Fort Bragg Therapy Dog Named Sapper Wins USO Canine Volunteer of the Year

An 8-year-old husky who greets almost 13,000 service members and families each month at the United Service Organizations Center on Fort Bragg has been named the USO's 2026 Canine Volunteer of the Year.

Sapper, the Alaskan husky who belongs to Army veteran Mike D'Arcy, won the national title on April 21 after a public vote among five finalists from USO centers around the world, the USO announced. Voting ran from Feb. 25 through March 16.

D'Arcy told Military.com the win came as a shock.

"It's worldwide. They said so. Germany, Japan, all these other places," D'Arcy said. "If any dog deserved it, he did."

Sapper’s Work at the USO

Sapper and D'Arcy conduct daily rounds through the USO inside Fort Bragg's Soldier Support Center. D'Arcy said the 83-pound husky shakes hands with most people who come through the door and occasionally climbs into laps uninvited.

"When they open the door in the morning, he's standing there and he likes to shake hands," D'Arcy said. "Sometimes he'll hug you depending on who you are. He loves the ladies."

D'Arcy said Sapper picks dog people out of a room without prompting. In a crowd of soldiers patting him on the way by, the husky will bypass five or six people and jump into the lap of the seventh.

"It's like he knows that they're a dog person," D'Arcy said. "He picks them out."

Outside the USO, Sapper attends deployment ceremonies and homecomings at Fort Bragg. D'Arcy said the husky works both ends of those events, even greeting spouses and children on one side before heading into the airplane hangars where the soldiers wait.

"I got a couple videos or pictures where you'll see the soldiers laying down, they're sleeping, and he's laying on their legs across their lap," D'Arcy said.

At a recent deployment, Sapper climbed into the driver's seat of the bus pulling up to take the soldiers out.

"He likes to sit in the driver's seat," D'Arcy said. "They're getting on the bus and he's in the driver's seat and they're all laughing and carrying on."

Sapper also completes a near weekly shift at a local veterans hospice, where D'Arcy said the husky walks the hallway off-leash and picks which rooms to enter. At hospitals and anywhere patients use wheelchairs, Sapper has a move where he backs his hindquarters against the wheel and leans in so the person can better reach him.

"Nobody taught him that," D'Arcy said.

At one point, a military spouse messaged D'Arcy through social media and asked when Sapper would next be at the USO. She came in the next morning after a loss in her family and spent 45 minutes with the dog. 

An elderly widow who works in the Soldier Support Center waits in the hallway outside her office every day for Sapper to walk by. According to D’Arcy, she was visibly emotional when Sapper’s award was announced on April 21.

How Sapper Got the Name

Sapper is D'Arcy's fourth husky. D'Arcy, who served as an Army combat engineer with the 37th Engineer Battalion at Fort Bragg, said the three huskies before Sapper all passed from cancer over a span of three years.

Eight months later, the woman who had given him Ranger, his first husky, asked D'Arcy to come out to her kennels and help her pick puppies for other families.

"They all went away except for this one," D'Arcy said of the litter. "He laid on my foot, and I picked him up, put him on my shoulder. He started sucking my neck like a baby."

She later told D'Arcy she had already set that puppy aside for him two weeks earlier as a gift to help him grieve.

The Army-inspired name came a few weeks later. D'Arcy said the puppy got the zoomies in the yard one afternoon and sprinted head-first into the trailer hitch of his Toyota Tacoma. D'Arcy picked him up, set him down, but the puppy ran into the hitch again.

"You got to be a little crazy to do that because you're [working with] explosives and stuff," D'Arcy said. "That's kind of how he got his name Sapper, because you got to be a little crazy."

In the Army, a sapper is a combat engineer highly trained in the use of demolitions.

Sapper’s iconic sunglasses became a thing after a veterinary physical required for his hospice certification. D'Arcy said a vet found cataracts in the dog's eyes and concluded Sapper had been born with them. The maroon beret came after D'Arcy noticed Sapper liked wearing baseball caps, so he had a beret made to match Fort Bragg.

D'Arcy said Sapper mimics whatever humans do. The husky has been filmed sitting behind the wheel of a Jeep and a Ford F-150 with his paw on the steering wheel, appearing to drive.

"It's so crazy when you look at this stuff," D'Arcy said. "He's not like a dog. He's like a little man in a fur suit."

Off duty, D'Arcy and Sapper ride in D'Arcy's open-top Jeep and compete in charity 5K races and other events at Fort Bragg. Saturdays are spent at Paradise Acres, a country restaurant in the Grays Creek area outside Fayetteville, N.C. that donates to the Fort Bragg USO.

The USO and the Canine Program

The USO Center at Fort Bragg operates out of the Soldier Support Center, a facility D'Arcy said did not exist when he was in uniform.

"We didn't have this when I was here. We didn't have it inside," D'Arcy said. "To have something like this, this big now, that's not just at the airport, is a big deal."

The USO, founded in 1941, supports service members and their families from more than 260 locations worldwide. Its Canine Program certifies therapy dogs to work at USO events and centers, recognizing the role dogs play in addressing the mental, emotional and physical needs of the military community.

D'Arcy said the soldiers who cycle through the Fort Bragg USO, from trainees to generals, rely on the downtime the center makes possible. Sapper is part of why they often come back.

"You can see people in here, be a two-star general and a private sitting at a table," D'Arcy said. "They're not throwing around rank or titles. They're just hanging out."

As for the win, D'Arcy said it belongs to the Fort Bragg community that filled out the ballot page for a month straight, as well as to Sapper himself.

"It's 90 percent Sapper and 10 percent me," D'Arcy said. "I do the driving, taking him where he goes, and then he opens up his heart."

Those interested can follow Sapper's daily life on Instagram at @sapperdrc, or on other social media sites like Facebook, TikTok and X.