Man's Best Friends - True Stories of the World's Most Heroic Dogs. John McShane
admitted: ‘It scared the crap out of me! I started thinking about it and I was like, “Wow, my dog just saved my life!” It was a scary moment for me, like the war actually hit me – the war became real in that moment.’
Mello and an Air Force K-9 handler went on a route-clearing mission near the town of Najaf and following this, he and the airman were asked to clear some suspicious piles of rubble around the convoy. He and the other handler split the area into two sections: Mello cleared in front of the convoy, while the airman cleared behind. After exiting their mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, they began clearing the piles. As they searched, Bodo began acting peculiarly.
‘I had Bodo on the retractable leash and while we were searching, he started to get a little bit behind me so I tried to coach him ahead of me but he wouldn’t go and I ended up getting in front of him,’ said Mello. ‘He was showing great change in his behaviour.’ Mello bent over with his head close to the ground and ordered Bodo to seek, but Bodo refused to listen and Mello soon learned why.
‘All of a sudden he jerked sharply behind me and him jerking the leash jerked my head up,’ said Mello. ‘I heard a whiz and a loud ping, like metal hitting rock. Sand started kicking up in my face and I’m waving my hands because I can’t see, because I have dust in my eyes. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: someone just shot at me.’
When the gunners realised what had happened, they yelled at Mello to get in their vehicle. Dazed, and with sand in his eyes, Mello received help to get inside from a fellow soldier. Once inside, he was asked where he thought the round had come from, but he told them he didn’t know, that he hadn’t heard the shot.
‘That was a scary day for me – the bullet was only a foot or so in front of my head,’ he recalled. ‘If Bodo hadn’t pulled me back, it would have hit me right in the head.’ And he attributed Bodo’s prompt actions that day to the dog’s keen sense of hearing. ‘He can hear things we can’t. He will hear things before I hear them, too – he lifts his head up, his ears perk up,’ said Mello. ‘It’s possible he did hear the round and thought, “Dad’s in trouble” and pulled me back. It’s not important to me how he did it – all I know is Bodo, without a doubt, saved my life that day.’
When Mello returned to his unit, the leadership asked if he wanted to be nominated for a Combat Action Badge but he said no. ‘I’m not wounded or anything,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do anything spectacular, I just did my job – Bodo is the one who did something amazing.’
War-torn Iraq was also the setting for the remarkable story of a dog named Nubs. In October 2007, Major Brian Dennis and his team of 11 men were in Iraq patrolling the Syrian border. One day, as his team arrived at a border fort, they encountered a pack of stray dogs – not uncommon in the barren, rocky desert that was home to wolves and wild dogs.
‘We all got out of the Humvee and I started working when this dog came running up,’ recalled Dennis. ‘I said, “Hey, buddy” and bent down to pet him.’ At this point he noticed the dog’s ears had been cut. ‘I said, “You got little nubs for ears.”’ The name stuck and the dog, whose ears had been shorn off as a puppy by an Iraqi soldier (to make him ‘look tougher’), became known as Nubs.
Dennis fed him scraps from his field rations, including bits of ham and frosted strawberry Pop Tarts. ‘I didn’t think he’d eat the Pop Tart, but he did,’ he admitted. Nubs accompanied the men on night patrols. ‘I’d get up in the middle of the night to walk the perimeter with my weapon and Nubs would get up and walk next to me, like he was doing guard duty,’ said Dennis. Eventually he had to say goodbye to Nubs but he never forgot the dog. He began mentioning Nubs in emails written to friends and family back home. ‘I found a dog in the desert,’ Dennis wrote in an email in October 2007. ‘I call him Nubs. We clicked right away. He flips on his back and makes me rub his stomach.’
‘Every couple of weeks, we’d go back to the border fort and I’d see Nubs every time,’ said Dennis, who penned his story for the Paw Nation website. ‘Each time he followed us around a little more.’ And every time the men rumbled away in their Humvees, Nubs would run after them. ‘We’re going 40 miles an hour and he’d be right next to the Humvee,’ said Dennis. ‘He’s a crazy fast dog. Eventually, he’d wear out, fall behind and disappear in the dust.’
On one trip to the border fort in December 2007, Dennis found Nubs was badly wounded in his left side, where he’d been stabbed with a screwdriver. ‘The wound was infected and full of pus,’ he recalls. ‘We pulled out our battle kits and poured antiseptic on his wound, and force-fed him some antibiotics wrapped in peanut butter.’ Nubs was in so much pain that he refused food and water and slept standing up all night because he couldn’t lie down. The next morning he seemed better. Dennis and his team left again, but he thought about Nubs the entire time, hoping the dog was still alive.
A fortnight later, he found Nubs alive and well. ‘I had patched him up and that seemed to be a turning point in how he viewed me,’ says Dennis. This time, when Dennis and his team left the fort, Nubs followed. Though the dog lost sight of the Humvees, he never gave up. For two days, he endured freezing temperatures and packs of wild dogs and wolves, eventually finding his way to Dennis at a camp, an incredible 70 miles south near the Jordanian border.
‘There he was, all beaten and chewed up,’ says Dennis. ‘I knew immediately that Nubs had crossed through several dog territories and fought and ran, and fought and ran.’ The dog jumped on him, licking his face.
Most of the 80 men at the camp welcomed Nubs, even building him a doghouse but a couple of soldiers complained, leading Dennis’s superiors to order him to get rid of the dog. His hand forced, Dennis decided the only thing to do was to bring Nubs to America. He began coordinating Nubs’ rescue effort. Friends and family in the States helped, raising the $5,000 that it would cost to transport the dog overseas. Finally, it was all arranged. Nubs was handed over to volunteers in Jordan, who looked after him and sent him onto Chicago, then San Diego, where Dennis’s friends waited to pick him up. Nubs lived with them and began training with a local dog trainer, who told Paw Nation: ‘I focused on basic obedience and socialising him with dogs, people and the environment.’
A month later, Dennis finished his deployment in Iraq and returned home to San Diego, California, where he immediately boarded a bus for Camp Pendleton to be reunited with his dog. ‘I was worried he wouldn’t remember me,’ says Dennis. But he needn’t have been concerned. ‘Nubs went crazy,’ recalls Dennis. ‘He was jumping up on me, licking my head.’
Dennis wrote a book about his experiences and appeared on several TV shows to publicise it. He even got to meet Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. ‘It’s been a strange phenomenon,’ he said, then in the middle of publicising his book. ‘It’s been a blessing. I get drawings mailed to me that children have drawn of Nubs with his ears cut off – it makes me laugh. I keep telling him he’s going to get a big head! He’s handling it like a pro; he’s definitely on board for the adventure.
‘I think people are intrigued because there are so many powerful lessons to be learned here, starting with doing a simple act of kindness and see how it is repaid and also how to overcome adversity in the worst of situations.’
And surely ‘the worst of situations’ is war? The Dickin Medal was introduced to the UK in 1943 by Maria Dickin – founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) – to honour the work of animals in war and is often described as the animals’ Victoria Cross. A bronze medal, it carries the words ‘For Gallantry’ and ‘We Also Serve’ inscribed inside a laurel wreath. Between 1943 and 1949, the medal was awarded to 32 pigeons, 18 dogs, three horses and one cat for events that occurred during the Second World War.
In 2002, the Dickin Medal was revived and since then recipients have included dogs working in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America of 2001 and dogs serving in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq. A German Shepherd called Antis was the first foreign (non-British) dog to receive the Dickin Medal for services rendered during World War II, though.
The phrase ‘one man and his dog’ might have been coined for