A Soldier’s Best Friend
Dave Sharpe started Companions for Heroes with the idea of linking veterans suffering from PTSD with shelter and rescue dogs. He knew it was a good idea because he was a veteran suffering from PTSD himself, and his shelter dog had saved his life.
By the time Sharpe was 21, he had already lost two friends from his unit in the Air Force security forces to suicide, one of whom had a wife and a one-year-old daughter. Consumed with survivor’s guilt, Sharpe convinced himself that “‘if someone should have died, it should have been me. I’m single. No one is going to miss me as much.’ I was so ticked off.”
That anger led him to abuse prescription drugs and alcohol. He became violent, starting fights at bars. Soon, friends turned their backs on him. “I was always this happy-golucky guy,” he says. “Now I’d turned into a ball of rage.”
One day, a concerned friend insisted he leave his apartment and accompany him to a pit bull rescue. “Every dog there jumped on me, wanting me to take them,” Sharpe says. “Every dog but one.” She was a pit bull mix, and she just sat there alone, wanting nothing to do with anyone. “That’s the one I picked,” he recalls. “I thought, I’m going to make you love me.”
He named her Cheyenne. “That night, she lay on my lap as I watched TV,” Sharpe says. “I felt a sort of peace for the first time in a long time.”
But the peace didn’t last. A few months later, he got drunk and grabbed his .45-caliber pistol. “I sat on the floor looking at the wall, my back against the bed. I thought, I’m ready. I put the barrel of the .45 in my mouth and clenched it with my teeth.” At that moment, Cheyenne padded in from the hallway and licked his face. “It distracted me,” Sharpe says. “I laughed and moved the pistol out of my mouth. I put it in my lap, and she plops down on top of the pistol.” That was all for that night.
A month later, he tried it again. This time he made sure the door was closed—with Cheyenne on the other side—but not locked. He wanted to make it easy to find his body. But somehow Cheyenne managed to climb back into Sharpe’s lap before he could harm himself. “I got chills,” he says. “How did she get the door open?” That night, he put away the pistol for good.
A staggering 16 veterans die by suicide every day. An estimated 670,000 shelter dogs are euthanized each year. Given his experiences with Cheyenne, Sharpe thought, Why not bring troubled vets together with troubled pets for their mutual benefit? In 2009, four years after he left the service, he started Companions for Heroes (C4H).
The idea was simple: Veterans suffering from PTSD would find shelter dogs, and C4H would reimburse all adoption fees and have the dogs professionally trained to assist with stress inducers such as traffic and crowds.
“Noises, car backfires, a glass drops on a restaurant patio, those are triggers,” says Sharpe. Vets, used to IEDS, don’t like surprises. “We like to see what’s coming at us.” Say a vet is punching in his PIN at an ATM: “The dog watches the rear while we watch the front. It’s a team effort, like we do in the military. If someone comes close, the dog signals the vet. If the vet gets startled, the dog nudges him with his body and brings the vet back to reality. He’s a reminder that you’re not over there; you’re over here. You’re home.”
Travis Warren is one of more than 3,000 soldiers C4H has helped. His two-year-old Plott hound, Cooper, “can sense when you’re having a bad day,” he says. And Warren has had his share. A Marine, he served a stint in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006, when it was dubbed the most dangerous city in the world. Warren escaped numerous firefights without any physical wounds. “PTSD is what I brought back with me,” he says. It manifested itself in night terrors. “I’d wake up in a dead sweat.”
Now Warren rests easy at night. “Cooper sleeps in the bed with my wife and me. He’s always touching me with his paw or his back. And I feel a lot better with him there. I have not had one night terror since I’ve had him.”
Sharpe’s dog, Cheyenne, passed away four years ago. Sharpe, who is now married with two young children, has a new dog, Darby—an Australian shepherd/australian cattle dog/lab mix. Like all C4H dogs, Darby is a rescue. The real question, of course, is: Who rescued whom?
“THE DOG WATCHES THE REAR WHILE WE WATCH THE FRONT. IT’S A TEAM EFFORT, LIKE WE DO IN THE MILITARY.”