Through the windshield of my Toyota Tundra, I watched as the mountains of Tennessee and Arkansas gave way to the flatland of Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. Cairo sat on the seat next to me, a comfortable copilot, as usual. We’d seen a lot of the country together over the years, much of it from the cab of a truck, where you can relax and let the road unspool at its own leisurely pace.
Our destination was a small town not far from Grand Junction, Colorado, where one of my best friends, Jack, lived. He was a retired SEAL. We’d known each other a long time and had gone through BUD/S together, and Jack had invited me to stay at his place while I worked at a security internship nearby. By this point, it had become clear that I would be separating from the navy, most likely via the medical retirement route. But the process remained slow and daunting, dominated by endless paperwork and interviews and treatment and therapy.
It was an enormously frustrating time. I tried to see it from the navy’s point of view: before granting a medical retirement, all avenues of rehabilitation and recovery had to be exhausted to avoid any precedent of exploiting the process. But I knew my career was over. I had been wounded in the spring of 2012. It was now late February 2015. Nearly three years had passed, and while there had been some sputtering progress toward recovery, I frequently walked around like a zombie, plagued by headaches and back pain and memory loss and by bouts of sadness and depression that came and went in waves. In my more selfish and self-pitying moments, which I hate to even acknowledge, I got angry.
I gave twelve years to the navy. I’m proud of my service, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, consequences notwithstanding. Please … let me move on.
If the navy appeared to show little compassion or understanding, well, the same cannot be said of many of the navy personnel with whom I worked. I had a lot of friends and bosses who patiently rode out my bad days and gave me all the help and support they could muster. But life goes on. Most of my closest friends and teammates were either still in the grinding cycle of training and deployment or they had retired; a few, of course, had died.
Meanwhile, I was in what felt like a permanent holding pattern.
Some relief came in the form of outside opportunities like the internship in Colorado, which would be followed immediately by another internship in Iowa, this one involving a dog-training program. Both of these represented a chance to explore other opportunities in the post-military world, and I was fortunate to have supervisors who wholeheartedly endorsed the idea. There was, however, the issue of what to do with Cairo. I would be on the road for roughly a month, and I felt bad about leaving Natalie at home with three dogs. While Cairo was not his old self, he had rallied somewhat since our trip to New York, so I decided to take him with me.
Frankly, I didn’t know what else to do. Like me, Cairo seemed to have good days and bad days. He could go for a walk or play fetch and seem perfectly fine in the morning. Then in the afternoon, he might retreat into sickness or exhaustion. Not every day, mind you, but often enough that it remained worrisome. I regularly brought him in to see the base veterinarian but kept getting the same message: he’s old, and he’s been through a lot. This was indisputable and logical. Malinois often live a dozen years or more, especially if they come from good stock, are well cared for, and get lucky. Cairo, obviously, was impeccably bred, but he had endured significant trauma and stress. It made sense that he was feeling the effects of that now, but the symptoms didn’t necessarily signal anything worse than premature aging.
I wasn’t so sure, and as a result, I made myself something of a nuisance, bringing Cairo in to see the vet a couple of times a month, or even weekly. This was a problem not merely because they didn’t think there was anything wrong with Cairo but also because he was no longer a working dog. He had been retired, which meant he was ineligible for unlimited free care by navy docs. That might seem unfair, given Cairo’s stellar résumé and the wounds he’d absorbed for his country and his fellow soldiers, but that’s the way it was.
“Will, you’re going to have to find an outside vet,” I was told. “You can’t keep bringing him here.”
Cairo tolerated the cross-country trip reasonably well. We made it from Virginia to Colorado in three days, and I think he vomited only once. But it wasn’t long after we arrived that Cairo started to go downhill. He seemed tireder than usual, disinclined to interact with my friend Jack, and even somewhat ambivalent toward me. For the first few days, all he did was sleep. I thought perhaps he was having trouble adjusting to the altitude of the Rockies, but when he began throwing up—not just once in a while but once or twice a day—I grew more concerned. Cairo was losing weight and seemed even sicker than he had been before we went to New York.
“I’m worried about him,” I said to Jack. “I think he needs to see someone.”
Jack agreed. “Let me make a call.”
I was lucky. Jack had dogs, as well, and was friends with a local civilian vet. Jack explained the symptoms, and the doc said to bring him right in.
The vet took some x-rays, which revealed issues with Cairo’s stomach and digestive system. But the results were inconclusive. To find out what was really going on, he needed to cut Cairo open. It was scary, but necessary.
“There’s obviously something very wrong,” the doc said. “But I can’t give you any definitive answers without surgery.”
Whatever was bothering Cairo, it was obviously a big problem. The vet told me he would do the work free of charge after he found out that Cairo was a retired working dog. He had no idea that this was the famous Cairo, but he refused to take payment and did the entire procedure and follow-up appointments out of the kindness of his heart. The gratitude I have for such a person … well, I cannot put it into words. People like that are hard to find.
After the surgery, the vet came right out to explain what he had found. It was complicated, and not encouraging. Cairo was so bloated that his spleen had been displaced. In effect, it had flipped over his stomach and gotten lodged in between the stomach wall and other vital organs. Dogs have a rudimentary digestive system that usually causes no problems, but when something malfunctions, the results can be catastrophic. The very description of Cairo’s malady made me queasy; it also made me feel so sorry for him, imagining what he had gone through for the last several months and how uncomfortable he must have been.
Fortunately, Cairo made it out of the surgery without any complications. The doc said he was able to put everything back in its proper place. The prognosis was as good as it could be given Cairo’s age and history. The best thing for him now, the doc said, was plenty of rest.
For the next two weeks, I slept with Cairo in Jack’s basement. Whenever I wasn’t working, I was right by his side. Jack had to leave town for a while to work, but he and his wife and kids were kind enough to let me stay while Jack was away. They took care of me and Cairo while he was recovering. Although he lacked much of an appetite—which isn’t unusual after gastric surgery—he seemed to be doing okay. Eventually, I loaded up the truck and headed east to Des Moines, Iowa, for my second internship. While I enjoyed the work, my heart wasn’t really into it; neither was my head. I worried about Cairo. He seemed to do better for a few days, maybe a week, then began deteriorating again. The vet had warned me to look for bloating in Cairo’s midsection—an indication that he was retaining water and that his digestive system was once again acting up. One morning, he threw up. Afterward, I ran my hands along his belly.
Nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, he seemed to be the opposite of bloated. I could feel his ribs sticking out.
“What’s the matter?” I said as Cairo lowered his head into my chest and tried to snuggle.
With only a few days left in March, I called Natalie and told her I would be hitting the road shortly. The internship was not over, but Cairo was clearly not doing well, and I wanted to get him home.
We made it to Virginia in two days, driving roughly ten hours a day. Cairo did not appear to be in great distress, but neither was he the copilot I had come to know and love. As we cruised across I-64 through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio before dipping south into West Virginia, I kept looking over at Cairo. I’d scratch him behind the ears, pat him on the head. Sometimes he’d look up at me or roll over as if to ask for more; for the most part, though, he just slept.
I thought that being in his own home would do Cairo some good and he would start eating more and naturally recuperate. This was not the case. We got him home, and within a couple of days, he had stopped eating completely. We decided to take him to a vet whom command had been using on and off for a long time. He was a great doctor and had done some work for us in the past. When we arrived at the vet hospital, though, a receptionist told us the doctor was going to be busy in surgery all day.
“Would you mind seeing one of the other doctors?”
I looked at Natalie. She shrugged. What choice did we have? Cairo was obviously very sick—his weight had dipped to fifty-five pounds, and he had trouble holding his head up; his eyes were sunken and hollow—and we did not have an appointment. This was an emergency.
“Of course,” I said. “No problem. Thanks for squeezing us in.”
The doctor was friendly and seemingly thorough in her examination, but in the end decided that maybe the best thing was to simply give Cairo an injection of an antiemetics to stop the vomiting, and then let him go home and recuperate. He’d been through a debilitating surgical procedure and been on the road for a month. It wasn’t surprising that he was sick. The recovery would take time, she said. We agreed to take him home and pamper him and to bring him back in a few days if there was no improvement. But just as we were getting ready to leave, the other doctor walked into the waiting room, fresh out of surgery.
We shook hands, made small talk for a few minutes, and then he bent down and began examining Cairo. He had known Cairo for a long time, and I could tell by the look on his face that he was concerned.
“You know,” he said. “Let’s get some x-rays … and start him on some fluids.”
The scans this time revealed a large mass in Cairo’s stomach, but there was no way to determine the nature of the mass without opening him up. Heavily invasive surgery.
Again.
It seemed so cruel. Cairo hadn’t even come close to recovering from the previous surgery. I worried that he wasn’t strong enough to go through it again. But what choice did we have?
“Okay,” I told the doc. “Do what you have to do.”
He agreed that Cairo was too weak to endure another surgical procedure right away. My job, he said, was to take Cairo home and help him get stronger; soon enough, he’d be ready for surgery.
In preparation for the procedure, Natalie and I blended Cairo’s food and fed him through a syringe. We gave him intravenous fluids and lots of medication. We nursed him and slept with him and told him how much we loved him. Sometimes Hagen or Sterling would try to get him to play, but Cairo had no interest; for the most part, they were nice enough to leave him alone. After a few days, Cairo showed minor improvement. He still had no interest in eating on his own, but by pushing fluids and force-feeding, we were able to put a few pounds on him. When I brought him to the vet on the morning of his surgery, he seemed to be in decent spirits. There was even a slight bounce in his step as we walked up to the door. I remember feeling bad for him, because he had no idea what was coming. At the same time, I clung to a thread of optimism.
“We’re going to get you all fixed up, Cairo. Don’t worry.”
I gave him a hug, handed the leash to one of the three cheerful young women who worked the front counter, and walked away without looking back.
For the next several hours, I did everything I could to try to make the time pass without worrying. It was impossible. In the early afternoon, I got a phone call saying he had made it through surgery and was ready to be picked up. The doctor would go over what he found when we got there.
Natalie and I hopped into my truck and drove as fast as we could to the vet hospital. When they brought Cairo out, he was still woozy from the surgery but seemingly okay. I was just happy he was alive. As we waited in an examining room, the doctor came in to talk with us. I could tell by his demeanor—serious, thoughtful—that the news was not good. In addition to the mass that had shown up on the x-ray, the surgery revealed that Cairo’s stomach wall was “about ten times thicker than normal.” The doctor had taken tissue samples from the stomach wall and from the adjacent mass. The biopsy results would be available in a few days.
Interestingly, he never once used the word cancer, but just by the way everyone was acting—the doctor, nurses, even the receptionists—I could tell the prognosis was poor.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Same as before,” he said. “Take him home. Feed him, give him fluids, try to make him comfortable.”
He urged us to have faith, to not jump to any conclusions, and while I appreciated the effort, I did not find it to be a convincing speech.
Cairo came home on March 31, 2015. My birthday. He was in rough shape, but very much alive. Maybe, I thought, he’ll be okay. After all, this wasn’t his first rodeo. Cairo had been sick before. He’d been shot. He was no ordinary dog. He could survive anything.
We celebrated my thirty-first birthday that night. Just me and Natalie and the dogs. A quiet evening at home. As much as possible, we tried to include Cairo, but he wasn’t in a partying mood. None of us were, really. That night, Cairo slept in his favorite dog bed. I slept on the floor next to him and tried to make sure he was comfortable. Every so often, he would roll over and groan, but for the most part, he just slept. In the middle of the night, I heard a sound and woke to find Cairo half crouching, his legs quivering. I moved my head just in time to avoid being sprayed with diarrhea.
Even after he was done, the cramping went on for several minutes. I kept a hand on his back until the spasms passed. Finally, he slumped to the floor.
“I’m sorry, pal,” was all I could offer. Natalie and I cleaned up the room, and then we all went back to bed.
Three days passed in a haze of sickness and mess. Cairo had no interest in eating, and whatever we pushed into him via syringe or IV came rushing back out almost immediately. The nausea and diarrhea were incessant and exhausting. Once, on the third day, he threw up violently, and the material he expelled looked and smelled not like vomit but feces. It was disgusting and shocking; more importantly, it seemed enormously painful to Cairo. I’d seen a lot in my day, but I’d never seen anything like that. All I could think was, his digestive system was so messed up that it was basically working in reverse, which, as it turned out, wasn’t far from the truth.
It finally got to the point where we couldn’t take it anymore, so we brought him back to the vet. They wanted to weigh him when we arrived, but Cairo could barely stand on the scale. I had to hold him in place. He was a virtual bag of bones by that point, his weight having dropped to slightly more than fifty pounds. At his peak, he had weighed between seventy and seventy-five pounds, so he’d lost nearly a third of his mass. The doctor who had operated on Cairo was tied up in surgery when we arrived, so we saw his associate again. She was compassionate and soft-spoken as she looked him over and delivered the news. The biopsy was positive. Cairo had cancer. Advanced.
“Is there any chance he could recover?” I asked.
She shook her head sadly.
“I’m sorry. No.”
I looked at Natalie. She was sitting with Cairo on the floor, rubbing his back and trying not to cry.
Okay … Enough.
It was time to let him go. We had reached the point where we were keeping Cairo alive not for him but for us. We were being selfish. He had experienced an unreasonable amount of pain, and it was only going to get worse.
The doctor agreed with our decision—actually, it was 100 percent my decision; it would not have been fair to solicit Natalie’s opinion. We both knew that. Cairo had risked his life for me, many times over. I could never repay him. But I could end his suffering. That was my responsibility, and mine alone. It was heartbreaking, but it was the right thing to do.
“We provide services for this kind of situation,” the doctor explained. “Whatever you need.”
I leaned down and gave Cairo a warm rub on the back.
“Thank you,” I said. “But we’ll take care of it. I want to take him home.”
I scooped Cairo up, carried him outside, and loaded him into the truck. Natalie and I drove him home, the miles unfurling in silence. I carried him into the house and gently placed him on his bed. I gave him a shot of Tramadol to help him feel more comfortable. Then I made a phone call to one of the navy vet technicians and asked him for a favor. A short time later, he arrived and began laying out the tools and medication he would need to euthanize Cairo. Natalie and I both lay down on the floor next to him and stroked his head. I took his paw in my hand.
“Everything is going to be okay, buddy.”
It was over quickly and painlessly. On April 2, 2015, at 3:20 in the afternoon, Cairo slipped peacefully away, surrounded by his family, with Daddy holding his hand.
“I love you,” I said through tears. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear me. My head was pressed against his. He could feel me. He knew I was there.
Afterward, the vet tech made a call for us. There was, he said, a woman who lived not far away who ran a small crematorium business out of her rural home. Her clients were mostly people like us, who had lost beloved family pets. She would help us with Cairo’s remains. As Natalie and I drove up to her house, with Cairo in the backseat, wrapped in his favorite blanket, a sweet, sad song poured out of the radio. It was Adele’s cover of “Make You Feel My Love,” written by Bob Dylan.
I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue …
To make you feel my love
The woman who owned the business welcomed us into her home, offered her condolences, and then asked to see Cairo. She explained her service, discussed the fee structure, and promised to take good care of him.
A couple of days later, we returned to her house to pick up Cairo’s remains. In a large coffee can, with paw prints and his name written on the side, were Cairo’s ashes. In another can was the hardware that had been implanted during surgery after he was wounded in Afghanistan—a handful of screws and a metal plate—along with whatever else had been inserted during other surgeries. Basically, anything that hadn’t disintegrated in the crematorium. There was also a plaster impression of his paw print, and a small, tight bundle of Cairo’s hair intended for Natalie.
“This is for you,” the woman said with a smile as she pushed it across the counter.
We gathered everything together in a box and thanked her for her kindness and professionalism. She knew that I was a navy guy, but I don’t think she knew I was a SEAL or that Cairo was a working dog; she certainly didn’t know of his accomplishments. If she had asked, I would have told her: Cairo lived a great life. He was a heroic working dog and a faithful companion; I can honestly say I could not have asked for a better dog. Or a better friend. He never knew what he had accomplished or the lives he saved, but he knew that he made people happy.
And that was the most important thing to him.