A soldier rescued a puppy from the rubble and the dog returned the favor by staying in his backpack and living with the soldier.

The sad cries came from the rubble of a school ravaged by fighting in the war-torn Syrian city of Raqqa.

It sounded like a frantic cry for help, but as bomb disposal professionals, we knew we had to rush to the rescue because making your child scream was a common ISIS technique to lure you into a booby trap.

This was February 2018, just four months after the US-led coalition liberated Raqqa from ISIS and evidence of their evil could still be found in the thousands of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) they had hidden appeared in each building and crack.

As a former soldier of the Royal Army, I went into the secret room to clear out those improvised explosive devices and we were at the end of a long, exhausting day when we heard that scream.

Checking our surroundings for tripwires and motion detectors as we moved forward, it took us little time to realize what we saw from behind the large concrete pedestal we lifted to reveal the boy. Syrian siпo to υп chihυahυa small and mυy asυstate.

Surrounded by the bodies of three other puppies and a large dog, probably his mother, he was the only one surviving from the horrible nightmare that had unfolded around him, but he seemed reasonably unharmed. “Relatively” is the critical term.

Having been a soldier for most of my adult life, I have seen the horrible repercussions of war. Traveling to Raqqa every day, we saw miles of houses riddled with bullet holes, mass graves, and corpses of young people who had taken the wrong step and paid the highest price.

War is inexorable, and in the strangeness of the beast this trembling puppy ate.

He was completely white, except for his dark ears and the black and brown spots on his small, round head, and I could see a layer of vibrating dust on the surface of his fur. “I’m terrified too,” I told him and I meant it seriously.

When I was five years old, I was attacked by my neighbor’s mean old Rhodesian Ridgeback, so I was really afraid of this little creature.

He gave me my extra large battle gear and I handed him the cookie with my medical supplies. After weighing it a little, he took a small bite and, as he did so, I gently patted him, my parents still protected by military goggles.

“What’s a good boy, Barry?” I said excitedly, just like that my whole team started laughing. I’m the biggest kid, with a full beard and tattoos everywhere, so I expected my fluency in language to be easy. The time came too soon to return to our camp, just west of Raqqa, and I could see that Barry was still too afraid of me picking him up, so I left him with a cookie and a little water.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Barry,” I replied, wishing with all my might that it was true because I recognized that this was not a common dog and ran.

Seeing Barry made me feel hopeful for the first time since I left the military in the summer of 2014, after seven years of two rigorous tours in Afghanistan.

At home in Essex, I sometimes cried hard at the horrors he had seen, like the disfigured corpse of a fellow soldier kidnapped and tortured mercilessly by the Taliban.

However, I now know that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and at that time I felt that I could simply cope with the realities of civilian life, where one thing seemed to supersede the other.

He was already planning to make a living as a personal worker because of my miscarriage. Finding out I was pregnant had been the best moment of my life and, even though I did my best to be there for her, when she lost the baby, I felt like a motherfucker about to burst and I started drinking a lot. We finally separated and, having nowhere to go except my parents, I ended up falling asleep in my truck so that the person who was kidnapping me would be given credit for the state.

The only time I felt like myself again was in October 2017, when I attended the funeral of a murdered friend clearing improvised explosive devices in Syria.

At home, people considered me somewhat of a failure, but my former co-workers simply treated me like the soldier.

I loved being that person and, therefore, when he asked me to take part in my friend’s job on the Syrian team, I needed little persuasion.

I arrived in January 2018 and the month after that I met Barry. The day after we found him for the first time, I returned to the rubble of the school and felt sad because there were signs of him.

As we prepared to return to base, I told myself that everything was fine, that I just knew it and that I had other priorities