Hanover
“I just like the fact that his ears are green and he’s red and he’s a stuffy,” said Bryan, soon to be 11. “He’s fun to cuddle with.”
The Palmer family — which includes mom Elaine, dad Charles, 13-year-old Blake, and Bennet, Bryan’s twin — had been visiting relatives in Louisiana. When the family rushed out on Christmas morning, Dawg was left in a rollaway bed.
Months later, Elaine Palmer received a phone call from Chief Warrant Officer Michael Campbell.
Dawg had been found on March 8 in the same place he was left, and he was about to go on an adventure like none he had been on before.
On March 26, Dawg returned to Hanover along with photographs of his travels, which included flying in a helicopter, being promoted to private and spending 16 days with members of the Bravo Company 603rd Aviation Support Battalion, who were at Louisiana’s Fort Polk to pick up an Apache that needed to be repaired and returned to Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia.
“We opened (the rollaway bed) up and there he was, phone number and everything displayed on his chest,” Campbell said.
Elaine Palmer oversees the lost and found at the Bernice A. Ray School in Hanover, where Bryan and Bennet are fourth-graders.
“Normally, I put names in their clothes and mittens and hats. … Since Dawg was so precious, I put a label on Dawg,” she said.
The day after finding Dawg, Campbell contacted Elaine Palmer.
“She was very, very shocked,” Campbell said. “Her first response was, ‘He is going to flip out.’ ”
Elaine and Charles Palmer decided to keep Dawg’s adventures a secret from Bryan until Dawg arrived in the mail.
“His eyes just got bigger and bigger as we told him the story and showed him the pictures,” Charles Palmer said. “He’s seldom speechless.”
“At first I thought, ‘Wait, what happened?’ ” Bryan said. “Yes, I was very surprised.”
After being reunited with Dawg, Bryan spoke to Campbell on the phone.
“He was very animated,” Campbell said. “He actually laughed and giggled a couple of times, which was cool. It made my Saturday morning.”
Campbell, who has served in the Army for 22½ years, has three children of his own, including an 11-year-old daughter and two others who are in their 20s, and a grandson. During Campbell’s first deployment to Iraq in 2005, his kids sent him a stuffed camouflage rabbit dubbed Gun Bunny.
“It’s been flying with me ever since,” Campbell said.
He would take pictures of the rabbit in his helicopter and send them back home.
After Campbell found Dawg, he remembered thinking, “Why don’t we just take it, have it be our mascot?”
The nickname for the battalion is the Bravo Company Bulldawgs — spelled the same way as Dawg’s name.
The men he was working with agreed. Most of them are married and have young children.
“They thought it was a great idea,” Campbell said.
Bryan said his favorite photograph of the bunch is one of Dawg in a helicopter, the sun setting and his green ears brightly glowing.
“I just thought it was kind of cute,” Campbell said. “I promoted him to private and I called him Private Dawg.”
Dawg now is settled back in his place on Bryan’s bed, next to his other favorite stuffed animal, a white bear named Bear, and the Palmer family has quite the story to tell about the kindness of strangers: one in particular about a man who went the extra mile to make sure the Palmers’ youngest child by six minutes got a surprise like nothing he could have ever imagined.
“He’s certainly on the Christmas card list,” Charles Palmer said of Campbell.
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
