Herbert Bowman, 86, joined the military on his 18th birthday on June 21, 1946.

His reason for joining was to get the education package part of the GI Bill. A person received two months of schooling for each month of service, Bowman said.

“That was very attractive to me,” said Bowman, who later went on to earn a degree in nuclear physics.

Bowman, a private in the Army Corps of Engineers, was sent to Los Alamos, N.M., a secret site where the atomic bomb had been designed and built.

Although Bowman had always been a “techie,” he said, his responsibility was to train war dogs, specifically, the K9 unit that provided area security.

“It was a rather unique service,” Bowman said, and “it was about as good a duty you could ask for — playing with dogs for five or six hours a day.”

There were different kinds of war dogs, which included messenger and casualty dogs. All were highly trained animals, but Bowman's dog, King, a German shepherd, was a silent scout dog, he said, which were the most highly trained and expected to perform equivalent to today's police dogs.

Bowman got to sit in on postwar lectures from the country's greatest scientists, and ironically, went back to Los Alamos to work on nuclear weapons development.

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