Dual-duty dogs

Retired Staff Sgt. Christopher Hill, a 20-year Marine veteran, returned from Iraq in 2004 an angry, hurting man. A rocket attack had slammed him into a concrete barrier and killed three of his comrades, including one who was on the phone with his father when the round hit. One minute he was discussing plans for his arrival home, the next minute his body lay in pieces.

Six men with whom Hill served have committed suicide since coming home, an emotional catastrophe that Hill attributes to the veterans' inability to reengage with a society that doesn't share their experiences of violence, loss, terror and numbness.

"You're there so long, then you get on a plane and come home, and you don't care about yourself or anyone," says Hill, who is 42. "You're introduced to people, shaking hands, welcoming you home. You don't care. You're deep within your own stuff. It's like camouflage."

By the time Hill was admitted to the VA hospital in Menlo Park, Calif., for treatment of spinal cord and brain injuries and PTSD in 2009, he was going 72 hours without sleep, followed by 24-hour crashes.

At the first group therapy session Hill attended at the hospital, he saw that "most of the guys were staring straight ahead. But the ones with the dogs looked peppy. I said, 'I gotta get one of them.' "

Only a few months earlier, Yount, who has not served in the military, had started bringing dogs to the hospital to have inpatient vets train them for comrades who relied on wheelchairs. Paws for Purple Hearts was just beginning, and Hill was one of the first to get a dog.

"It was hard at first to learn how to talk to him, but he has revamped my lifestyle," said Hill as he stroked Verde while walking around the grounds of the hospital during a recent visit.

Hill, who was a music producer before joining the Marines, is a quick-talking, funny man, but he says the violence and stress had clammed him up. "All the drugs . . . made me into a zombie. But now, I have to be up at 7 to feed him. Verde doesn't want anything from me except to be there with him. He's just like the guy in the foxhole. So for that, I'm willing to talk and act like [bouncy TV aerobics instructor] Richard Simmons."

After training Verde, Hill said an emotional goodbye when the dog was sent to a wheelchair-using vet. But Verde proved too skittish to be a guide dog, and a year later he was reunited with Hill for good.

Now that Paws for Purple Hearts has been underway for a while, Yount says he can clearly see how training dogs helps vets open up to communicating with their peers and therapists. The dogs just have a way of getting through to people who shun human touch. "If you went up to someone and offered your hand and they rejected you, would you do it again? No," he said. "But these retrievers are bred to be as engaging as possible. They are the perfect beings for this kind of job."

The mission continues

The vets who train the dogs spend several months with them, sometimes longer, and letting go can be difficult. Yount said that some experience sleep problems after their dogs go, but "processing that sense of loss in saying goodbye to their dog has been a valuable gateway to processing other loss issues that have been hampering their recovery. "

And it's terribly important for veterans to feel they are continuing a mission that held them together through the violence and stress of war. "PTSD carries a stigma, that you're broken and wounded," said Yount, "And many guys have guilt for not still being in the fight. The idea of Paws for Purple Hearts is you can be part of the war effort while you're getting treatment."

Officials at Walter Reed did not allow me to visit the installation or speak with active-duty soldiers in the Paws program there, but at the Menlo Park hospital, I watched Yount - a hulking, crew-cut western Pennsylvanian transplanted to California - show a veteran how to control his chocolate Labrador with gentle commands and rewards of doggie treats.

This is where the dual benefits of the program are apparent. The vets are working on behalf of a wheelchair-using vet, but are learning - or relearning - the emotional skills needed to manage a dog that will help them function in a world of normal human feelings and interactions.

"The training of a dog requires you to emote," Yount says. "That's hard for a guy with PTSD who's emotionally numb. But if you tell them it's necessary to train this dog to help a fellow vet, there's motivation. First, they have to sound happy. It's fake. But there's a concept that says, 'Fake it until you make it.' Within a few days, it sounds more and more sincere. Pretending to sound happy actually impacts your feeling of happiness."

Heidenreiter, the former reconnaisance officer, said training a golden retriever named Owen forced her to go into malls, restaurants and stores so that the dog would be a good companion for a physically disabled veteran. Doing so terrified her at first, but eventually she learned to relax.

'A natural remedy'

As many as a dozen service members may be involved in training dogs as they move through their own rehab. So far nearly 200 vets and active-duty service members have participated. Only three Paws for Purple Hearts dogs have been placed with disabled vets. But Yount says more are in the pipeline, and even the "failures" provide important companionship to vets such as Hill.

Yount is hoping to expand the program, which is run out of the Bergen University of Canine Studies of Santa Rosa, Calif., but it has faced some obstacles. Thus far it has operated with charitable donations, including a major one from Finmeccanica North America, a defense contractor.

Federal money has been held up by bureaucratic problems as well as the Catch-22 of evidence-based medicine: There are few data yet to show that Yount's program has positive effects; but to get the data, you need to expand the program.

Still, the effort seems to be gaining momentum. Legislation that would create a $7 million, five-year pilot program at up to five Veterans Affairs facilities is currently before the Senate. In October, Paws was cleared to set up shop at the new National Intrepid Center of Excellence, a research, diagnosis and treatment center in Bethesda for service members and vets with traumatic brain injuries and psychological problems.

Carter, the University of Illinois psychiatrist, says dog therapy for wounded warriors makes sense. "The pet is an evolved, natural remedy," she said. "The dog became an extra pair of ears and legs to protect us. The boy warrior with his spear may have had a dog with him for an awful long time in history. Thousands, tens of thousands of years."

Allen is a freelance science writer in Washington and author of "Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver."