I like dogs, I’ve always had a dog, and now we own Lola, a fluffy white Schnoodle we call La Blanca. Before Lola, we owned Betty and Wilma who were purebred black and tan Dachshund sisters. They came after Coco, another Dachshund who fancied herself a bird and squirrel killer. Sam, a blind, Syrian Muslim friend, acted like Coco was Count Dracula. Sam’s mother, who spoke with a French accent and joined us for Thanksgiving dinner, asked me to put Coco outside because he was “allergic.” I think she was afraid of Coco, too.
The one before that was Rosie, a champion English Springer Spaniel that died peacefully in her doghouse outside the kitchen window where we live now. Before that I owned Primo. She was a mutt we rescued from death row at the dog pound and turned out to be my best dog ever. I had Primo for 17 years, all through college, law school and beyond. Before that, growing up, we owned Fantan, a champion Bassett Hound. And before that we owned an energetic and frisky Dalmatian named Pooch.
I was a boy living in Yalova, Türkiye when we owned Pooch. I was reminded of Pooch in the early 90’s when I saw the photographs of the dogs snarling at the prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the second Gulf War. It doesn’t bring back a happy memory.
We moved to Türkiye in 1958. My father was a Marine Corps officer and he was posted to a U.S. Air Force Base outside Yalova where Dad was the liaison officer between the U.S. military and the local civilian community. We spent the year before at the language school in Monterey, California, where Dad learned to speak Turkish and I learned how much fun it was to kiss a girl.
Before that we lived in Yokosuka, Japan, where Dad was second in charge at the Navy Brig and my sister was born. We briefly had a dog there, too, a large snarling German Shepherd; but he came on Christmas Day, made a very large pile of dog crap on the kitchen floor, and promptly disappeared. When I saw the pile I hoped my father’s hands were big enough to get it all when he cleaned it up. I was happy to learn the dog ran away; I never knew his name.
I loved our time in Türkiye. We traveled there by ship from New York City and visited Barcelona, Naples, and Tripoli, Libya on the way to Istanbul. Upon our arrival in Istanbul, Dad put us up at the Hilton Hotel until he could arrange to rent a house in Yalova. There was a minaret outside our balcony and my earliest memories of Türkiye are hearing the call to prayer. It’s a sound that resonates with me even now whenever I hear it. In those days the mosques didn’t use amplified speakers. Instead, men came out and sang the call, and the men on the street carried little rolled up rugs to kneel on when the call came. We lived in three places in Türkiye.
Our first place was a two story house on a creek, and the landlord lived upstairs. This house had no electricity, running water or toilet. We had kerosene lanterns for light, a kerosene stove for cooking and heat, a hand pump in the kitchen for water, and a bomb-site hole in one small room instead of a toilet. I now realize that my Dad expected far more of my Mom than was reasonable, although at the time I didn’t see a problem. I watched as a man dragged a two wheeled horse drawn cart up the creek to shovel sand out of the creek bottom for use as building material, and my brother and I ran in the wilderness all day as if we were Romulus and Remus.
Our second place was a penthouse apartment on the beach of the Straits of Dardanelles. The landlord lived downstairs, and we had electric lights, running water and a toilet. His son built a wooden boat under my supervision out back, and on Saturday mornings he would take me to the market on his motorbike. I learned to ride a bicycle and one day brought home a flea infested feral kitten I found in a huge litter under a bush. But the roof of our spacious apartment leaked when it rained, and we moved once more.
Our third place was the ground floor of a three-story apartment building. It was protected by a large gate that led us to call our home “Fort Apache”, but I really don’t recall why we believed we were in hostile territory. We moved in during Ramadan, and within days of our move into this neighborhood somebody sacrificed a ram, and what I remember most was a stray dog dug up the ram’s guts and dragged them down the dirt road we lived on. A soccer field was at the end of our street; beyond that the Anatolian Plateau went all the way to the Caspian Sea, and I played with Candace in the haystacks.
My friend Izet was a Turkish boy who was a little older than me. Izet’s family lived at the end of our street, and I was forbidden to play with him, but that was all the more reason to hang out with him. Izet was so strong he could pull the old wood wagon loaded with all my American playmates. One morning his mother cooked me a scrambled egg; even then I knew this was a special honor as they were poor and lived in a house with a dirt floor.
Twice a Gypsy came out of the hills with a bear on a leash and they danced and wrestled for us and passed a hat around for coins. We lived there during an attempted coup when martial law was declared; Dad was called to the base, and tanks in the streets kept order.
Not long after we moved to Fort Apache one of the neighborhood dogs was poisoned. Some of the dads put the suffering animal in a bag and took their rifles out past the end of the street and shot the dog and buried it. We heard the gunshot but, despite many earnest searches, never could find where they buried the dog.
I think the Turks didn’t like dogs, and Pooch didn’t help the situation. I should have known there would be trouble when he chewed the head off my favorite large teddy bear. Once he came home sick and threw up for several days. Dad said he thought Pooch might have eaten some chicken bones.
I don’t recall how it came to be, but one day out at the soccer field my friends and I were on one side and a group of Turkish boys were on the other. I had Pooch on a leash, and he got away and ran across the field and bit one of the Turkish boys. I was horrified and ran home. It happened so fast, and I still feel shame about it.
A few days later Izet came to our front door and asked, “Was your dog white with black spots?”
I said, “You mean Pooch?”
Izet replied, “Your dog is dead. It looked like he was poisoned. I saw him lying in the street when the garbage man threw him into the back of his wagon.”
It was not a happy few days in our house after that. I don’t remember crying then, but seeing the photographs of the dogs terrorizing the Iraqi men in the Baghdad prison made me want to cry.
The unspeakable events of October 7 in Israel have hardened my view of things. An Israeli Defense Forces video circulating on social media shows what appears to be a Belgian Malinois in a Gaza tunnel when he encounters and attacks a Hamas terrorist. It’s not a pretty sight. My reaction is to say, good dog.
Beautiful. Thanks for the memory.