Stress, Dog.

Slow and steady finishes the book. New story starts now and continues ... eventually. In any case, now begins my next story: Stress, Dog.

Undoubtedly, the person with the best job in the Iraq War, other than observation balloon minder (yeah, she's still up there, boss ...) was the Corporal from C/215th BSB whose job it was to just take care of a golden retriever and lead it around to visit every company on COS Marez for 15 minutes at a time. Dog fucking loved it.

One slightly interesting thing about military working dogs, reflected in this drawing, is that they're nominally assigned a rank, which is always one higher than the one assigned to the handler, so that the handler is obliged to treat it with respect. This can lead to some counseling statements: "Then you forgot to take care of Sergeant First Class Bounce, and he shit in the day room. I am counseling you for the conduct noted above ..."

By and large, though, they take their duties very seriously. On one of my first missions outside the wire in Iraq, we had an explosive-sniffing dog team attached to clear the cloverleaf we were doing a half-assed job of reconstructing before we got down to work. One of the million or so corpse-eating mongrel dogs that roamed the streets of Mosul came up to investigate / spread disease to / bite our guy's dog, and he straight whipped out his M9 and shot it dead, no hesitation.