From the
Post-Gazette:
This is the story of a soldier and her dog, and the act of Congress required to keep them together.
It began in July, when Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jamie Dana woke up, confused, in a hospital bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
Her last memory was riding in a military convoy in Iraq after she and her bomb sniffing dog, Rex, had searched a village. She remembered being in extreme pain. And she remembered asking frantically about Rex, eventually being told that he had not survived.
But she didn't know that the military had told her husband, fellow Air Force security officer Mike Dana, that she wasn't going to survive her injuries.
She didn't know that, after a bomb exploded under her Humvee, she spent more than a week in military hospitals in Iraq and Germany before arriving in Washington.
And she didn't know that Rex had survived the bombing with only a minor burn on his nose.
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The bomb exploded under her Humvee three weeks after she arrived in Iraq. The explosion collapsed her lungs, fractured her pelvis and her spine and sent her into hemorrhagic shock.
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When she regained consciousness at Walter Reed, she immediately thought of Rex. "He was always on my mind," she said. "From the moment I was actually starting to become coherent again, I started asking about him."
When U.S. Rep. John E. Peterson, R-Venango, visited her in the hospital, she enlisted his help in adopting Rex. "For her to go through all that trauma, all that pain, it seemed to me that if Rex was her first love, Rex should be at her side," he said.
When Rex came to the hospital for the first time, Sgt. Dana whistled when she heard him coming. He immediately ran down the hallway and jumped into her hospital bed, tangling himself up in her tubes.
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But the long-term adoption process wasn't as simple as Sgt. Dana had hoped.
Mr. Peterson sent an official request to the Air Force, only to receive a letter telling him that adopting a military war dog was prohibited by law until the dog reached retirement age because of the $18,000 training expense.
It would take congressional intervention for the adoption to go through.
And although the Air Force initially was opposed to the adoption, the agency eventually was instrumental in getting the ball rolling.
A spokeswoman for Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown, said the secretary of the Air Force contacted his office and asked the congressman to insert language on Sgt. Dana into the defense appropriations bill. Rep. Murtha agreed, although the final language is still pending.
On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. John Warner. R-Va., agreed to insert similar language into the Senate defense appropriations bill.
"We're just delighted that top military brass has sensed that this is the right thing to do," Mr. Peterson said. "There will be language in there that the military helped craft and supports and I don't see the wheels coming off the wagon."
When Mr. Peterson told Sgt. Dana that the adoption looked likely, she cried.
