He had been at the Iraqi front for months — and before that, in the war zones of Kuwait, Somalia and Bosnia — so for Sgt. 1st Class Mark Gwathmey, the day-to-day presence of shelling and explosions seemed like no big deal.
Sure, there were headaches from an old head injury, and a few hand tremors, and some pain from a past broken foot.
"[It] was nothing I wasn't ready to deal with," Gwathmey says. "I'm a Marine."
Then he got home.
Back in Maryland in 2006, Gwathmey saw his shakes worsening. Then came the nightmares and anxiety attacks. Worse, grand mal seizures began to strike Gwathmey without warning, knocking him unconscious several times a day.
"He was getting worse, not better," says CeCe Gwathmey, his wife and chief caregiver.
As it turned out, only man's best friend could help.
In late 2007, a nonprofit group the Gwathneys had never heard of — America's VetDogs of Smithtown, N.Y. — served up just the right medicine: a talented English retriever-golden Lab mix named Larry who can sense when a seizure is coming and bark out a warning, Lassie-style.
"I thought the whole idea was crazy at first, but he has changed our lives," says Gwathmey, 40, of Upper Marlboro.
One of Gwathmey's friends wants to help another veteran. Next Sunday, Ari Schiff, a midshipman at the Naval Academy, will chair the first America's VetDogs 5K Run/Walk in Quiet Waters Park in hopes of raising $50,000 for the organization.
The amount would provide a service dog for one more veteran who needs help with balance, eyesight or other issues stemming from combat.
Schiff, who says the Naval Academy has no affiliation with the event, isn't sure he'll reach his goal, but 100 runners and walkers had signed up by mid-March.
One was Gwathmey, who will try to finish the course despite leg pains derived from an old injury.
"If [my ankle] starts to hurt too much, you'll see how I lean on Larry," he says.
Pedigree
Gwathmey (the name is Welsh) comes from a long line of servicemen.
His grandfather, John Henry Gwathmey, was an Army infantryman during World War II. His father, Hewlet Gwathmey, fought with the Air Force in Vietnam and was one of the 52 Americans taken hostage by Iran mullahs in 1977.
The organization helping him has a similar pedigree.
It was 1946 when a handful of patriotic civic leaders in New York founded the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind, a school to train service dogs for the sight-impaired, but especially for vets returning from Europe or the South Pacific.
"Helping [veterans] was one of the strong foundations on which the organization was built," says Jeff Bressler, executive vice president of America's VetDogs, which came into being as an arm of the foundation five years ago.
The Guide Dog Foundation is still breeding and raising hundreds of dogs for the sight-impaired, providing them to their new owners — military or civilian — free of charge.
But physical therapists working with veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan knew that dogs could help with more than sight issues.
They were already offering physical and emotional balance to veterans dealing with amputations, comfort to those in the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder, and even calm to soldiers stationed in war zones.
"It got to a point where the guys in rehabilitation [at places like] Walter Reed were saying, 'Hey, how come I have a 'guide dog' when he's helping me with all these other things?'"
In 2005, America's VetDogs — the only foundation in the country certified to raise both guide dogs and service dogs for military users — was born. The nonprofit has full access to the parent organization's eight-acre campus in Long Island, including its breeding program, classrooms and 30,000 square feet of kennels.
"The people there are dedicated; they're nuts about dogs, and they're versatile in what they do," says Schiff, who learned of America's VetDogs during high school in his native Chicago.
But the service, he found, doesn't come cheap. It takes two years, and costs tens of thousands of dollars, to breed, raise, train and find a match for a dog. And demand far outstrips supply.
One dog
Schiff noticed long ago, he says, that Annapolis is a dog lover's town, not to mention a city of runners and walkers. The idea for his event, then, was a natural. He and about a dozen other midshipmen have been putting up flyers and spreading the word online.
He's mildly disappointed that more corporate sponsors haven't stepped forward (several local companies have kicked in raffle prizes), and even if he triples his current roster of participants, at about $25 a head, he'd still fall well short of his goal.
But if history is any guide, the 20-year-old could find a way to reach it.
Schiff grew up in the Windy City the son of an attorney who taught his kids the value of patriotism. He watched as an older sister raised thousands for the USO. By the time Schiff was in high school, he too wanted a cause, and during a family vacation, he found one.
In 2007, he and his father were rafting in Colorado when they met a Marine Corps officer who knew of America's VetDogs. "He told us what these incredible dogs can do, and that the military can't and doesn't pay for them," says Schiff, a junior.
He set a goal for himself — to raise $30,000, enough at the time to supply one veteran with a trained dog.
After a slow start, he got himself a mention in a local paper, then an interview on radio. A columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Jeff Lyon, learned of his story and wrote an article.
The checks started rolling in. Schiff raised $60,000.
"We've had some young people do a few things for us," says Bressler, "but nobody like this. Ari doesn't need much help. He has a lot of initiative."
The organization named Schiff to its board of benefactors. He was 17. He's still by far the youngest member of the group, and Bressler thinks he might be the youngest person in such a position in any nonprofit.
His contribution might seem like a drop in the bucket for America's VetDogs, which has an annual operating budget of $10 million, most of it raised through wills, bequests and corporate gifts.
But the nonprofit, which provides about 30 dogs a year, has a waiting list of 200 veterans, and the list is growing. It also lacks the resources to staff fundraising events.
To Bressler, every dollar counts. "Look at the Gwathmeys," he says. "What if we hadn't been able to produce Larry? How much of a difference would that have made?"
Psychological
In the kitchen of his home, as Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" plays in the background, the veteran takes a fond look at his furry, 92-pound companion, who's flopped on the floor near Gwathmey's feet.
The reddish-brown dog rolls onto his back, exposing his stomach for a rub.
"You can't get enough attention, can you?" Gwathmey asks, providing some.
He isn't the only Maryland veteran the organization has helped. There are perhaps half a dozen, Bressler says. But their stories are emotionally delicate, and Gwathmey is more comfortable than most sharing his. For a time, it didn't seem it would end happily.
As Larry looks on in silence, Gwathmey recalls his work in the hot sports of modern warfare: Mogadishu in 1994; Rwanda in 1996; Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, Iraq, in 2003; Fallujah in 2004.
"I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. We helped a lot of bad things get better," he says, his words tripping on each other a bit even after years of therapy.
But the traumas he played down in those days — the shrapnel he took in the helmet, the broken foot on which he walked, the frequent sight of violent scenes — added up. Back home, over a course of months, he found his mind wandering, his speech slurring, his hands shaking. He fell into seizures, sometimes collapsing without notice. He couldn't fall asleep without seeing scenes of mayhem.
His doctors guessed his condition was largely psychological. Later testing revealed traumatic brain injury, caused not by a single event, but by many over time.
They changed his meds. The seizures continued. Gwathmey had no way of knowing that even then, handlers in New York were working with the creature who is now calmly watching his every move.
In those days, Larry was a mere puppy. Like many service dogs, he was a mix of retriever and Labrador (breeds known to be sociable and loyal). And like every such dog, he had his own personality. His responsiveness to commands was unexceptional, but he was unusually sensitive to mood changes in the humans around him.
VetDogs officials thought Larry might be one of those rare dogs who could become a good seizure-detection companion. When CeCe Gwathmey filed an application on her husband's behalf, they brought him to Maryland. When the dog and the veteran met, Larry couldn't stop wagging his tail.
Trainers warned the Gwathmeys it would take at least six months to determine whether Larry would develop the requisite skill. The Marine said he could wait. A week later, he was feeling dizzy for no apparent reason when Larry woke from a dead sleep and started barking as though the house were on fire.
CeCe got her husband's meds and made him comfortable. The veteran had a full-blown seizure. "Ever since then," Gwathmey says, "Larry has known how to protect me."
Secure
Larry had done what trainers only hoped he'd be able to: He'd smelled the minute chemical changes in Gwathmey that signal an oncoming episode.
Those who come to the 5K Run/Walk next Sunday probably won't see Larry deploy that skill. Nor are they likely to witness the way he nuzzles Gwathmey awake when a nightmare's coming, distracts him when he gets depressed, or stands guard behind his legs when the veteran is in the checkout line at the store.
"I do have hypervigilance [a lot] of the time, as if something bad's about to happen," says Gwathmey, whose continuing propensity for seizures prevents him from driving, and who is still unemployed after retiring from the military two years ago. "When he does that, it gives me a secure feeling. If it weren't for him, I'd still have a hard time going out in public."
Nor will they see how the dog has changed the Gwathmeys' lives — how his presence allows CeCe to go to her full-time job, knowing that if a seizure hits, her husband will have time to take his meds and sit or lie down to prevent a fall. "He's the other caregiver in the family," she says.
What they will see is one of the success stories of America's VetDogs — a veteran who is still healing but has hope, working with a young man who has even more.
"The way Ari organized this? He's going to make a great officer someday," Gwathmey says.
Gwathmey will try to walk the 5K route, even though his calf swells up painfully when he's on his feet for long. If he takes hold of Larry's stiff harness, he says, he'll be able to stay upright and keep going.
After all, it's for a good cause.
"I've never felt as close to any animal as I do to Larry," he says. "Maybe someone else can get that kind of friend."