Gunner is from Virginia. He was trained to sniff out bombs and seemed able to “tolerate gunfire.” He sounds like a good dog. He was given the canine rank of first sergeant. But he was sent to a front-line battalion, and “reached a crisis soon afterward.” He’s recuperating in a kennel at Camp Leatherneck, a rear base:
For weeks after he arrived at Camp Leatherneck, Gunner refused to leave the kennel compound. Even now almost any sound sends him into a panic. If a shipping container door slams somewhere nearby, Gunner hunches down and bolts for an open cage door. If an artillery round goes off in the distance, he races into Cpl. McCoy’s tent, then weaves around the cages, his tail low and twitchy. Even the click of a camera shutter can send him flashing back to some bad experience only he can recall.
Poor dog. But this is more than an un-cute animal story—a contrast to the heartrending videos of dogs greeting their soldier-masters, home safe. (In Afghanistan, the number of service members who didn’t make it home is fast approaching a thousand.) Gunner is the canine in the coal mine, so to speak—a reminder that war is awful, whichever side you’re on, whatever role you’re in. And dogs, like people, react in a variety of ways. A lab named Zoom
refused to associate with the Marines after seeing one serviceman shoot a feral Afghan dog. Only after weeks of retraining, hours of playing with a reindeer squeaky toy and a gusher of good-boy praise was Zoom willing to go back to work.
From Amy Davidson's blog, with excerpts from the original Wall Street Journal story.
