Every Day Heroes - Soldier and Dog

Heroic Rex, Mine Dog
Heroes come in all forms, in all shapes and sizes, and they’re not limited to humans alone. Throughout history animals too have performed heroic deeds that have benefitted men, and many animals today continue to work in partnership with humans in order to perform extraordinary deeds. This is the story of a dog, indeed, several dogs, but for a reason we cannot state, we’re combining them under a single name, Heroic Rex, because they all perform heroic deeds each day while working in teams in close harmony with their handlers, each team consisting of a man and a dog. This is the story of a Mine Dog, a dog that has been trained to locate buried land mines through scent, to point out that mine to his handler so that it can be removed, disarmed and no longer be a danger to men, women and children who live in the vicinity of those mine fields in Afghanistan.

Both the American soldiers in these stories and the dogs that work with them are heroes, because each day they go out they face the dangers of a mine exploding and injuring or killing them. They are unsung heroes, except perhaps to the small children who live nearby and often observe them doing their lonely job on the roads to remote villages in Afghanistan, some of those children missing legs from mines that exploded when they were on their way to school, or playing together. The danger is ever present until those hidden mines are located and removed. There are millions of them in Afghanistan, most planted by the Russians and the Taliban, some fifteen or twenty years ago, but they are still live and dangerous, always poised and ready to take a life. It might be that of an adult, it might be that of a child, but when the fighting stops the mine does not know it and it is ready to kill until it does, or it is removed. Rex’s job and the job of the other dogs is to find the mines so that they can be safely removed and rendered harmless.

So Heroic Rex is out there every day, using his superior sense of smell and his keen intelligence to find those mines before a child is killed or injured by one. Yes, Rex is a true hero, thousands of miles away from home, using his natural abilities along with the additional skills he has been taught, to save humans from the dangers that other humans have created for them. Rex is a hero because he does all this dangerous work unselfishly, in return for lots of love and affection from his handler, an American soldier who is also thousands of miles away from home doing a job that will make a little bit of that country safer for the people who live there.

That’s what American soldiers often do and get too little recognition for, and we hope that by telling this story, Americans at home will understand a little more about what our men and women are doing in the Middle-East.
The soldiers and their dogs shall remain nameless, but this is their story and I am telling it for them. They are the heroes. I am just an ordinary citizen who thinks that we should talk more about our heroes who are doing a good job for us overseas, and give them some of the credit they deserve. I hope that you agree.

And perhaps the "power that be" will see the futility of silencing the Sergeant's voice on the Web and allow him to continue his good work in keeping us informed.
Thanks fellows. You're doing a great job.