Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Read Online Free Page B

Explosion responded to commands in English,
     and within a week or two they had learned to answer the commands the American troops
     garrisoned on Kiska issued. They were almost perfect. The soldiers adored them. The
     two dogs weren’t humiliated, they were treated like kings.
    February 10, 1944. Seven dogs. Having been stationed for approximately six months
     on the island, the troops were ordered on to their next field of battle. As they boarded
     the transport ships that had pulled into Kiska Harbor, the seven dogs went with them.
    The twentieth century: a century of war, a century of war dogs. These dogs did more
     than simply die on the battlefields. They took prisoners and were taken. It happened
     all the time on the front lines. Dogs were captured. Trained in battle, bred in all
     sorts of ways, developed, perfected, the dogs were crucial, secret weapons. In the
     second decade of the twentieth century, Germany seized mastiffs from all over Belgium,
     which it had conquered, and inducted them into their military, where they were used
     to pull guns and carts—tasks German dogs were unable to perform. All along the Eastern
     and Western Fronts, Europe’s great powers busied themselves snatching whatever types
     of dogs their own armies lacked. The situation was the same during the Second World
     War. Germany, for instance, still the most advanced nation in terms of its dogs, had
     compelled almost every dog in the French military to turn on its homeland by the time
     Germany conquered France.
    The seven dogs on Kiska would be sent to the mainland. Two as “prisoners” captured
     on the front lines, the remaining five to be trained as “candidate military dogs.”
     The dog-training unit of the Marine Corps was especially interested in the puppies.
     They couldn’t wait to see how good these animals would be—a new generation born of
     two purebred German shepherds, the first (Explosion) American and the second (Masao)
     a sample of the sort of dog that Japan, with its admittedly greater experience in
     this area, was sending into the field. The order had been issued for the dogs to be
     shipped to the mainland precisely for this reason.
    If things went well, all seven dogs would be retrained at a Marine Corps camp and
     emerge from the experience as American military dogs.
    Not prisoners, not candidates. Full-fledged military dogs.
    The seven dogs had been brought onto one of the transport ships, but no kennels or
     beds had been prepared. For the time being, they were simply chained to the bridge.
     The puppies, less than four months old, were terrified. Not that this mattered, of
     course; the fleet departed anyway. The ship’s first stop would be Dutch Harbor, on
     Unalaska Island, over four hundred miles away.
    Three miles brought it outside Kiska Harbor.
    The seven dogs would never return.
    And they were seasick.
    Violently seasick. Tracing the arc of the Aleutian Islands, the boat pushed relentlessly
     eastward through the North Pacific Ocean. The body of the boat itself, however, rocked
     in all directions: not just east but west, south, and north. The Aleutians’ unique
     climate played with it, preyed upon it. Clouds hung a mere ten meters or so above
     the waves; fierce gusts of wind dashed snow across the deck. And the weather kept
     changing suddenly, then suddenly changing again. First the puppies felt it. They vomited,
     shivered; their eyes were blank. What terrible punishment was this? Incapable of comprehending
     what was happening, what it meant to be seasick, the five puppies succumbed. Kita,
     the Hokkaido, was the next to go. He was the only non–German shepherd, and his symptoms
     were even worse. Masao, meanwhile, was fine. He remembered having made this crossing
     to the Aleutians once before. Boarding a similar ship, a transport ship or a destroyer
     or whatever it was, part of the Northern Command’s Hokkai Task Force—he remembered
     that experience, the long passage from Mutsu