US VETERAN, WADE BAKER FIGHTS PTSD AND HIS DOG, HONOR. UNFORTUNATELY…

“Honor,” a service dog tried to jump into his Gulf-War Veteran owner’s coffin! Part of the Labrador retriever’s training was to sense when the demons of war had invaded Wade Baker’s dreams.

“I was having a nightmare, a flashback,” Baker once told an interviewer. “And I woke up with Honor standing on my chest, licking my face. He was stopping the nightmare for me.”

This summer – when he saw his master lying in the flag-draped casket, Honor pushed through the clutch of weeping family members, reared up, placed his paws on the edge and tried to climb in. Unable to comfort Baker, the lanky black dog in the camouflage-patterned vest curled up underneath.

Baker’s quarter-century battle with post-traumatic stress disorder ended on Aug. 19 at a little church in the western North Carolina mountains. Police responding to an alleged hostage situation where they did not know it at the time, but it was Baker who’d made the 911 call.

He was both gunman and hostage, and, as he told a friend who was trying desperately to make him surrender, it was time for him to be “put down.” When he fired at the officers, they returned fire, striking him nine times. AP​