Last Updated on May 22, 2026 by admin
On the last Monday of May, we list names. The names belong to people. They have for as long as the holiday has existed. But there is another list, smaller and almost always private, kept by the families of veterans who served alongside animals. The animals on that list are not heroes in any official register. They are simply the ones who came home with them.
The Names on the Other List
Pooli rode an attack transport from the Marianas to Iwo Jima. Four battle stars. Three service ribbons. A small canvas vest stitched with all of them. The sailor she went home with carried her photograph in his wallet for the rest of his life.
Pitouchi was born in a Belgian trench in 1916 and saved Lt. Lekeux’s life by drawing German fire away from the crater the lieutenant was hiding in. Both of them survived the war and went home to Belgium together.
Faith sat through the bombing of her London church and refused to leave her newborn kitten. The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals awarded her a Silver Medal in 1945. She lived out her years in the rebuilt church she had refused to abandon.
Koshka was a Russian-language word stitched onto an American soldier’s dog tag pouch when he came home from a deployment a few years ago. The cat she names was rescued from a ruined building. She rode home in a duffel bag and slept on a couch in Pennsylvania, where the soldier eventually woke up at the same time every night, the way he had learned to overseas, with the cat already on his chest waiting for him.
Hammer belonged to a Marine veteran who had been quietly running through a list of every difficult thing he was carrying when a small orange cat walked across his keyboard and refused to leave. The cat is named Hammer. The Marine is doing all right.
Fent followed an Army medic out of a forward operating base in the back of an armored vehicle. The medic spent six months getting Fent out of the country and into a house in Texas. The cat now sleeps in a sunbeam on the same kitchen floor where the medic does her morning stretches before work.
Eddie was lifted out of a clinic tent in Iraq by a Navy corpsman who had just delivered medicine to a Marine unit. He came home in a Paws of War cargo crate. The corpsman calls him a small calico miracle.
Cricket walked into a USMC plywood barracks outside Kandahar in 2011 and decided, with the absolute authority that only kittens possess, that the men there were his. One of them brought him home.
What These Cats Have in Common
None of them enlisted. None of them earned a paycheck. None of them appear in the official histories of the wars they were carried into. They are not on the rolls. They are not on any wall in Washington. They were never given service numbers.
And yet — quietly, for as long as men and women have gone to war and been allowed to come home — these animals have been carried back with them. Sometimes in duffel bags. Sometimes in cargo crates. Sometimes with the help of an organization like Paws of War that exists exactly because veterans keep refusing to leave them behind.
The cats don’t know why they were carried. They don’t know what the medals on the small canvas vest are for. They don’t understand the difference between a Belgian trench and a sunny apartment in California. They only know that a particular person was the safe one, and they made a decision to stay near that person, and the person made a decision to bring them home.
A Small Space, on the Last Monday of May
It would be wrong to put the cats next to the soldiers on the list. The soldiers gave more than any animal can be asked to give. Memorial Day is for them. It will always be for them.
But there is a small, parallel tradition — kept by families, kept by veterans’ groups, kept by anyone who has watched a returning service member sit on the floor for an hour scratching the same cat behind the ears, slowly remembering how to be in their own house — of also holding space for the animals who held space for them.
Pooli. Pitouchi. Faith. Koshka. Hammer. Fent. Eddie. Cricket.
Eight small cats. Eight long stories. Eight quiet additions to a list that is mostly about people, on a holiday that is mostly about loss, in a country that is — when it remembers to be — capable of bringing them all home together. 🐾
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