A Dog Called Hope: A Wounded Warrior and the Service Dog Who Saved Him - Softcover

Morgan, Jason; Lewis, Damien

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476797013 ISBN 13: 9781476797014

Verlag: Atria Books, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Lone Survivor meets Marley & Me in this “inspiring and very moving” (Bear Grylls, host of the hit TV show Man vs. Wild) memoir of an extraordinary service dog whose enduring love brought a wounded soldier back to life.

A decade ago, special forces warrior Jason Morgan parachuted into the Central American jungle on an antinarcotics raid. He’d served with the famous Night Stalkers on countless such missions. This one was different. Months later, he regained consciousness in a U.S. military hospital with no memory of how he’d gotten there. The first words he heard were from his surgeon telling him he would never walk again. The determined soldier responded, “Sir, yes, I will.”

After multiple surgeries, unbearable chronic pain, and numerous setbacks, Morgan was finally making progress when his wife left him and their three young sons. He was a single father confined to a wheelchair and tortured by his pain. At this very dark, very low point, Morgan found light: Napal, the black Labrador who would change his life forever.

A Dog Called Hope is the incredible story of a service dog who brought a devastated warrior back from the brink and taught him how to be a true father. It is the story of Napal, who built bridges between his wheelchair-bound battle buddy and the rest of able-bodied humankind. It is the story of Jason, who found life’s true meaning with the help of his faithful companion. Humorous, intensely moving, and uplifting, Jason and Napal’s heartwarming tale will brighten any day and lift every heart.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Originally from Texas, Jason Morgan served as an Air Force Weather Specialist with the 10th Combat Weather Squadron, a Special Forces unit, before joining the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), more commonly known as the Night Stalkers. He now works to raise the profile of service dog availability for wounded warriors and others, campaigns for disability awareness, competes in a variety of Paralympics sports, speaks at veteran events, and raises three teenage boys.

Damien Lewis is a lifelong dog lover and award-winning writer who has spent twenty years reporting from war, disaster, and conflict zones for the BBC and other global news organizations. He is the bestselling author of more than twenty books, including several acclaimed memoirs about military working dogs—Sergeant Rex, It’s All About Treo, Judy, and The Dog Who Could Fly.

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A Dog Called Hope

1

The air was slick with moisture yet burning hot all at the same time.

As I waited for the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft to fire up its giant turbines, I ran my eye along the column of brother warriors lined up on this sunbaked tropical runway—each American, like me, dressed in unmarked combat fatigues. For a mission such as this, you never wear a mark of unit or rank or anything that might betray your identity, just in case things go wrong. If taken prisoner, you don’t want anything on your person that might distinguish you as being particularly special.

Like my fellow warriors, I’d sanitized myself completely, removing all patches from my clothing and not carrying a single piece of ID or family memento, anything that might link me to my nationality or my unit. Carrying even a photo of my wife and three infant boys was a strict no-no.

Such precautions had to be taken utterly seriously when involved in this kind of war against this kind of an adversary. We were in Ecuador, training that country’s special forces to fight FARC—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—a notorious rebel group that finances its operations from kidnap and ransom, illegal mining, and most of all, drugs.

FARC’s narcotics-smuggling network stretches from the South American jungle as far north as the USA and east across the Atlantic into Europe. With an income of some $300 million a year and tens of thousands of armed fighters under its command, FARC is a well-armed battle-hardened force constrained by none of the normal rules of war. They have gained a reputation for horrific brutality and are the last people you’d ever want to mess with.

I checked my watch. We were twenty minutes to getting airborne.

I glanced at my two jump buddies, Will and Travis—their sleeves rolled up, shirts unbuttoned at the neck—looking easy and relaxed. Hailing from the Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), a renowned U.S. Army special forces unit, they looked like they were stepping out for a practice jump over Florida and not heading into a jungle full of the world’s foremost narco-rebels. It was the late 1990s, and the SOAR—also known as the 160th, the Night Stalkers—had taken casualties on previous missions here. What we were stepping into was a deadly serious business. But for Will and Travis it was just another day of doing what they loved. And, truth be told, it was getting to feel that way for me, too.

Since I was an Air Force Special Operations guy, it had taken a good while for the SOAR to come to accept me. The competition between army and air force is merciless, and we’d never want it any other way, since the intense rivalry serves to sharpen both arms of the military, but I’d been with the SOAR for months now and I was getting to feel like very much one of the boys.

We were here working with the Ecuadorian special forces—the 9th Special Forces Brigade, better known as PATRIA—to combat FARC and put a stop to the illegal drugs trade. But practically speaking, we could never train these guys if our remit only ever kept us in the rear with the gear. The only way to do it properly was to go out into the field alongside them. Though the Ecuadorians were lined up with us, they were a long way from being sanitized. Each wore the distinctive PATRIA badge on his left sleeve, a skull flanked by daggers with a cobra twined through its empty eye sockets. The way they saw it, if they were captured by FARC, they’d face a horrific death anyway, so why bother disguising what unit they were from?

The enmity between the narco-rebels and the armed forces here ran very deep, and neither side was inclined to show much mercy. We were about to fly north into the remote and lawless Cordillera Central, a spine of jungle-clad mountains snaking into neighboring Colombia. Intelligence reports suggested that FARC was using the rivers there to traffic drugs from the heart of the rain forest to the outside world, with America as their likely end destination. The PATRIA boys planned to stake out one of those rivers, put a stop to any narcotics operations, and take prisoners from whom further intelligence could be garnered to help break the drug-trafficking network.

Our role was to train them to prosecute these kinds of missions more effectively, and this was the type of tasking that we could wholeheartedly believe in. We were fighting the good fight against entirely the right kind of enemy, and despite their lack of experience and expertise (or maybe because of it), we’d grown close to the PATRIA guys. They were ideal trainees, like the proverbial sponges, ready to suck up all that we could throw at them. And boy, did they have a lot to learn.

From behind me, I heard a high-pitched whine as the starter motors on the Hercules fired up the aircraft’s engines. Gradually, the massive hook-bladed propellers spooled up to speed, the avgas—aviation fuel—burning fierce and heady in the hot sludgy air.

As I turned to mount up the aircraft, Jim offered me a high five. “Looks like we’re on! Way to go, Goshman!”

My SOAR teammates called me Goshman because I never cussed much, and especially not around my parents or anyone in authority. That was just the way my folks had raised me. The most I ever managed was a “gosh.” Hence the nickname. But that hadn’t stopped the 16oth from making me one of their own. Recently, I’d been pulled aside by our unit commander. He’d told me that since I was serving with the SOAR, I’d get to wear the Night Stalkers flash as well as my Air Force Special Operations Badge. I had the Night Stalkers badge on my right shoulder and my Air Force Special Operations badge on my left chest pocket. It was highly unusual to wear both, and I felt hugely honored to do so.

We mounted up the aircraft; I pulled on my helmet and fastened the strap beneath my chin, settling into the fold-down canvas seat. We took to the skies. The aircraft executed a short climb, then thundered low and fast across the treetops, keeping below any radar. Going low also reduced the threat of ground fire because you’d flash past in a matter of seconds and be gone.

I was seated in the plane’s tail section, next to a massive heap of rucksacks secured to the floor by netting. Through the partially open ramp, I could see the jungle speeding by. It felt close enough almost to reach out and touch the highest treetops. The pilot sure knew his stuff. If he had taken the Hercules any lower, its propellers would have been shaving the topmost branches.

We sped onward across the carpet of green, the wind noise and the throbbing roar of the turbines killing the chance of any chat. Now and again there was a break in the forest canopy, marking a river, a narrow trail, or a jungle village. But 99 percent of what we were flying over was pure wilderness.

As with so many previous flights, I bore a special responsibility for getting this one airborne. I just hoped and prayed that I’d called it right this time. As I gazed out over the jungle, I reflected on what had brought me to this position—an air force guy embedded within an elite army unit. I hailed from a tiny, little-known outfit—the 10th Combat Weather Squadron, part of Air Force Special Operations Command. The 10th was a seventy-two-strong unit when I was a part of it. Only sixty of us were jump-trained and mission-qualified and thus able to undertake the kind of task I was now on.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476797013
• ISBN 13: 9781476797014
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar