Unconditional Honor: Wounded Warriors and Their Dogs

by Cathy Scott, Clay Myers (Photographs)

In this comprehensive and gorgeously illustrated book, Cathy Scott and Clay Myers, with a foreword by former NBA star Bill Walton, show how service and therapy dogs are having a profound impact on the lives of military personnel injured in action. Not only do our veterans deal with physical injuries, but they often return with psychological issues that can be treated with help, companionship, and love from working canines. Through moving stories and color photographs, Unconditional Honor highlights the nearly forty-year history of working dogs helping wounded veterans, the mental and physical combat traumas that are mitigated by the dogs, the selection and training of the dogs, including rescued canines, and what the future holds. Featured in the book are inspiring personal accounts of what the dogs mean to veterans, and how their lives have been forever changed and even saved since adopting canines.
     In addition to the remarkable healing journeys of wounded warriors and their canines, this book showcases the various groups, formed originally to train dogs for the blind and the physically disabled that now embrace military services, that provide, at no cost, returning troops with dogs to make them whole again after surviving the reality of war.

Genres: Dogs

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 4, 2014

About the author

Cathy Scott, a Los Angeles Times bestselling author, investigative veteran journalist and blogger for Psychology Today, has written twelve books. Her work has appeared in New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Reuters and Las Vegas Sun. Best known for penning The Killing of Tupac Shakur and Murder of a Mafia Daughter, she taught journalism for five years at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her latest books are The Millionaire’s Wife and Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography, which won a best non-fiction award in 2014. Recent TV appearances include The Dr. Oz Show, Dateline NBC, the Today Show, Vanity Fair’s crime series. She lives in a renovated miner's cabin in the mountains of San Diego County with her three rescued dogs.

Reviews

[Gina Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book takes a fascinating look at service dogs, their complex training, and the wounded warriors who love them. I learned so much about the process of placing animals with soldiers in need of healing. I highly recommend this book to dog lovers, and for those who love the people who sacrifice for our country.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories of injured veterans and the affect getting a service dog had on their life. The stories include how they were injured as well how the dogs were trained. Often the dogs helped in ways beyond just doing the tasks that they were training to do. The story highlights the need for funding for research as well as services for these veterans.

[Baglady · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inspiring - yes. Interesting - for the most part. Beautiful images - not in the ebook I read. Well written - maybe not. After 75% of the book completed I can honestly say the stories, while heart-warming and rewarding, are redundant, both in terms of how service dogs of various types are used and redundant in the story telling. Many of the vignettes jump back and forth in time to preview the ultimate result, provide history on how the human and canine subjects came together, describe how they trained and work together, then forward again to some problem and its resolution, then back again to the detail of how the human subject came to need a dog, then forward again ... then backward again ... often repeating the same facts already disclosed. It became confusing in some cases. Don't misinterpret me - these stories fundamentally are feel-good and optimistic, serving as great examples of don't-give-up people who have learned to live with some problem (disease, disability emotional or physical) and do so better with their service dogs. The almost miraculous changes that occur after dogs come into their person's lives make me want to move into a place where I could foster a service puppy before sending it to training. But I'm stopping the read now because the stories are repeating too much to keep me interested. This would be a great read for someone with 15 minutes a day to read, and no desire to keep information until the next chance to read.