KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN - Bill has been kidnapped six times. He has endured torture, mutilation, artillery barrages, sniper attacks, forced sex-change operations, and bloody gun battles in the scrublands of southern Afghanistan.
If Bill were a soldier, he'd have nine medals.
But this hero remains an underground legend in the Canadian military, honoured only in the wild tales told by old soldiers to new recruits, because of the one thing that sets him apart.
Bill is a cat -- a stuffed one.
The mascot will leave Afghanistan in early June, returning to Canada with its owner, Sergeant Paul Haskins, the senior medic for the Canadian battle group in Kandahar. Bill probably won't return to active duty for at least two years, as Sgt. Haskins takes advanced medical training.
But the beloved toy has earned a rest, he said, after sacrificing so much for troop morale.
"People would be disappointed if I ever forgot him," Sgt. Haskins said.
Bill started his military career 18 years ago, in the Vancouver airport, as Sgt. Haskins was leaving for basic training. He was a fan of the 1980s comic strip Bloom County, so his girlfriend at the time gave him a toy cat modelled after the fictional feline.
The first kidnapping was relatively tame: In basic training, other recruits held Bill hostage for a few days and released him unharmed.
The cat continued to disappear during Sgt. Haskins's stint in Germany from 1988 to 1993. "Bill was on the front lines in the war against communism," Sgt. Haskins said. "He'd go carousing, I think, disappear for a few days and come back." In Croatia, where Sgt. Haskins was in charge of a military ambulance, he assigned Bill lookout duty, strapping him to the front of the ambulance or to the aerial, giving him a good view of artillery attacks, sniper fire and the smoking aftermath of mine explosions.
One morning in 1992, Sgt. Haskins found a cardboard box near his barracks. Inside was Bill's severed tail and a ransom note from British soldiers stationed nearby: "If you want to see your cat again, leave a case of pivo on our front steps," it said, using the Slavic word for beer. "Do not involve the authorities." The box also contained photos of the cat braced against British military ambulances, with guns pointed at his goggle-eyed face.
Sgt. Haskins copied the photos onto 150 reward posters, offering 10,000 dinar -- less than $5 -- for Bill's safe return. A month and a half into Bill's ordeal, Sgt. Haskins found another cardboard box on his doorstep, containing the cat's body and severed head.
He stitched his friend together, and they enjoyed several years without mishap until 2000, when the medic went for training with U.S. Marines in South Carolina.
"I got called into the operating room, like they needed my help with an emergency," Sgt. Haskins said. "There was the whole team: doctor, anesthetist, nurses. They had Bill on an operating table under the lights, with machines going beep, and a retractor holding him open." The team told Sgt. Haskins that Bill had undergone a sex-change procedure. The cat was airlifted to the USNS Comfort, a floating hospital, where he -- or she -- spent the rest of the year. "I don't know what happened to him on that ship, and maybe I don't want to," Sgt. Haskins said. "It's the Navy, after all." In 2002, Bill cavorted with a concrete pig belonging to a Canadian general, and in 2005 he deployed to Afghanistan ahead of Sgt. Haskins and was photographed reading adult magazines in a latrine.
Amid the seriousness of war, Sgt. Haskins said, Bill reminds soldiers to lighten up. "We do have fun out there," he said.