My dog adventuring days began when Koda was a mere puppy. Eight weeks old and still trying to untangle his oversized paws, we trekked the trail above our house. (Before the rangers got wise to us!) Amazingly he kept up, with an occasional airlift into my arms when his little legs tuckered out. Early in our adventures we met a man with his own puppy, Kadi, a little black lab mix. Koda and Kadi became fast friends, and Rick, Kadi's owner and I began trading war stories. In Rick's case, this was very literal. A Vietnam veteran, he had some heartwrenchers to tell...especially as a dog handler in this jungle war zone.

Rick is a walking encyclopedia about all animal species, but his love of dogs makes him a canine officiado. When asked about dog's sense of smell, he loads me into his "magic schoolbus" and we enter the nasal passages of "man's best friend" to explore the physiology of their scent glands. Dogs' noses sport about 220 million smell receptors in comparison to our puny 4-5 million. No wonder their noses are always at work, sniffing everything in sight...or better said, out of sight. We pride ourselves with our ability to access data from invisible internet waves, but dogs are constantly taking in data from a network that is totally invisible to us! And they don't even need an electronic connection or a search engine! Max's urine is clearly Max's urine, even if he had Alpo instead of Purina brand the night before!

These canine attributes were used (and arguably abused) during the Vietnam War. Dogs were set up as sentries to guard posts, trackers to sniff out explosives or the presence of the enemy, and even listeners to perceive the tiny vibrations of trip wires that triggered booby traps along trails. They lived in the trenches with their handlers, facing life and death situations every day. It is estimated that they saved up to 10,000 lives of our soldiers in Vietnam. About 4000 dogs were put to work. At least 1000 of them died in service, some from wounds, but many more from heat exhaustion, jungle diseases and even snake bites. Only about 200 of these military dogs made it home. The real atrosity was what the US Government did with the remaining 2800 war dogs. Designated as "surplus army equipment," they were either euthanized or given to the South Vietnamese to await whatever fate the invading North Vietnamese deemed appropriate. After risking life and limb with all the other soldiers, that was the best we could do. I can barely write this without crying.

I'm sure their handlers cried too.

Thankfully the US Government has changed their perspective and policy on war dogs. No dog is left behind now and they are recognized as the heroes that they are. Rick gives talks about the contribution that dogs have made in American wars as far back as the Civil War to the present. He has helped create a National War Dog Memorial to honor the memory of these brave canines who so willingly sacrificed their lives to wars of our own making, born of our human inability to get along.