From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel via
Romanesko's Obscure Store, a National Guard company was required to
have the dog they'd adopted put down.
I can't really object that much - regulations do ban pets and I'm sure it's for very good reason - but it's symptomatic of what's going to happen more often with the long deployments that the National Guard units are seeing.
They've been away from home for a year already and a lot of them are looking at quite a bit more time before they can go home, and they're trying to do what they can to adjust to what is more and more seeming like "home." Adopting pets, marrying locals, it's all part of acclimatizing. The military can address symptoms as they've done in these cases, but that doesn't fix the underlying problem - leaving semi-civilian National Guard and Reserve forces in place for long periods after they've left the regular military and built lives in the civilian world.