Black dog down: US soldier in fight to take home war zone pet

[thundley4]

Every American soldier knows that you never leave a buddy behind.

Sergeant Gwen Beberg knows it. So do 30,000 other people who have signed an online petition urging the US Army to show some compassion. The maxim stands even if the buddy is a scruffy dog named Ratchet.

“I just want my puppy home. I miss my dog horribly,” Sergeant Beberg, 28, e-mailed her mother after being separated from Ratchet, whose life she saved by rescuing it from a pile of burning rubbish in May.

The split came after the sergeant was transferred from her base in Iraq in preparation for a return to the United States next month. “I’m coping reasonably well because I refuse to believe that Ratchet has been hurt,” she wrote. “If I find out that he was killed though . . . well, we just won’t entertain that possibility.”

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