece says. “Most of them have never done anything for someone else—least of all someone they don’t know. The program enables them to help someone, and in return they learn to love, heal, and most of them reconnect to their families and children and show them that they aren’t terrible people; they are people who made a terrible mistake or terrible decision. They learn humility, integrity, discipline, gratitude, respect, and more. They learn to love and be loved. They learn they are worthy of love.”
My eyes get wet. I try not to blink until the tears evaporate. (Cece doesn’t know me yet. I don’t want her to think I’m not a pro.)
She tells me that despite the rigors, once the prisoners are in the program, most never want to leave. They say it’s the first time they’ve felt a purpose in their lives. They know they’ve taken something from society and feel that by helping the dogs get ready to assist people with difficulties, they can help give something back. And having a dog by them nearly 24/7 is therapeutic—lessening the loneliness and isolation and providing a built-in best friend. Cece explains the bond:
“The dog doesn’t judge them for what they did or who they are or where they came from or how much money they have. A dog doesn’t know how to do these things. If they love a dog, feed him, take care of him, don’t abuse him, a dog will give them love they may have never had.”
Cece knows firsthand what it means to train a dog as an inmate: In 2007 she was sentenced to two years in federal prison in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia, for construction contract fraud. She saw the papers going through, and she signed them even though she had suspicions they weren’t legitimate. In the eyes of the law, she was part of the fraud. She had to leave her two children behind.
Some inmates find God in prison; Cece found dogs. (She had already found God.) Paws4People had just rolled out its prison program. Paws4Prisons had been in Cece’s prison for six months before she arrived. Three days into serving her sentence, she became part of the program. She quickly rose to the top and became a valued trainer. When she was released, the organization didn’t want to let her go. She could identify with the prisoners and knew how to work with them. She became a volunteer two weeks after her prison term ended. She volunteered until 2013, when there was funding to hire her.
Our first stop this day is at Lakin Correctional Center, a women’s prison that houses custody levels from minimum to maximum. Cece meets with the forty-two khaki-clad women in the program for a couple of hours and updates them on how some of their dogs are doing in the outside world.
A few women wipe away happy tears when they hear about the successes of the dogs they’d worked so hard to train. The dogs don’t stay with the same prisoners the whole time, but the trainers still get attached. At the end of the meeting, Cece announces the names of the dogs who will be moving to the men’s prison for their next round of training. Some of the women just nod, understanding it’s part of the process to let go. A couple of others get emotional. They hug their dogs, say good-bye, and file out to lunch.
As Cece, two prison employees, and I walk out with several leashed dogs, we pass the chow hall line. One of the inmates from the program is weeping so hard that her body shudders as she watches a dog she came to love walk out of prison and out of her life forever.
The dogs won’t be free for long. Ninety minutes after we leave Lakin, we arrive at St. Mary’s Correctional Center, a medium-security men’s prison. The dogs, seemingly unfazed by the change of venue and the fact that they’re back in the slammer, wag through security, and are soon distributed among the excited trainers who have been waiting for them in the prison yard.
“Good dawg!” “You’re going to like it at St. Mary’s!” The head rubs and hearty greetings seem to make the dogs feel welcome as they jog off to their new quarters with their new trainers.
A half hour later, the fifty men in the St. Mary’s dog program assemble in the prison’s gymnasium and take their seats. Four of the inmates have dogs with them. One after the other, the men with the dogs walk up to a podium and address a Marine veteran who has flown in from North Carolina to be matched with his future psychiatric service dog, who will help him cope with PTSD. They tell their stories eloquently and compellingly. One man with thick-rimmed black glasses reminiscent of a 1960s NASA scientist bats tears back when talking about his children, and how the dogs have helped make him a better father, even from behind bars.
The Marine veteran sits riveted as he listens. When it’s his turn, he tells his story of how the hell of war damaged him. On the outside he’s a strapping Marine, the kind you see on recruitment posters. But just below the surface, he says, he’s angry and anxious and on edge almost all the time. He’s here with his mother, who hopes that adding a dog to his therapy and meds will help save him.
Now it’s the dogs’ turn. Working with their trainers, they show off some of their skills. A golden retriever opens a refrigerator, takes out a bottle of water, and closes the fridge. A couple of dogs show how they calm and ground someone who appears anxious. A Lab alerts to someone approaching from behind. A golden-Lab mix shows how he can summon help for someone who has passed out, and how he can help him stand back up, using his own body to aid the man’s balance.
After the demos, it’s time for the dogs to meet the veteran. Cece has narrowed the candidates to these four, but now it’s up to the dogs. There’s a kind of chemistry that she’s looking for. “We’ve had dogs who won’t go near someone I thought they’d do well with. They have this demeanor like they’re giving them the middle finger almost,” she says. “Then there are the dogs who walk up and almost seem to say, This is my guy.”
The prison version of speed dating commences. One handler at a time walks toward the veteran’s chair and lets go of the leash. A chocolate Labrador retriever who moves with the lithe enthusiasm of a cartoon character becomes even more animated near the veteran. To me, it looks like love, but Cece says it’s too much energy. This vet needs a calm, reassuring dog. One dog approaches him hesitantly and seems to want to leave. A Lab appears to like him well enough, sitting next to him and letting the Marine pet him. Last up is Blu, an eighteen-month-old golden retriever.
Cece had noticed that Blu “was all eyes” on the veteran during the demo. She has a good feeling about this dog. And sure enough, when it’s Blu’s turn to meet him, he walks right up to him, turns around, and sits between his feet—a classic “anchor” position that trained dogs take when they sense their person is anxious. The veteran strokes Blu’s fur and talks to him. He looks more relaxed with Blu than he had been with the other dogs.
At the end of the session, Cece announces that Blu is the match, and that he’ll be one of the dogs going back to Wilmington with us the next day. The veteran’s mom breaks out in a wide smile, clasping her hands together under her chin. “I liked him best all along,” she tells me quietly. Her son wouldn’t be getting Blu for a while, though. In Wilmington the dog will be receiving another few months of training with a student from the University of North Carolina Wilmington Service Dog Training Program.
Before he leaves, the vet tells the inmate who’s with Blu that he’s grateful for everything he’s done.
“Happy to pay it forward,” the inmate responds. “I think you’re going to really like this guy.”
Blu is one of the first to jump into the van the next morning at 7:55 when we load it with twelve dogs who will be going on the journey back to North Carolina. Most of the dogs did the first leg of this round-trip van ride six to ten months earlier when they were sixteen to eighteen weeks old. They left North Carolina as preschoolers, and thanks to the prison program, they were going back with the canine equivalent of college degrees.
All but two of the dogs who aren’t that keen on each other get to choose their spots on the rubber-coated van floor. The other two will ride in kennels. As we drive south, the van is remarkably quiet. Cece hopes to keep it that way. It’s a ten-hour ride. She doesn’t stop for the dogs to stretch their legs or go to the bathroom because it would add too much time to the already long trip, and it could be dangerous, with dogs potentially escaping as she lets others out.
She has taken dogs back and forth dozens of times (“way too many to count”) and has it down to something of a science. The dogs don’t get food after 5 p.m. the day before a trip. At 9 p.m. they get a little water, and are taken out to relieve themselves every two hours. By the time she picks them up in the morning, they should be fairly empty. Since they mostly just lie down and sleep for the ride, she says ten hours isn’t that bad. It’s rare that anyone has an accident in the back of the van.
My own bladder has not been prepped like this, and I’m hoping Cece won’t mind making a stop or two along the way.
Our passengers today will soon be embarking on a variety of career trajectories, and consist of Labs of various colors, golden retrievers, and some Lab-golden mixes. As we head south, I assemble the manifest:
Blu—Matched with the veteran with PTSD
Helo—Not yet determined, but he’ll be working in a health care or educational setting
Hopkins—Emotional support dog
Kennedy—Dental dog offering comfort to nervous dental patients in a rehabilitation facility
Lansing—Emotional support dog
Layton—Not yet matched
Lochlynn—Helping patients in a psychiatric facility
Noah—Emotional support dog; “he wasn’t cut out for service dog work”
Rhode—Psychiatric/medical alert dog for a veteran
Shire—Not yet matched
Trent—Civilian psychiatric/medical alert dog
Vivian—Paws4People ambassador and demo giver
At 9:25 a.m. Lochlynn, a golden retriever, manages to get her front half over the barrier of kennels and supply boxes Cece has set up between our seats and the back of the van. The dog is perched on Cece’s left shoulder and is smiling as she watches the scenery through the windshield. (Goldens almost always look like they’re smiling.)
I realize how exciting it must be for this freshly sprung dog. I am sure that in the back of the van, where I can’t see, Lochlynn’s tail is wagging and whacking another dog in the face.
“Ugh, this never happens!” Cece says.
Cece tells her to go “back, back, back,” but the dog won’t budge. Instead, she rests her head on Cece’s shoulder. From my vantage point, it looks like she’s either giving Cece driving tips or trying to strike a deal: Let me stay here and I’ll be the best service dog ever.
At 9:38 a.m. Cece pulls into a Marathon gas station, gets out, and gently pushes Lochlynn back. She adds some towels and blankets to the top of the blockade to prevent more visits. I hop out and stretch my legs, and when I climb back in, it smells really doggy. It didn’t smell like that before. Clearly I have already gone nose-blind. It dawns on me that my luggage, in the back with the dogs and secured in a kennel above leg-lift range, is probably sponging up the odor and will be an olfactory souvenir of our trip.
We continue our drive down Interstate 77. Blu’s head pops up over the barrier, but Cece tells him, “HEY!” and he disappears. The rain starts as the green hills turn to mountains. We’re in the Appalachians now. Our air conditioner is going full blast to keep the dogs cool on this muggy mid-May morning.
It gets cold fast. I pull the hood of my sweatshirt over my head to try to keep warm. As soon as I do this, a magical scarf appears around my neck. The scarf is a living, breathing dog, complete with dog breath. I look at his collar and see this is Helo. He has somehow squished his way past the barrier on my side, and his paws are draped over my shoulders. A true helicopter dog. I wonder if somehow he knows I’m cold. But he’s not my miracle muffler for long. After a couple of minutes, Cece notices him and gives him a look. My scarf slinks to the back of the van.
It’s quiet now except for the rain dancing on the roof of the van and the country music playing quietly on the radio. I tell Cece I don’t know how she does this drive so often, alone, with so many dogs, on these winding roads perched so high up that looking down in certain spots can give you vertigo.
“I love this job and I’m driven to do it. I’ve got a personal reason, too.”
She tells me the story of her big brother, John Champion, as we loop through the Appalachians.
First Sergeant John Champion served in the Army from 1985 to 2007. He started as a medic and worked his way into the 82nd Airborne Division, the elite infantry division specializing in parachute assault. He spent a decade with the 82nd Airborne, and eleven years as a Special Forces operator. During his career he served several combat tours, including two to Iraq and two to Afghanistan. He received a Silver Star and a Bronze Star and a long list of other honors for his courage and valor.
But for the last years of his service, it was clear to family that something was amiss. He had fought many battles overseas, but now he seemed to be fighting them in his head. There were the outbursts of anger, the screams only he heard. Usually they were the screams of children.
During his most recent deployments, boys as young as ten or eleven would come at soldiers with submachine guns or throw IEDs in their path. John didn’t want to kill them. He wanted to put them on planes back to the United States and show them a good life, show them he wanted to help them, not hurt them. But sometimes there was no choice. Like the time a boy held an Uzi to his friend’s head. The interpreter couldn’t talk him down. The kid was about to blow his friend’s life away.
Later the friend would tell Cece, “I was going to be dead any second. John did what he had to do. He saved my life.”
The ghosts of the dead children stayed with John. He sought help, but there was too much red tape, and help came in the form of pills he didn’t want to take. He felt that deadening the pain or sleeping wasn’t the solution.
After he retired from the Army, he took a government contract job in Rwanda for two years. When the contract ended, he came back to the United States and shifted gears. He got a job as manager of a restaurant in Beaufort, North Carolina, once voted “America’s Coolest Small Town.” He became a member of a nearby Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post and was so popular he quickly rose to post commander.
On July 6, 2009, John packed his Jeep with fishing equipment. He had everything but bait. He stopped at a local store and bought two lottery tickets, but they weren’t winners. He went to Burger King.
The next morning someone at the VFW was looking for photocopy paper, which was kept in John’s office. He knocked. No one answered, so he entered.
He found John there, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head.
Cece got the news in prison. Her sentence was almost complete. She still feels remorse that she couldn’t help him because she was behind bars. John had always been there for her. He was six years older and a great protector for Cece, who was born into turmoil after her father beat her mother so badly she went into early labor.
“You’re the best of us, kid,” John would frequently tell Cece. She can still hear him saying this. She wants to live up to his belief in her.
The road is white with rain. It’s raining so hard now that we have to almost shout to hear each other. After the story of her brother, it’s not the time for high-volume talking, so we fall silent for a while. I absorb the tragic story. Cece wipes away tears. The dogs don’t say a word.
As we approach Raleigh, the rain lets up. As if to make up for the silence, two dogs begin barking, sharp staccato barks. Maybe they know we’re nearing the end of the trip. Or maybe they just want to eat and find a nice patch of grass or a fire hydrant.
Cece stops at a gas station to fuel up for the last leg. When we hit the road again, more dogs join the bark chorus. The sleeping dogs no longer lie.
We decide to see if music might calm the dogs. We try different artists from her iPod music library. Waylon Jennings only sets the dogs to barking more. But a catchy Blake Shelton version of a song called “Ol’ Red” seems to grab their attention. They fall silent. The song is about a prisoner who escapes thanks to distracting a tracking dog named Red with a female bluetick hound.
Cece tells me one of the inmates we met at St. Mary’s recently trained a red dog. He’d sing this song with a big smile, even around the guards. I thought the song would pump up the dogs, but they quiet down and stay chill through the song. Maybe the tune is familiar to some of them.
The effect doesn’t last, though. Once it ends, one dog barks, and then another.
“We’re almost there! The home stretch! Just a few more lights!” Cece calls to them.
She selects a slow gospel song from Shekinah Glory Ministry. The dogs quiet down. The rain starts again. We pass a sign. “Welcome to the City of Wilmington, North Carolina!”
In a half hour, the dogs have been handed to their assigned student trainers, who run them out to a grassy area next to the van. When the dogs are done with their constitutionals, one by one they trot away with their new trainers, ready to move on to the next stage of becoming someone’s hero.
The next morning I met with Army veteran Wil Nobles and his chocolate Lab, Harnett. The dog had taken the long journey from the prisons about eighteen months earlier. Wil and I sat on rocking chairs on a covered porch in a semi-rural area of Wilmington during a rainstorm.
Every so often a puff of wind brought tiny dusty white flowers through the boards of the porch’s roof. No rain came through, but the flowers descended on us like so many miniature snowflakes. Harnett ended up with an ivory pattern on his fur as he lay at Wil’s feet.
Wil talked about his two deployments. His first was in 2005, when he was a fuel-supply specialist for aircraft. He worked on refueling and rearming helicopters in Camp Taji and Forward Operating Base Kalsu, both near Baghdad. The birds—Black Hawks, Apaches, Chinooks—would still be running as he and his crew swiftly performed their tasks. It was exciting, fast-paced, and relatively safe.
They took some mortar rounds. And one of the Apache crews he’d worked with got shot down. Both pilots were killed. That got to him, but he thought he processed it pretty well.
He came home and felt he was doing OK. His wife said he was more tense. He decided not to continue in active duty and joined the National Guard instead. During his second year in the National Guard, he got the news he was deploying.
“Just what I didn’t want,” he said.
This time he was in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, working logistics. It was quieter than the first deployment. But there was this one incident where they lost three guys. The soldiers were in a convoy in a Humvee, and an IED exploded in the road. Wil was responsible for getting the response team to them, but the soldiers had burned to death, and there was nothing the team could do.*
He knew two of the soldiers. When the vehicle came back, he had to deal with it as part of his logistics job.
“The smell—the burned flesh—I’ll never get it out of my head.”
As he told the story, he twisted Harnett’s leash in his hand. Harnett looked at him, stood up, and put his head in Wil’s lap.
Wil stopped twisting the leash and stroked Harnett’s head. He became visibly more relaxed as he continued his story.
When he came back from that deployment, he felt his life slipping out of control. “I kind of knew I wasn’t the same,” he said.
“I was tearing my family apart. I’d get angry at my wife easily. I was having multiple affairs. I didn’t care about life too much. I had terrible anxiety. I didn’t like crowds. I got nervous in public places. You name it.”
He took some online surveys and realized he probably had PTSD. He went to the VA and ended up taking what he calls “VA candy” for years.
Wil was helping his in-laws with their business, but with all the medications, he barely felt functional. He was flat, zombied out.
“The meds made me feel like I wasn’t me. I was on antidepressants, antianxiety meds, all kinds of things, five or six pills all the time,” he said. “The side effects were awful, and when they realized something wasn’t working, they’d give you another and see how it worked.
“There’s a reason they call it practicing medicine. It was really sad. You’re like a guinea pig.”
He decided to quit, cold turkey. The withdrawals were awful. He felt like he had the flu. His stomach hurt. His body hurt. He doesn’t recommend others do it this way. But after it passed, he was glad he’d quit.
“I felt better just because I was me,” he said. “The people around me didn’t think I was better, though, because I was me.”
All his anger issues came back. So did the anxiety, the nightmares, the panic attacks, the depression. But he was just relieved to be off the meds, happy to be able to feel anything.
His wife told him that if he wasn’t going to take the medication, he had to do something to improve. He said the VA offered therapy only once every couple of months. And it wasn’t cutting it.
Wil didn’t know what to do. He looked into going for in-house therapy at a VA in Asheville, but he would have missed Thanksgiving and Christmas. One day he attended a local event for veterans and ran into a man who was there with his psychiatric service dog. The veteran saw how Wil always tapped his foot nervously when he was sitting. He could spot an anxious veteran.
“I think a service dog would probably be pretty good for you,” the man told him. “It’ll help you with that leg and a lot of other things that probably go with it.”
Wil talked it over with his wife, and they decided to give it a try. He met someone in his church who had a service dog through Paws4People and applied for the program. His application moved along quickly, and a few months later, he was introduced to Harnett at St. Mary’s. Wil liked Harnett from the start, but it was a matter of how much Harnett liked him.
Harnett acted like he’d known Wil a long time. They just fit.
They’d been together about a year when we met. He said that between Harnett and regular counseling he’s getting now (a stipulation of the program is that veterans have to be getting some kind of counseling), his life has become infinitely better. So has his family’s.
“Having Harnett is the biggest thing every day. I can’t even describe it,” he said. Harnett keeps Wil calm in public; if Wil senses his anxiety levels rising, Harnett is just a command away from being able to help him. Often Harnett does it on his own. He’ll “anchor” while standing in line or “visit” while Wil is sitting, as he did when he put his head in Wil’s lap.
But of all the commands Wil uses with Harnett, “cuddle” is his favorite. “It’s the best. Sometimes that’s all I need, to feel his weight and his warmth right next to me.
“My wife loves him, but I think she feels like he’s a second spouse,” he said and laughed. “I’m more affectionate now in general, more in tune with my emotions, so she really appreciates that. I’ve hardly had any angry outbursts since Harnett. He’s brought out the real me. Medicine only hid it.”
Wil has a tattoo on the inside of his left arm. It’s a long arrow with the word “warrior.”
I asked him about it.
For years he didn’t feel like a warrior, he said. “Really, I felt like the opposite of a warrior, whatever that is. Powerless and helpless.”
Then along came a dog who’d done time in prison.
It’s easy to think about PTSD only in relation to veterans who have seen combat. But that’s just part of the story.
More than twice as many women as men are affected by PTSD. The US Department of Veterans Affairs, which keeps track of the latest studies on PTSD, reports that about 10 percent of women and 4 percent of men will develop PTSD during their lifetime. The VA PTSD website states that one-third of women will experience sexual assault or childhood sexual abuse, making these the most common traumas for women—traumas that can lead to PTSD.*
One balmy spring day, I was in Southern California to see how Little Angels Service Dogs trained seizure-alert dogs. As I was watching Dexter gleefully perform his tasks, I noticed a young English cream retriever lying on the sidelines. She seemed to be hanging out with Judy, one of the trainers. (You met Judy and Dexter in Chapter 2.) In between Dexter’s romps with the life-alert button and the medicine pouch, I asked Judy about this other pup.
“This is Oprah,” she said. “I love telling people I hang out with Oprah all day. They always do a double take.”
But this wasn’t the time or place to go into who Oprah was and why she was with Judy. Their story would unfold over the coming months.
The abuse started when Judy was five years old. She somehow found herself alone with her abuser. After that, it happened every few summers. She dreaded going on vacation, but she couldn’t tell her parents. Her abuser—and, eventually, abusers—said that terrible things would happen to her and to anyone she told.
So she stuffed her anger and fear and disgust and guilt and pain away as best as she could. After several years, summer vacations changed, and she thought it was behind her.
She had a pretty good run of it for a few years, but then, in college at the University of San Diego, something else happened. Different person, same results. She was old enough now that she felt she should have more control, so the guilt overwhelmed her. And the depression took over. She got some counseling, but she wouldn’t part with her secrets. She was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.
Comedy was the only therapy that worked. She took to the stage as a stand-up comic at school and was a hit. She became known as the Catholic Comedian and performed her faith-based routines to packed audiences. On the stage, the rest of her world went out of focus, and the burden of her past disappeared.
After college she toured full-time, bringing laughter to military bases, conferences, churches, top comedy clubs, and TV. Her unique brand of humor landed her a spot on The Dennis Miller Show. She opened for comic legends Paula Poundstone, Margaret Cho, and Mark Curry. Life should have been good.
But behind the scenes, she was barely functional. She couldn’t shake the mysterious depression. And there were the flashbacks. She wanted some way to get rid of the part of her that she hated. Death seemed like the only way to shed it all.
She couldn’t deliberately kill herself, though; suicide was off the table because she’s devoutly Catholic. But she realized there were other escape doors—ones that might not feel so overtly suicidal. She was hardly sleeping, and she wasn’t really eating. Maybe one PowerBar all day. And she was running several miles daily. She knew she was running from something and, at the same time, hoped she was running toward the final finish line.
“I really thought I’d run to death,” she says.
If she wasn’t running, she was most likely in bed. She went through periods where she didn’t want to wake up, or go out, or see anyone. She managed to rally herself for her shows and usually pulled herself together for church. Otherwise she was running or hiding.
In 2012, she didn’t have the strength to hold back the secret of her years of sexual abuse any longer. She finally told her story to a therapist. The therapist diagnosed her with PTSD. A psychiatrist later confirmed the diagnosis. Judy didn’t understand.
“I thought it was something guys from the Vietnam War got, not women in Southern California,” she says. “How could I have PTSD?”
While she was coming to terms with her diagnosis, she ran across an article on psychiatric service dogs for veterans with PTSD. She thought if they could help men and women coming back from war, they might be able to help her. Something inside her told her she had to pursue this—that it might be her last chance.
But finding an organization that provided PTSD service dogs to people who’d never gone to war wasn’t easy. Every call she made ended with a little less hope. Everything was riding on this. She couldn’t give up.
“In my mind, it was either a dog or death,” she says.
A winding path led to a small organization only about an hour east of her home. The owner of Little Angels Service Dogs took Judy’s need for a dog seriously. After all, Judy had the same symptoms as war veterans—flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety, depression—and unlike soldiers on battlefields, she had to face her enemy alone. “We’ve got to do something for you,” she told Judy.
Daisy is a yellow Lab with light brown eyes Judy describes as “looking right past all the BS other people see and getting straight to the heart.” When she was Judy’s service dog, she was part therapist, part best friend, and you could even say part pharmaceutical. She did what nothing and no one else has been able to during Judy’s long fight with PTSD.
Daisy gently brought Judy out of flashbacks and nightmares and calmed her, often by applying the canine version of deep-pressure therapy: She’d lie on Judy with all or most of her weight. If Judy was sitting, she’d get on her lap and snuggle tight, or stand with her back paws on the ground and her front half curled around her in something like a hug.
When Daisy sensed Judy’s anxiety rising, she’d bump her with her nose. (Originally Daisy’s signal for anxiety was alerting with her paw. But she was too enthusiastic. “I looked like a mixed martial artist who sucked at being a mixed martial artist,” Judy says. So they switched the alert to the nose nudge.)
If possible, Judy would sit, and Daisy would work her magic. Judy hugged her and put her head down on her. Her tension dissipated. The deep pressure helped Judy remain in the present and reminded her she was not alone.
“It was like Valium,” she says. “Actually, better than Valium.”
Daisy also had her back while she stood in lines, offering a buffer between Judy and others. And on rougher days, she helped her get out of bed. Some of this was Daisy simply being driven by her stomach. When she was hungry for breakfast, she nuzzled Judy until she woke up. Then she covered her face with kisses. If that didn’t work, she’d stand over her and bark until she moved.
“I love her more than anything or anyone, and being able to focus on her needs and off of mine helped me get up and get going to tackle the day with her,” Judy says.
Daisy also had another job: She was Judy’s mobility-assistance dog. She helped stabilize and brace Judy when she was feeling beat up from her bum back: Judy had spinal fusion of a few vertebrae, and while she maintained an active lifestyle, sometimes she needed a little extra help.
“God knew he didn’t have to send me a person, a therapist, or a drug. He knew what I could handle and sent me a dog,” she says.
When Judy first brought Daisy home after their initial training weeks, she could sense life beginning to shift in her favor. “I hadn’t felt this normal and safe for a long, long, long, long, long time,” she says.
Psychiatric service dogs need frequent feedback from their people to let them know if they’re helping and how they’re doing. It’s not like they have a single concrete scent to work with, as medical alert dogs do. Continually working with Daisy to be in tune with her mental state helped Judy to check in with herself—something she had never done before.
“I had this seventy-five-pound psychologist checking in with me all the time, so I had to be aware of things I used to try to bury,” she says. “She enabled me to talk about this horrible stuff that a few years ago I’d rather have taken a bullet than admit it.
“Daisy saved my life.”
But even the most dedicated heroes have their limits.
It was the kind of perfect mid-September San Diego day that calls surfers to the Pacific. The water temperature was comfortable, and the waves were a few feet and glassy, just right for an easy ride.
Judy was driving her Ford Escape to pick up a longboard at her parents’ house and meet some friends at the beach. She had undergone the back surgery a year earlier, and thanks to regular physical therapy, and mobility help from Daisy, she was doing well and happy to be able to surf again.
Daisy loves the beach as much as any other red-blooded Labrador retriever. She was hooked into her harness in the back seat and enjoying the breeze that made her ears flap like small velvet wings. It was going to be a fun day for both of them.
Judy came to a stop behind a truck at a traffic signal. When the light turned green, she slowly accelerated, and there was the oddest sensation. Her SUV sped off out of control at an angle to the right. She realized it was nothing she was doing. Oh my God, I think we’re in a car accident. A small truck going thirty to forty miles per hour had smashed into them.
Even though Daisy was buckled in a harness, she flew into the front seat. They were about to crash down a steep embankment when Judy pulled to the left.
Everything stopped.
Judy managed to call 9-1-1. Soon a fire engine, ambulance, and sheriff arrived. Judy felt a sharp pain in her back and neck. EMTs wanted to transfer her to the ambulance.
“I’m not going unless my service dog can ride with me,” she told them.
“Of course she can, that’s not a problem.”
They carefully moved Judy onto a gurney. As soon as she was loaded into the ambulance, a firefighter brought Daisy over. Judy and Daisy rode together to the emergency room. Daisy seemed shaken and pressed close to Judy. Once at the hospital’s ambulance entrance, Daisy flanked the gurney as they wheeled Judy in. Staff warmly greeted Daisy first, then Judy.
Physically, Judy and Daisy were lucky. Nothing was broken, and no damage had been done to the hardware in Judy’s back from her spinal fusion. But soft-tissue damage led to new nerve pain in her neck and back. She had to start physical therapy from scratch.
Daisy would never be the same dog. Even though she hadn’t been seriously hurt physically, something inside her—something that can’t be detected by X-rays or MRIs—had broken.
On walks, noises she had never reacted to before would make her jump. Daisy could no longer join Judy on the stage during her comedy acts. Before, she had slept during Judy’s stand-up routine (this always provided Judy with self-deprecating material). After the accident, Daisy would shake uncontrollably. Judy gave up on bringing her to the stage.
At home Daisy sought refuge in the bathtub. Judy could tell when Daisy was in the tub when she saw the shower curtain trembling.
She took Daisy to veterinarians and behaviorists. They diagnosed her with PTSD and did what they could. But nothing—not any combination of medicines, not prescribed rest, not any of the suggestions offered by behaviorists—made much difference.
For a while, the beach seemed to be the only place where Daisy’s anxiety decreased. But then she started barking at seaweed and surfers.
“She went from being my energetic rock to being a bowl of Jell-O,” says Judy. “My poor service dog needs her own service dog.”
Instead of alerting to Judy’s anxiety, Daisy seemed to be alerting to her own anxiety. Roles reversed. Judy found herself helping Daisy as Daisy had once helped her. She woke Daisy from nightmares, calmed her with deep pressure, and tried to be her rock. She didn’t want to give up on her.
But every time she brought Daisy out as her service dog, she felt like she was bringing a shadow to Little Angels, where she had started working as a trainer after going through an extensive program there.
“She was a broken wheelchair,” she says.
One day she looked at her shaking dog wearing a service dog vest, and she knew what she had to do. She needed to get another service dog and retire Daisy. The idea of finding a new service dog, training her, and seeing if it was a good match was overwhelming. The idea of leaving Daisy at home or with her parents while she went out in the world with the new dog was worse.
“I’d take a bullet for Daisy,” she says. “I felt like I was abandoning her. How would she handle it? How would I handle it?”
She didn’t have to worry. Daisy now spends her days relaxing with Judy’s retired parents in their Southern California home. She enjoys occasional dips in their pool and adores Judy’s parents, especially her mother. She follows her around the house and gets rewarded with plenty of treats just for being Daisy.
Judy visits nearly every day, and often joins her in the pool. Sometimes they go to the beach. Daisy seems more like her old self, but sometimes there’s a sharp noise and she’s back to trembling. When Judy’s parents use their fireplace, something about the little crackles and pops gets to her, and she seeks refuge in or next to their bathtub.
But for the most part Daisy’s retirement is going much better than Judy thought it would. At least it is for Daisy. Judy misses her terribly, but she’s relieved that she’s happy.
Daisy has found a new calling. She’s teaching Oprah, Judy’s service dog in training. She keeps her in line when she gets too hyper and mentors Oprah during beach time. Daisy swims and gives Oprah the confidence to swim. She has taught Oprah how to deal with waves and carry a ball at the same time. While Daisy is helping her protégée, she seems transformed. She lives in the moment, and the moment is joyous.