Canine compassion

<p>With a year-old golden retriever at his feet, Iraq war veteran Christopher Hill slept soundly through the night — something the muscular Marine staff sergeant hadn’t experienced in four years.</p><p>One of nearly 40,000 service members diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, Hill, 40, from Las Vegas, had been traumatized by the war since he left Iraq in 2004.</p><p>His bedroom had become a “torture chamber,” Hill said, his nights fluctuating between zombielike sleeplessness and nightmares of battlefield violence.</p><p>Relief came when Verde, an easygoing dog born and raised in Santa Rosa, began breaking the grip of PTSD that had turned Hill into a fitful, raging man.</p><p>Verde, he said, was “on guard” at night. “He’s there looking over me,” Hill said at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Menlo Park, where he’s completing a residential treatment program for PTSD. “I’ll take this shift,” Hill imagined the retriever saying. “You get some sleep.”</p><p>Hill is one of six Iraq veterans involved in a new program — Paws for Purple Hearts — pairing the psychologically scarred warriors with gentle canines from the Assistance Dog Institute in Santa Rosa, a nonprofit that pioneered the training of service dogs to aid disabled humans.</p><p>The program, just four months old, already has some Menlo Park VA staffers speculating that it could become a national model, a new treatment for the PTSD epidemic generated by seven years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan involving about 1.6million U.S. troops.</p><p>With nearly 40,000 military personnel diagnosed with PTSD — and as many as 300,000 believed to be suffering from the anxiety disorder — top Pentagon and Veterans Affairs officials are searching for alternative therapies, such as acupuncture, yoga and meditation.</p><p>Rick Yount, a social worker who joined the Assistance Dog Institute staff in 2004, first saw the potential for treating troubled vets. The idea came out of his experience taking ADI canines to the Sierra Youth Center, where at-risk teens help train them as service dogs and learn social and parenting skills in the process.</p><p>“It just kind of dawned on me,” Yount said. “It made sense.”</p><p>Paws for Purple Hearts helps war veterans two ways, engaging them as dog trainers who need emotional catharsis and ultimately providing service dogs for disabled vets, many in wheelchairs, who need help getting around.</p><p>Yount, who is the program director, last week watched as PTSD patients at the tree-shaded Menlo Park VA facility put three young golden retrievers, all brothers from the same litter, through their paces. As the brown-eyed dogs learn skills like tugging doors open with a rope, turning light switches on and off, and picking up items off the floor, the combat veterans rediscover their emotions.</p><p>“The guys we have are very numb, emotionless,” said Melissa Puckett, a VA recreational therapist. To train a dog, the vet needs to develop a range of feelings, from firm taskmaster to loving companion rewarding a dog for good behavior.</p><p>Yount listens for the vets’ voice modulation, rising from low-toned orders like “stay” and “leave it,” to higher, warmer compliments, such as “attaboy,” reinforced with a tidbit of food from the pouch always attached to a trainer’s belt.</p><p>“You have to regulate your emotions,” Yount said.</p><p>For vets prone to anger, violence and sometimes suicide, emotional depth and compassion for another creature is a breakthrough, he said.</p><p>The veterans involved with Yount’s dogs have cut back on their medication. “They’ve been able to cope better with their anxiety,” Puckett said.</p><p>Hill, who walks with a cane, suffered nerve damage from a rocket blast that threw him in the air and killed another Marine. He came home in one piece, he said, better off than the amputees and paralyzed veterans who will receive the service dogs. </p><p>Marines always want to back their buddies, and dog training gave Hill that chance. “I can’t grab a rifle and serve on the front lines, but I can still do my part,” Hill said.</p><p>Chuck Marino, 40, a former Army sergeant, said his training dog, named Vegas, helped him turn his life around. “He taught me patience,” said Marino, a burly man with close-cropped hair, a goatee and a tattoo on his right calf. How to listen. How to be attentive to another’s needs.</p><p>The stern voice and overbearing demeanor he perfected during 16 years in uniform don’t cut it with a dog — and won’t endear him to anyone in civilian life, Marino said.</p><p>He served as a military policeman in Iraq in 2003 and came home aware of his disorder: emotionally numb, withdrawn, angry and self-medicating with alcohol. “You don’t get over PTSD,” Marino said. “You have to live with it the rest of your life.”</p><p>But, he added: “You can learn how to cope with it.”</p><p>In August, several veterans from Menlo Park went to a Giants baseball game with their golden retrievers on leashes and were surrounded by dozens of curious fans. For the vets, who tend to shun strangers, the situation could have been threatening, Yount said.</p><p>But the vets fielded questions, eased by the crowd’s attention to their dogs. “You could hear the pride in their voices,” Yount said.</p><p>Service dogs, just like the shellshocked veterans, need to become comfortable in noisy, crowded situations. Assistance Dog Institute runs a breeding program for Labrador and golden retrievers, both genial species, but trains only the best-suited dogs, those inclined to stick to their duty and not run off after squirrels.</p><p>Marino, who will complete the Menlo Park program in two weeks, will return to his home in Las Vegas where his four cats are waiting. He plans to adopt a golden retriever.</p><p>“A dog’s going to be your best friend,” he said.</p><p>Hill, who said he looks forward to becoming a “productive citizen,” also plans to get a dog. His rage has greatly subsided, but Hill said that when his mind begins to churn, he finds relief by looking into a dog’s eyes.</p><p>Experts like Yount say that dogs offer unconditional love, a balm for human angst.</p><p>Hill sees it more from a canine perspective.</p><p>“I want to live a dog’s life,” he said. “They take every day just like it’s a new chew toy.”</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@</p><p>pressdemocrat.com.</p>