Montalván - Tuesdays promise: one veteran, one dog, and their bold quest to change lives

I NOTICED HIS CAP EVEN BEFORE I SAW THE MAN SITTING BENEATH IT.

332nd Fighter Group, the hat read, and I knew immediately what that meant. The man had to be one of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen whod fought so valiantly in World War II for a military and a nation still divided by race.

He was old enough. He was African American. And now he was parked in a wheelchair, unattended, in a busy hallway at the decrepit VA hospital in lower Manhattan, while his couldnt-be-bothered attendant was jabbering away on her cell phone.

Tuesday noticed him first. Tuesday often notices things before I do. Hes more intuitiveand, yes, far better trained. As soon as we made it past the elaborate security checkpoint at the hospitals main entrancealways an ordeal with a service dogTuesday was tugging on his leash and signaling to me: Luis! Wait a second! That man needs something!

Id read plenty about these flying aces, how they had trained in a tiny speck of dirt called Tuskegee, Alabama, and went on to complete 1,578 missions through heavy combat in North Africa and Italy. The Airmen flew hand-me-down Republic P-47 Thunderbolts and North American P-51 Mustangs with the tails and rudders painted bright red. Thats why the Airmen were often called Red Tails by other fliers in the Army Air Corps, the predecessor to our modern U.S. Air Force. The Airmens wartime accomplishments included destroying or damaging 409 enemy aircraft, 40 boats and barges, and 745 boxcars, rolling stock, and locomotives. Using only machine-gun fire, a Tuskegee Airman was credited with sinking the Giuseppe Missori, one of the fiercest destroyers in Mussolinis Italian Navy. Long before the modern civil rights era, the Tuskegee Airmen taught a lesson to a nation not quite ready to learn it: Talent, bravery, and patriotism have nothing to do with skin color. But until that day in the hospital, I had never personally met one of these humble heroes.

The man in the wheelchair looked old, old in a way that old veterans sometimes dognarled and twisted, blank and glum, like hed seen a lot and done a lot but couldnt hide what the years had done to him. His spine was bent with scoliosis. His eyes were impossible to see behind Coke-bottle cataract glasses. He certainly didnt appear eager for chitchat.

Tuesday and I had come to the hospital for one of our biweekly counseling sessions, the standard-issue treatment for an Iraq or Afghanistan War combat veteran who battled raging, full-blown PTSD. The truth was that Tuesday, my golden retriever service dog, had done far more to ease my symptoms than any human Department of Veterans Affairs employee ever had, helping me secure the control and the confidence I needed to leave my apartment, quit drinking so much, finish graduate school, write a bestselling book, rebuild my relationship with my family, and begin traveling around the country advocating for Americas battered and ignored military veterans, among others. But as good as Tuesday was at his job, talk therapy was important, too. Id finally found a caring therapist at the VA. So here we were for another forty-five minute fuel stop on the long road to recovery.