By LISA HOFFMAN, Scripps Howard News Service
(May 17, 2003 12:54 p.m. EDT) - He's an adopted commando dog with the improbable name of Fluffy, a fast learner who served nobly during combat in northern Iraq.
Now, his best friend is battling to bring the war dog home to the country for which he fought.
"This dog was used in many combat operations in northern Iraq and proved to be a wonderful 'soldier,'" U.S. Sgt. 1st Class Russell Joyce, an Army special forces soldier, wrote in a plea for help with his mission to have Iraq-born Fluffy "live his retirement with me here in the U.S."
Air Force and Army officials are sympathetic, but it is proving neither a quick nor easy thing to approve Joyce's unconventional request. There are strict rules - military, health, customs and others - about bringing animals into the United States, and the fact that Fluffy, in effect, enlisted on the battlefield just complicates matters more.
"We are trying to work something out," Maj. Gary Kolb, a spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, N.C., said Thursday. On Friday, the unofficial word was that the two might be reunited sometime "in the near future."
Fluffy's still-unfolding saga began when Joyce's unit, working behind-the-scenes in the Mosul area, needed a canine to provide security for the soldiers and otherwise help them in their battle to oust Saddam Hussein's regime.
Trained to improvise on the battlefield, these elite troops didn't requisition an Army working dog; instead, they asked their local allies, the ethnic Kurds, to find them one. The Kurds brought back a malnourished German shepherd who apparently had been maltreated by the Iraqi army.
Assigned to be the dog's handler, Joyce, 35, gave the young animal his irreverent name, set to teaching him English as his second language and added pounds to the scrawny dog's frame and trust to his heart.
By Joyce's account, the dog - who he estimates is no older than 2 years - took to his new life with enthusiasm and performed admirably as Joyce's team fought for control of a mountain north of Mosul. Joyce said he and Fluffy went through several "shootings and a minefield" together.
When it came time for Joyce to come home, he scrambled for permission for Fluffy to accompany him. He had the dog immunized and checked out by Army veterinarians, and got initial Army permission for the dog to leave.
But bureaucratic roadblocks developed, and Joyce had to come home alone. He found temporary quarters for Fluffy with the Army's 506th Security Force Squadron, a dog-handling team now based in Kirkuk.
That unit, however, couldn't keep Fluffy for long. Joyce feared the dog would be euthanized within days, or simply turned back to the Iraqis, whom Fluffy had been trained by Joyce to dislike.
So from virtually the moment he returned home to Fort Bragg last Sunday, Joyce, who is married and the father of two, mounted a frantic effort to find a way to cut through the red tape and bring Fluffy over via Air Force transport. He offered to foot the travel bill himself.
For help, he contacted the U.S. War Dogs Association, a group of former GI dog handlers familiar with the deep devotion that grows between dogs and soldiers in combat, as well as with the pain of leaving their canine comrades behind.
"He was so upset. You could hear the desperation," said group president Ron Aiello, who walked "point" on patrol in Vietnam for 13 months with his beloved Stormy, who he said saved his life countless times.
While the U.S. armed forces have used combat canines since World War I, it was in Vietnam that they really earned their stripes. More than 4,000 dogs served in that long, jungle war, where they are believed to have saved 10,000 U.S. soldiers, and were so effective that the Viet Cong offered a $20,000 bounty for their capture - twice as much the reward paid for a GI, according to war-dog histories.
But at the end of the war, barely 200 of those four-legged troops were brought home to the United States. Thousands were deemed surplus "equipment" by the Pentagon and either euthanized by the U.S. military, turned over to the South Vietnamese army or simply abandoned.
That fate still gnaws at the veterans who, to a man, say they owe their lives to their dogs and found leaving them behind the hardest thing they have ever done.
"As a Vietnam veteran, I don't want that to happen again," George Augustine, of Sarasota, Fla., wrote in an e-mail this week, one of thousands of messages from veterans and animal advocates that flooded the in-boxes of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on down this week.
"I think that the origin of the dog is irrelevant," Augustine wrote. "The dog served the Army and now I think he should be reunited with his trainer."