For more than 150 years, Americans have sent animals to war; legions of strong, furry brutes, bright-eyed, dumb and eternally loyal. But of course the Marines haven’t done all the fighting, and every so often it has been necessary to enlist the instincts and talents of beasts with sensitivities more refined than those of the human animal.
An outrage, claim animal rights activists. But what these people fail to understand, as they re-hydrate premature koala fetuses by dribbling milk through their nostrils on to the tiny pink faces, is that Americans send their animals into combat not because they are cruel, but because they love their pets more than any nation on the planet.
By now it has become apparent that all citizens of the United States hope and pray for their lives to climax in one of three ways: to be gunned down in an exclusive club shortly after winning the Grammy for Most Ass-Wobblin’ Bitch–Slappin’ Glock-Totin’ Gay-Bashin’ Mom-Lovin’ Dad-Hatin’ Wife-Pimpin’ R&B Homey; to be gunned down by their short-sighted father-in-law shortly after gunning down an endangered manatee in Yosemite (a real coup, given how phenomenally rare manatees are in Yosemite); or to be gunned down while planting a tattered, smoldering flag on some rubble, whether an Iranian hilltop or the irradiated remains of the Hermitage or the Louvre or, in the case of Midwesterners, New York City.
Of the three, the last is by far the most desirable, since it implies an altruistically sordid death rather than just a regularly sordid death. And if it’s good enough for people, it’s good enough for animals. If they could speak they’d agree.
But of course they can’t speak, despite what some well-circulated home videos insist is evidence of eloquence: alas, a hysterical puppy screaming ‘Whooo-haaaa-wooo!” does not an orator make. Which is why animals will continue to be drafted — and killed — in the name of national security.
Of some comfort, however, is the safe assumption that the animal cadres of the US Armed Forces who are slain in the line of duty receive as dignified a send-off as their human colleagues. In the shrubbery behind the Arlington National -Cemetery, covert hamsters are gently lowered into the ground entombed in coffee-tins, a military doctor having first ascertained, by means of a long pin, whether the fallen is dead or just hibernating; while in the basement of the Lincoln Memorial, martial goldfish are flushed down marble toilets as bagpipes drone the last haunting notes of Hymn for Those in Peril on the Seas.
It’s been going on for years, of course. In the Ardennes in 1944, German shepherds were dropped deep behind German lines, tasked with laying massive turds on important troop routes, their flat Bavarian barks convincing to all but the most astute Gestapo dachshunds. Twenty years later, hundreds of Labradors with names like Rusty and Shep saw action tracking Siamese cats through the paddies of Vietnam. (The resulting massacre saw one ‘Rex” court-marshalled for being, in the words of the court, ‘a very bad dog”.)
Of course not all aspects of the Pentagon’s zoological-warfare strategy run smoothly. Its brief flirtation in the 1980s with suicide-hedgehogs ended in catastrophe as the chief chemist on the project absent–mindedly sat on ‘Fat Boy”, a hedgehog whose quills had just that morning been primed with Amazonian jungle-madness juice. Similarly, heads rolled after $135-billion had been spent fitting tiny cameras to snouts of reconnaissance field mice: Operation Cowrin Tim’rous Beastie was aborted when all that came down the wires was footage of some cheese, a contented micro-burp, and a tiny rodent bottom. The agent had curled up and was sound asleep, a scenario the planners had overlooked.
But there was no way the -Pentagon could have prepared for the latest disaster: last weekend it emerged that specially trained hunter-killer dolphins had been washed out of their enclosure by Hurricane Rita, and are currently unaccounted for. Flipper and his pals are bright, vivacious, highly mobile, and wear some sort of belt that allows them to fire darts at terrorists. Given that a terrorist in a wetsuit looks almost exactly like a surfer in a wetsuit, the authorities are worried that the perforated corpses of innocent Texans are going to start washing up in Galveston and points north. That is, if the dolphins weren’t washed inland instead of out to sea, and are even now lurking in swimming pools, waiting for cabana-boys to come into range:
Yes the eyes of the dolphin are upon you
Any wrong you do he’s gonna see
When you’re in Texas look behind you
‘Cause that’s where the dolphin’s gonna be —