Jimmy Didear was backed into a corner, with an elevator behind him, a glass partition to his left, and a wall to his right. Directly in front of him — almost in his face — was a VA police officer. He was asking questions, lots of them, about Jimmy and his service dog, Max. Not getting the answers he wanted, the officer kept pushing. And the more he pressed, the madder Jimmy got.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where you’re up against the wall and you can’t get out of it,” Jimmy said. “You’re gonna come over the top of somebody. I know how to do it. I know how to put this guy down and make sure he doesn’t come back.”
Max is a ninety-four-pound mix of chocolate Labrador and American Bull Terrier that Jimmy had brought with him to his weekly Tuesday morning group session at the Corpus Christi VA Specialty Clinic. As he and other vets had waited for the counselor to arrive, Jimmy was letting Max stretch his legs and get some water. The officer spotted them and approached.
“This guy corners me and starts asking me a bunch of questions about the dog,” Jimmy recalled. “Like, ‘Is he a service dog? What is his job? What is he trained to do?’ And all this other stuff. The more he talked, the madder I got. And I told this clown, ‘You can only ask me two questions. The Americans with Disabilities Act and the VA say you can only ask me two questions: Is he a certified service dog and what is his purpose? You cannot ask me what my problem is. You cannot ask me why he’s with me or any of these other things.’”
Jimmy could see his fellow group members watching the confrontation from the other side of the glass partition. Jimmy, a hot-tempered former Marine tanker who had served twenty-two months in Vietnam, was steaming.
“You do not want to corner me,” Jimmy stated matter of factly in his smooth Texas accent. “It was embarrassing as hell, and I was getting madder and madder. I was at the point where I was fixing to go over this guy — and one of us was not going to get up.”
Instead, Max acted. He reached up with his mouth and took hold of Jimmy’s hand. It wasn’t a bite. It wasn’t meant to cause pain. He just gently applied pressure, trying to redirect Jimmy’s attention.
“And I snapped out of it,” Jimmy said. “I came back down and I looked down at him and he was looking up at me. And I see that he had positioned himself in between me and this guy.”
As the argument heated up, the officer had inched closer and closer. But Max had stepped between them, nudging them apart, without either of the men realizing what was happening. And the touch of the dog’s mouth on his hand had calmed Jimmy down, focused him. He looked the officer square in the eye and declared:
“That’s what that dog is for.”
This has been an excerpt from Wounded Warriors and the Animals That Help Them Heal. Buy it here.
