It’s 7 A.M., just north of the town of Safar, Afghanistan, and Fenji M675 is already panting. Her thick, black German shepherd coat glistens in the hot August sun. Fenji is out in front of ten marines, leashed to a D-ring that’s attached to the body armor of her handler, Corporal Max Donahue. He’s six feet behind her and holds his rifle ready.
Fenji leads the marines down the flat dirt road, past the trees and lush vegetation in this oasis amid the deserts of southern Afghanistan. She ignores the usual temptations: a pile of dung, a wrapper from a candy bar. Her mission doesn’t include these perks. Her nose is what may keep them all alive today, and she can’t distract it with the trivial. Coalition forces have been sweeping Safar of insurgents and their bombs, allowing the Safar Bazaar marketplace to reopen and locals to start living normally again. The Taliban had to go somewhere else. So they headed north. And they planted improvised explosive devices (IEDs) like seedlings among the poppy fields and grape fields and off to the sides of roads, under thick weeds.
Around here, any step you take could be your last.
And that’s why Fenji is in the lead, walking point. IEDs are the top killer in Afghanistan—even with the highest technology, the best mine-sweeping devices, the most sophisticated bomb-jamming equipment, and the study of “pattern of life” activities being observed from remote piloted aircraft. But there is one response that the Taliban has no answer for: the soldier dog, with his most basic sense—smell—and his deepest desire—some praise, and a toy to chew.
“Seek!” Donahue tells Fenji, and they continue down the road, leading the men from the 3/1 (Third Battalion First Marines). She walks with a bounce to her step, tail up and bobbing gently as she half trots down the road. Every so often she stops and sniffs a spot of interest and, when she doesn’t find what she’s seeking, moves on. She almost looks like a dog out on a morning stroll in a park. Donahue, in full combat gear—some eighty pounds of it, including water for his dog—keeps up with her.
Fenji stops at a spot just a foot off the side of the road. She’s found something of great interest. Without taking her eyes off the spot, she sniffs around it swiftly and her tail starts to wag. Suddenly she goes from standing up to lying down, staring the entire time at the spot. The men have stopped walking and are watching her. Her wagging tail kicks up some dust. Everything is silent now. No more sniffing, no crunching of boots.
Suddenly a hushed, enthusiastic voice cuts through the dead quiet. “Fenjiii! That’s my girl!” In training exercises, Donahue is a lot more effusive, but out of respect for the bomb, he makes his initial praise short and quick, calls her back, and they “un-ass” from the area. It could be the kind of IED someone sets off from a distance, not the type that goes off when you step on it. One of the marines marks it with a chartreuse glow stick, and they move on.
Within the next hour, Fenji alerts to three more roadside bombs. Donahue lavishes her with quiet praise every time. Twice after her finds, shortly after they get away from the bombs, he tosses a black Kong toy to his dog and she easily catches it. She stands there chewing it, reveling in the sound of Donahue’s praise, the feel of the hard rubber between her teeth, and the gloved hand of her best pal stroking her head. Life doesn’t get much better than this for a military working dog. These are the moments these dogs live for, when all the years of training, all the hard work, come together.
“I’m proud of you!” Donahue tells her, and he means it, and she wags hard. She knows she’s done well. She’s been with him for seven months now, and she has a great fondness for Donahue, her first handler, and he dotes on “my sweet girl.” She liked him from the moment they met at Camp Pendleton back in February. Nearly everyone who meets Donahue reacts the same way. There’s something about his big personality, his love of life, his dry humor, the way he looks after you. Fenji fell right in with him, and he immediately took to her. She was young, bright, eager to learn from him, and he swears she has a sense of humor. He once said that she gets his jokes before his friends do. That’s probably because she tends to wag in his presence regardless of jokes. She’s just happy to be near him. She’s three years old, he’s twenty-three, and together they’re a formidable bomb-finding force.
Their bond might contribute to their success on missions. She sleeps at the foot of Donahue’s cot every night out here; she joins him for card games with the other marines; she eats next to him at the patrol base where they’ve been stationed during this mission. He lets her have some of his food “because my girl deserves it.”
The explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians usually accompany the squad but had been called to another spot this morning. They’re on their way back to investigate the IEDs and defuse them. Donahue and the other marines go into action to protect the EOD techs in case of an ambush. They take positions to secure the area.
Donahue finds a great spot for his sector of fire, at a Y in the road. It’s wide open here, and he can see a few hundred meters around him. He fills Fenji’s portable bowl with water from his CamelBak. As she laps it up, he lies belly down, propped up on his elbows, and positions his rifle. He’s facing away from the field where some of the other marines are. He’s got a tiny village about two hundred meters away in his sights. If there’s trouble, that’s where it could start. A quenched Fenji lies down beside him a few feet away, and they wait.
The EOD techs arrive and get to work, carefully digging up the first IED, about one hundred meters from Donahue. One wrong move and they’re done for, and the Taliban adds another tally mark to its scorecard. One of the techs extracts the bomb from its hiding place and bends over it to take a look. Down the road, Donahue adjusts himself slightly to get more comfortable.
Three klicks south, in Safar, Corporal Andrei Idriceanu hears a terrible explosion as he and his dog sweep a building for explosives. “That could not be good,” he thinks, but he tries not to think about it too much.
Cairo, reportedly a Belgian Malinois, was part of the SEAL Team Six raid that led to the demise of Osama bin Laden. You don’t have to be a dog lover to be fascinated by the idea that a dog—the cousin of that furry guy begging for scraps under your table—could be one of the heroes who helped execute the most vital and high-tech military mission of the new millennium.
As the first details about the operation emerged, it sometimes seemed as though the dog was more the star of the story than the Al Qaeda leader: “Enough with the discussion of the photos of Osama’s corpse,” rallied a blog on the Web site Gothamist, “we want to see photos of the war dog who helped take him out!”
Though the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (known as DEVGRU, the more recent name for SEAL Team Six) and the Department of Defense were tight-lipped about the dog’s involvement in the raid, the stories poured forth. Most were conjecture presented as fact. According to some accounts, the dog sported night-vision goggles, bullet-resistant body armor, a live-action camera between his shoulders, earbuds to hear whispered commands, and rappelling gear. Not to mention four deadly titanium teeth. Holy canine superhero! Cairo’s image made Batman look like a gadget-impoverished Spartan.
Night-vision goggles for an animal who already sees pretty well at night? Fake teeth? Titanium teeth are never preferable to healthy, unbroken dog teeth. They are sometimes used to replace teeth that get broken, as patrol dog teeth sometimes do. But no self-respecting veterinarian would ever yank a dog’s teeth to replace them with titanium for no reason, regardless of how durable the metal is.
Concerned that some of this gear might be at least slightly exaggerated, I tried to find out the truth about Cairo, or any of his elite Special Operations multipurpose canine (MPC) brethren working dramatic missions. How hard could that be? They’re just dogs, after all. We aren’t talking about the Manhattan Project.
While I was visiting Joint Expeditionary Base, Little Creek, near Norfolk, Virginia, my escort pointed at the obstacle course used by the SEALs and showed me the beach where they swim. “They don’t talk to anyone about this stuff,” he told me.
These Special Ops dogs are so secret that they aren’t there at all—at least some of the time. A former veterinary technician at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, discovered this a couple of years ago when an Army Special Forces dog came in for treatment of some ailment. The staff treated the dog without doing the usual paperwork, and when the tech asked about some forms that were supposed to be filled out, the dog’s handler told her, “This dog was never here.” “From his tone, it was pretty clear. I never questioned it,” she told me. “The dog didn’t exist.”
Oh well, never mind.
There are real canine heroes—the ones walking point, leading soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines safely through some of the most dangerous parts of the world every day—who definitely do exist, do their jobs in harm’s way without fanfare, and expect in return only a bit of praise, a chonk on a ball. They may not jump out of airplanes or fast-rope from helicopters or be rumored to have titanium teeth, but as I’ve come to find, the jobs they do save real lives and play an increasingly crucial role in real battlefield situations.
Throughout history, dogs have been used for attacking (disemboweling the opposition was once a favorite technique), protection, and sentry duty—alerting soldiers to danger well before they could sense it themselves. They’ve been trackers, messengers, sled pullers, and first-aid deliverers. As scouts, they’ve excelled at sniffing the air and alerting their handlers to snipers and other hidden enemies. But there may be no other time in history when their olfactory abilities have been so essential.
“My life is in my dog’s nose,” many handlers have told me.
In Afghanistan, where IEDs are the biggest killer, a dog’s most important sense is being used more than ever: The most common job of today’s military working dog (MWD) is sniffing out explosives. A trained dog can detect and alert to dozens of explosives scents. No mechanical sensor can even come close. CIA director David Petraeus praised their service when he was a four-star general: “The capability they bring to the fight cannot be replicated by man or machine.”
Air Force Master Sergeant Antonio “Arod” Rodriguez, who’s in charge of advising more than one hundred military working dog teams assigned to twelve air force bases, puts it this way: “The working dog is a weapons system that is resilient, compact, easily deployable, and can move fast when needed. Nothing compares.”
That’s part of the reason dog teams are targets. Not only do these dogs help save lives, but the information that’s gathered from their finds can lead—via a very long and involved path—to locating the bigger operatives behind a device. It’s not something the Taliban relishes.
Most of the traditional soldier dogs serving in Afghanistan are patrol and explosives detection dogs like Fenji. The “patrol” part means they’re tough when they need to be and can put the bite on someone. I witnessed this rather personally during my research. Most patrol and explosives detection dogs in Afghanistan rarely if ever have to actively use their patrol skills, but their explosives-sniffing abilities are constantly in demand.
The lives they’re saving are not just those of the troops; IEDs are not choosy about their victims. Children, families, the elderly—no one is immune to their disfiguring, deadly effects. Locals in IED-infested areas are often prisoners in their own small, mud-walled homes. Venturing outside to meet with a neighbor or get some food is fraught with danger. Whole villages have stopped functioning because no one dares to go anywhere.
There’s a news video online that really brings the tragedy of the situation home for me. It shows a seven-year-old girl in Safar being rushed on a stretcher to a waiting military helicopter. She had been playing outside with her younger brother when someone stepped in the wrong place. The brother had not yet been found. His body was probably recovered later, far from the blast.
Dogs help normalize life where it has been overshadowed by constant threat of Taliban violence. These everyday paws-on-the-ground heroes and their human partners help clear villages and towns of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of explosive devices. Safar, for instance, had become a ghost town. People would not venture out. The once-thriving Safar Bazaar marketplace had been shut for months; there were so many IEDs that someone would be injured or killed there nearly every day. With all the people virtually trapped in their homes, commerce almost entirely ceased.
The dog teams came in and changed all that. In an operation that took several weeks, the village was cleared, the market declared safe. “It gives me goose bumps to think about the change. It went from dead to alive,” says Corporal Idriceanu, who spent weeks helping clear the Safar Bazaar with his dog. “People could live again. I’m honored my dog and I could be part of that.”
It is hard to quantify how many lives deployed soldier dog teams save by way of their detection skills. Figures range from 150 to 1,800 lives per dog. A dog who finds a bomb just as a squad is about to pass by could save several lives, depending on the bomb’s strength. Maybe there would have been no lives lost, just a slight injury. Or not even that. It’s impossible to count exactly how many people did not get hurt by a bomb that a dog discovered.
In any case, military working dog teams in Afghanistan were credited with finding more than 12,500 pounds of explosives in 2010. The number is probably at least slightly higher, officials say, since dogs are not always given credit for finds. Still, when you think of the damage even ten pounds of explosives in an IED can do, you can get a sense of the importance of these dogs to our military capability.
The Department of Defense has some 2,700 U.S. military working dogs in service worldwide and about six hundred serving in war zones. Another two hundred are contract dogs. Contract working dogs are trained by contractors, and their handlers work for the contractor, not the military. Most handlers in this world are former military handlers. Many got out of the military because the money is purported to be better on the contract side. Others just wanted a little more control of their jobs. If they don’t want to go into a war zone, they don’t have to. That’s not something they could pull off when working for Uncle Sam. The Department of Defense maintains these contracts because the Military Working Dog Program can’t supply enough dogs for the current need.
Even as troops start to draw down in Afghanistan, the dog teams don’t show any signs of staying home for long. Because of their vital role there, many in the military dog world think the dog teams could keep deploying steadily to the end of U.S. involvement. This could put them at higher risk. Already, seventeen handlers have been killed in action since 2001, and forty-four military working dogs have died in war zones since 2005, the first year for which figures are available. (The number of dog deaths includes dogs killed in action and dogs who have died from heat injuries and other causes. The Department of Defense does not yet have a full report of causes of death.)
Military working dogs are incomparable troops, superbly well suited for their tasks. But there’s something else that draws us to these dogs and their stories: For all their remarkable feats, they’re not only our heroes, they’re our pals. We share our homes and lives with their cousins, whose loyalty, intelligence, and unconditional love make them part of the family. When we see or read about how they’re involved in war, the war becomes a little closer. It gives us a little more skin in the game. The irony is that soldier dogs make war a little more human.
While I’ve yet to meet Cairo (or as some reports say, “Karo”), I have had the pleasure of meeting a nearly one-hundred-year-old military dog named Sergeant Stubby. The highly decorated World War I military hero died in 1926, was stuffed, and put on display at the American Red Cross Museum for nearly thirty years. His skin and hair eventually began to deteriorate, so he was taken off display. Eminent war-dog historian Michael Lemish wrote about him in his book War Dogs: A History of Loyalty and Heroism. He had found the dog stored in a shipping crate in an old artifacts room at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The crate read: STUBBY THE DOG—FRAGILE.
While in Washington, D.C., I decided to see if I could pay homage to this granddaddy of U.S. war dogs, and I called ahead to speak with someone who knew where the old relics were stored and how I could get access. I learned that Stubby had been refurbished from nose to tail and was now once again on display. He’s down the hall from Dorothy’s ruby slippers, toward the end of the large exhibit called The Price of Freedom: Americans at War.
Stubby became a war hero at a time when the United States didn’t have any semblance of a war-dog program. The small stray pit bull was taken in by a man who would make him the mascot of the 102nd Infantry in 1917. When the man went to war, he smuggled Stubby over to France by ship. Stubby provided comfort to the wounded and was devoted to his troops, but he became more than a loyal mascot. His “hero” title came to him from such feats as when he warned a sleeping sergeant of a gas attack, so that soldiers had adequate time to don their gas masks. He also bit a German infiltrator, who was hobbled by the bite and captured. The dog later suffered a shrapnel wound.
His popularity was immense, and he was grandly—if unofficially—decorated. He had to wear a blanket (given to him by several French women) to hold all his medals and pins. The dog went on to tour the United States, and he hobnobbed with three presidents.
Eighty-five years after he drew his last breath, I gazed through a glass barrier at Sergeant Stubby, who was now surrounded by a mannequin in a gas mask, an old wooden arm prosthesis, a well-preserved carrier pigeon, and other relics from the war. World War I has been relegated to a small, almost parenthetical, portion of this exhibit. Stubby looked a little plasticized, and his lip contours were bizarrely black, almost Herman Munster–ish. But this was Stubby, in the flesh, or at least in the fur.
Stubby’s procurement was not a formal process, but back then in the United States, there were no rule books for war-dog procurement. In fact there was no war-dog program here at all. During World War I, European armies were using dogs to great advantage, particularly as first responders and messengers. The Red Cross suggested a procurement process be initiated, but no appropriation was made. Someone in the General Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces proposed setting up a program to buy a supply of five hundred dogs every three months from the French and then setting up kennels in the United States to create a canine corps. Nothing happened.
Still, there are plenty of great stories like Stubby’s, of dogs serving in combat in American units during the war, not just as mascots, but also as sentries and messengers. And certainly thousands of soldiers saw the huge benefits of using dogs in wartime. But after the war, as military budgets were drawn down, the idea of starting a war-dog program faded.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American Kennel Club and another group, Dogs for Defense, led by a prominent breeder, appealed to dog owners across the country to donate their pets to the war effort. The public response was overwhelming. And so began America’s first formal military dog procurement program.
The army’s logistical arm, the Quartermaster Corps, acquired thousands of dogs spanning thirty breeds during the next three years. Based in large measure on the British experience in World War I, a K-9 Corps was built around five breeds: Belgian sheepdogs, giant schnauzers, collies, German shepherds, and Doberman pinschers. In all, of about nineteen thousand dogs acquired, more than half were trained. Of those, the vast majority became sentries. As the war progressed, the need for scout dogs increased, and some 436 dogs served in the island campaigns in the Pacific.
Because so many dogs loaned during World War II proved unfit for duty—and the expense of having to return them to their owners fell to the military—the army changed its procurement policy after the war to buy its own dogs. Moreover, it set out to select dogs who could perform all the various assignments in all climates and who were bred extensively. The procurement specifications are intriguing.
He should be a sturdy compact working type, revealing evidence of power, endurance, and energy. The dog must have good bones, well-proportioned body, deep chest with ribs well sprung, strong pasterns and muscular feet with hard wall-cushioned paws. Front feet should not toe inward or outward, hind quarters should have moderate angulation, and, as viewed from the rear, hind legs should be straight. The temperament of the dog should show general alertness, steadiness, vigor and responsiveness. He should not be timid, nervous, gun or noise-shy. In addition, the dog must be from nine months to three years old, must be between 22 inches and 28 inches high at the shoulder and must weigh between 60 and 90 pounds. The dog may be either male or female, but a female must have been spayed 60 days prior to being offered for purchase.
Hard wall-cushioned paws?
One by one, breeds were discounted. Climate was one deciding factor. Dobermans worked well only in temperate climates; collies, Siberian huskies, and Alaskan malamutes in colder climates. Labs and other sporting breeds were not considered dependable because of their gaming instinct. In the end, the German shepherd became the dog of choice as the Korean War began in June 1950.
But with all the talk about how successful dogs had been in World War II and the forging of a real procurement policy, as the curtain went up on the Korean War only one dog unit went into action: the Twenty-sixth Infantry Scout Dog Platoon. It did well, and there was a plan to attach a scout dog platoon to each division, but then the war ended.
And that marked a hiatus in the military’s dog program. The procurement stopped. The army war-dog program was defunded, and rumors spread that the program would be abandoned entirely. This drew an emotional, angry public response. The program survived; the air force took it over and started a training center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as America’s involvement in Vietnam intensified, and as the air force began to see the labor-saving advantages of sentry dogs, demand outstripped supply. Moreover, there was no military pipeline, or even a civilian pipeline like Dogs for Defense, to bring more dogs to the effort.
The result was that the military was forced into a hurry-up scenario, and quickly sent out small teams of recruiters to bases around the country to buy up dogs from neighboring communities. The price paid was usually not more than $150 per dog. The breeds of dogs procured once again expanded, and Labradors and even hounds were among those drafted. Some 3,800 dogs would serve during the course of this war.
War dog procurement is partly a matter of selecting breeds for combat and then drawing a steady supply, but it’s also a matter of demilitarization and repatriation. That was assumed after World War II but forgotten after Vietnam, when thousands of dogs were left behind, either to replenish supplies for the South Vietnamese Army or to be eaten, as some have asserted, or simply euthanized. Some handlers even chose to reenlist so they could be with their dogs as long as possible, in hopes they might be able to prolong the dogs’ lives and perhaps even adopt them.
The situation now is utterly transformed. Our understanding of dogs’ qualities and abilities is far better, and the results of our working together in the military are vastly improved. So does this new kind of military use have anything to offer back to our understanding of, or relationship with, our own dogs at home?
I’d written about other military working dogs before Cairo and Sergeant Stubby. And every time I did, I found myself looking at my own dog.
In the haze of glory surrounding military working dogs, my dog Jake, who is now nine, doesn’t really look like a contender for admission into the military elite. When he was younger, did he have what it took to sniff out bombs, to risk his life, to walk point in order to save others? I’d look at him, typically lying around sleeping somewhere and perhaps snoring, or absconding with an unattended bit of food, or rolling in the grass. Not obviously military hero material.
But Jake does have his breed going for him. He’s a Labrador retriever—a breed the military commonly uses for detection work. Actually, we’re not 100 percent sure he’s all Lab. He was found wandering the streets of a seedy part of San Francisco at six months of age. A rescue group took him in and we agreed to foster him. It was to be just for a week or two. Our old Airedale had died the previous month, and we weren’t ready for a dog to take up a full-time, permanent position in our house. This was to be a temp gig. But the minute he walked in the door, on December 1, 2002, I knew we were in trouble. He was all paws, with a big smile on his wide blond face, and bright brown eyes that scanned the foyer, looked at me, and gave me that “Yup, I’m home! Get used to me!” look.
Jake does show some signs of being a good potential war dog. He bonded with us quickly, he is eager to please, would do anything for us (except stop chewing flip-flops), and is pretty fearless. He’s also a great sniffer. I have yet to find a place to hide his dog treats where he doesn’t sit staring at the invisible wafting scent, obsessed, clearly trying to figure out ways to maneuver them down from their stealth position, and often succeeding.
But military dogs have something Jake doesn’t: a job. It’s something dog experts say is lacking with many pet dogs today, and is at the root of many problems. Boredom can lead to destructive or anxious behavior. At best, it’s just not much fun.
“Dogs used to have jobs; that’s what they were trained to do,” dog trainer Victoria Stillwell, host of the Animal Planet show It’s Me or the Dog, told me when I ran into her at an event honoring hero dogs in Los Angeles. “Now these poor animals spend most of the time sitting on the couch, alone all day. They’re bored. We need to give them jobs. If they’re motivated by them, if they enjoy themselves, life is better all the way around.”
I started to feel bad that Jake didn’t have a job, but then I realized he’s like me. He’s kind of a self-employed freelancer. He finds work that he’s passionate about and puts everything into the job until his mission is accomplished.
His current gig is rather cliché: He lies in wait in our backyard much of the day, so he can chase a relatively new neighborhood cat, Kika, out of the yard when she ventures over the fence. (He never gets closer than several yards from the cat, or I’d put the kibosh on it.) She’s a beautiful, lithe, leopard-spotted feline, and I welcomed her into our yard until I saw her chasing and killing butterflies, and until I found out why my little writing cottage smelled like a litter box every time I opened the front window. (She was using the bit of dirt right outside my window as her toilet.)
When Jake is in the house and he hears her little bell, he races down the stairs and out to the backyard. When he runs after her, he looks more like a rocking horse, cantering merrily, tail woggling quickly from side to side and up and down. He doesn’t seem to take the chase too seriously. A big woof or two and Kika is out of the yard through a hole in the lattice of the back fence. Only then can Jake rest, a job well done.
Jake is an Everydog. His is the most popular breed of dog in the United States. He’s even got one of the most common names for male dogs. And his passion for chewing shoes and chasing cats and finding food are charmingly stereotypical.
He pokes around in this book. You can think of him as a stand-in for your dog or other pet dogs if you find yourself wondering, as I did and still do, how the average dog would fare in the military.
Having an Everydog in the mix puts war dogs into perspective. Military dogs may have unique breeding and intense training, but underneath it all, they’re dogs. Unless they’re of the super-aggressive variety, many go on to become pets at the ends of their careers. (A huge improvement from post-Vietnam days.) Inside, most probably just want to catch a ball and get a pat for a job well done, eat some good grub, and sleep in a comfortable bed near their favorite person.
Most maybe. But “some dogs are just jerks” I was told by an air force technical sergeant who has worked with every type of dog during his decade in the world of handlers. There are the dogs, for instance, who will seem to reach out to you and beckon you to pet them, but once you do, they try to bite your hand off. “They get this look in their eye like ‘Heh heh heh,’” he said. “Just like people, some dogs are bad guys.”
Military working dogs are considered equipment by the Department of Defense. In some ways, they’re officially looked upon as a rifle or a minesweeper would be. It’s a designation that fell upon military dogs after World War II, when the military stopped borrowing dogs from Mom and Pop Dog Lover and started buying dogs.
And it just so happens that dogs may be the only “equipment” that get tattoos.
Of course, handlers see their dogs as anything but equipment. Handlers put their lives on the line for their dogs, and the reverse is also true. During the Korean War, the handler of a dog named Judy was taken prisoner and forced to march for two days to his place of detention. When he got there, he unleashed Judy and begged her to run, hoping she’d make it back to HQ. But she stayed at his side. The next day Chinese guards took them to a kitchen and made him tie Judy to a post and leave her. They asked him who Judy was, and he told them she was a mascot.
“I heard a gunshot. I am sure it was Judy,” he wrote.
When soldier dogs and handlers deploy, they spend almost every hour together. Like Donahue and Fenji, they rarely leave each other’s side when they’re at war. Handlers can end up developing a closer bond with their dogs than they do with other people, even spouses. When a handler and his dog have to part from each other in order to fulfill a unit requirement, it can be enough to bring the handler to tears, and to cause a dog to ignore his new handler—at least for awhile.
I’ve never seen anyone cry when she talks about turning in her old rifle or giving back her body armor. The fact that dogs are still considered equipment seems rather antiquated. Sure, they’re not human soldiers, but they’re a far cry from a rifle or a helmet or a helicopter. Ask any child who watches Sesame Street which of these things does not belong, and the tot will point right to the dog. Most instructors and trainers will, too.
“I try to articulate that a dog is not a piece of equipment, but a working, breathing animal that needs to be treated respectfully and kindly,” says Arod, who also runs Olive Branch K-9, a police and military dog consultancy. “Your dog is your partner and values meaningful interaction. You just don’t think about equipment in the same way.”
Some handlers I’ve spoken with hope that at some point four-legged warriors will be given a new designation. Even something like “animal personnel” would be more accurate than “equipment” and would take dogs out of the “thing” category. Dogs could be joined in that category by other animals used by the military, like the sea lions, dolphins, and whales used by Navy SEALs to find sea mines and enemy divers.
In this book, you’ll notice that in most cases where I mention a dog’s name for the first time, it’s followed by a letter and three numerals. That’s a dog’s tattoo number, his unique ID, inked inside his left ear. If you view a dog as equipment, it could be like his VIN. If you see a dog as something more, think of it as his last name.
Here’s a way to use a dog’s tattoo number to win a bar bet with a handler. You can tell a handler what year his dog arrived at Lackland Air Force Base—where young future military working dogs go for processing and training—just by knowing the first letter of the tattoo. Even most handlers I spoke with weren’t sure how their dogs came by their tattoo numbers. But it’s fairly simple.
Tattoos start with a new letter every year. The year 2011, when I arrived at Lackland Air Force Base, was an R year.
So let’s say you come upon Handler Joe and his dog Bella M430. Tell him you can guess pretty close to when his dog arrived at Lackland for the first time. Then all you have to do is figure out how many letters earlier than the current year’s letter M is. If you’d met Joe and Bella M430 in 2011, during the R year, you’d calculate the numerical difference between M and R. So M-N-O-P-Q-R—that’s six letters. But don’t blurt out that Joe’s dog arrived five years ago. The letters G, I, O, Q, and U are not used in tattoos because they can easily be confused for other letters or numbers. So in the case of Bella M430, you “add back” two years (for O and Q) and now you can safely say that Bella arrived at Lackland for processing three years ago. Since most dogs get to Lackland when they’re two or three, you could take it a step further and figure that Bella is five or six years old.
Beers all around!
I’m not sure how much Sergeant Stubby had to do with this, but a military myth holds that a dog is always one rank above his handler. The popularity of this story spiked after the bin Laden raid.
The truth is that, officially, dogs hold no rank—equipment never does. (Equipment doesn’t let you bury your face in its fur when you’re mourning a fallen comrade, either.) It would also be confusing when a dog gets transferred between handlers of different ranks. There would be a lot of demotions and promotions in a dog’s career—not that the dog would care.
That’s not to say that some handlers don’t refer to their dogs as the next rank up. I’ve never come across a marine handler who did this, but it’s a fairly strong tradition in the army, where it probably started during World War II. Some say it was a move to get handlers not to abuse their dogs, because they could be in trouble for abusing a superior. Others believe it was just a maneuver to warm the hearts of Americans so they’d support the war-dog program and donate their dogs to the fight.
Even in army ceremonies honoring a dog for his service, the dog will often be referred to by his rank. And handlers have fun with it in everyday life, too.
“On occasion we tease lower-ranking soldiers if they ask to pet our working dogs,” says Army Sergeant Amanda Ingraham. “We tell them if they do pet our dogs, they need to do so at the position of parade rest and show our NCO some respect. It’s all in fun, but at the same time it gets everyone to realize the value of our dogs.”
And non-handlers will also notice the names of dogs tattooed on their fellow servicemen’s arms or legs.
Ink all around!
Early in the research for this book, I got a note from Brandon Liebert, a former marine sergeant who had been a handler and trainer for eight years. He deployed to Iraq in 2004 with one of the first groups of garrison handlers sent into a war zone. He’s now a civilian contractor, working as a dog handler. He gave me one of my first insights into who dog handlers are.
Dear Maria,
During my time at MCAS Cherry Point, NC (March 2003–August 2006), I only handled one dog. His name is Monty E030, a Patrol Explosive Detector Dog. He and I had a great bond. He was a very fast learner and loved to please me. Because I trained him to do more than what the military required, I ended up making sure he had a different toy for every task. He also had his personal toys. He had more toys than any other dog in the kennels. Every morning we would go out and play before starting any type of training. Even though we were not supposed to, I would feed him some human food while we would be out on patrols. While deployed to Iraq, I would take Monty with me everywhere (i.e., chow hall, internet cafe, phone center, etc). Taking him with me everywhere also helped in keeping up the morale of the troops. They loved to play with him, pet him, help me with his training. Having him around all the time was not only fun and good times for me but also the troops, whether it was on base or out in the field.
When we were in Iraq, we celebrated the Marine Corps Birthday. The Marine Corps flew in steaks for us. I asked the cooks if they would save a leftover one for me so I could give it to Monty, and they did. So we both had steak for the Marine Corps Birthday. He sure did love it.
I would do anything for him and he would do anything for me. I had full confidence in him when he alerted to something. If he was not confident about something, I could tell. He could read me and I could read him. That is how good our bond was. When I had to give him up to another handler and change duty stations, it was hard. I felt like I had lost my best friend. We had bonded for over 3 years and now it was time to say goodbye. It was harder for me to say goodbye to him than what it was to say goodbye to everyone in the kennels. But he had a new daddy, so I had to move on.
It was an intriguing note to get at the start of this project. Here was a marine who referred to himself as the dog’s “daddy,” a warrior who felt a lump in his throat when parting with his best friend of three years. His tender ways with his dog clashed with the image I’d always had of marines as super-tough, aggressive combatants. I wondered: Was Liebert the exception, or was he typical of military dog handlers?
As I came to see, Liebert’s closeness with his dog was not unusual. Phrases like “He’d do whatever it took to save my life, and I’d do the same to save his,” or “She was like my child,” come up all the time when talking to handlers. The stories handlers told me made it clear that the closer a handler feels to her dog, the better the working relationship tends to be. In the end, that translates into saved lives. If a handler knows a dog well, she’s going to know what subtle signs to watch when the dog is looking for explosives or bad guys.
I met up with Liebert and his fiancée, Amanda Lothian, when they were passing through San Francisco. No longer obligated to uphold marine standards, he wore his dark hair slicked back in a tidy ponytail and sported a trim beard and mustache. He’d met Lothian at Lackland Air Force Base, where she was a vet tech. She left the army for civilian work shortly before having their baby. She went into labor as Liebert was getting on a plane to go train as a dog handler. “I’m sorry,” he told her on the phone when she—in the throes of contractions—called him. “I have to get to the dogs.”
Dogs are still front and center in their lives. When we met at the rooftop bar at the Marines Memorial Hotel, Liebert was awaiting a high-security clearance for his second round of contract work in Afghanistan. He is now “daddy” to a German shepherd mutt, Mabel. When stateside, he plans vacations around her, refusing to put her on a plane, and taking her in his truck on road trips instead. The dog will be staying with his sister while he’s away for the next year. Lothian is now a vet tech at the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital at the University of California, Davis, and has a German shepherd, Archimedes.
Liebert and Lothian both sport tattoos of dog paws on their lower legs. His paw tattoo is big and burly and is flanked by the words “Dogs of War.” Hers is a replica of her dog’s paw, with the name written in dainty italics underneath.
With introductions made, drinks in hand, and the pianist gliding his way through the entire song list from Phantom of the Opera, Liebert begins to recount the story of his dog Monty’s greatest day, his biggest find in Iraq. Liebert’s voice sounds remarkably like Jimmy Stewart’s when the actor was young. I’ll let him tell it.
“We were in a little forward operating base (FOB) in a town called Husayba. The commander of the base was given information about threats made to the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) unit there. These threats came from a group of insurgents looking to take over the ICDC compound. They feared the worst, so the unit chose to abandon their compound, which was located just a few hundred yards away from our base. If the insurgents were to take over this building, it would give them a good advantage to try and take over our base.
“We got to the building with no resistance and had to sweep it for explosives. When we started searching inside, Monty led me to a back room. On the way he alerted to a mortar round and an antitank mine that had been taken apart. We continued toward the back room again, and when we walked in, he started to circle the room. This usually means that there’s a high concentration of odor and he can’t pinpoint where exactly the odor is coming from. The only things in the room were these huge metal boxes. I brought him over to them so he could search them, and he gave me a final response. Something was there.
“One of the boxes was slightly open, so I looked inside as much as I could without touching it. From what I could see, there were bullet rounds in it. I notified the sergeant in charge and we had a couple of marines guard that area while I continued. In the next room, we found the weapon for those rounds. It was some type of antiaircraft gun with a swivel mounting system. Eventually we went over to a medium-size building with only one room. Monty alerted to an area against the inside wall where there was a mound of dirt and some trash. We secured the area and had the EOD team come out and check the areas where Monty had responded.
“According to EOD, Monty found over six hundred antiaircraft rounds and a 155mm round. It was the biggest find our K-9 group had while we were there. I was so proud of him, and he was really happy, because he knew he did a great job. He loved to work for his toy, and he loved to work for me, so it was really all just big fun for him.”
I ask him what could have happened if Monty had not found those rounds. “If those rounds had been used,” he says, pausing and taking a long draw on his drink, “you just don’t want to think about what they can do with those things.”
We talk more about their adventures together. About how the dog cheered up troops by his mere presence. About the array of different toys Liebert gave Monty for successfully completing tasks. “If you were given a steak dinner every time you did something good, it would get old after a while.”
Eventually we come to how Liebert and Monty had to part ways. The pianist is playing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” now. Another round of drinks comes our way.
When they came back from Iraq, they had more time together at the kennels for several months until Monty was assigned to another handler who would be deploying to Iraq with him two months later. Liebert likened it to having your child assigned to another parent. “It’s disconcerting, really hard, especially when you’ve been together as long as we had.” But he knew this came with the territory of being a military dog handler, and he steeled himself.
He wasn’t supposed to interact much with Monty at that point, because the new handler needed to build up a rapport with him. So Liebert would pet him through the fence. Every once in a while he’d get in the kennel with him and hold on to him and hug him. “I told him, ‘Hey, I’m your stepdaddy now, that’s your new daddy.’”
The handler and Monty deployed, did their tour, and came back safely. Not too long after they got back, Monty was put up for adoption for a medical reason Liebert wasn’t privy to. He handed in his adoption packet immediately, but he learned that Monty had already been adopted out, probably to another handler. He’s not sure who got Monty, because there was an incident toward the end that caused a rift between him and the people who made the decision in the kennel. He doesn’t go into it. He kept busy, spending the next four years, from 2006 to 2010, as a dog trainer at Lackland Air Force Base. He left in mid-2010 in order to make more money as a dog handler in the private sector.
He had several good months as a contract dog handler in Afghanistan, working with Loebes, a black shepherd, but he can’t imagine anyone will ever take Monty’s place. Some days he wonders if Monty, who would be a senior citizen by now, is still around. “All I can do is hope and pray that whoever has him is taking care of him and giving him the life that he deserves as a retired military working dog.”
Ask almost any handler how he likes the work, and you’ll hear something like this: “It’s the best job in the world.” I’ve never heard this phrase so much as I did while exploring the world of military working dogs. These are people who go to hellish areas and get shot at and risk their lives every day, and they say things like “I wouldn’t trade working with my dog for anything,” or “Canine is a lot of hard work, a lot of extra hours, but, I mean, it’s a dog.”
These men and women (women make up only 10 percent of handlers) don’t all come from a dog background, but those who make it through the intensive training and end up with a canine partner are passionate about what they do. Handlers tend to be type A personalities who, by their own admission, often get along better with dogs than people. Not that they don’t like people. It’s just that they get to know dogs so well. Handlers in war zones must rely on the dogs for their very lives. Along the way they get to know the hearts and souls of their dogs. “It’s better than with people,” one handler told me. “It’s just simpler, and more pure.”
A big fear some handlers have is that their home kennel won’t get enough dogs, and they’ll become just regular MPs, which is where most started out. Once you’ve worked with these dogs, once you’ve experienced that bond, it seems the idea of becoming a regular “straight legs” is a lonely proposition.
Army Corporal Kory Wiens called his mine-detection dog, a Labrador retriever named Cooper, “my son.” He bought him all kinds of toys, and they sometimes shared a cot while on deployment in Iraq.
Wiens, twenty, planned to reenlist so he could stay with Cooper and adopt him when the dog was at the end of his career. He would never get that chance. Wiens and his dog were killed by an IED while on patrol in Muhammad Sath in July 2007.
His family knew how important Cooper was to Wiens. The pair’s cremated remains are buried together in a cemetery in Wiens’s hometown of Dallas, Oregon.
What was bad in Iraq is worse in Afghanistan.
The first handler I reached in Afghanistan was an army staff sergeant named Marcus Bates. In an e-mail, he introduced himself with characteristic military formality. “My name is SSG Bates, Marcus, serving in the U.S. Army,” he began. Bates wanted to talk about his partner, Davy N532, a three-year-old Belgian Malinois, whose name didn’t match her gender.
Bates recounted how he and Davy were supporting the Fourth Battalion Twenty-fifth Field Artillery Regiment, in Kandahar Province. During their months together they’d already found 140 pounds of explosives, two grenades, and two mortars.
“We get action about every time we go on a mission,” Bates said. He described Davy as a top-notch patrol and explosives detection dog. She’d been with Bates for nineteen months, at home base and in theater. “I trust her with my life. If I didn’t trust her, I wouldn’t be here.”
Bates had deployed with a dog once before, in Iraq. But Davy is new to war. In fact, Bates is her first handler. They hit it off immediately and she sleeps on his cot. She starts off with her head on his chest, but by the morning she is sleeping nestled up to his feet.
She’s slight for her breed, weighing only forty-five pounds, but her size turns out to be an asset in more than just sleeping arrangements. She’s agile enough to scramble up and over the four- to five-foot-high hardened mud walls that surround the area’s notorious grape fields. When Bates thinks of other handlers having to hoist eighty-pound German shepherds over those walls, he’s grateful for Davy. His combat load is already fifty to sixty pounds, including weapons, ammo, and enough water and food to last both of them for a two-day mission.
One November day Bates and Davy were on patrol in a grape field when they came under fire from eighty yards away. “I hate the grape fields here.”
Grape fields in Afghanistan are a far cry from your standard lush, manicured Western vineyards. Grapes grow in sprawling, tangled rows, between humid, muddy ditches obscured by weeds. The trenches are notoriously good places to hide explosives. When a blast goes off, the narrowness of the trench concealing it intensifies the explosion. These are the killing fields of a new generation of soldier.
As bullets from the AKs flew past, Bates and his squad took cover and returned fire. After a while it was time to get away from the dangerous trenches and up close with the enemy. The squad leader and Bates, Davy alongside, moved swiftly toward the enemy, firing as they approached.
The insurgents bolted and disappeared. But their secret ally—in the form of a long strand of copper wire in the dirt—remained. Bates and his little team followed the wire to a nearby grape hut. It was a small mud barn with thick walls pocked with holes for hanging fruit, as well as opium and marijuana, depending on the season. They entered, with Davy’s nose leading the way. Bates followed the wire to a battery. It was the makings of a command-wire IED. All someone had to do was touch the battery to the wire, and an IED on the other end would explode “on command.” When Bates looked up, Davy was sitting down staring at a pile of branches. She sat there, head tilted slightly down, riveted to the branches as if lost in a good book.
“My first thought was ‘Holy crap what is right next to me?’”
Bates approached the pile gingerly and found a vest with two grenades and some intel on local insurgents. A short time later, Davy discovered two IEDs near the hut.
It is clear that the bond between handlers and dogs on the battlefield is extraordinarily powerful. But wait. Before we go any further, there is a question we must address. Is it right to use dogs in war? Should we be putting them in harm’s way at all? Why should dogs die for the arguments of men? After all, dogs don’t have any say in the matter. They’re drafted and serve faithfully. They probably don’t understand the concept of death. This is all a big game to them, in a way. It’s about chasing a ball and bonding with a handler and having fun and getting praised.
I don’t have a complete, perfect answer to this question. I love dogs. The first time I met a military working dog, I wanted to abscond with him. He seemed happy at his home station of Travis Air Force Base, near Fairfield, California. But I found out he was going to war the next month. He had no worries about this, of course, but his innocence made his fate seem almost heartbreaking. “Hey, pal,” I wanted to tell him, “see that old station wagon over there? Make a break for it in one minute and I’ll meet you there. Do I ever have a nice dog bed for you, and there’s this dog named Jake I think you’d like.”
As the months went by, I met more dogs and handlers, and learned about the lives they saved, and saw the bonds they forged. I saw that, despite the less-than-ideal work conditions, these dogs have something a lot of pampered dogs don’t: a purpose, something meaningful in their lives.
It’s something we all aspire to.
I came to see just how incredible the best of these dogs are. If I had to cover a war, I’d want to be in a unit loaded with soldier dogs. Ditto if I had a kid who was in the military.
But just who are these dogs? Is there something that makes them entirely different from your dog or Jake, or even that rugged German shepherd you see in the neighborhood? Is it just their training or is it something in their bloodlines? That is the question at the core of the next part of this book.