Salt in His Bones

As a writer, I trade in tales. Stories are my currency, and hidden gems can be found in the strangest of places. So you can imagine my surprise and excitement when the story of Sinbad—an outsized, four-legged character hovering on the edge of obscurity—came across my desk. Sinbad wasn’t the hero of an epic poem—heck, he wasn’t even human. Sinbad was a misbegotten hound, though his exploits are legend. Dog years aside, he packed more experiences into his 13 years than most people who live six times as long. I don’t think it’s a longshot to call him the saltiest dog of all time. And the saltiest dog of all time was, until now, in danger of being forgotten.

In 1951, Sinbad was laid to rest at the Coast Guard’s Barnegat Light station in New Jersey. While the lighthouse was eventually decommissioned, a granite monument at the base of the station’s flagpole remains, commemorating the decorated mutt, whom the Boston Daily Globe described as “rough, tough and rowdy,” a combination of “liberty-rum-chow hound, with a bit of bulldog, Doberman pinscher and whatnot—mostly whatnot.” I grew up 100 miles away, but had never heard of him or his seaborne adventures. How was that possible? It turns out a book, Sinbad of the Coast Guard, was written by the Chief of the Coast Guard’s press bureau, George R. Foley Jr., in 1946. And if you Google “Sinbad,” you’ll find he has his own Wikipedia page, which comes close to the truth but flat-out misses it in some respects.

My sleuthing led me to Mike Walling, an author and historian who wrote the introduction to the newest edition of in 2005. Like Sinbad, Walling was a fellow Coastie, serving six years as a