Thank You For Your Service: To All Of Our Working Military Dogs

On this Veteran’s Day, I would like to honor our military working dogs. They are on the front lines. They are the ones that check for bombs to protect man. They are the ones that go into places man can’t go. ❤️

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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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National Dog Day Turns Into Military Canine Lovefest on Twitter

Veterans and U.S. service members shared pictures of the canines they encountered while deployed.

Perhaps you’ve heard that today is National Dog Day. According to the website devoted to the occasion, it was founded in 2004 to honor dogs for “their endearing patience, unquestioning loyalty, for their work protecting our streets, homes and families.”

The holiday sparked the hash tag #NationalDogDay, in which Twitter users posted photographs of their favorite dogs. And that quickly turned to veterans and U.S. service members sharing pictures of military working dogs and other canines they encountered while deployed.

Consider this first one, from Thomas Gibbons-Neff:
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The Pentagon’s official account also got in on the act:
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So did the Air Force and the Marines:

                     Click on images to enlarge.

     

Here are a few examples of dogs at work:
                                         
                                             Click on images to enlarge.

                 


And some examples of military service dogs getting love:

                                                 Click on images to enlarge.

                 

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