The Pet Tree House - Where Pets Are Family Too : IED The Pet Tree House - Where Pets Are Family Too : IED
Showing posts with label IED. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IED. Show all posts

Monday, February 15, 2016

Troops Betrayed as Army Dumps Hundreds of Heroic War Dogs


By then, Daniel had been in Afghanistan two months. It was July 2012, his third tour of duty and his first with Oogie, his military working dog. They were leading their platoon on yet another patrol, clearing a no-name village with maybe 15 houses and one mosque, when they began taking fire.

“The first thing that went through my mind,” he says, “was, ‘S- -t. My dog’s gonna get shot.’ ”

It was a perfect L-shaped ambush, bullets coming from the front and the right, the platoon pinned down in a flat, open landscape. Along the road were shallow trenches, no more than 14 inches deep. Daniel grabbed ­Oogie, squeezed him in a hole, then threw himself over his dog.

It went against all his Army training. “They tell us it’s better for a dog to step on a bomb than a US soldier,” he says. The truth is Daniel, like just about every other dog handler in the armed forces, would rather take the hit himself.

Five weeks into their training, Daniel and Oogie were inseparable. They showered together. They went to the bathroom together. When Daniel ran on the treadmill, Oogie was on the one right next to him, running along.

That week, Daniel got Oogie’s paw print tattooed on his chest.

“The few times you safeguard your dog are slim compared to what he does every time you go outside the wire,” Daniel says. “That’s your dog. The dog saves you and saves your team. You’re walking behind this dog in known IED hot spots. In a firefight, the dog doesn’t understand.”

Bullets were coming closer now; the enemy had long ago picked up on how important the dogs were to the Americans, how successful they were at sniffing out bombs. “I know there were three separate incidents where they shot at ­Oogie,” Daniel says. And as he lay on top of his dog, he stroked him and whispered and kept him calm.

To read more on this story, click here: Troops Betrayed as Army Dumps Hundreds of Heroic War Dogs


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