ohmidog!

By day, Army Maj. Steven Hutchison — a Vietnam veteran who came out of retirement at age 59 to fight in Iraq — was rough and tough, crusty and disagreeable, a man with little respect for the rules.

He violated one of them nightly, sleeping with his arms wrapped around Laia, a stray yellow puppy he had taken in from the streets.

Hutchison died in May, killed when a roadside bomb exploded near his truck — the oldest soldier to die in the Iraq war. But Laia lives on.

Laia was transported back to the U.S. by Operation Baghdad Pups, preserving not only the pup, but — as described in the Detroit Free Press yesterday — the memory of Army Maj. Steven Hutchison, as well.

“Whenever Laia was around,” Hutchison’s “demeanor and personality changed 1,000%,” Sgt. Andrew Hunt wrote in an e-mail to Hutchison’s family. “He was never without a smile; he was so much happier in life.” When a senior officer ordered Hutchison to get rid of the dog or face disciplinary action, Hutchison sent her into hiding with a friend at a far outpost on the border of Iran. The puppy broke free and ran away, returning one day to Hutchison’s base with a broken leg.

The day Hutchison was killed, Laia was spotted chained up outside a tent by Jerry Deaven, an employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Detroit. He was visiting Iraq to research terrorist funding.

“What’s going to happen to her, now that the major is gone?” Deaven asked. A few members of Hutchison’s team said they wanted to take her, but they were getting redeployed. “If I didn’t take the dog, they would have had to put the dog down,” he said.

Deaven contacted his wife, Colleen, at home in Brighton. She said she wanted Laia.

Nine armed security officers drove from Baghdad to Basra, Iraq, to pick up Laia and two other dogs. The $6,000 two-day mission was by paid for by Operation Baghdad Pups, a program run through the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International.

“There may be some people who say, ‘You are wasting all that time and money and putting people’s lives in danger to go pick up a dog?’ ” said Terri Crisp, the program manager. “But these dogs are so much more. … They have gotten them through some incredibly tough things … A lot of the guys will say that when they go out on patrol, the closer they get back to base, they look forward to getting there, because the dog or cat is waiting for them.”

Crisp flew from Kuwait to Baghdad to pick up Laia. They then flew from Baghdad to Kuwait, to Amsterdam and to Washington, D.C., and finally on to Detroit.

In early June, Colleen Deaven and her three children met Laia for the first time at Metro Airport. They took Laia to a vet who tried to fix her leg, but it never healed correctly and had to be amputated in July.

About three weeks ago, Hutchison’s mother, Peggy Loving, visited Laia, according to the Free Press article.

“He would have fallen in love with anything as long as it had four legs and a face,” Loving said. “He just loved dogs.”

(Photo by KIRTHMON F. DOZIER/Detroit Free Press)