Ron Harris
Published: February 18 2004
Yo-ge has made it out of war-torn Iraq. So have Cookie, Ratchet and Private.
But to the dismay of Missouri National Guard Pfc. Jeremiah Smith of Fulton, Mo., and scores of other soldiers and Marines, Niki and dozens of others like her have not. And as the clock ticks down, the chances of their survival diminish.
This is the story of man’s, and woman’s, best friend and the bond between them, a bond that has created an international effort to save the hundreds of stray dogs that roam Iraqi cities and countryside. That bond also is causing friction within the military as soldiers extend their stay in Iraq and befriend more dogs.
Special Forces Sgt. Major William Gillette discovered Yo-ge (pronounced Yo-Gee) when he and his unit took over a border checkpoint between Iraq and Jordan.
The full-blooded German Shepherd was being held by one Iraqi and beaten by two others. Gillette, 34, of Clarksville, Tenn., “persuaded” the men to let the dog go and he and Yo-ge have been together ever since. Gillette even speaks to Yo-ge in Arabic.
“He’d walk with me when I checked buildings,” said Gillette, who has been wounded in two prior military conflicts. “When I pulled guard duty, he’d go with me. He’d sleep at the foot of my mattress. Me and him just hit it off. So, I made the decision to bring him back.”
Smith ran into Niki one day at a gate to his unit’s compound.
“There isn’t anything in particular that I like about Niki,” Smith, 21, said in an e-mail from Iraq. “She is just a great dog to have. She sits and stays on command, not to mention I am training her to fetch a ball. She may not be house broken yet, but I am still working on that.”
Army Staff Sgt. Jason Cowart of Fort Hood, Texas, used Army rations to entice a scrawny puppy that he later named Ratchet from under a dumpster. Throughout the war, Ratchet rode next to Cowart in the front seat of a Humvee. And in May, when Cowart learned that his stay in Iraq was being extended another six months, he made arrangements to send Ratchet back to the United States.
Cowart’s e-mail was one of the first requests for help that the U.S. office of the World Society for the Protection of Animals received, but it has been far from the last.
“We get three to six calls or e-mails a week from soldiers, fathers, mothers, wives and siblings trying to find out how to get a dog from Iraq to the United States,” said Laura Salter, director of the World Society’s U.S. headquarters in Framingham, Mass. “They’ll say, `My family member has fallen in love with this animal and now we don’t know what to do.’ So, we’ve been trying to assist soldiers to find exit routes to bring their animals back to the states.”
The organization even has created a brochure to explain to soldiers the hurdles they’ll need to jump to get their new friends to the United States.
Don Smith, a 20-year Navy veteran and father of Jeremiah Smith, is one of the family members who called Salter’s office.
His son’s tour is up in either May or June, and he is hoping to bring the dog to the United States within the next two to three weeks, he said. Don Smith already has sent a pet crate to Iraq for the trip.
For every dog, there’s the question of money. The soldiers and agencies trying to help them, however, are finding a way around it.
In the case of Ratchet, WSPA International Projects Director John Walsh contacted an animal lover who works for British Airways. She helped arranged the flight for Ratchet from Iraq to London to Houston and paid all the veterinary fees and shipping costs.
A California animal lover picked up the tab for Private, who was shipped from Iraq to Camp Pendleton, Calif., where he now lives with his Marine buddies.
And friends helped the family that brought over Cookie by lining up to adopt the puppies to whom she gave birth just a few days after arriving in the United States.
Gillette spent his own money, more than $1,500 to get Yo-ge from Iraq to New York, where his friend, Chris Cornelius of Royal Oaks, Mich., a former Special Forces soldier, met the animal and arranged to fly him to Detroit.
Once in Detroit, Yo-ge was taken to an area veterinarian, Dr. Jack Wright, who treated the dog free of charge for severe arthritis in both hips, a degenerating joint disease and an arthritic elbow.
“If the soldier is over there risking his life, the least I can do is help the dog that he rescued,” Wright said.
Additionally, the nearby Royal Oak Fire Department chipped in about $200 to defray costs as did a local real estate agent, Cornelius said.
One of the reasons for the transportation cost is because of long-standing orders that don’t allow the soldiers to use military transport to move non-military animals.
Consequently, soldiers have to find their own transportation and make arrangements to have the dogs treated by veterinarians before they can travel.
The biggest barrier recently, however, is stepped up enforcement by the military of a rule against the soldiers having mascots.
Salter of the animal protection group said she often receives e-mails from soldiers seeking help, and then receives another from the same soldier later explaining that they no longer need assistance because the camp commander has had the dog killed.
One soldier reported that his commanding officer has a standing order to shoot any dogs that come into camp.
Making the effort even more difficult is a new order by neighboring Jordan, the country through which most of the Iraqi dogs had been shipped until recently. The order restricts the flow of all animals across the Iraqi-Jordanian borders.
Jordanian officials are concerned about a lack of proper veterinary control on the Iraqi side that could result in the transfer of diseases to Jordan.
