A Vicksburg policeman and guardsman has crossed geographical and cultural boundaries to share his experience in dog training with the Iraqi police — a first in the country, he says.

Bo McLeod, 35, left with the Clinton-based Army National Guard’s 114th Military Police Company in August and headed to Mosul to train Iraqi police as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He expects to complete his work there and return to Vicksburg sometime this summer.

Since the Army specialist’s arrival, he has been building among the relatively new Iraqi force an understanding of the benefits canine units can have in bomb detection.

“(The canines) become quiet and very still” in the presence of explosives, said McLeod.

He spends four days a week training officers who are eager to learn and understand uses for the dogs, despite being met with adversity of their culture.

“They take a lot of shame for working with canines from their countrymen,” said McLeod.

Dogs are not valued as much in Iraq as they are in the United States, he explained, but he hopes things will change. Regardless of cultural differences, McLeod said, he believes the police will eventually embrace the addition of the dogs and start to use them more often.

“I believe they (have) started seeing (NATO) coalition forces with dogs as a dominant presence,” said McLeod. “The Iraqi canine handlers are changing (their)minds about canines.”

McLeod said he and the Iraqi police have been working with four males — two German shepherds named Robin and Johnny, a Belgian malinois named Chucca and a Labrador retriever called Diego.

Vicksburg police Lt. Bobby Stewart, a trained canine handler who has been McLeod’s supervisor since he joined the Vicksburg Police Department in 1999 as a patrolman, said the soldier spent much of his private time working with canines and acquired much experience before actually joining the K-9 unit.

“Bo had been training on his own time,” Stewart said.

At the VPD, McLeod is an investigator who is assigned to Kargo, a German shepherd used to retrieve evidence and track and hold suspects. Three others — Ranger, Tongo and X-On — are used for the same things, plus they can detect explosives.

When McLeod joined the police force, he had already decided he wanted to work with dogs.

“Some want to be investigators, some patrolmen,” he said. “I wanted to be a canine handler.”

McLeod has a wife and two children who live in Vicksburg.

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Contact Tish Butts at tbutts@vicksburgpost.com