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Leading the way
The first class of Clemson University pre-vet students to train golden retrievers for Battle Buddies had a 100% success rate of pre-training their dogs to be matched with veterans. From right to left, Natasha Mueller and Riggs; Marena Fleming and Cooper; Jo Anne Creed, co-founder of Battle Buddies Carolinas; Dana Galvin and Bowman.
Photo by John Gillespie
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Good dog!
Battle Buddies Carolinas specializes in training English cream golden retrievers as service dogs for veterans. “They’re just more trainable. They have very pleasing personalities,” says co-founder Jo Anne Creed. “They want to please you, and they’re not very independent, which is great for a veteran with PTSD because they want to be stuck to you.”
Photo by John Gillespie
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Hope and healing
U.S. Air Force veteran Candice Matelski-Brady suffered physical injury and post-traumatic stress that led to a suicide attempt. A service dog from Battle Buddies helped her readjust to civilian life and thrive. Today, she works as an administrator at the Veterans Administration hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, where she shares her story of healing and hope and advocates for the service dog program. She also urges veterans enduring emotional suffering to seek help from the Veterans Crisis Line at (800) 273-8255, press 1.
Photo courtesy of Candice Matelski-Brady
Candice Matelski-Brady has a clear memory of the day she decided to take her own life.
Raised in foster care, Matelski-Brady had forged a life of her own after joining the U.S. Air Force in 2006. She was married with a son and was working stateside as a military linguist fluent in five languages, including Arabic.
“I had a family, and I enjoyed what I did,” Matelski-Brady recalls.
All that changed on a California street in May 2009 when, on her way to duty, the vehicle she was driving was struck by another car. Matelski-Brady suffered severe injuries to her neck and lower back that resulted in nerve damage stretching from her neck down her arms.
Matelski-Brady was granted a medical retirement by the military in 2010, and she struggled to return to civilian life.
“I couldn’t find a job. And, at that point, I had two babies and was a single mom,” Matelski-Brady says. “I couldn’t run. I was walking with a cane. I don’t think people realize how depressing it is at 30 years old to be walking with a cane. It’s not really an attractive thing when you’re a single mom.”
Matelski-Brady experienced depression and anxiety. Military doctors diagnosed her as having post-traumatic stress. A longtime runner, she suddenly found she could no longer carry in her groceries, much less provide the care her youngest son, who is autistic, needed. Her ex-husband was granted custody of their children.
“I couldn’t be the mom I wanted to be,” she says. “I spent a very long time wishing I wasn’t here anymore because I wasn’t offering anything to society anymore. I felt like I had become a failure. I’d lost everything.”
In September 2014, as she sat between her sons in a church service, with tears streaming down her face, Matelski-Brady made her decision. That night after she had delivered the boys, ages 9 and 7, to their father, she would return home, close the door and kill herself.
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Two years earlier, in 2012, John and Jo Anne Creed began the Battle Buddies program.
During the four previous years, they had volunteered to train service dogs for other disability organizations. The idea for Battle Buddies Carolinas came after they first heard of PTSD when their oldest son was serving in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Bragg.
“We started learning and researching,” Jo Anne Creed says. “My husband was like, ‘We’ve got to do something. This is really bad.’”
A November 2020 report released by the Department of Veterans Affairs shows the rate of suicide among U.S. veterans has ticked upward in recent years. In 2018, the latest year when statistics were available, 17.6 veterans a day committed suicide. That was a slight increase over the 2017 total of 17.5. From 2005 to 2018, the overall suicide rate remained largely unchanged, between 17 and 18 veterans a day.
Over the past eight years, the Creeds have placed 12 service dogs with veterans.
“The whole idea is for the veteran to get their independence back,” Creed says, “to put all their hyper-vigilance on the dog so the dog is always watching their back, watching their front. They alert before anxiety starts.”
It takes about 15 months to train each golden retriever. The Creeds have four golden retrievers of their own, including the female they use as a breeder dog. Battle Buddies loves the line called English cream goldens.
“They’re just more trainable. They have very pleasing personalities,” Creed says. “They want to please you, and they’re not very independent, which is great for a veteran with PTSD because they want to be stuck to you.”
After starting with just one puppy per year, interest in the program pushed Battle Buddies to train more dogs to meet the demand. Currently, the waiting list is long and about a year out.
The nonprofit organization is fueled largely by donations from individuals, schools, businesses and fundraisers, and relies heavily on volunteers to help raise and train puppies that are ultimately placed with veterans at no charge.
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In March 2020, the Creeds met with members of Clemson University’s Pre-Vet Club. Jo Anne Creed chose three students and paired them with their new puppies. The students were allowed to name the dogs, and they all chose names with links to the university—Cooper (named for Robert Muldrow Cooper Library), Bowman (for Bowman Field) and Riggs (for Riggs Stadium) soon joined students on campus.
Jo Anne Creed is thankful for the work done by the first three students, Dana Galvin, Marena Fleming and Natasha Mueller.
“You can’t copy this kind of socialization,” she says. “This was a dream, and it exceeded everything I wanted it to be.”
The students began basic crate and potty training, followed by 30 standard obedience commands, as well as teaching the dogs to become alert to nightmares and panic attacks. Cooper, Bowman and Riggs were taken to football games. Bowman accompanied Galvin on a flight to Florida. Riggs took in a hockey game in Charleston.
There were also trips to campus when the students returned to in-person classes. Fleming, from Gilbert, recalled with a chuckle the day Cooper let out a long groan of boredom during her physics class. The entire class, including her professor, broke out in laughter.
Mueller, from Hanahan, has always had dogs. She hopes to specialize in equine science and would like to eventually pair up with her younger sister, also a student at Clemson, and open their own veterinary clinic. She’s proud of how far Riggs came in the course of the year she trained him.
“He became so much more in tune with my emotions and body language,” says Mueller, recalling when Riggs climbed in her lap during the closing moments of a loss by the Clemson basketball team. “I’m very proud of him because that’s what he’s going to be doing for his veteran—watching him and being there when his veteran needs him.”
Interest in the program has skyrocketed. There were 22 students interested in taking part in the latest round of puppy training. Twelve students were selected, and six two-member teams began working with the new batch of puppies at Clemson this past fall. Three of the new names are Dabo, Brooks and Clementine.
As for Cooper, Riggs and Bowman, they are now with their new owners, says Jo Anne Creed. The hardest part of the program is saying goodbye to that animal that has gone from a stumbling, bumbling eight-week-old puppy to a service dog that will serve as a veteran’s partner in life.
Galvin, Fleming and Mueller all say easing the transition for volunteers is the knowledge that the dog is going to help someone who needs them.
“I signed up with the mindset that this is what the end goal is going to be,” Fleming says.
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Matelski-Brady’s suicide attempt was unsuccessful. She was hospitalized for a week and began therapy for depression.
In 2017, she landed a stable job as a clerk answering phones at the Veterans Administration hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. It was there where she saw a veteran walking with one of the service dogs trained by Battle Buddies.
Matelski-Brady called the organization, and on a summer day in 2018, she finally met her match—a golden retriever named Justice.
“I was very shy. And I was so nervous and so afraid, I was literally shaking,” she recalls. “Justice was so sweet. She came over and put her head in my lap. That was it.”
The two trained together for six months. Matelski-Brady learned commands, while Justice helped her become less dependent on her cane, serving as a brace and helping her traverse stairs. Justice would also sense her owner’s anxiety and wake her from nightmares.
“I think the biggest help was that Justice helped stop my self-isolation that was really contributing to my depression,” she says. “I felt better about going to places because now people weren’t looking at me and looking at my cane. They were looking at my dog and saying, ‘Wow, your dog is super cute!’”
Today, Matelski-Brady is a business manager at the hospital, where Justice sits beside her desk. She went back to school and earned a master’s degree in psychology in 2019. She’s now pursuing a doctor of public administration degree from Liberty University. Matelski-Brady remarried and continues to see her sons. Her husband, a Navy veteran and retired federal police officer, has his own Battle Buddies companion, Captain Sulley.
Justice and the Battle Buddies program changed her life, Matelski-Brady says.
“When I see her, I have that reminder that I’m not alone,” she says. “She’s there to help me, and I have to take care of her because she’s my teammate and my partner, and I can’t let my partner down.”
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Get More
Battle Buddies Carolinas provides service dogs to veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries. The nonprofit organization is largely funded through donations.
To learn more, go to battlebuddiescarolinas.org, email battlebuddiessc@gmail.com or call founders John and Jo Anne Creed at (864) 404-8888.
Veterans Crisis Line. Veterans dealing with emotional turmoil or thoughts of suicide can seek immediate help 24/7 by calling the Veterans Crisis Line at (800) 273-8255 and pressing 1 or by texting 838255. For more information, visit veteranscrisisline.net.