Dogs of war

I had a dog as a kid that had been, supposedly, abused by a hunter/trainer. Everytime she heard a fire cracker she'd panic. What must it be like for a dog in a theater of war? Does anything make any sense at all?

Poor dog. But this is more than an un-cute animal story—a contrast to the heartrending videos of dogs greeting their soldier-masters, home safe. (In Afghanistan, the number of service members who didn’t make it home is fast approaching a thousand.) Gunner is the canine in the coal mine, so to speak—a reminder that war is awful, whichever side you’re on, whatever role you’re in. And dogs, like people, react in a variety of ways. A lab named Zoom

refused to associate with the Marines after seeing one serviceman shoot a feral Afghan dog. Only after weeks of retraining, hours of playing with a reindeer squeaky toy and a gusher of good-boy praise was Zoom willing to go back to work.

What was he being trained not to mind? What can break a dog is not going to spare people. Feral dogs are not the only bystanders who have been killed. One could say that our reason means we can better make sense of war than dogs can—if only everything (or even most things) that happened in a war were reasonable or made sense. But we are smart enough to know how contingent things are once you step into a battlefield. (Whether you are bitten by a feral dog or shoot someone’s pet might just be a matter of hearing a bark at the wrong, unlucky time.) We have better and more elaborate imaginations—and, one presumes, a greater capacity for being haunted. We can dream about war.