By KEVAN MOORE
Ozzy Vom Binderhaus is one heck of a handsome fella. He’s also a little rambunctious, but that’s quite alright considering the fact that he’s only nine months old.
“He’s our first dog,” said John D. Fielden, the founder of the Healing Shepherd, a non-profit that trains Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) service dogs for veterans. “He’s our prototype, our pilot program.”
Ozzy is still very “green” and won’t be certified as a service dog until he’s about 2 years old and he’s already got what Fielden calls his “ladies in waiting.” That’s when the Healing Shepherd is likely to really take off.
Fielden had a long and distinguished military career. He’s been on 14 deployments since 1984 with the Navy, Naval Reserve, Army and Army Reserve. In addition to Operation Desert Storm, he served three tours in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, including a stint alongside Naval Special Warfare Command – Group One at a counter-intelligence temporary holding facility.
Since leaving the military in 2011, he’s dedicated himself to helping other veterans. Especially those, like himself, who have dealt with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“When I left the military I was diagnosed with PTSD and I’ve been dealing with that for about two-and-half years now,” he said. “Actually, I’ve been dealing with it longer, I just didn’t have a title on it.”
Fielden founded of the Healing Shepherd in June of 2012. The organization, like Ozzy, is still in its infancy and Fielden is hoping to find veterans who are willing to take on training dogs to be certified. The animals are not emotional support pets; rather, the training allows them to meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements and rigorous Army standards.
“Everyone that goes over there gets it,” Fielden said of PTSD among veterans who have served in combat. “They’re just traumatized in different ways, some more than others. Some have more coping skills when they go into and some don’t.”
And, even though, he didn’t have a name for it, Fielden knew he was suffering.
“I realized I had it (PTSD) after my first tour because I was drinking a lot more,” he said. “And, then, after my second tour I drank a bit, but I still maintained because I knew the third tour was coming.”
He left the Navy for the Army, in part, because he was suffering from PTSD. It was while in the Navy that he got some boots-on-the-ground experience.
“That kind of led into a little bit of an addiction, kind of an adrenaline rush,” he said. “I had done 24 months on the Navy’s time deployed. And at the end of that second mobilization as a Navy reservist I got a DUI on post and that was my first real red flag for PTSD. I let my contract expire because I was going through personal turmoil. But I knew the only way I could get back into the fight was to get in the Army.”
A short time later, he was back in Iraq for the tail end of the surge.
Eventually, Fielden left the military and found himself alone and struggling with anger, a sense of betrayal and other issues.
“I found it difficult to cope when I was in the civilian environment and sought help from the VA and that was a challenge,” he said. “It took 25 months for my VA claim to go through.”
Fielden had a German shepherd when he was young and has loved the breed ever since. He has more than 25 years of experience as a consultant on German shepherds and specializes in German and European bloodlines. He has been involved in selectively breeding the Greif zum Lahntal working line and Mutz von der Pelztierfarm, Quanto and Canto Weinerau West German show lines.
While working through his own issues, physical or PTSD-related, was a significant challenge, a friend of Fielden’s prompted him to get Ozzy.
“I had a friend of mine a year and a half ago, who has known me since 1986, he says to me, ‘John, you’ve got PTSD. After all of your years of experience with German shepherds, why don’t you have a dog?’ I didn’t have an answer for him. My answer was an excuse. My excuse was my house is too small. My excuse was I don’t have a yard. And these are significant, but challenges is what they are. Just challenges.”
When Fielden traveled to Los Angeles to get Ozzy, he made a stop by a friends house who had helped buy the dog. Then, Fielden went straight to his mother’s house.
“She’s been, you know, concerned about me so we got into a little topic and I started to cry and the dog was laying down at my feet at that moment,” Fielden said. “This is an eight-week old puppy. Literally, eight weeks old and I started to get emotional and he sat up and whimpered at me. It took me out of that moment right then and there, you know? Not trained, but just the relationship, the physical proximity and being able to feel that emotion.”
And while the Healing Shepherd continues to grow and evolve, Fielden knows that the animals can help men and women like him who have been on the front lines of war.
He points to one recent call as an example.
“I got a call from a guy who just got out of the fog of Afghanistan and getting his left leg chopped off,” Fielden said. “I said, ‘I’d love to help you right now, but I don’t have a dog to give you.’ These guys are calling me. This guy had only been home for two weeks. It’s that moment in time when that dog, those early stages of PTSD, when that patient, that soldier, can benefit the most emotionally from having a dog around.”