Part 2: I Adopted a Retired Military German Shepherd Who Lost His Right Ear to a Blast in Afghanistan. I Lost My Right Leg to a Blast in Afghanistan. We Did Not Find Out, Until We Read His File Together, That It Was the Same Blast.
Part 2
I want to tell you about military working dogs, briefly, because most people do not know how this works, and you need to know it to understand the rest.
Military working dogs are soldiers. I do not mean that as a sentimental flourish; I mean it as a fact of how they are regarded by the men and women who serve alongside them. They have ranks, informally. They have service records. They deploy. They do specialized, dangerous, irreplaceable work — and a great deal of that work, in Afghanistan in the years I was there, was the detection of explosives.
They walked ahead of us. That is the plain truth of it. On a great many patrols, the dog and its handler were the front of the formation, because the dog’s nose was the best technology the United States Army had for finding the buried bombs that were killing and maiming us. A military working dog on a route-clearance patrol was, very literally, walking point so that the rest of us did not have to.
When those dogs are wounded, they are treated as wounded soldiers. When they retire — because of age, or because of injury — they become eligible for adoption, and there is a process, and there is a preference, an entirely correct preference, for placing them with veterans.
So, two years ago, I applied.
I went through the process. It is a real process — they do not simply hand you a dog. There were interviews, and a home assessment, and a long wait. And eventually I got the call that there was a dog who they thought might be a match for me, a retired German Shepherd, and that he was at a facility about four hours from me, and that if I wanted to meet him I should come.
They told me very little about him in advance. They told me his name — his name was Rex, which is a common name for these dogs, almost a default name, and I did not change it. They told me he was a German Shepherd, that he was about nine years old, that he had served in Afghanistan as an explosives-detection dog, and that he had been medically retired after a blast injury that had cost him his right ear and done some damage to the hearing on that side.
Blast-injured. Afghanistan. That was the extent of what I knew when I drove four hours to meet him.
I want you to hold that, because here is the thing about veterans, and I include myself: when you hear “blast injury, Afghanistan,” you do not think coincidence, and you do not think connection. You think of course. You think it the way you would think it about a sunburn in July. Afghanistan was full of blasts. Half the wounded of my entire generation of soldiers are blast-wounded. A blast-injured veteran adopting a blast-injured dog is not a remarkable thing. It is almost the statistical default.
That is why neither of us — not me, and not the program — caught it. The connection was hiding inside a coincidence so common that nobody thought to look at it twice.
Part 3
I want to tell you about meeting Rex, because I knew, in the kennel, before I knew anything, that I was taking him home.
The facility brought me back to a run, and there was a German Shepherd standing in it, and he was a big dog, dark, classic in his markings, gray coming into his muzzle the way it does on a nine-year-old. And the first thing you saw, the thing you could not not see, was the right side of his head.
His right ear was gone. Not torn, not folded — gone, and long healed, a smooth contoured place on the side of his skull where a German Shepherd’s tall sharp ear is supposed to be. The left ear stood up perfectly, alert, classic. The right side was just that quiet smooth absence.
I want to tell you what it did to me to look at that, and I am going to be plain about it, because the plainness is the point.
I have a body that is missing a piece. I have lived for over a decade with the specific experience of being a person whose physical self has an absence in it where something used to be — and of moving through a world that notices that absence, that does the flinch, that recalculates. And I stood at that kennel run and I looked at a dog who was also missing a piece of himself, also to a war, also from a place I had been, and something in my chest simply turned over.
The handler let me into the run. And Rex — this big, dignified, gray-muzzled retired soldier — Rex walked over to me, and he did the thing I have not been able to fully describe to anyone since.
He came up on my right side. My prosthetic side. And he leaned the full weight of his body against my right leg — against the leg that is not a leg — and he stood there, leaning, steady, the way one tired soldier might lean on another at the end of a very long day.
I did not decide to adopt Rex. There was no decision. I signed the papers the way you sign papers for a thing that has already happened.
He rode home in the passenger seat of my truck, four hours, and at a red light somewhere around the halfway point I reached over to steady him, and my hand found the smooth scarred place where his ear had been, and he did not flinch from my hand, and I remember thinking, with my hand on his old wound: we match. Whatever did this to you, it found me too.
I thought I was being poetic.
I was being literal, and I did not know it yet.
Part 4
I want to tell you about the first three weeks, because the first three weeks were good, and quiet, and ordinary, and that ordinariness matters, because it is the thing the fourth week broke open.
Rex settled into my house the way a retired soldier settles into anything — methodically, watchfully, and then completely. He was a calm dog. He was past his working years and he knew it; he was not anxious, not destructive, not difficult. He was, mostly, a large dignified presence who had decided that his new posting was me, and who took that posting seriously.
We were good for each other immediately, and I do not want to oversell it or make it mystical. It was simply this: we both moved a little differently than other creatures, and we both did not mind it in each other. He had a deaf side; I had a side that was machinery. He would, I noticed within days, always position himself on my right — my prosthetic side, my weak side, the side a person guards. I came to understand that this was old training and old instinct both. A working dog learns to cover its handler. Rex had decided I was his handler, and he had clocked, faster than most humans do, which of my sides needed covering.
We took slow walks. We watched television. He slept beside my bed. Three weeks of a good, plain, healing routine, two damaged soldiers keeping each other company, and I assumed that was the whole of the story and that the whole of the story was plenty.
Then, in the fourth week, I got a call from the adoption program.
It was a caseworker — a woman I had dealt with during the application, a thorough and decent person — and she said that they were finalizing Rex’s permanent records into my custody, the full transfer of his complete service file, and that there were a couple of documents she needed me to come in and sign in person, and could I come by the regional office.
I said I could. I did not think anything of it. Paperwork is paperwork.
I drove over, with Rex, because by then Rex went where I went.
And the caseworker had Rex’s complete file — his real, full, military service record, the whole of it, which I had never seen; I had only ever had the thumbnail summary — and as we went through the signature pages, she was, the way thorough people are, also actually reading the file.
And she stopped.
I watched her stop. I watched her eyes go back up the page and read something again. And she got a look on her face that I did not understand, and she looked up at me, and she looked down at Rex lying on the floor by my chair, and then back at me, and she said:
“Sergeant Cobb. Can I ask you — the day you were wounded. Do you know the date?”
Part 5
I want to tell you that I did not have to think about the answer to that question, and I want to tell you why.
You do not forget the date. Every wounded veteran reading this already knows that. The date you were hit is not a fact you keep in the ordinary filing cabinet with birthdays and anniversaries. It is welded into you. It has its own permanent room. I gave the caseworker the date — the month, the day, the year, in 2012 — without a half-second of hesitation, the way you would give your own name.
The caseworker looked back down at Rex’s file.
And she turned it around, on the desk, so that it was facing me, and she put her finger on a line, and she did not say anything, because she did not need to.
It was the line in Rex’s service record documenting the incident in which he had been wounded. The blast that had taken his right ear. The event that had ended his deployment and begun the long road to his medical retirement.
It was the same date.
The same month, the same day, the same year. The date welded into me was the date printed in his file.
I sat in that office and I could not speak, and the caseworker, to her great credit, did not fill the silence. She let me sit there.
Because I was doing the thing you do. I was going back. I was standing on that road in Helmand Province in the summer of 2012, in the minutes before, and I was finally — eleven years later, in a government office in Tennessee — understanding what I had actually been looking at that day and had never known to look at.
There had been a dog on that patrol.
Of course there had been a dog. There was almost always a dog. The route-clearance element had a military working dog and a handler, and they had been forward, ahead of us, doing the work that dogs and their handlers did, which was finding the thing in the ground before the thing in the ground found us.
The dog had been forward of me when the blast happened.
The dog had been close enough to that explosion to lose an ear to it.
I had been close enough to the same explosion to lose a leg to it.
We had been wounded, Rex and I, by the same buried bomb, on the same road, on the same afternoon, eleven years before either of us sat in that office — and then the Army had carried us both away from that road on separate stretchers, into separate hospitals, down separate years and separate recoveries, and neither of us had ever known the other existed.
And then, more than a decade later, a counselor had suggested a dog, and an application had been processed, and a match had been made by people who had no idea what they were matching, and I had driven four hours and signed papers for a German Shepherd because something in my chest turned over when I saw the side of his head.
We had not met at that adoption facility.
We had met again.
Part 6
I want to tell you what I understood, sitting in that office, because I have had two years to think about it now, and the understanding has only gotten larger.
The first thing I understood was about the leaning.
For three weeks, Rex had been leaning his weight against my right leg — my prosthetic leg, my missing piece. I had thought it was sweet. I had thought it was old working-dog instinct, a dog covering its handler’s weak side. And it was that.
But I understood, in that office, that it might also be something else, something I cannot prove and have stopped needing to prove. That dog and I were hurt by the same blast. A military working dog on a route-clearance patrol is trained, bred, and devoted to one central purpose: to walk ahead of his people and find the danger before it finds them.
On a road in Helmand in 2012, Rex had been doing exactly that job. He had been walking point. He had been ahead of me, between me and the ground, doing the work that was supposed to keep the thing from happening.
And the thing had happened anyway. It had taken his ear and my leg.
I do not believe a dog carries guilt the way a man does. I want to be careful and honest about that. But I will tell you what I believe, and I believe it all the way down: that dog had a job, and the job was to protect the soldiers behind him, and on that day the job had not been finished — and eleven years later, that same dog had walked across a kennel run, found the soldier with the missing leg, and leaned against the exact place the war had taken.
Whatever that was — instinct, or memory, or something underneath both that I do not have a word for — Rex had found his way back to a piece of unfinished work, and he had set himself down against it, and he had stayed.
And the second thing I understood was about myself.
For eleven years, I had carried my wound as a private thing. A solitary thing. My leg, my road, my bad afternoon in 2012. The loneliness of it — the sense that the worst thing that ever happened to me had happened to me alone, inside my own single body — that loneliness was, I had not realized until that office, one of the heaviest parts of the whole load.
And it turned out that it was not true.
There had been someone else on that road. There had been someone else inside that same explosion, someone else who had carried a piece of that exact afternoon out of Afghanistan and through eleven years and into the rest of his life.
I had not been alone in the worst moment of my life.
I had just not been able, until I was forty-three years old and sitting in a government office with a German Shepherd at my feet, to meet the only other person who had been there.
Part 7
I want to tell you what changed, after that day, because something did, and it was real.
I told the caseworker, before I left her office, that I needed a copy of that file. The whole file. And she made sure I got it, and I have read it many times since, and I have learned my dog’s war the way you would learn the history of a brother you found late in life.
I learned the name of Rex’s handler — the soldier who had been at the other end of his leash on that road, a young man I am now, carefully and slowly, in contact with, because it turns out that finding Rex meant finding one more person who had been on that patrol, one more thread back to that afternoon, and the threads, I have learned, are worth pulling.
But the largest thing that changed was inside the house, between me and the dog.
I stopped, after that day, thinking of Rex as a dog I had rescued.
I had thought, going in, that I was the one doing a kindness — the veteran giving a wounded old war dog a soft retirement, a couch, a quiet end. And I had been doing that, and I am glad I did it.
But the file rearranged it. The file told me that Rex and I were not a rescuer and a rescued. We were two veterans of the same engagement. We were the two survivors of one particular buried bomb on one particular road, and we had each spent eleven lonely years not knowing the other had made it out — and then we had been returned to each other.
That is not a man adopting a dog. That is a reunion. That is two soldiers from the same terrible afternoon finding out, a decade late, that they both lived, and getting to spend whatever years are left on the same couch.
I started, after that, to heal in a way I had not healed in eleven years. I want to be plain about that, because it is the truest thing in this story. It was not the dog’s company alone that did it, though the company was good. It was the specific, particular medicine of no longer being alone inside that memory. Every day I look at the right side of Rex’s head and I see the proof — walking around my house, gray-muzzled and calm and breathing — that the worst afternoon of my life was not a thing that happened only to me, in only my body, in only my private dark.
It happened to us.
And we both made it home. It just took us eleven years and a four-hour drive to find that out.
Part 8
Rex is eleven now, and old, and slowing down, and gray all through his face, and he is asleep on his bed beside mine as I write this.
He still leans on my right side. Every day. When I stand at the counter, when I wait at a curb, when I am tired — there is a German Shepherd’s full weight against my prosthetic leg, covering the side that needs covering, finishing, I think, in his own way and on his own time, a job that a buried bomb interrupted on a road in 2012.
I do not let him think it is unfinished anymore. I tell him. I am a forty-three-year-old retired Staff Sergeant and I talk to my dog, out loud, and what I tell him, most days, with my hand on the smooth quiet place where his ear used to be, is this:
We made it. You did your job. We both got out. Stand easy, soldier.
I drove four hours, two years ago, to do a kindness for a wounded animal nobody else had taken.
I did not know I was driving toward the only other survivor of the worst day of my life.
I did not know that the dog missing a piece of his head and the man missing a piece of his leg had lost those pieces in the same half-second, to the same blast, on the same road, eleven years and one whole ocean ago.
I know it now.
We were never two strangers who met at an adoption facility.
We were two soldiers, from the same field, on the same date — finally, at long last, accounted for.
Both of us.
Present.
Good boy, Rex.
Welcome home. It took us long enough.
Follow this page for more stories about the ones who survived the same thing we did — and found their way back to us.
