What do you do with your pet when you deploy?

There's a program for that.

That was the dilemma Staff Sargent Steve Meduna faced in January 2009 as he prepared to go to Iraq for the first deployment in his 15 years in the Minnesota National Guard: What to do about his 100-pound, two-year-old dog, Dozer--as in "bulldozer." Meduna was newly divorced and his father lived in a town home community that doesn't allow dogs, his brother had a small yard without a fence and his friends who had watched Dozer in the past were all guardsmen going to Iraq, too.

Then he heard about Guardian Angels for Soldiers' Pet, or GASP, a five-year-old network of volunteers who take in dogs and cats--and even horses and, in some cases, snakes and lizards--left behind when their owners deploy with the military.