And then something licked his ear. He looked around and locked gazes with a pair of brown eyes.
Cheyenne cocked her head to one side.
“It was just one of those looks dogs give you,” Sharpe recalls. “It was like, ‘What are you doing? Who’s going to take care of me? Who else is going to let me sleep in this bed?’ ”
For a long minute, Sharpe stared into the puzzled face of his 6-month-old pit bull. And then slowly, reluctantly, he backed the barrel of the .45 out of his mouth.
“There’s no doubt about it,” he says now. “I owe her my life.”
This is a different kind of tale of K-9 Corps bravery, distinct from those exploits of grenades sniffed out and warnings barked. Cheyenne’s heroics were in her unconditional devotion. Sharpe, whose series of harrowing encounters as an Air Force security guard in the Middle East led to post-traumatic stress disorder, says that just by being there day after dark day, his dog rescued him from a soldier’s death as surely as if she had dragged him bloody from the battlefield.
A decade later, it’s a much more stout pit bull lolling on the floor of Sharpe’s much neater apartment in Arlington County. But Cheyenne still loves to nuzzle her buddy’s hand whenever she gets the chance. And he still loves to tell the story of how a torn-eared refugee from a shabby animal shelter saved his bacon.
“She was the force that pulled me back into society,” says Sharpe, 32, who was married last month and is now a program analyst in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
But it’s also a story of action: Sharpe is trying to give other scruffy pound dogs a chance to save other emotionally wounded warriors. Even as he continues his own recovery from acute depression and PTSD, Sharpe has launched P2V.org (Pets to Vets), a nonprofit group that seeks to link service members and first responders with shelter animals and help them with related expenses and training.
“I couldn’t talk to anybody — not my father, not the counselors — but I could talk to that dog, and she never judged me,” Sharpe says. “We don’t want to hear, ‘Wow, that must have been horrible.’ We just want to talk.”
Sharpe got the idea for P2V after seeing a documentary on the role highly trained service animals can play in a veteran’s recovery. But those elite creatures can take thousands of dollars to prepare and years to deliver. Sharpe saw a more straightforward match to be made between suffering soldiers and animals from the pound.
“Most of the vets I’ve spoken to don’t want dogs to do tricks. We just want companionship,” he says. “Eighteen vets commit suicide every day in this country, and one animal is put to sleep every eight seconds. They can help save each other.”
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