On March 1, the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General quietly , seemingly prompted by a 2016 New York Post exposé about hundreds oꦡf military war dogs carelessly dumped out for civilian adopti🌼ons.
To read news coverage of this report, and the investigation launched by the House Committee on Armed Services in 2016, you would think the problem is fixed, thatܫ the wrongdoers h𝓀ave been held to account, and this will never happen again.
You would be wrong.
To recap: In February 2014, several unauthorized “adoption events” for recently discharged military working dogs were held on the grounds of K2 Solutions, a North Carolina-based Army sub🐟contractor.
In their wake, multiple Army veterans who had been handlers — who served alongside these dogs in Iraq and Afghanistan — talked to The Post about their attempts to locate their do☂gs. By law, the handlers are supposed to be the first in line to adopt their discharged dog. The bonds these human and canine soldiers form in war are deep and profound.
Many of these veterans called K2 Solutions directly. They were to🍎ld, over and over, that ⭕no one could help them.
How amazing, then, to read the DoD report and not see a single mention of K2 Solutions or its CEO Lane Kjellsen, who told The Post yes, the company had ado🐻pted out these war dogs — most, if not all, having no business around small children — to civilians.
K2, by the way, would often direct distressed veteran dog hanꦿdlers to the Army’s Office of the Provost Marshal General. How amazing, then, to see no mention in the DoD report of Robert Squires or Richard Vargus, both then-staffers at the OPMG, both of whom were seen at at ꦡleast one K2 adoption event and both of whom took dogs.
It was Squires, a witness told The Po🐟s💝t, who was overheard saying, “All of these dogs have PTSD.”
Leo Gonnering was a Pentagon employee who took a military working dog, and when his han෴dler came to The Post, we called Gonnering. A voicemail sent from Gonnering’s phone defiantly informed us he🦋 would not be giving the dog back.
Also unmentioned are Dean Henderson and Jamie Solis, two 🦂men known to Vargus who rolled up and took 13 dogs — in fact, they later told a kennel master that they purchased the dogs for $13,000 each and planned to sell them to the Panamanian government for double that.
Such an act would be illegal, if not treasonous: Those dogs are considered war equipment by the Army, each having between $75,000-$100,000 worth of training. Hender🐷son and Solis eventually abandoned them. Kennel master Greg Meredith told The Post he was instructed by Henderson to “destroy the dogs.”
But no: Only cited h🀅ere is Henderson and Solis’ deeply dubious company Soliden, which seemed to consist of a website and little else.
Nowhere in the repor♔t is any investigation into a black market, or sales to foreign governments, or what consequences the p♕eople who masterminded such a grand and grievous deception should face.
Among the fixes the DoD touts is a streamlined system of tracking these dogs and their handler🔯s — but again, as The Post revealed in 2016, the Army kept records of each dog, ID’d by name and🍰 tattooed serial number, and their matching handlers.
Such protocol isn’t and has never been🎶 the i🃏ssue, but it sounds nice on the nightly news.
Meanwhile, heartbroken veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are still searching for their long-lost dogs while those responsible aren’t even publicly shamed, let alone fined or prosecute♈d.
The DoD’s final report on the matter will be published March 30, 2018. There’s still time to call or write💟 every member of the House Committee on Armed Services and demand more.