Ben and Marlin: 'He Gives Me Confidence'

Ben Rodriguez grew up in Virginia idolizing his grandfather, a Marine who spent 30 years in the U.S. Marine Corps. “He was a fighter jet pilot for 30 years, active for 15 and the rest in the Reserves,” Rodriguez says. “It was inspiring to see all the pictures and hear the stories he’d tell. I really looked up to him.” Originally, “my plan was to be just like Granddad and be a Marine,” but by the time he was ready to go to college, he had changed his mind about the branch he wanted to join. 

Rodriguez decided to attend the University of Maine in Orono and join Army ROTC. “My grandfather gave me a little bit for it,” he recalls, laughing, “because of the way each branch cracks jokes at each other, but he was more than anything just proud and ecstatic that I was doing it. He didn’t expect any of his kids or grandkids to feel like they had to serve.”  

Rodriguez planned to do ROTC all through college, but “I didn’t get a scholarship after my first year,” he says. To help offset the increase in tuition costs, he decided to enlist in the Army National Guard in 2018, near the end of his freshman year. 

“I was 19 years old, and by the time I was at basic training, I turned 20,” he says. While his original plan was to become an officer (ROTC graduates enter the Army as second lieutenants), “I kind of caught the bug for the enlisted side of the Army,” he adds. “I knew that what I wanted to do in the military was going to have to be combat related,” so he went to infantry school. His grandfather was ecstatic that he was doing a combat MOS (military occupational specialty). “I loved it. There’s nothing like it.”

Rodriguez kept pursuing as much education as he could through the National Guard, attending as different schools and courses as he could. “I would try to take as much active-duty time I could while in a part-time position, just to kind of get away from college.” Right before his grandfather passed away,

Rodriguez was accepted into sniper school. “I told him I was going to sniper school, and he was like, ‘You’re going to be able to do it. You’re going to graduate,’ and I just carried that with me throughout the whole time I was there.”

When COVID struck, Rodriguez had amassed three years’ worth of college credits, but the pandemic “changed my perspective on college,” he says. “I disliked the online style of everything.” He had basically withdrawn from school when his unit deployed to Somalia in the Horn of Africa on a security mission in March 2021 as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. 

Rodriguez had originally planned on the Army as a career. “My intention was to be just like Granddad, you know, do 20-plus and retire,” he says. “But the turning point was my deployment,” when he began to reevaluate himself, his ideas of the military, and his plans for the future. 

During his deployment, Rodriguez was the victim of a crime committed by a fellow Guardsman. He did not report it at the time.
When his unit rotated stateside in January 2022, after 10 months on deployment, he went back to Maine and had three months without any Guard-related duties. “That was a really difficult few months for me,” he recalls. “It was nice to have a life back, but I kept getting reminders: ‘Hey, I missed out on this, this, and this,’ all these different things I wasn’t familiar with anymore.”

As a National Guardsman, “you’re a part-time soldier, so you have to constantly flip a switch and you get good at it: ‘This is normal Ben’ to ‘This is Sergeant Rodriguez.’ His deployment, he says, “made the switch on for a full year, so it got a lot harder to flip that switch back off” when he returned stateside.

“There were days when I woke up thinking I was still in Africa.”

Rodriguez had compartmentalized everything – his deployment, the incident – and ignored it. “I just kind of got through it,” he says, but eventually, “the floodgates opened. And I knew I needed help.” 
He reported what had happened to him, and following a lengthy investigation, he was offered an expedited transfer from his existing unit. The only program that was available at the time was the recruit sustainment program (RSP), which is normally staffed by full-time personnel.  

The RSP introduces new recruits to the fundamentals of the U.S. Army before they leave for basic combat training. “I always had this want to be an instructor of some kind,” Rodriguez says, “so I pitched it to my advisor to see if it was a possibility.” His advisor agreed. With 18 months left on his contract, he now faced another new challenge: not only did he have to deal with the aftereffects of the incident, he had to join a new unit and prove himself. 
“Pretty quickly they realized I had a knack for it, and I was good at it,” he says. “I kind of filled a post they didn’t know they needed, of someone to push recruits to make them realize that they were in the military and it wasn’t Call of Duty or summer camp.”

Dogs not drugs
Rodriguez decided to be proactive in tackling his post-traumatic stress disorder.  “I started talking to the VA about benefits and healthcare and mental health,” he says, He made it clear that he was open to therapy and other types of treatments so long as medication was kept to a minimum. “I didn’t want to be on a ton of drugs.”

His healthcare providers discussed different types of alternative therapies and provided him a list of service dog providers. “I didn’t really know what a service dog was like,” he says, but when they mentioned America’s VetDogs, “I said, ‘I think I’ve heard of them.’” He had – thanks Captain, the Washington Capitals’ Puppy With a Purpose®. 

He was reassured when he spoke to the admissions department at America’s VetDogs. “They told me that whatever decision I make, whoever I go with, I’m going to have a positive experience with a service dog.” 

Rodriguez applied and was accepted. “I had gotten my application approved and that was excitement enough,” he says, but then he got the call inviting him to join the February 2024 class. “Once you hear it’s happening, that you’re not waiting anymore, it just starts building even more from there.”

Service dog students meet their dogs on the third day of class during Dog Day. “I was so built up with energy and ready,” Rodriguez recalls, “but I was the last one [to meet his dog].” When black Labrador Retriever Marlin entered the room, “I was so overwhelmed with joy. It was fantastic.” 

Marlin has been trained in nightmare interruption, pressure therapy (where the dog places his head on Rodriguez’s leg),  and providing extension of personal space for Rodriguez in public spaces. 

Rodriguez’s first “a-ha” moment with Marlin came when they were training in Target. “I realized I wasn’t thinking about what he was doing, wasn’t thinking about what I was doing to prompt him. We were just working.” 
His second, he says, occurred near the end of their first week of training. He had a nightmare and woke up to Marlin pushing at him with his nose. “I was disoriented for a second, but then I got ‘transported’ back to reality. I gave him his treat and he went back to bed and so did I. And I slept so much better for the rest of the night.” 

Marlin, Rodriguez says, “gives me the routine that I needed to keep myself out of really bad slumps of depression. He gives me the confidence that we can go out together in public.”

Rodriguez currently works as a safety coordinator for a solar company. “I started as an installer, then became a fleet manager, and now I’m a safety coordinator.” He is usually on the road, visiting job sites to ensure worker safety and acting as a mentor or coach to the workers. Marlin is by his side. “I don’t think there’s any place more than his bed that he loves than being on the road, unless it’s in the car, moving.”

Rodriguez has started a veterans resource group in his company and also engages in a lot of informal veteran outreach. “One of the big things I cared about coming home was make sure my buddies got themselves sorted,” whether that meant learning how to rent an apartment or buy a car or encouraging them to get their VA benefits. 

“A big stigma I’ve been trying to break with my friends, and that I had to break with myself, is the ‘someone has it worse than me’ dilemma,” Rodriguez says. “Yeah, someone’s always going to have it worse than you, but that doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to something.”

He’s encouraged his fellow veterans to apply for a service dog if they think they will benefit from one. “I will talk about this organization [America’s VetDogs] day and night because I think it’s so important,” he says. “There is no service dog like an America’s VetDogs service dog.”

Puppy Raiser: 
Blackwater River Correctional Facility

Weekend Puppy Raiser: 
Michele Fielder

In for Training Sponsor:
Dogtopia Foundation
Dogtopia of Omaha Northwest