We were on a search-and-rescue mission in Fallujah. We were in ASVs—armored security vehicles—and we drove off the road and came to a ravine.
They had to be watching us from a roadside house. They let two vehicles drive down the ravine. My turn was next. Then everything went black.
In my vehicle, one of my buddies died. Other buddies should be coming home from the hospital soon. They suffered traumatic brain injuries, too.
There had been an initial blast. And then a second. We were ambushed. A roadside bombing. We were blown up from underneath. The bomb which got me was strong enough to uplift a vehicle 29,000 pounds.
Sergeant Ronald Portillo, 39, doesn’t remember much from that day, March 13. Most of his memories come from secondhand information.
The bomb that exploded underneath his ASV rendered him unconscious, paralyzed for the next eight days and critically wounded with injuries that afflict him today, such as memory loss.
The sergeant was evacuated to a hospital in Baghdad, and then transported to a medical center in Germany. He had suffered devastation to his body and his brain. He was black and blue.
“And mentally, I was a wreck,” he says.
The sergeant was angry. It was a general, virulent, unendurable anger that tinted his view of the world and everything in it black.
It was as if everything failed him. He had been sent to Iraq to help rebuild that country, and he left under the conclusion that “they’re not going to change: You can’t help someone who doesn’t want help.” His business back home, a window-tinting shop here in Henderson, would be forced to close down without him there to run it. His mortgage company would decline to reduce the mortgage rate on his Henderson home to 6 percent, as the law mandates for all active military personnel in accordance with the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act of 1940, because the mortgage is in his wife’s name, not his. The Department of Veteran Affairs would deny his claim for Traumatic Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance, a fund into which he paid, because they did not deem his injuries—brain damage, speech and eyesight impairment, a paralyzed left foot—traumatic enough.
Furthermore, his family—his wife and his six children, five boys and a baby girl—was 5,000 miles away.
Then, one day, a dog jumped on his hospital bed. His name was Toffy, he was a golden Labrador, and his mere presence helped the sergeant recover his spirits.
“I became too busy caring for him to pay attention to my own problems,” Portillo says.
Toffy came to visit the sergeant for three or four hours every Tuesday and Thursday, as the sergeant rehabilitated. Portillo awaited those days. “The dog would put his head on my lap, he would put his paws on me,” he says. “He changed my entire outlook.”
Portillo found a new optimism for getting out of bed, into a wheelchair, over to physical therapy. A new enthusiasm for life.
He didn’t feel so deserted.
When Portillo returned home, after a transfer to the Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio and after a grand total of two months of hospitalization, he saw his own dog, Sonya, a presa canario, and the sergeant was happy. He told his wife: “I have to do something.”
The war in the Middle East has so far been responsible for 26,953 wounded American soldiers, according to official reports. But they are overshadowed by the 3,648 American casualties. The historical fact is that the injured do not receive the same media or political attention that the dead do.
“You don’t hear about us wounded,” says Portillo, who is trying to cope with the nightmares and flashbacks of his post-traumatic stress disorder. “These illnesses that we come back with ... if people only knew.”
And so the sergeant started Canines for Combat Wounded. It’s a nonprofit organization with a simple mission: “To get more dogs to more injured troops,” as Portillo puts it.
Service dogs can assist with myriad functions, from aiding balance to opening doors. “And psychologically, too,” the sergeant says. “Say you’re 19, and you’re missing a limb. You might be thinking, Who’s gonna love me now? Dogs are another tool to help.”
You can learn more by logging on to the organization’s website: www.caninesforcombatwounded.org.