Until Tuesday (23 page)

And that was only ten days! To lose Tuesday forever? No, it was inconceivable. I may not be able to quantify everything Tuesday does for me, but I can tell you the sum total is this: I can’t live without him.

(And don’t worry, Mary kept her dog. I am proud to report that she and Remy are still living happily together.)

CHAPTER 23

FOR VETERANS
EVERYWHERE

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy
is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet,
alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then
does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes
to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.

—A
NNE
F
RANK

As the end of the year approached, I was feeling better
about my move to Manhattan. I had a new primary-care physician, a new psychiatrist, and a new course of medicine. I took a break from my advocacy for veterans and the disabled, and I would soon have a winter break from classes. An episode with a professor, in which we heatedly disagreed over whether reporters should be allowed to do whatever they deemed necessarily in a war zone, turned out to be the turning point of my fall. After that, I hugged Tuesday and, over the course of a few days, felt my tension ease. I became more comfortable in my classes and more familiar with the rhythms of my neighborhood. By Thanksgiving, I was frequenting the three restaurants along Broadway with outdoor tables, where I could keep an eye on traffic and pedestrians while relaxing with a cup of coffee. Tom’s Restaurant, the beloved Seinfeld restaurant on the corner of 112
^th
Street, had practically become my second home. The Greek waitresses would always shout, “Hey, Tuesday” as soon as we walked in the door, then usher us to a tight Formica booth, where Tuesday would curl at my feet, invisible to the other customers except for the tip of his nose, which he would push above the table to ask for sausage. Tuesday loved Tom’s sausage.

He loved it so much, in fact, I sometimes ordered him a link. Sure, it was greasy, but it was only once or twice a week, so I figured it couldn’t hurt, and Tuesday deserved a treat. It was important to gain his respect, as I had that spring. It was joyous to discover that we could spend time together in public parks and dog runs, as we had that summer. But it was life-changing to test his love with a major crisis, and for Tuesday to sacrifice his own health and happiness to stand by my side. When I told him to rest, at the depths of my anxiety, he wouldn’t leave me. When I tried to call out in despair, he was there before the words, as if he had read them in my mind. The real battle wasn’t with the pit bull in Sunset Park, when I came to Tuesday’s aid. The real battle was with myself in my apartment in Manhattan, when Tuesday came to mine.

So maybe the timing of the AP reporter was unfortunate. Or maybe not. Maybe it was better that his phone call occurred during a good period that winter, because while as an outspoken veteran I received calls from reporters all the time, many of whom questioned some of my policy positions, I had never received a call from a professional this hostile or personally insulting. I had never met or spoken to this reporter, but he acted as if he knew me—and “knew” that I wasn’t injured in Iraq.

So I hung up on him.

A few hours later, he sent me an email acknowledging that I was attacked, stabbed, and wounded at Al-Waleed, but claiming that Spc. David Page, who had finished off the wounded attacker, and officers in my chain of command had given differing accounts of the incident. (Not surprising, given the circumstances.) He even questioned whether two attackers were present, although the official report and sworn statements indicate there were. He then used the fact that I “returned to duty within days, with little apparent difficulty,” to jump to an accusation of fraud.

“Without a doubt, PTSD is a subjective thing,” he wrote. “Two people standing side by side can be affected in vastly different ways by the same event. But I am also told that it is one of the easiest psychological disorders to feign.”

In my years of advocacy, I have been called many derogatory names. My articles have been attacked and my website befouled by pornographic rants against my opinions and ideas. These days, that’s just part of putting yourself out there for a cause you believe in. There will be critics, which is fine, and many of their criticisms will be vindictive and personal, which isn’t. A traitor for being critical of the war effort? A commie? Okay, I know where you’re coming from, and I respectfully disagree. But a faker? That I didn’t understand. Why would an AP reporter make such wildly unfounded accusations? Had we really, as a culture, sunk so low?

I learned his intentions four months later, when he published an article on May 1, 2010, entitled “In Tide of PTSD Cases, Fear of Fraud Growing,” which insinuated that veterans were perpetuating a massive fraud against the VA. The article, which did not allude to me in any way, included no proof of any systematic fraud, but simply stated that “experts” claimed fraud
could possibly
occur. The reporter’s only “proof” was a 2005 report that one-quarter of the 2,100 PTSD disability claims studied by the government lacked proper documentation of a stressor. In fact, as Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) pointed out in a rebuttal to the article, the official government press release on that 2005 study stated: “The problems with these files appear to be administrative in nature, such as missing documents, and
not fraud
” (italics mine).

“In the absence of evidence of fraud,” the release continued, “we’re not going to put our veterans through the anxiety of a widespread review of their disability claims.” And yet the AP article used the report to state exactly the opposite, going so far as to say if the findings were extrapolated to the whole VA “questionable compensation” payments that year would have totaled $860 million.

Even the inclusion of Dr. Dan Blazer from Duke University, the “expert” quoted as saying PTSD was among the “easiest [psychiatric] conditions to feign,” was dubious. As
Veterans Today
pointed out in another rebuttal on May 7, Dr. Blazer is a geriatric psychiatrist specializing in mental and physical problems among the elderly, and he has no public affiliation with the armed forces. He was a fringe figure at best, and not one of the hundreds of reliable experts on PTSD that could have been consulted.

I don’t belabor the point for personal reasons, although the reporter’s accusations were deeply hurtful and would have no doubt, in another period of my life, sent me spiraling into outrage, anxiety, paranoia, and despair. The consequences are still with me today. In my anger, I’d posted his email on my Facebook page and somehow it found its way onto Gawker.com. In a post from Mara Gay on AOL.com that identified me as a
Huffington Post
blogger—I am proud to have had published articles on that site, but my articles appear in numerous other publications as well—it was claimed that “[AP reporter Allen] Breed seems to be on the verge of revealing Montalván as an outright fraud.” The original title of the article, now labeled as “War, Lies and HuffPo: Vet’s Tall Tale Coming Undone,” even contained the word “hoax.” The word was removed from AOL.com the next day, but not before other websites picked up the original version.

Far worse than the personal attack, though, were the damaging attitudes inherent in Breed’s article.
Veterans Today
was correct, I believe, when they called it a “deliberate hit piece on America’s veterans” from a reporter with “a fetish for Stolen Valor.” The article’s underlying premise was that streamlining the disability process made fraud by the rafts of malingering veterans almost inevitable (if not yet provable). I’m not saying there isn’t fraud. The Inspector General’s report for 2008–2009 found about one hundred cases of fraud per year, out of about one million veterans receiving disability benefits (or only 0.01 percent), and this report covered the end of the Bush administration, which was vigilant in its effort to deny claims.

In fact, the real problem is the opposite of the one speculated about in the article: the difficulty of the VA system means tens of thousands of veterans give up on receiving the help they need, with devastating consequences for their lives. While the article dwelt in loving detail on the cases of three veterans convicted of fraudulently claiming benefits,
none of whom had served in the military or filed claims for disability in the last fifteen years
, it dismissed the suicide of a veteran from New Mexico, who had placed a letter from the VA beside his Purple Heart before killing himself, as mere emotional manipulation. It’s a tragedy when a veteran claims to have been in the Tet offensive in 1968 when he didn’t reach Vietnam until 1969, the article implies, but to care about a Purple Heart recipient who committed suicide after being turned away by the VA during our country’s most recent war? That’s for soft-hearted crybabies.

This fixation on fraud—even in the face of hundreds of suicides from veterans who cried out for assistance, not to mention rampant alcoholism, isolation, homelessness, and anonymous death—is an outgrowth of the attitude exemplified by my father when he told me that seeking help for my disabilities meant I was descending to the “lowest common denominator” of humanity and associating myself with people whose real purpose was “helping each other take maximum advantage of disability benefits.” It’s a belief that those who suffer from PTSD are malingerers by nature, and that if they were just stronger, like real warriors, their affliction would be cured. It was a damaging attitude from my father, because although I never seriously considered suicide, his words sent me into the valley of death, where I contemplated my end often and, on too many nights, welcomed its coming.

It’s far more dangerous, though, when that attitude poses as news from a venerable association like the AP, because it legitimizes those views. It emboldens the old school officer who abuses his soldiers for the “cowardice” of their psychological damage. It inspires the loving mother or father, terrified by the change in their child, to show them the “tough love” of dismissal and disbelief rather than helping them with their suffering. It encourages the young veteran to believe that his problems are a matter of weakness, that real men don’t suffer pain, and that admitting to nightmares, anxiety, and antisocial behavior would be an embarrassment to himself and his family.

And all of those scenarios, played out every day in this country, have devastating real-world consequences.

But the article heartened me, too. Not the article itself, of course, but the reaction. Veterans and their loved ones from across the country, and from all our modern wars, stood up and said no. We’re not going back to the horror of Vietnam, when our battle-scarred veterans were mocked and shunned. We’re not going back to the image of the returning soldier as a shiftless burden on society. We’re not going to stand at a safe distance and judge trauma by the shots fired or the blood on the uniform; we’re not going to engage in intergenerational pissing contests over who had it worse; we’re not going to allow society to dwell on a few negative examples when a million men and women have given everything to this country and have come back damaged by what they’ve done and seen. Maybe PTSD really is triggered by a single incident, a stressor, as it’s known in the psychiatric community, and maybe the attack at Al-Waleed was that stressor for me, but as I have learned in the intervening years, I was not damaged by that moment alone. In fact, while there are specific memories that resurface with some frequency, like the suicide bomber in Sinjar or the border riot at Al-Waleed, I find myself most traumatized by the overall experience of being in a combat zone like Iraq, where you are always surrounded by war but rarely aware of when or how violence will arrive. Like so many of my fellow veterans, I understand now that it is the daily adrenaline rush of a war without front lines or uniforms, rather than the infrequent bursts of bloody violence, that ultimately damages the modern warrior’s mind.

War isn’t like regular life. In war, every soldier routinely experiences trauma and makes judgment calls beyond the pale of civilian existence. In January 2004, for instance, Iraqi border police arrested a young man driving a truckful of fake medicine. A two-man U.S. Army counterintelligence unit—a category three translator and a military intelligence staff sergeant—rotated through Iraq’s western border posts on a regular basis, and they happened to be in Al-Waleed when the man was brought in. The two men interrogated the driver for about an hour, but when he wouldn’t cooperate, they threw him on the concrete floor, elevated his legs, blindfolded him, stuffed a rag down his throat, and poured water into his mouth. For ten minutes, I watched as U.S. Army interrogators waterboarded a truck driver, his screams of agony and terror muffled by the wet cloth in his throat.

That incident is a scar on my mind. I still hear the splashing of the water, and especially those muffled, desperate screams. I still see the way his head thrashed against two strong hands, and the way the tendons clenched and the blood vessels popped in his neck. It is a black mark on coalition forces. I wish we hadn’t done it. But it doesn’t haunt me, not like so many other things I did and saw. I don’t blame myself for not stopping it. The act didn’t violate Army protocol, as I had learned it, and in the absence of orders to the contrary I deferred to the interrogators’ judgment. After all, they were professionals. They knew what they were doing. They didn’t worry about consequences or calling headquarters to request permission to use strong interrogation techniques. Waterboarding, it seemed, was a regular tool of their job.

This truck driver was no terrorist. After months at Al-Waleed, I knew fanatics. I had stood toe-to-toe with them, and I could recognize the hatred in their eyes. They were different from you and me. This was just a young man paid to drive a truck from Syria to Iraq. A mule. I doubt he even knew what was in it. Does that make waterboarding him wrong?