For mixed German shepherd siblings Gee, Hunter and Ryan, these are the good days.

“These dogs have suffered through so much, just like the people of Afghanistan,” declares Dan Hughes, co-founder of the Dogs for Defense Foundation.

We found this busy canine trio getting in some playtime at a Rockford dog training facility, watched over by Hughes and Henry Johnson, who met in Afghanistan in 2007 and started the dog rescue and training non-profit.

“Dogs don’t think about what happened in the past,” Johnson explains. “Dogs live in the now.”

This story begins in August 2021, during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Amid the chaos, Charlotte Maxwell-Jones, running a Kabul small animal rescue, was trying to evacuate explosive detection dogs used by the U.S. government.

“I paid really close attention to what was happening during the withdrawal,” Hughes recalls. “And I kept hearing these stories and saw little, tiny clips of dogs being left behind.”

Among the dogs in Maxwell-Jones’ care was Sheba, an explosives detection dog, who gave birth to five pups.  

Hughes, a former U.S. State Department dog handler, and Johnson, now a retired U.S. Marine, worked with Maxwell-Jones to bring the dogs, now two-and-a-half years old, to Minnesota this past June.

For these dogs, it was a long journey from Afghanistan to Minnesota — a long journey from a war zone to a place of healing.

“Flying 30 hours with all these other animals was a difficult thing,” Hughes says. “Putting them in a car to Dulles International Airport and sending them all the way here. So, the whole journey was excruciating on them, plus their limited experience.”

Johnson says if the dogs had been left behind, their fate might have been very different.

“They wouldn’t have done well. They certainly would have been wild dogs,” he explains. “They would have gotten run over or they would have been killed, unless they were really good scavengers, live a feral scavenger life.”

One of the five rescued dogs recently died after a medical emergency, Hughes says.

Another has a home at the University of Kansas, where a doctoral student is developing a protocol on introducing children with special needs to dogs.

Hughes says the three dogs he’s now working with were named after U.S. Marines Nicole Gee and Hunter Lopez, and U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Ryan Knauss, who were all killed in Afghanistan.

The foundation team hope to donate the others as comfort dogs- giving them a new life, and a new purpose.  

“Steer some of them towards what would be called a facility dog, where a dog might live in a firehouse or police station and provide comfort to the first responders,” Hughes says.

The team is considering traveling to Costa Rica and Florida to see if they can find dogs in need of rescue there.

Hence the phrase, ‘who rescued who?”

“My fondest hope would be that each of these dogs ends up in an environment where they’re happy, where they can thrive,“ says Johnson. “Where they have somebody that they can comfort, but that individual is also able to comfort them and give them a good life.”

You can find out more about the Dogs for Defense Foundation by CLICKING HERE.