10 Badass War Heroes You've Never Heard Of
7. Wojtek The Bear
Taking in a stray dog is the sort of thing that happens all the time. People come across poor abandoned pooches in the street, they adopt them from shelters, all that nice stuff. Don't think you should just be limited to your regular garden variety house pets, however. Why not follow in the footsteps of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps, who happened across a Syrian brown bear cub in Iran and decided to keep it? And then train him to carry ammo across the battlefield? And then let him earn the name "he who enjoys war" or "smiling warrior"? Wojtek was sold to a young Polish girl by an Iranian orphan, and was donated to the Polish army when he got a little too big to keep in the family home.
Initially struggling to eat anything other than condensed milk from a vodka bottle, Wojtek began to enjoy eating fruit, marmalade, honey and syrup. Oh, and beer, which he frequently got rewarded with. Also he developed a taste for cigarettes - both smoking them and eating them. We think that a drunk bear barrelling across a warzone with a fag dangling out of its jaw is pretty badass in and of itself, but that's before you even get to Wojtek's war record.
Besides being a fun little mascot who would get sloshed and was taught to salute his fellow soldiers, Wojtek trecked with the Polish army all the way from Persia to Palestine, and became an officially enlisted "soldier" of the company who transported ammunition, never dropping a single crate, and helping the good fight against the Axis forces in World War II. Did we mention he was a bear?