Happy dreams don’t often come true in wars, but the dream of Marine Corps Maj. Brian Dennis did.

Dennis, now stationed at MCAS Miramar, dreamed of taking his dog to the beach in San Diego. Easy for most people. But at the time, Dennis and his dog were both in Iraq.

He’d found and informally adopted the dog, which he called Nubs (you’ll see why when you watch), and he “became enamored with the idea of Nubs going from the sands of Iraq to running around and playing in the beaches and the sands of San Diego, transitioning from one life to the other, and how amazing that would be. He earned it.”

The stories of Nubs, of Lava, another Iraq foundling now taking it easy in La Jolla, and of a few more wartime mutts adopted and brought home by American service members, are told in “No Dog Left Behind,” a modest but moving documentary airing on the Military Channel at 10 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15.

Lava was found by retired Marine Lt. Col. Jay Kopelman, now a La Jolla resident. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Lava, another of the countless strays roving Iraq’s war zones, had been taken in by Marines at his base. One morning, Kopelman recalls, “I felt something in my sleeping bag. I didn’t know what it was. I was having these horrible visions of being bitten by the dreaded camel spider.”

It wasn’t a spider. It was Lava. “He’d found comfort in my sleeping bag, and feels he belongs with me, and I felt the same.”

Much of the documentary consists of home video shot by the soldiers and Marines themselves, frequently wrenching, disturbing images of battlefield violence, jarring explosions, and the bloody limbs and faces of the wounded. And there are shots of Iraq’s lost and abandoned feral dogs, scavenging through garbage heaps, trailing convoys in hopes of bumming a meal. Those brought home to the United States – Nubs, Lava, a couple more called Patton and Moody – are the extremely lucky few.

As explained in the film, such adoptions are against military regulations and only achieved after a lot of bureaucratic wrangling and with considerable help from the SPCA, airlines, contractors, veterinarians, donors and an organization called Operation Baghdad Pups.

Some determined dogs, however, make it impossible not to take them in. Nubs followed Dennis’ company as it rolled 70 or 80 miles across the desert and eventually caught up, refusing to be left behind.

Kopelman personally attests that the warmth and affection of a dog can indeed have therapeutic effects. He admits to “some unattractive and undesirable behavior” since returning from Iraq, but says that “having Lava has probably halped me from letting it get out of control. By saving him, I’ve saved myself.”

Nubs, when last seen, is running with Dennis in the surf of a San Diego beach.

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"Lopez Tonight," hosted by comic George Lopez, is making its debut this week on TBS (11 p.m., Monday through Thursday). The show blazes a new frontier for Latino performers and marks a new programming beach-head for the rerun-heavy cable channel. If Lopez succeeds as planned (and there’s no reason he shouldn’t), his show will sharply boost TBS’s "Very Funny" brand.

When Lopez starred in “George Lopez” on ABC from 2002 to 2007, he was the first Latino since Freddie Prinze in the 1970s (“Chico and the Man”) to be the leading star of his own prime-time network sitcom. Now he’s the first to host his own late-night talk show.

Both he and his Latino-heavy studio audience have been joyously celebrating all week long. "The revolution begins right now!” he proclaimed Monday night. “And the revolution begins in English y tambien en Español!"

His first-week guests joined him in the celebration. Kobe Bryant, who rarely appears on talk shows, showed up the first night, expressing a sentiment shared by all in the studio, "I cannot tell you how much it means to me that you're here."

In format, the show is nearly the same as those hosted by David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and the rest. Lopez opens with a comedy monologue (taking his material not from politics and the front pages but from the celebrity gossip of “Access Hollywood” and “Entertainment Tonight”), interviews a couple of guests, tosses in one or two taped comedy sketches, winds up with a musical performer and says goodnight.

Too often, though, Lopez and his guests seem to be at a meeting of a mutual admiration society, heaping ever more lavish praise on each other. That can be a difficult balance for a talk show host – how to welcome a guest without fawning. Lopez would benefit from following the example of the late Johnny Carson, who treated everyone simply as his equal.

The biggest, most obvious difference in the show itself is in the prevailing energy level. Surrounded by a set lit like a pinball machine, Lopez struts back and forth across the stage as he speaks, acting out his jokes with buoyant, eye-catching body English. The audience responds loudly and frequently, encouraged by Lopez himself, the band, and, so help me, a couple of 1980s-style go-go girls prancing atop a platform.

What nobody seems to remember, however, is that Lopez is not the first person of color to host a national late-night talk show on English language TV. That honor belongs to the African-American comic Arsenio Hall, whose syndicated program opened a generation ago, in 1989, and enjoyed a five-year run. It was on "The Arsenio Hall Show" that presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992 played "Heartbreak Hotel" on his saxophone. How soon we forget.