In February 2011 a marine squad of about twenty men was returning to base in the upper Gereshk Valley of the Helmand Province in Afghanistan after a morning of patrolling a small village. Coalition forces hadn’t been in this area for ten years, but they had encountered no problems. They’d walked from the lush “green zone” near the Helmand River up to a plateau in the muddy “brown zone.” It was a cold, wet, overcast day and they were glad to be heading back.
Suddenly three Taliban insurgents opened fire with AK-47s from about sixty yards behind them. The marines in the rear immediately whirled around and fired back with M4s, 240s, and 249s, while other marines flanked the insurgents so they wouldn’t get away. It’s a tactic known as laying a base of fire and enveloping the enemy. It can be highly effective, but this time the insurgents bolted just before the squad could surround them.
The three men ran behind a thick mud wall around a compound at the village edge and once again fired their weapons at the marines, who were in a vulnerable position in a field of short poppies. Several marines ran toward the gunfire, shooting their own weapons in a fast, cyclic manner they’d practiced to perfection. They looked fearless on the outside, but inside, dog handler Marine Sergeant Mark Vierig told himself, “Just don’t get shot in the face. Just don’t get shot in the face,” as they charged the wall, running straight into the fire.
At this point, the insurgents probably realized they did not have fire superiority, and they fled toward the half mile–wide village, hoping to blend in and get lost.
But you don’t get lost so easily when there’s a combat tracking dog team in hot pursuit. Vierig and his Belgian Malinois, Lex L479, are a rare breed of military dog team. Their mission is twofold: to find the people who plant IEDs and to track down fleeing insurgents who so easily disappear into their familiar surroundings.
Vierig has been a dog handler since 2002 and a combat tracker for the last two years. His dog is six and one of the best noses in the business.
They set out after the men. Any of the three would do. Vierig ran to the spot where he knew one of the men had been, and put his dog on the track, telling him “Zoeken!” (Dutch for “Search!”; Lex is from the Netherlands.) Lex picked up the man’s scent immediately, and they started following the invisible trail toward the village.
The dog pulled strongly on the leash, nose to the ground, tail up, confident. Vierig followed six to ten feet behind, running in eighty pounds of full combat gear. As long as his dog had his nose down and “pulled like a freight train,” Vierig knew he was on track. In situations like this, where people are fleeing from a chase instead of just casually walking away from planting an IED, the track they leave is particularly strongly infused with “extreme pheremones” and other scents that are highly interesting to dogs.
Tracking is a dangerous mission in Afghanistan, where IEDs are so prevalent that troops don’t want to go out without a metal detector or a bomb dog. Trackers don’t have either luxury. In situations like this, they’re heading into virgin territory at a jog or even a run. If a dog loses the track, and a handler doesn’t realize it, not only may the two lose their quarry, but they can lose their lives—and those of the troops following close behind.
But if the dog is on a good track, it’s a safer business. After all, the person the dog is pursuing has already run over the ground and would (in theory) have set off any IEDs. Plus the insurgents are often very aware of where IEDs are and will avoid those areas. (Much intel on IED placement is gathered by observing insurgents and others steering clear of certain areas.)
Lex continued into the village in confident pursuit of the insurgent. It’s tricky tracking around buildings, because there are many places for the enemy to hide and open fire. So once in the village, Vierig had to slow down his dog and begin doing tactical tracking. Slowing the pace increases the time/distance gap that’s important to keep to a minimum when tracking, but it’s the only way to proceed in villages. For instance, Vierig explains, there’s the matter of corners. Danger can literally lurk around every one of them.
“If I blow by a corner and the guy knows I’m tracking him, he can just hide behind a corner and as I blow by straight, he can shoot me. So I’ll get to the corner of the building, down the dog, pie the corner [a tactic where a handler can look around the corner in cautious “slices” to make sure no one is waiting to kill] and if it’s clear, we move on.”
Lex and Vierig tracked the man through the labyrinth of alleys in the village. People who had been out when the marines had patrolled the village earlier had all run inside for safety. The village appeared eerily devoid of residents. Lex didn’t lose the scent trail once. The insurgent wasn’t in sight, but he may as well have been. Lex’s nose could “see” his trail as clearly as you and I can see a path in a park.
Lex suddenly took an abrupt right turn down an alleyway. The dog “threw a huge change of behavior,” picking up his head a little higher, pulling to the point where Vierig couldn’t stop him. “OK, boys,” he yelled to the eight marines who were keeping up right behind him in perfect Ranger file, “we’re close, get ready.”
At the end of the alley, Vierig could see the man for the first time since he ran behind the wall. He was bent over a creek, rubbing his hands with water, presumably in an effort to remove any scent of black powder. As they approached, Lex barked “in a way that hits a nerve in my neck,” says Vierig. The man had nowhere to run. The marines snapped some flex-cuffs on him and radioed the others in the squad to take him. Vierig gave Lex loads of praise, lots of pats and rubs, and threw him a tennis ball, which he joyously destroyed. “His tennis ball is like crack cocaine to him. That dog would rather have a ball than breathe.”
So would a dog named Blek.
Military working dog Blek H199 didn’t have much time between his fourth and fifth deployments. The black German shepherd returned to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama from Afghanistan in December 2009 with a handler who had bonded deeply with him. The two had found numerous explosives and grown to be best friends.
The handler would like to have stayed with six-year-old Blek for the rest of the dog’s career. That was not to be.
In what’s known as a “hot swap”—he had to give up Blek upon return from war, and Blek got a new handler, Air Force Staff Sergeant Brent Olson. He liked Blek immediately but felt a little guilty. “His other handler wouldn’t even talk to me, he was so upset that I had his dog. They had really bonded. I was like, ‘Dude, it’s not my fault.’”
Less than three months later, Olson and Blek deployed to FOB Salerno/RC East and Kandahar/RC South, Afghanistan, where they were attached to the 101st Airborne, 502nd Bravo Company, Third Platoon. During their months there, they bonded over “all that war stuff. We experienced firefights and we found IEDs and pretty much had a good time.”
Like most military working dogs, Blek loved finding IEDs. He’d sniff and wag his tail hard and fast. “He’d be like, ‘OK, Dad, I did good! Now give me my ball!’” Olson credits the predeployment training he and Blek got at Yuma a few months earlier with helping keep them safe, perhaps alive, during some tenuous moments. “We’d been through the dress rehearsal, so we were ready to perform.”
They fought Taliban insurgents together for six months and spent almost every hour at each other’s side. Life was about as good as it gets for a dog and handler at war, as far as Olson was concerned.
But on the night of September 16, 2010, through the odd green glow of night-vision goggles, Olson’s war would take a dark turn.
It was the third night of a mission to clear a known hostile village in southern Afghanistan. Each day, as American and Afghan army troops swept buildings for insurgents, weapons, and caches, someone would open fire on them. It was a grueling mission. Troops were tired. But it was almost over. Just a few more buildings to go.
That night, after clearing three buildings, the platoon arrived at the fourth. It was near a huge marijuana field—a mud hut residence on the bottom, with stairs on the side leading up to a grape hut. Olson sent Blek up to check out the door frame to make sure it was not booby-trapped, and to sniff for IEDs on the mud stairs along the way. “Go up, boy!” Blek ran up, sniffed the twelve stairs, inspected around the bottom of the door frame with his nose, ran back down the stairs, and stood about ten feet away from Olson, awaiting his next command. Then an Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier ran up the stairs, followed within seconds by another Afghan soldier. They were going to open the hut and take a look at what lay inside. But when the second soldier got to the fourth step, there was a tremendous explosion.
What followed was a hellish scene.
A platoon sergeant got on the radio calling, “IED! IED!” The Afghan soldier who was on his way up the stairs was thrown twenty feet, onto an old dirt road. His left leg had been blown off, and he lay screaming, begging in Arabic for someone to shoot him. He quickly bled to death in the middle of the road.
The force of the explosion had blown Olson back a few feet into the wall behind him. He stood stunned. “What brought me back to reality was the sound of Blek screaming. It was a horrible sound.”
He couldn’t see his dog because it was nighttime, so he reeled Blek in on the retractable leash, pulling and pulling until Blek was next to him. Blek had run when the IED exploded, so the leash was out a good twenty-five feet. When he finally got him close, Olson was relieved that Blek was even alive. He felt his dog for any injuries. As he was running his hands up and down Blek’s legs, Olson’s right arm went completely numb. He put his left hand under his right armpit, and then drew it out—his hand was drenched with blood.
“I’m hit!” he yelled.
“Who’s hit?”
“The dog handler!” Olson shouted back.
An army medic came over and started cutting off Olson’s gear and clothing. Blek growled at the medic. “All he sees is someone touching me and me in pain, and he’s like ‘That’s my dad. Leave him alone.’”
Olson couldn’t take chances, and he handed off Blek to someone who was also hurt, but not completely out of the fight.
As the medic worked on Olson, the Afghan soldiers were running around in a panic. More IEDs went off as they ran into other buildings to seek shelter. The damaged platoon called in First Platoon for support because of all the casualties. As the troops ran in, they set off more IEDs. Two American soldiers died, and several others were wounded.
Olson had taken shrapnel to his right armpit, and his upper arm was broken and still devoid of feeling. His left arm was burned, shrapnel peppered his face, and he had a three-inch piece of metal in his leg.
He saw Blek again as they were waiting for a Black Hawk medevac. He knew right away that Blek had gone deaf. He was talking to his dog, but it was clear Blek could not hear him. The dog just stared straight ahead, panting. Blek’s eardrums had been blown by the concussion. He also had a piece of shrapnel embedded in the left side of his muzzle.
Twenty minutes after the initial blast, the helicopter arrived.
“The dog can’t go!” yelled a crewmember above the noise of the chopper.
“He has to go. If he doesn’t go, I’m not going! There’s no way I’m leaving my dog!”
Blek went with Olson on the Black Hawk to Kandahar. There, an ambulance sped Olson to the base hospital. Veterinary staffers took Blek to the vet hospital. “You’re a good boy,” Olson told him as they parted.
Two days later, Olson had a visitor at the hospital. Blek had come to see him, brought by another handler who was taking care of Blek. The dog jumped onto Olson’s bed and just stared at him. “I almost cried.” The dog’s face was already better, but he was still deaf. Blek stayed with Olson for about a half hour and then went off on the first leg of his journey back to the States. They would meet up again briefly at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
Olson spent the next month going from one medical facility to the next. He had three surgeries, and one year later is back in fighting shape. He will be deploying to Afghanistan again in March 2012. This time he will not go with Blek. He is working Wiel R139, a young, high-strung Malinois fresh out of dog school. “I wish it were Blek, but he’s a good dog. He’s coming along pretty well.”
As for Blek, he is now eight years old. He was deaf for two months and still has troubles with equilibrium from time to time because of his ear damage.
Olson has not forgotten his old comrade. In fact, he sees him every day. Blek is now officially Olson’s dog. Blek couldn’t work anymore because of his injury, and Olson jumped at the chance to adopt him. As a handler, he got first dibs.
Blek spends his days hanging out on the couch, sleeping in the comfort of a real bed, and eating dog treats shaped like prime rib bones. When he’s not busy sleeping or eating, he follows Olson or his girlfriend around the house to see what they’re up to. “He’s my shadow,” says Olson. “I’m going to miss him.”
A true bond between soldiers is unparalleled, particularly a bond born in deployment. In part, because like a mother’s bond with her child, you can’t possibly explain it; it’s too intense, it’s unique—that closeness and camaraderie, the complete interdependence, and then of course the shared adrenaline rush during moments of life or death.
Every handler who has done it says that if you’ve never been a handler in a war situation, you’ll never grasp it. You’ll just never understand the razor-sharp dread and thrill of facing what’s at stake together. You are absolutely dependent on that dog doing his thing. And the dog relies on you for everything else.
The dog is a check for what you might miss: the scent of an IED buried so cleverly there’s no way to tell by looking, the sight of someone doing something that doesn’t look quite right, the sound of an insurgent releasing a safety ever so quietly. And you’re there to keep him out of the trouble he could wander into out of naïveté or enthusiasm.
How could you possibly explain the sensation of being dependent upon such ability and, more so, surviving because of it? Who else would understand what that means and what it’s like to owe your life to another creature—a creature that you could swear is humanly conscious in some way?
“The bond will pull you through the toughest situations,” says Master Chief Scott Thompson, who was in charge of all dog-team operations for a year in Afghanistan. “I don’t think there’s anything else in the world that can compare to the bond between a handler and dog.”
But as any dog lover knows, a bond can’t be created overnight. It takes an investment of time, nurturing, and shared experiences. Sure, Jake will be enraptured with anyone who pays him the slightest attention. Once he even followed a jogger a mile down the beach before I could catch up with him and remind him of my existence. (The jogger had stopped to pet him, saying he was missing his own yellow Lab, who was back home in Connecticut; maybe Jake could sense the guy needed a pal.) But in the larger scheme of things, Jake and I have spent nine years together, and if he ever had to come to the defense of the jogger or me, I have no doubt he’d have my back.
It’s the same with military working dogs. Initially, when a dog and handler are matched up, the goal is to establish a rapport. Blek had been with his previous handler for at least a year, and there were others before him, too. So Olson went out of his way to have long grooming sessions with the dog, to visit him more frequently than called for by protocol, to let him off leash in the fenced area to play catch. Blek was adaptable, outgoing, and willing to work, as long as he got his praise and his ball. It made for an easy transition.
But what about dogs who haven’t had a handler before? What’s it like to go from a breeder to a vendor to dog school to a kennel and finally get assigned a real handler?
Fenji was young and green and needed a lot of fine-tuning when she was assigned to Corporal Max Donahue in February 2010 at Camp Pendleton. So it was up to Donahue to move her along to where she’d be ready for deployment.
He liked her enormously from the first time he met her. There was something about her happy demeanor, her eagerness to please. And he brought out the best in her, says his kennel master, Gunnery Sergeant Justin Green, “because he wasn’t afraid to make a jackass of himself in front of his buddies. You have to be willing to put yourself out there and look like an idiot to look like gold to a dog.” When Fenji performed a task successfully, there is no imitating the sound of the thrilled, goofy, crazy praise her handler lavished on his dog.
Like many other marines, Donahue had never been one to follow convention. He did things his way from the start. On July 14, 1987, his mom drove herself to the hospital between contractions because she’d gone into labor at 3 A.M., two weeks before she was due. Her husband was out of town, and “I didn’t want to bother any friends just because my baby decided to make a grand appearance at a time of his choosing.” Growing up, Donahue was always making grand appearances, it seems. He couldn’t walk into a room without all eyes falling upon him. Something about his smile, his confident, congenial gait.
He got in plenty of trouble in his early years, fighting to defend his younger brother, disrupting class to tell a joke. As he got older, he drank, smoked, flirted, and got into more fights. But even as a rowdy teen, he’d always help someone who needed a hand. Broken down on the side of the road? He’d change your tire. ATM card not working at the gas station and you’re out of gas? He’d fill your tank. Someone picking on a weaker kid? You’d be unwise to do that in front of Donahue.
As with many now serving in the military, September 11, 2001, was the day Donahue decided that he would join the armed forces when he was old enough. He told his mother, “I’ve decided: I’m going to become a marine and fight to protect this country.”
He stayed true to his mission, and a month after he graduated from high school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps with the knowledge that he wanted to work with dogs. “To have a dog at your side while you fight for the good guys? A best friend right there to have your back and maybe save everyone around you?” he said. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”
The effect these dogs have on their handlers can be profound. As army veterinarian Captain Emily Pieracci says, “You get these big burly guys and they melt with these dogs. They love them more than anything.”
Everywhere you turn in the world of military working dogs, you will hear handlers trying to summarize how much their dogs mean to them: “My boss may be mad at me, my wife may be mad at me, but my dog is always happy to see me.” “My biggest fear is of not getting assigned a dog and having to be a regular cop. It’s like half of you is gone.” “War would have been hell without my dog.”
Air Force Staff Sergeant Chris Keilman was only eight months into being a handler when he got picked—he thinks totally at random—for a deployment with a Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force unit in Afghanistan. It took a while for this elite group to trust the new guy and his German shepherd, Kira L471. But after enough missions with the dog team out front—and 95 percent of the time, Kira led the way, with Keilman not far behind, and the others covering for him—they came to appreciate these two. They grew especially fond of the dog.
Keep in mind that these are tough warriors. They go on long missions in dangerous places and don’t see a shower or outhouse for up to seventeen days at a time. There are no days off on these missions. They target insurgent leaders with great success. They go on missions about which I could not be told.
Kira’s handler loves her and calls her “my girl,” “my baby,” “my sweetheart.” (He is married, and his wife loves the dog, too.) “She was out there making sure we were safe every day. I would try to make her comfortable, massaging her belly, her pads. It wasn’t much in return for what she did,” he says.
But the effect this dog had on the rest of the troops is what’s surprising. She would sit around the campfire with them as they ate, and they’d talk to her and pet her and reminisce about their own dogs. Kira was their number one morale booster on most days. And so, as Keilman puts it, “they babied the crap out of her.”
“She got steak a lot when she was downrange. Anytime we’d get real meat, they were always giving her some. We’d be riding the RG (a mine-resistant light-armored vehicle), and Kira would stand in the front by the gunner, looking out the window. He’d feed her beef jerky the whole way.
“One of my guys, holy shit, he didn’t like that she only had a duckboard to sleep on when she was in her crate. He was pissed that it was too hard. He went to the main FOB and bought her a memory foam pad. Someone else gave her a nice soft blanket.”
Part of a dog’s charm during deployment rests in the simple fact that the dog is friendly. Who better to tell your problems to than a dog? She won’t tell anyone else, and she won’t judge. Even just touching a dog, being around one, has been shown to have myriad health benefits, including lowering blood pressure and reducing stress levels.
“These dogs are there for you and will listen to you and will keep you company in what may be one of the worst places in the world. These dogs make your days over there a lot less lonely,” says Thompson.
That accounts in part for why so many stray dogs in Afghanistan become an intimate part of the everyday lives of troops. “She’d just sit there with us the entire time, and if anyone wasn’t doing well, she’d put her head on them and just close her eyes,” Marine Corporal Ward Van Alstine told the San Francisco Chronicle, of Chloe, the stray he ended up adopting after his deployment. “She was the one thing that, no matter how bad the day was, she was our best friend.”
A dog makes the most foreign situation seem a little more normal. Think about a time when you were in a new city or country, and you felt a little lost, a little upended. Then you saw a dog, and if you like dogs, you probably felt a bit more at home. If you got to make the dog’s acquaintance, all the better.
Not all military working dogs can be good companions for the troops they’re supporting. Some dual-purpose dogs are too unpredictable. What may seem like a friendly gesture to you—like reaching out your hand to pat a dog’s head—could be interpreted as a threat. After all, these dogs have been trained to attack in certain situations when someone raises a hand. Some dogs can’t tell the difference between those scenarios and what’s intended as a friendly fireside ear rub.
But many dual-purpose dogs, and the vast majority of single-purpose dogs, provide a vital form of companionship on deployment. “Even if they’re terrible at explosives, afraid of gunfire, and just have to sit around and color all day, a dog may do funny things that make time pass for everyone. It’s comforting,” says Gunny Knight.
The army even uses specially trained stress-therapy dogs, notably Labrador retrievers, to help deployed soldiers relax and cope better with the stresses they endure. Just by virtue of being their affable canine selves, these members of army combat stress teams can make a difference in how the rest of a soldier’s deployment may go.
But the deepest levels of friendship are between dog and handler. They can be together almost 24/7 while deployed to remote areas with no kennels—and even on FOBs that have large kennel operations, if the handler chooses. More often than not, these dogs sleep in or near the handler’s cot. Some dogs crawl right into their handler’s sleeping bag; others curl up on the foot of the bed. Where there are no chow halls, they’ll eat with the handler. Many even end up following their handlers into the shower.
Some will say that the best time in a soldier dog’s life is during war. Instead of being with a handler only a few hours a day back home, and often not at all on weekends, in war they’re almost inseparable.
“You know this dog so well, and he knows you,” says Marine Sergeant Mark Vierig, whose story opened this part of the book. “Deployment seals it.”
For more than a month in early 2011, Vierig slept in foxholes every night in the Upper Gereshk Valley of Afghanistan. Vierig and his combat tracker dog Lex were supporting the Third Battalion Eighth Marines Second Platoon, which was safeguarding the construction of the first paved road in the Helmand Province from Taliban attacks. As road construction moved on, so did they, and the marine found himself digging a new foxhole every few days.
It was a cold, wet time of year and rained heavily, daily, almost all day and all night long. Gore-Tex rain gear protected Vierig somewhat by day, and at night he’d take refuge in a sleeping bag in his muddy foxhole. The hole was like a shallow grave—about three feet deep, six feet long, and two feet wide. He also dug a connecting circular hole next to the part of his foxhole near his head. This was for Lex and his backpack. From the air, the whole setup would look like the letter P.
Every sopping night Vierig would sink into the foxhole to sleep and would get Lex in to bunk next to him to keep relatively dry. He’d prop up his rifle under a camouflage tarp so the rain would run off and not flood their refuge. Rocks kept the outside of the tarp in place. Every night Vierig would wake up at least a couple of times to scoop water from a deep hole he’d dug at the foot to collect water so his foxhole wouldn’t flood.
But when Vierig awoke in the middle of the night, Lex was rarely in the foxhole. It was baffling the first time it happened, but the marine raised the tarp and looked outside and found his dog. This would go on every night during those wet weeks. “He’d just be standing there, in the rain, just standing guard over me.” The dog did not sit, but stood, head erect, large triangular ears at attention and focused for sounds, eyes peering into the darkness for any sign of intrusion. His coat was soaked with rain, but he stood riveted, noble.
“I’d tell him, ‘Hey you, come on in here!’” and the dog would leave his post and go to his subterranean room—at least until Vierig fell asleep again. When Vierig would wake up a couple of hours later ready to scoop more rain with his empty half-plastic water bottle, Lex would be back up on volunteer duty.
Did Lex sleep during this time? “I wondered that a lot. I asked him ‘When do you sleep, dog?’ He spent a lot of sleepless nights watching over me.”
As Lex protected Vierig, so Vierig protected Lex. “Would I sacrifice another human life to save him? I would not. But I’d do everything in my power to save him.” It’s a common refrain among military working dogs handlers. The Department of Defense may officially consider military working dogs to be equipment, but most handlers—while they know that’s the bottom line—see things quite differently. “My rifle is a piece of equipment,” says Vierig. “But I don’t feel the same about my rifle as I do about my dog.”
One day during their month of foxholes, Vierig and Lex joined another platoon for a short mission. Everyone else had already dug in, but Vierig was a newcomer, so he got to work digging his foxhole into a barren, rocky hill. It was the full six feet long but barely over a foot deep when insurgents fired an 82mm heavy recoilless rifle in his direction. The explosive round hit thirty feet from Vierig, although it was likely aimed at a nearby tank.
Without thinking, Vierig grabbed Lex by the scruff of his neck and threw him into the foxhole. Then he jumped down and covered Lex’s body so the dog wouldn’t get hit. Most of Vierig’s body protruded from the semi-dug foxhole, but he had his flak and Kevlar and figured he was a lot less vulnerable out in the open than Lex would have been.
Suddenly another explosion rocked the earth just fifteen feet away. Lex remained calm under Vierig. “When stuff goes down in a situation like that, dogs know what’s going on. They’re like, ‘OK, this is serious.’”
Then out of nowhere, man and dog started laughing. It’s incongruous, Vierig knows, but it’s the only way he can describe it. There they were, face-to-face, nose-to-nose almost, in this vastly dangerous situation, and Lex gave Vierig a look that seemed to say, “This is a most ridiculous position we’re in, don’t you think?” If you had been an insurgent and you saw this up close, you would have thought they were going a bit mad. As a former professional bull rider, Vierig has laughed in the face of danger before. “But it’s a lot better when you’re with your dog.”
In civilian life, the idea is that you stay with your dog until death do you part. Unfortunately, too many people don’t, which is why shelters are so overcrowded, but that’s another story.
By contrast, in military life, handlers play a game of musical canines. They get assigned a dog for a set period—a deployment, a year, a few years, depending on their specialty and the luck of the draw—but it’s generally not a pairing that lasts a dog’s career. Handlers switch dogs, dogs switch handlers, all depending on the jobs that must be done.
Kennel masters often try to match dog to handler, but sometimes a handler gets stuck with whatever dog happens to be around and available, and the match can be downright dreadful. Some pairings stay that way for the duration. But as any dog lover can attest to, dogs have their ways of working themselves into people’s hearts. Military dogs are no exception.
When Army Sergeant Amanda Ingraham learned she had been assigned to work with Rex L274 in 2008, she was aghast. “Of all the dogs, why him?” she wondered.
The army had tried to pair the four-year-old German shepherd with other handlers, but no one could work with him. You had to yell to get him to do anything. He chased everything that moved, from wild mules in Arizona to rabbits in Texas to squirrels in Virginia. Being a specialized search dog (SSD), he worked off leash, and chasing critters while looking for IEDs was not an option.
But Ingraham seemed to be the only person the dog would listen to even remotely while training. For instance, once during night training, Rex was doing nothing she asked, and in frustration she yelled, “Good God, you can’t even sit!” And he sat. It was a rare command that he would obey. Another time, she told him to come to her. He was on a footbridge twelve feet above her. Most normal dogs would run off a footbridge to get to their handler. Not Rex. He jumped straight down twelve feet to his sergeant.
The man in charge said the dog was hers.
Specialized search dogs stay with a handler longer than most other dogs stay with their handlers. Stints of four or five years together are not uncommon. After spending a couple of months with Rex, Ingraham was counting the days until her contract with the army was up, especially after the dog led her dangerously close to faux explosives. And more than once. “I’d be right on top of it by the time I saw it. He showed no change of behavior like he’s supposed to. I’d have been dead if it were the real deal.” She was almost certain she would not reenlist in eighteen months. She couldn’t bear the thought of spending more time with this wretched dog.
The two eventually headed to Yuma Proving Ground for predeployment training. They were to go to Iraq together. The thought made Ingraham queasy.
One day Rex once again led her right on top of an IED, and she was yelling at him, pushing him on to sniff out more and do it right. He refused to do anything. He just sat there, as if on strike. “I was yelling as much as I could yell. I said, ‘What’s the matter with you? You want me to ask you nicely?’” She has no idea where the words came from. The very notion struck her as ridiculous, since he had never responded to anything but yelling.
But she gave her next command in the kind of polite tone you reserve for speaking with people who are listening. “Rex, get on,” she told him, which meant for him to go out away from her and search. He did just what she asked. “Get over,” and he’d go left or right, depending on her arm signal. “This way!” and he came bounding back to her. She was shocked. Thrilled. He looked proud. From then on, she would rarely have to raise her voice again. They had come to a meeting of minds. Whether handler broke through to dog or dog broke through to handler didn’t matter. There was common ground. They were starting to speak the same language.
That night, Ingraham let Rex sleep on her bed in the hotel. She’d heard it was good for creating a bond, but she’d never felt like letting the big beast up there. Rex weighed ninety-six pounds. (Ingraham often wondered how she would manage to lift him over her shoulder, as handlers sometimes have to do downrange.) It was the first time anyone had offered Rex such a privilege. He didn’t know much about beds. He fell out of bed almost immediately. He decided that sleeping crossways was a safer option, and Ingraham couldn’t budge him. So she joined him, head on one side of the bed, feet at the other.
“The next day, he was like a brand-new dog,” she says. That day Rex was the star of the school. He went hundreds of meters from Ingraham during one exercise and gave a big enough change of behavior that she could see what he was doing. Instead of barely showing a subtle tail movement, he wagged hard when he found the explosive. She didn’t have to yell at him once. No one could believe it was the same dog.
In a few weeks they deployed to Iraq, supporting various units and missions over the coming months. Rex’s nose was strong and his drive to sniff out explosives stronger. Units frequently requested his help because he was such a good worker, and also because he was big and not the traditional breed of dog that works as a specialized search dog. Those are usually sporting breeds, like Labs, since the job doesn’t require a biting dog, just a good sniffer.
Enemy soldiers aren’t terribly scared of Labs, and for good reason. Around the world they’re seen as the friendly dogs they generally are. Some Labs might do serious damage if a handler were in trouble, but these dogs don’t have the ferocious reputation German shepherds and Malinois do. To have a huge shepherd like Rex doing the job of a Lab just added to his popularity among the platoons. Just the sight of him might send the bad guys running.
But what insurgents didn’t know was that as big and scary as Rex looked, he was a gentle giant. He had failed out of aggression training at Lackland because anytime he bit someone wearing protective gear during practice, and they yelled or screamed in response, he immediately let go and seemed to look concerned and sad. You could imagine him saying, “Sorry, mate. I thought we were just having a bit of fun. I hope you’re going to be all right.” Nevertheless, when he broke off a tooth during an aggression exercise, the vet replaced it with a glistening titanium one.
But gradually people at Lackland realized this dog was about as aggressive as a deer. “The only thing he used that titanium tooth for was eating his food,” says Ingraham.
Rex’s sensitivity made him an informal therapy dog for deployed troops. “He’d always find the one soldier who was having a hard day and hang out with them,” says Ingraham. But his favorite therapy was to cheer up down soldiers by getting them to play with a water bottle. After all, he liked playing with water bottles, so it would seem natural that others would, too. He’d run up and bonk the soldier with a water bottle (empty or full, it didn’t matter). Or he’d sit next to him crunching the bottle and periodically banging it against the soldier who was blue or scared. Eventually the soldier would take the bait, and a grand game of tug-of-war or a big chase would ensue.
Rex’s sensitivity also proved helpful in scouting work—something he came by accidentally. One day Rex was with a platoon in a field with grass much taller than his head, and he was sniffing for explosives. Ingraham and the other soldiers got information from a drone above that someone was hiding in the field. A few minutes later, Rex yelped and ran back to Ingraham. It was a behavior she had seen during training, when someone had hidden and startled him. She knew that same thing had just happened in the tall grass. “I was able to tell a couple of people with me where the man was in front of us and how many steps to the left or right he was.” They apprehended him, and Rex got a tennis ball. Another time he sniffed at something in a barn the same way and looked at Ingraham with such a scared expression that she knew there was someone hiding under the hay.
It wasn’t heroic, but it got the job done.
But gentle as he was, he would have killed for Ingraham. She was climbing out of a ravine when she lost her footing and fell to the ground. An Iraqi interpreter reached down to help her and was leaning down close to her. Rex took this the wrong way and charged the man, growling and barking ferociously. Ingraham was able to call off Rex before he did any harm. Rex would even stand guard at the shower trailer, barking protectively while she was in there.
She credits their successes on missions and on base to knowing each other so well. “We wouldn’t have been able to do half of what we did without the bond. I knew almost every move he made. I could read almost every emotion in his face. You learn to read everything, and they learn to read everything about you. It got to the point where if I sat, he sat. If I lay down, he lay down.”
Rex was still a stubborn dog with others. He wouldn’t take commands from anyone else, no matter how nicely they asked or how much they coerced. He was a one-handler dog. “Sometimes if someone told him to do something and he was with me, he’d just open his mouth and wag his tail and look back at me like he was laughing at them.”
While deployed, Rex and Ingraham were together day in, day out. He spent nights on her bed, or on an extra bunk next to her, or curled up on some bedding below her bed. During the day, if she happened to be working at a desk while at FOB Warhorse (one of the better living conditions during their deployment), Rex would sleep on a giraffe bed Ingraham had bought online. Rex is probably the only deployed dog who ever slept on a dog bed with a giraffe print and a squeaky giraffe-shaped head sticking out of the top. He liked to play with its head for awhile, chomping it to make it squeak, until he got tired and plopped down for a good nap.
Every night before bedtime, Ingraham would lean down close to her dog and tell him, “I love you, Rex. Everything from your big feet to your stinky breath.” And he’d drift off to sleep.
Early in their deployment, Ingraham decided that she would reenlist. If all went well, she would be able to retire at about the same time Rex would be retiring, after a couple more rotations together in Afghanistan. “I would adopt him and he was going to live on my couch in Waverly, West Virginia.” It was a perfect plan.
Their Iraq deployment done, they went back to the States, where they were stationed once again at Fort Myer, a small army base next to the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. It was very hard for Ingraham to leave Rex back in the kennels every night. She provided him with a dog bed (something most dogs don’t get, partly because so many would chew it up) and visited him frequently, even on days off.
While there, they went on some presidential missions together, making sure the coast was clear for the chief executive and his entourage. At one event at Fort Myer, scores of wounded warrior soldiers and veterans showed up. It was one of those times Ingraham realized what a special dog she had.
Although the dogs don’t search people at these events, any wheelchairs have to be searched, because they can’t go through scanners. “It’s sensitive, because you know what they’ve been through.” Of the three dogs present, Rex was chosen for the duty because of his gentle nature.
“The first wheelchair came in, and instead of searching, Rex just walked up to the man sitting in it and laid his head on the man’s lap and looked up to him.” Ingraham realized this was Rex’s way of signaling to her that there was nothing to worry about with this one. After Ingraham assured the soldier the dog was friendly, he gave Rex a pat on the head and moved on. This happened with every person who came in a wheelchair. Rex even gave soldiers on crutches special attention, but essentially ignored the uninjured. “He knew the wounded warriors. As always with him, he seemed to sense who needed the most care. I was so proud watching him.”
In early 2011 Ingraham got word that they would be heading to Germany for a few months, with the idea that a deployment to Afghanistan would follow. She was excited that soon she’d be able to spend 24/7 with Rex again, even if meant their lives would be at stake with every step they took outside the wire.
But on March 16 she went to check on him in his kennel and right away she noticed something was amiss. There was foam in his water bowl and the dog didn’t look right. She took him outside, where he passed up a chance to eat food, which was not like him. He made efforts to go to the bathroom, but he couldn’t. She let him off leash, and instead of running exuberantly, he lay down by the fence. She took his tennis ball and threw it down the field, but he didn’t move. She began to realize that something was terribly wrong.
She took the dog straight to the vet, where he was given several tests and screenings, including X-rays and ultrasound. Blood work was done. Everything came back OK.
They returned to the kennel, where she watched him all night. “I tried not to panic, because he picks up on everything I do.” Around 9 A.M. his heart rate jumped, and he started throwing up. The vets, who had left base, came back for him. They did all the tests again and still couldn’t see anything. The vet called several different vets in the area, and they decided to send Rex to Fort Belvoir, about forty minutes away. There was a surgeon there. More tests there, same results. The surgeon said, “Let’s go in and see what’s going on inside.”
Ingraham opted to stay in the room with her dog. “You’d rather see everything that happens to your dog.” She could read the vet’s face before the vet said anything. Something had twisted deep inside of Rex, and his colon was gray, essentially dead. The vet worked tirelessly to save Ingraham’s dog, but in the end, there was nothing more he could do. (A military veterinarian I described Rex’s condition to said it was not bloat, but likely a very rare, fatal condition called mesenteric root torsion.)
The veterinarian decided at that point that Rex would not come out of his anesthesia. Ingraham burst into tears. The vet administered the dose of euthanasia solution. Everyone left the room so Ingraham could be alone with him. She tried to keep it together, for his sake. She kissed him, stroked his head, and talked to him like old times.
Then she leaned down, snuggled into his fur, and told him, “I love you, Rex. Everything from your big feet to your stinky breath.”
And he drifted off.
Less than a month later, and still raw from the loss of Rex, Ingraham learned that the army had assigned her to work with a new dog, Cinte M401. She was aghast. “Of all the dogs, why him?” she once again wondered.
She had seen the Belgian Malinois in the kennels and had been grateful he was not her dog. The four-year-old dog was clearly slow on the uptake. Much to Ingraham’s dismay, he bonded with her almost immediately, following her around and always wanting to nuzzle up to her. But she didn’t want him touching her. She was still aching from losing Rex. And besides, this dog was just annoying.
Her mother said to give it time, said she thought this sounded like a nice dog, but Ingraham knew she’d never like this dog.
In autumn of 2011, when we last communicated, Ingraham and Cinte had been in Germany for a couple of months. And as her mother predicted, Cinte was starting to grow on Ingraham. “His quirkiness has found a place in my heart.”
Here’s what she wrote me about this dog:
“He’s a bit skittish so everyday noise is a challenge full of new things for him. For example, he was searching a box and he touched it and it moved, so he jumped like a cat onto a cart next to him as if he’d never seen a box move before.
“As he searches, every time he finds what he’s looking for he gets this shocked look on his face that seems to say, ‘OMG did you know that was there?’ Also he tends to overthink things as simple as a command of sit.
“Then, there are children. He is terrified to the core. Even if the children are at a distance he will hide behind me or try to run as far away from them as he can, often without looking where he is going and running into anything in his path. He is a challenge but every day holds new surprises and it’s never dull.
“Cinte is very clumsy and careless when he runs or fetches his toy and has repeatedly smashed his snout, so we are looking to make sure some of his issues aren’t medical. He’s a great dog and knows his job and loves doing it, but he seems to have a harder time doing it when compared to the other working dogs. His nose is weaker than any of his breed we have seen, but he seems to know and works harder. In a deployment situation I would trust him; he has no problems finding the mass odors of IEDs and other caches, but he may miss a single magazine of ammo.
“It may be a while before we are proficient enough to go to Afghanistan, but when we go, it will be a good deployment.”
The kind of tender relationship Ingraham and Rex developed, and the kind that seems to be blossoming with her and Cinte, is not unique to this war.
Robert Kollar was a handler with the Fifty-eighth Infantry Platoon Scout Dog Unit in Vietnam, during 1968–69. He was based at Camp Evans and given a German shepherd named Rebel. According to the Vietnam Dog Handler Association, there were fifty-two dogs named Rebel who served in Vietnam. Few fates are known, but at least five were killed in action, four were put down because of their injuries, one retired, and one died of heat stress. That was Kollar’s dog, who died three weeks after Kollar, who was a sergeant, returned home.
He remembers so vividly when he and Rebel would be dropped off to walk around the jungle for five days at a time, walking point, and how it seemed like you were always assigned to a unit where you didn’t know anybody. You’re on the point in front of strangers, and so in all senses it’s just you and the dog. In the monsoon season and the dead heat of summer. On good days and bad—like the night Kollar was part of a night ambush, but he could not keep Rebel up. The dog just would not stay awake, and Kollar had to keep pulling him up to keep watch. It’s all about teamwork, of course, but in this kind of work the team is less you and the patrol, more you and the one other soul in the world who, after weeks or months together, understands who you are and what this is all about, and that when you put on the scouting harness the real game is about to begin.
“With Rebel I was always going to his hooch,” Kollar remembers. “What a sweet dog. A real pussycat. Not aggressive at all, but then he didn’t need to be. I was always going to see how he was doing; I’d sit with him, talk to him, we’d listen to the audiocassettes from home. He was my main man. I don’t know how else to tell you. A dog like that is a real friend; it’s also the one link you have with home.”
In between patrols, which might last for days, Kollar would work with the dog constantly, to keep him tuned, to keep the game going. They would practice basic obedience and hand signals, and they might go down the “training lane” to see what had been planted, to keep the dog razor-sharp. Kollar found the ritual of taking care of the dog each day helpful and morale-boosting.
It’s been forty-three years since Kollar worked with Rebel, but he’s never forgotten it, and of the fifty or so photos and mementos hanging on the walls of his bedroom, eight or nine show Rebel. And Kollar’s got his collar and choke chain mounted.
For Kollar, “Rebel is always around.”
He likes to point out the photos of him and Rebel that appear on Michael Lemish’s Web site, k9writer.com. One page features photos of handlers and their dogs from different wars.
Kollar’s favorite photo from that collection is not from Vietnam but rather a photo taken during World War II, at battle of Peleliu, which is sometimes called “the bitterest battle of the war for the marines.” Fought in the fall of 1944, the battle’s casualties were among the highest of any Pacific War battle. Eight marines from the battle were given the Medal of Honor—five posthumously. Some of the fighting was hand-to-hand, throwing whatever you had at the enemy. And all to take an island with dubious military value.
The photo is of a young marine from the Fifth Marine War Dog Platoon, Corporal William Scott, and his Doberman pinscher, Prince, in what looks like a foxhole on the beach. The soldier is on his knees, rifle in his right hand, left hand on the dog’s shoulder. The soldier is looking up and not at the camera. It is not an unusual photo. Others on Lemish’s site are more interesting or just better quality photos, but for some reason, for Kollar this photo catches everything one might say about being a handler. But he cannot explain it, even to his wife.
If there is a key to the appeal, perhaps it’s the soldier’s expression, blank at first glance, but look at it for a moment and you see fatigue and also confidence. A brashness even. And then it all becomes a little clearer. Look at the photo for what it implies: a soldier and his dog and nothing else, beyond all other identities, alone, the two of them against the world.
The history of dogs in relation to war is almost entirely about how dogs have been used for thousands of years to protect, detect, or attack, and about the glory or terror dogs bring to the fight. The bond that makes this all possible is implied but rarely described.
But if you look beyond traditional tales of war, in the footnotes of famous battles, you can get an interesting perspective on the importance of this bond. Two of my favorite stories are not about war dogs, per se, but about the effect that a dog found on a battlefield had on renowned military leaders.
George Washington, whose many canines included hunting dogs by the name of Sweet Lips, Venus, Truelove, Taster, Tippler, and Drunkard, understood the emotional bond between dogs and their owners. Dogs were both his passion and his hobby.
During the Battle of Germantown in October 1777, when things were not going well for the Americans, a little terrier was found wandering between American and British lines. A check of his collar revealed him to be the dog of British General William Howe. He had somehow become lost on the battlefield.
Against the desires of some soldiers who wanted to keep the dog as a spoil, or to weaken Howe’s resolve, Washington ordered a cease-fire. An aide wrote this note and attached it to the dog’s collar: “General Washington’s compliments to General Howe. He does himself the pleasure to return him a dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on the Collar appears to belong to General Howe.”
The shooting stopped on both sides, and under a flag of truce, Washington’s aides brought the little dog back to his rightful owner. In some versions of the story, Howe was so impressed by Washington’s honor that he began to take a more compassionate view of colonists, and eventually resigned his post.
Napoléon Bonaparte had a similar experience. The famously hard-hearted military leader was brought to tears as he inspected the battlefield after the Battle of Castiglione in 1796. He came across a dog mourning a dead soldier. The loyal dog sat by the soldier’s corpse after everyone else had fled. He was groaning and licking the soldier’s hand, then trying to draw Napoléon to the soldier’s side.
The scene deeply affected the emperor, who wrote about it during his long exile:
No occurrence of any of my other battlefields impressed me so keenly. I halted on my tour to gaze at the spectacle and reflect on its meaning…. This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog…. I had looked on, unmoved, at battles, which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? The grief of one dog.
In Afghanistan, war-related deaths are an everyday occurrence. Those of us not directly involved with the military read about the numbers, the names, the condensed stories of a too-short life, and we shake our heads, we feel the sting of another tragic loss, or many losses, and maybe we think about the families back home and how their lives are forever changed. And then we move on, our day perhaps a bit heavier. After years of this, the names and stories tend to blend together, and it’s hard to remember what or where or especially why.
But when a soldier dog is involved, when news media come out with details of a dog being any part of a fight, especially one that ends in tragedy, for some reason the story is not easily forgotten.
I have met people who know little about what’s going on in Afghanistan, but who can tell you months after it happened about the soldier dog who died, or the dog who protected his best friend to the end. It doesn’t mean these people don’t care about the countless men and women making the ultimate sacrifice. There’s just something about these soldier dogs and their loyalty and devotion….
Explosives-detection dog Eli, a black Labrador retriever, was a vital part of his handler’s life, both on and off patrol in Afghanistan. Marine Private First Class Colton Rusk shared meals and his cot with the dog. Eli liked to stretch out when he slept, and the dog would often end up with more of the cot than Rusk.
Rusk didn’t mind at all. “Whatever is mine is his,” he wrote on his Facebook page. When he called home to talk to his family, it was always about Eli. When he sent pictures, the dog was inevitably in them. It made his mother feel better knowing her twenty-year-old son wasn’t alone.
On December 6, 2010, they were on a mission in Sangin, in the Helmand Province—one of the most deadly areas in the region at that point. Eli had already sniffed out two explosives. It was looking like a good mission for the team.
But then there was a firefight. Rusk went down. Eli ran over to him. According to marine accounts, the dog crawled on top of Rusk in what could only be interpreted as an attempt to protect him. He snapped at other marines who ran over to move Rusk away from the battle, and even bit one of them.
This Labrador retriever, who had become such an essential part of Rusk’s life, did not want to give him up so easily in death.
In Rusk’s obituary, Eli was listed first among his survivors.
A true bond knows no direction. A dog loves his handler who loves his dog, back and forth and on and on. A dog helps his dying handler. A handler helps his dying dog. The lyrics may be different but the melody is the same.
About two weeks after Rusk died, Marine Lance Corporal William “Billy” Crouse IV was on patrol with his chocolate Lab, a bomb-detection dog named Cane. They were looking for IEDs along a roadway so others could follow safely. An IED found them first.
A helicopter rushed in. As Crouse was being evacuated, he cried out, “Get Cane in the Black Hawk!” Then he lost consciousness.
They were his last words.
His dog, terribly wounded, died as well.
At an auditorium at Lackland Air Force Base—the same auditorium where new handlers graduate from the dog program—memorial plaques for Rusk and Crouse hang side by side, in order of their deaths, in a row of plaques honoring fallen handlers. They are no longer at the end of the row.
You look at the row and find yourself trying not to wonder who will fill the next space. Will any of the men and women who are picking up their diplomas right now on the stage end up on this wall? You can’t think about that. It’s not right. They look so thrilled to be starting their careers as soldier dog handlers. You don’t go there.
So you switch to a better track. Who will their dogs be? What kinds of bonds will they form? Will their dogs nestle into their sleeping bags on frigid nights at their patrol bases and keep them safe against those who would do them harm? Will the handlers survive, physically and mentally? How about their dogs?
I’m walking down the aisle between two long rows of kennels at Lackland Air Force Base’s adoption kennels. The dogs, as always seems to be the case at large kennels, are going nuts. The cacophony of excited barks makes me wish I’d taken up someone’s offer of earplugs before we entered. Several dogs are spinning in fast circles like whirling dervishes. Others run back and forth. And then I come to Buck P027.
Buck is a chocolate Lab. Labs are normally rambunctious, happy dogs, and I would have expected him to be woofing with the rest. But he is curled up in a tight ball toward the back of his kennel. He seems like the only normal, calm one among these super-energetic dogs. But there is something about his eyes, his demeanor, that seems almost sad. He doesn’t lift his head; he just looks at me unblinkingly, and then stares out again, eyes not seeming to focus on anything much.
Buck, it turns out, was in Afghanistan as a marine IED detector dog (IDD). The man taking me through the kennels tells me, “He heard one too many explosions.” Buck has been diagnosed with canine post-traumatic stress disorder. He did not respond well enough to treatment, so tomorrow he will be picked up by thrilled new owners and given a new life as a civilian dog.
Months after I met poor Buck, his new people, Larry Sargent and his wife, Lynette, updated me on how he’s doing. “We love him to death, and we’re seeing his inner puppy a lot the way he plays,” says Larry, a San Antonio pastor. “But we still have a lot we’re trying to figure out about him.” Buck is pretty clingy with him and needs to be attached to him by a leash when people come by, or the dog gets too nervous. And once, on a visit to the veterinary hospital at Lackland, Buck “completely froze” when he saw some soldiers in uniform. “He just lay down. He wouldn’t even take treats from them,” he says. Only after they walked past did Buck move again.
The Sargents wonder if it brought back memories of war—or perhaps worse yet, if Buck thought maybe his days of happiness on his quiet acre of land with this doting couple were over, and that he was going back to war. “It’s a heartbreaking thought,” says Lynette.
Until early 2011, PTSD was not officially recognized in dogs. A few years earlier, veterinarian Walter Burghardt, chief of behavioral medicine and military working dog studies at Lackland’s Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital, had seen a number of dogs come back from deployment with what looked like clear signs of PTSD. He and colleague Kelly Mann, a veterinary radiologist and director of the veterinary hospital, developed a survey for handlers to track possible signs of PTSD. For the next two years they collected data and weeded out dogs with preexisting issues, like fear of thunderstorms, or post-event problems, like short-term anxiety. The result: About 5 percent of dogs were coming back with signs of what they could diagnose as PTSD.
Burghardt held a blue-ribbon panel meeting in January 2011 to see if nearly three dozen top experts and researchers could come to a conclusion about whether or not canine PTSD exists. The result was a consensus statement that some dogs do, indeed, qualify for the diagnosis.
Panel members weighed in on whether to use the term PTSD, because it might be considered an affront to people who have served their country and been diagnosed with the syndrome themselves. It was decided to officially call it canine PTSD to at least partially mitigate the issue.
Signs of canine PTSD include hypervigilance, increased startle response, attempts to run away or escape, withdrawal, changes in rapport with a handler, and problems performing trained tasks—like a bomb dog who just can’t focus on sniffing out bombs anymore. These are variations of PTSD’s symptoms in humans.
Burghardt points out a misnomer in one piece of the name PTSD: the word stress. “It’s more distress; stress that can’t be mediated.” And as with PTSD, the causes of the canine version are highly variable. What may result in problems in one individual may not affect another at all. Just as different people react to events in different ways, some dogs shrug off what could shut others down.
Sporting breeds, like Labs, appear to be more prone to PTSD than traditional dual-purpose dogs, like German shepherds and Malinois. Burghardt is not sure of the reasons, but he and Mann and a small team at Lackland are starting to investigate this and dozens of other questions about the disorder, including how to prevent it and how to best treat it. Right now, affected dogs are given time off and get a combination of drugs and different therapies. A dog who is shaking and hiding may be given antianxiety medication; one who is withdrawn could get antidepressants.
The success rate is not great so far. About one-fourth of soldier dogs being treated go back to their jobs. One-fourth are assigned to less stressful jobs, in which deployment is likely out of the question. Another fourth need long-term therapy, from three to six months.
About 25 percent will not be able to work again and end up being retired from service. Depending on their condition, they could go to a police force or be adopted by a family or an individual, as Buck has been.
Burghardt and Mann are studying dogs like Buck to investigate what can go wrong inside a dog. They’re also looking at dogs who face unthinkably violent and terrifying conditions and are able to return to service with a bounce in their step.
Dogs in horrendous situations … As Burghardt describes the hell some dogs have been through, I think about Fenji….
Marine Sergeant Rosendo Mesa immediately looks up toward his EOD partner when he hears the explosion. He’s afraid of what he will see. Only last week an IED detonated on another EOD partner as he was defusing it.
But when Mesa looks toward the other tech, who is working on the first of four IEDs Fenji has alerted to this morning, he’s fine. Then they both see it; a rising billow of dark smoke a hundred meters away. It’s coming from where they had last seen Corporal Max Donahue. He had been lying down, rifle poised, ready to engage against an ambush if needed. Fenji had been lying just a few feet away, attached to him by her leash.
One of the roles of an EOD tech is to run to an explosion where there may be an injury, give emergency care to any victims, and investigate the IED. The other marines stay put, ready to fire, to protect the mission and the EOD techs. Mesa and his partner sprint toward the smoke. There’s a hole where Donahue had been keeping watch. Fenji is lying near it, bleeding from her ears, unable to get up.
They find Donahue ten meters from the blast hole. He’s on his back, in a pool of blood, left leg gone at the thigh, right leg missing below the knee. He’s blinking, but Mesa doesn’t think he knows what hit him. Mesa has seen years of blast injuries, and it’s not just the fireball that tears people up, it’s the earthquake in the skull. The air itself becomes like shrapnel. And sure the vest takes the brunt, but you’re talking about ten pounds of ammonium nitrate and aluminum, encased in a metal container planted a foot deep in the ground.
Donahue had been lying right on top of the bomb. It had been the perfect lookout spot. And it wasn’t by chance that this bomb went off. While the other EOD tech works on Donahue, Mesa finds a cord leading from the IED to about two hundred meters south, to a small village. The cord is roughly hidden under dirt. He doesn’t follow it all the way. He knows enough. This is what’s called a command wire IED. All the enemy on the other end had to do was wait for a good opportunity and put a battery to the cord.
Even the best marine, the best dog, can’t always catch these things. Instinct fails. Or there just aren’t enough atoms floating above the dirt to detect. Or maybe somebody was tired, or assumed something. It happens. It’s nobody’s fault.
Just as the EOD techs get the tourniquets on Donahue and the major bleeding stops, the marines start taking fire. The two men quickly lift Donahue between them, like you would if a friend had twisted his ankle. They just grip him for life and run. They run down the dirt road in the 117-degree heat with bullets flying at them, as the other marines fire on their assailants. The corpsman (a medic everyone calls “Doc”) follows them, and in about three hundred meters they come to a place on a tributary of the Helmand River where they can cross. They set Donahue down, and the corpsman tends to severe wounds on his abdomen, where even his body armor couldn’t completely protect him.
The techs run across the river, which is about thirty feet across at this point and only knee deep. On the other side, they pull out their metal detectors and start sweeping the area as they continue to a place where the Black Hawk can land. Once they’ve checked the area for bombs, they run back, grab Donahue, and carry him across the river—not an easy feat, with the slippery rocks. They run to a wide-open spot and throw a red smoke marker down so the helo pilot can see them. They’re still taking fire. The Black Hawk comes down in smoke and dust. And a minute later Corporal Max Donahue is lifted out of his hell and gone.
Later in the day doctors had to amputate one of Donahue’s arms. His mother, Julie Schrock, sick with worry when she heard the news, took refuge in the fact that he was alive. If anyone could make a good life with three limbs missing, it would be her son. “He’d be joking around in no time, flirting with the nurses. He’d be an inspiration for anyone else who had to go through this.”
But at 4:30 A.M. on August 6, 2010—two days after the explosion—she got the call from a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Her son was brain dead. “Words can’t describe the excruciating pain of that message,” she says. “If only I could have just been there to hold him so he wouldn’t have been alone.” He wanted to be an organ donor, so Schrock was told they had to keep him alive another day until they could operate. That’s why his official death date is listed as August 7.
The next day she got a package in the mail. It was from Max. A DVD, with photos and video snippets from Afghanistan. His family got out the laptop and watched it on the kitchen table until the last frame. It was a photo of him in full combat gear, just him and his rifle in the desert. Across it, these words: “See you soon—I miss you guys.”
In death, as in life, Donahue was there for others. His death saved three lives in Europe. His liver helped a thirty-four-year-old man in liver failure. His right kidney went to a sixty-seven-year-old man who had waited for a kidney transplant for more than ten years. And a fourteen-year-old boy’s life would change forever because of Donahue’s left kidney.
His casket rolled slowly off the plane in Denver. Six marines dressed in their blues saluted in perfect unison. Schrock caught sight of her son’s dog tags on the casket handle. They were undamaged, yet her son, inside his final resting place, was broken beyond repair. The thought made her nauseated and angry but mostly just numb.
At the packed funeral on August 13, his father said this:
“I loved the way you always stood up for the little guy or were willing to help someone in need. You hated bullies. And it didn’t matter how big they were, either. They knew they had their hands full with Max Donahue. When you were growing up, all the little kids liked to hang with you because they felt they were safe. They knew you wouldn’t let anything or anyone hurt them. You were their hero.
“… I’m going to miss you, your laugh, your passion and compassion, and your love for life. You literally lived it to the ‘max.’ We all love you. And we’re all so very proud of you. And every American that values their freedom should be proud of you, too, for the way you so bravely served your country. I know at times as a father I’ve let you down, but as a son you have never failed me. You’re my hero. God bless you, Max.”
Any soldier, sailor, airman, or marine who has ever served during wartime knows that with serving come loss, triumphs, partings, tragedies, and unbreakable bonds. But for dogs and handlers, it’s all doubled, in a way, because there are two of you. You’re a team within a team within a team, and you have your own dramas, your mutual losses and joys.
And while you’re stronger because of each other, you’re also each more vulnerable. Everything one of you does affects the other. If one of you gets hurt, the other is at a loss. You have to stop working. Without your other half, you can’t function, and in fact, you are not allowed to keep working on your own. If it’s bad enough, you mourn, and eventually you find a new teammate and go through the months of bonding and training and certifying that lead to life with a new other half. And you begin again.
But even without a loss of life or limb, bonds and partnerships are routinely forged and broken in the military dog world. Perhaps your dog needs to deploy before you can, so he goes off with a new handler. Or if you get shipped to a new base, in most cases your dog will not travel with you.
And so it is, comings and goings, beginnings and endings—a never-ending cycle of life and death is enacted all around you, both in your own microcosm of soldier dog and handler and in the universe of war that’s your backdrop.
And when you think about all that this means, you see more clearly than ever that a soldier dog is so much more than just a piece of equipment. And you wonder: If these dogs also risk losing life and limb in combat, how should they be treated when they can no longer serve their country? Should treatment reflect their status as equipment, or as brother species-in-arms?
These questions lead to many others, some of which are tuned to cultural debates. Is man’s best friend entitled to rights or just compassionate regard? What’s fair treatment of these dogs? What’s the right thing to do?
On their long nights of patrolling near the Panama Canal in the mid-1990s, Army Sergeant John Engstrom and Max P333 forged an indelible friendship in the midst of the dense jungle. When you walk together six miles every night in a foreign environment, the bond comes easily, as it tends to with expats. Engstrom and the long-haired shepherd would talk about politics and life while on alert for trouble. It was a one-way conversation, really, but that didn’t matter to Engstrom. Max listened, looking intently at Engstrom when he came to emphatic points.
Max kept Engstrom’s mind from the jungle laden with large spiders. In an elephant versus mouse scenario, the robust 195-pound man hated the creatures, and they were everywhere. During one patrol where Engstrom had to crawl on his belly alongside the canal looking for someone Max had alerted to, Engstrom ended up covered with hundreds of ticks—spiders’ bloodthirsty cousins. They embedded quickly, and by the time the hospital started taking them out hours later, many were round and soft with Engstrom’s blood. On their long patrols, Max couldn’t keep the arachnids away physically, but the dog’s presence kept them from overtaking Engstrom’s imagination.
Max was an aggressive partner when he needed to be—a “real dog” in handler parlance. He bit the bad guys hard and with confidence. But with Engstrom’s wife, the dog turned to mush. Max would start out dignified and well mannered, but within thirty seconds of her kindly attentions, “he’d wag so hard his ass shook, his ears would go back all happy and goofy.” Max had almost nonstop ear infections, despite the best treatment, and she’d rub his ears just the right way, and the lethal weapon would purr.
Engstrom had to say good-bye to his partner in early 1995. They had been reassigned to others. Later that year, Engstrom left Panama because U.S. presence was drawing down. But he didn’t forget that dog.
Back in the U.S., Engstrom ended up at Lackland Air Force Base, instructing green handlers from all services in the art of working with military dogs. As part of the job, he’d routinely take them on tours of the base. In June 1997, he was showing a small group the dog hospital. He saw that there was something going on in the necropsy lab.
A military dog necropsy isn’t the relatively tame affair you see on NCIS. A series of knives, one bigger than the other, hang on a magnetic strip on the wall, as at a butcher shop. Dozens of smaller, shiny cutting-and-grabbing instruments lie on a tray off the foot of the necropsy table: hemostats, tweezers, clamps, rib cutters, a steel mallet. Sinks and vats catch fluids and parts. It is a scientific business. Since there is no chance of an open-casket funeral, dogs are cut and opened with everything hanging out in ways you don’t want to imagine. Sometimes just the head is recognizable. Sometimes not.
Engstrom opened the door to the necropsy lab and brought his students in. They approached the table on which the splayed mess that was once someone’s comrade was ready for disposal. And then Engstrom saw it. The head, the odd Cyrillic tattoo from his original breeder, and the other tattooed ear he knew so well from all those ear infection solutions he’d massaged in.
It was Max.
Engstrom doesn’t remember much after that. Just shock, followed by a sick, empty feeling. A hole in his own gut. “Man, they cut him apart.” He went home after that. Or maybe he didn’t. He can’t remember. The nightmare fogged the day. You don’t want to see a friend like that, he explains. You should never see a friend like that. For months it was hard to shake the image, the sickening shock. He never tried to find out why Max had been euthanized at age eight. He thinks the dog had hip issues, but he just couldn’t bring himself to ask.
Necropsies are performed on every military working dog who dies in service. The extent of an ailment isn’t always apparent on the outside. These dogs have so much heart and drive that it masks signs of just how bad things are on the inside. And then you cut them open on the necropsy slab, and you’re stunned that a dog with that kind of cancer or other great physical problem could still carry on.
Before the law changed in 2000, when federal legislation dubbed “the Robby law” passed, bite-trained dogs who were no longer able to work were considered unadoptable. The liability was deemed too much. They were sometimes transferred to other law-enforcement agencies, but more often they were euthanized.
Many people, even those steeped in the military working dog world, are under the impression that before 2000, the Department of Defense euthanized all dogs who were unable to be working dogs, if they were not transferred to law enforcement. It turns out this is not true. I’m told that non-attack-trained dogs were usually adopted out. Lackland provided me with a spreadsheet of dogs adopted by individuals from 1983 through 1999. There are 192 dogs on the list. Their ranks include a number of beagles and Labrador retrievers, and even a cairn terrier. But the majority of the dogs on the list are Belgian Malinois or German shepherds. It can be assumed that most of these dogs were purchased by the Department of Defense and then didn’t make it through training. They may have been lovers, not fighters. More puzzling to me are the few dogs who have “Patrol” or “Patrol/Explosive” listed as their occupation. Maybe these dogs were so old and decrepit that they were harmless. Perhaps they even went to their handlers, who knew how to deal with them. Fewer than two hundred dogs in seventeen years is nothing compared with today’s thriving adoption program, but it is a worthy footnote in the history of military working dog adoption.
The routine euthanization of most dogs outraged people like former Marine Captain William Putney, who had commanded a war-dog platoon in World War II and watched dogs giving their lives for their country for years during the war.
“To use animals for our own use and then destroy them arbitrarily when they can no longer be of use to us is the worst kind of animal abuse,” he would write in a letter that was read to Congress in support of the Robby law.
He never got over the bravery and loyalty he saw in these dogs. And decades later, he was still struck by incredible feats he saw and the bonds he witnessed.
In 1944, Putney was leading a patrol to find some entrenched Japanese during the invasion of Guam. Suddenly there was gunfire, and a bullet slammed into a Doberman named Cappy and tore a hole in his chest. The dog was walking just in front of Putney, and the bullet would have been his if not for Cappy. The dog’s handler was overcome. He “picked the body up and held it in his arms with blood all over his face—he was crying, just rocking back and forth…. He’d lost his buddy,” Putney told The Washington Post in 2000.
Putney, who became chief veterinarian of the Marine Corps after the war, did not buy the idea that these dogs were a liability—something the Department of Defense would put forth for the next fifty years. “It is not true that once a dog has had attack training, it can never be released safely into the civilian population,” he wrote in his letter.
He knew from experience that the majority of these dogs could be safely re-homed: The 550 marine war dogs serving at the end of World War II had all been trained to attack, but he says only four were put down because they could not be “detrained” well enough for civilian life. The rest of the dogs were adopted out. He says that to his knowledge, none of those dogs ever attacked or hurt anyone. This was done throughout the military with similar success.
But that lesson was lost in the Vietnam era. Some thirty-eight hundred dogs deployed there and are credited with saving many thousands of lives while protecting troops, leading jungle patrols, and detecting ambushes and mines. But the military deemed the dogs too dangerous to return home. Indeed, many of the sentry dogs had been trained to be so vicious that even their handlers had a hard time controlling them.
But sentry dogs were just one type of dog in the war. There were others, including scouts and trackers. Still, only about two hundred dogs would ever return home. Besides the behavioral issues, there was worry that even the less violent dogs would carry disease from Southeast Asia—something that could have been circumvented by a quarantine once they were home.
The majority of dogs were left behind or euthanized.
My friend Sylvana Stratton’s father was one of the few to be able to adopt one of these dogs. He had befriended a scout dog’s handler while in Vietnam. Her father, Harold Thomason, was then a sergeant. He had a way with animals and was one of only a couple of people the German shepherd, King, would accept.
One day, King’s handler went out on a covert mission without King. He stepped on a land mine and was paralyzed from the waist down. He immediately flew Stateside for treatment, recuperation, and medical retirement.
Thomason was the only person who could handle King, so he would visit the kennel daily and walk him and feed him. Eventually he was authorized to take the dog as his own.
Thomason applied for an exception to bring King home when his assignment was up. He had to go through miles of red tape to get the approval. He knew that if King didn’t come home with him, the dog was never coming home. Thomason finally got approval and arranged for a commercial transport for the dog to come back to the States. It cost about $700—a big chunk of change in the early 1970s.
King lived with Thomason and his family for a couple of years and had no problems with family members. But Stratton says it was a struggle to have to keep the dog separated from guests—especially when she and her brother always had friends coming and going. “I forgot one day,” Stratton says, “and the dog lunged at my date, who luckily put his arm up and was bitten in the arm and not the throat, which is where he was heading.” The dog had to go.
Her father decided to track down the paralyzed handler, who lived alone, with no family nearby. The man was ecstatic to have King back again. King remained his great companion until the dog died several years later. There were no more incidents of violence.
In a way, it was understandable that the Defense Department balked at allowing dogs to have a better fate. After all, even King, a rare dog allowed to return from Vietnam, was not entirely trustworthy. But dogs are no longer trained as sentries, or even as some scout dogs had been. Patrol dogs are far more controllable, and many can take care of business one minute and come back and be everyone’s best pal the next. In 2000, it was time for this antiquated policy to be brought into the new millennium.
Putney had watched the devastation so many Vietnam-era handlers went through when forced to leave their canine comrades behind. To this day, many handlers cannot talk about their dogs; it’s just too painful. He would do whatever it took to prevent this from happening again. In 2000 he got his chance.
Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett (R-MD) had taken note of an article in Stars and Stripes that pointed out what happens to dogs at the end of their careers. The article had mentioned a dog named Robby W005, a dual-purpose Belgian Malinois who was suffering from bad arthritis, elbow dysplasia, and a painful growth on his spine. He was no longer able to work—no longer even able to be considered as a training aide (a desk job, as it were) at Lackland. His handler wanted to adopt him, but the rules prevented that.
Bartlett vowed to do something. In a move widely supported by animal agencies and the public, he introduced HR 5314 (which would become the Robby law), which allowed adoption of any military dog deemed adoptable by the Department of Defense. New owners were to bear the liability. Putney was one of many who came out in favor of the bill. He wrote:
Our service dogs must be honored and treated as heroes because that is what they are. And they must be allowed to retire to loving homes, as any soldier is. They have served us with honor and distinction, and have saved countless American sons and daughters from injury and death. They have risked their own death and injury for no more than the love and affection of their handlers.
They would never, ever have left us behind, and they would never give up on us because we were too old or infirm to do our jobs anymore. If they can offer us this sort of service and devotion, how can we do less for them? We owe them.
With support like this, Bartlett was able to ramrod the bill through Congress. The vote was unanimous. Bill Clinton signed the bill into law two months after Bartlett had introduced it.
The law would save thousands of soldier dogs in the future, including at least one who shared its name….
When former Air Force Staff Sergeant James Bailey takes walks in his quiet Richmond, Virginia, neighborhood with his Belgian Malinois, Robby D131, people take note. “Is that the dog that got Osama bin Laden?” they want to know. Robby is something of a celebrity these days since that other Malinois, Cairo, played his secret role in helping the Navy SEALs take down Bin Laden.
Robby was Bailey’s first military working dog and already a veteran when they met. He’d done two deployments to Iraq and one to Kuwait. The war vet, age eight, and his handler, twenty-one, got on like old friends from the start. Soldier dogs don’t seem to harden, even after several tours and different handlers.
Robby and his green handler deployed for six months in November 2008 in Camp Taji, Iraq. Robby was a patient teacher. “For the first few weeks he took the lead and pretty much showed me how things worked. He made me a better handler by ‘understanding’ that I was new to things, and it almost seemed as if he took his time in the beginning because he knew that. He searched much more slowly in the beginning compared to at the end of his working career, when we were flying through our training problems without missing a beat.”
The old dog provided support beyond the technical. “He’s always had my back. He was always there to make sure I was OK, whether he needed to help protect me, or when I was a little down and he’d come over and put his head in my lap. He could read my body language, he could read my emotions, like no one else could.”
After numerous missions outside the wire, the team returned to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina, and settled in for a couple of years.
But when Bailey’s turn for deployment came up again in 2010, he couldn’t take Robby. The dog’s back had gone bad in the interim. He had been diagnosed with lumbosacral disease, a compression of nerve roots in the area where a dog’s spine meets his hips. It’s not uncommon in larger dogs. In bad cases, nerve impairment can lead to weakness in rear limbs and even incontinence. Robby’s case was relatively mild, and the pain could be controlled by medication. But he was not fit for another deployment.
Bailey was relieved in a way—at least the old man would be safe—and went off to an undisclosed location with a four-year-old German shepherd named Ajax L523. They bonded, as soldiers do, “but nothing like Robby and me.”
When Bailey returned six months later, Robby, who had been living in the base’s kennel, had not forgotten his friend.
“I walked around the corner of the kennel and he dropped his ears back and was wagging his tail like crazy. It was kind of cool because he still knew exactly who I was.”
Robby, now eleven and white of muzzle, has a new assignment: He has retired and will spend his remaining time with Bailey, who left the air force at the same time he adopted Robby. “I just wanted to get him out of the kennel and get him home so he could have a good couple of years before the end.”
They live together in a house with a fenced backyard and all the toys a dog could want. “It is absolutely wonderful having him at home. I like to call him my shadow. If I go to a different room, so does Robby. He follows me all over and will just lay and watch me do chores or lay on the patio while I cut the grass.”
Robby sleeps on a large tea-green orthopedic dog bed (a big improvement over the concrete floors of kennels he slept on for years) next to Bailey’s other dog, a sixty-five-pound shelter mutt named Gunner. Gunner is Robby’s first real dog friend, since working dogs are generally not allowed to fraternize with other dogs in the service.
“It’s a pretty awesome feeling to give Robby a safe, comfortable home. He kept me safe while we were in Iraq and protected so many people. It’s great to be able to give back to him and try to repay the lifelong sacrifice he has given to me, his other handlers, and the country.”
But what about the day when Robby is in too much pain to go on, the day Bailey has to make the decision no pet owner wants to face? Bailey pauses and takes a breath. “It won’t be easy, but I’ll know it’s my turn to help him and I’ll be there for him,” he says. On his walls hang framed pictures of the two of them. After Robby goes, Bailey plans to make a tribute wall or a shadow box to memorialize him. “That way I can always show him off and give him the respect he deserves, even after he’s gone.”
And one more thing. He hesitates. It may sound kind of weird, he forewarns. “I’d like to think that one day we will be able to play fetch again on the other side.”
In early 2011, John Engstrom, the former handler who had the shock of finding his old dog in the necropsy room, got a new job at Lackland. It’s a position he wishes existed when Max was still around. Engstrom, now a civilian, is the adoption coordinator for the military working dog adoption program. He has come full circle, in a way, from that terrible day in 1997.
When he started the job in March 2011, there was already a long list of people who wanted to adopt military working dogs. Engstrom had his work cut out for him. But that was child’s play compared to what would happen less than two months later, when the world learned a military dog took part in taking out the world’s most wanted terrorist. All hell broke loose. “The phone has been ringing off the hook since May 1,” he told me months later. “Everyone and his brother and sister and aunt wants one of these dogs now.”
Many people who call here want to adopt Cairo. It seems a lot of people don’t even realize there are other military working dogs, Engstrom says.
Engstrom breaks the news about Cairo (that he’s not here, and he’s certainly not up for adoption), and then goes on to inform callers that some available for adoption are dog school washouts. These dogs might be gun-shy or slow to learn important skills. They’re good dogs with flaws that make them less-than-ideal military dogs. Many dogs on the adoption roster are training aids who may or may not have served overseas before becoming a little old or stiff for the work. Few dogs up for adoption to the public have recently deployed; one or more of the handlers of those dogs will usually step up to claim the dog before the dog is even retired.
Something Engstrom tries to remember to tell callers is that while the available dogs may be highly trained and very well bred, many are not house-trained. Think about it. The dogs live in kennels, where they do their business whenever and wherever. A few have stayed in hotels, so they probably have been trained. Those who stay in tents on deployment may have gotten the general idea that you saunter outside when nature calls. But most of these dogs have never set foot in a house.
Of all the skills a military dog needs to know, the locale in which to do his business is not among them. Jake may not know how to sniff out IEDs, and he’s no attack dog, but I’ll say this for him: He doesn’t use our floor as a toilet. Fortunately the military dogs are fast studies, and usually it just takes a couple of times until they learn the ropes.
While Engstrom is in charge of adoptions through Lackland, other bases around the United States and abroad adopt out dogs, as well. Unless a dog is already at Lackland as a dog school student or training aid, or is there to be checked out medically at Lackland’s veterinary hospital, the dog will be adopted straight from his home base.
Engstrom does his best to encourage people to fill out the applications or, if they’re far away, to contact local military dog kennels to see about “dispo’d” dogs in need of adoption. Plenty do. “They want to help these great American heroes,” he says.
The average wait for a member of the public (you and me, as opposed to handlers or law-enforcement agencies) to adopt a dog at Lackland is about eighteen months, but that may fade as the Bin Laden story fades into the past. Handlers and law enforcement get top priority, depending on the dog and the situation. If a dog’s handler wants to adopt his old dog, she’ll usually take precedence. There’s a waiting list of about sixty law-enforcement agencies hoping to get their hands on a good dog with a strong drive for a reward. They’re not looking for war heroes. And about forty to fifty new applications from the public come in each month. Only five to ten dogs get eliminated from the training program during the same time frame. That makes for a backlog of willing homes.
Whether or not the would-be adopters qualify is another matter altogether.
Engstrom has heard it all from potential adopters. I promised him I would not give away key words or phrases that make him automatically suspect a home is not suitable for adoption. The dogs are to be pets, nothing more, certainly nothing less. I won’t go beyond that, because he needs to do the screening his own way, and I don’t want anyone getting clues and circumventing his process.
He doesn’t hesitate to talk in general terms, however, about the breadth of people who want to invite a military working dog into their lives. On one end are the people who want a fearsome dog and are probably up to no good. On the other are the people who write pages and pages of flowery prose about how they are psychically in tune with a dog who is sending them messages that they were always meant to be together, that no other match must be made, and who cares if they’re eighteen months down the waiting list—their intuition is never wrong and they must have that dog (whoever he or she is) now.
The barking frenzy in the adoption kennels is at a fever pitch, but I can still hear Engstrom. His voice sometimes hits the excited praise notes of trainers and handlers, and at other times it’s quiet and more reverential and serious. It depends on the dog we’re passing.
“What’s up there, handsome stranger?! Nigel! Niiigelllllll! Isn’t he a dark handsome wonder?!”
“There’s Bono. You are an excellent dog. He’s got degenerative arthritis in his hips. Poor guy.”
“Asta! Your new parents are coming to get you today! Isn’t she a beautiful color?”
“This is Jerry. Jerry is really cool. He’s always down for fun.”
“Pepper! You’re going to be in the San Antonio police department! Way to go!!”
We stop at Buck’s kennel. He’s the one with canine post-traumatic stress disorder. “Hang in there, buddy. Tomorrow you’re going home with a couple who loves you a lot.”
Buck’s neighbor is Rony. He is a beautiful German shepherd—everything a shepherd should be, from his regal stature to his alert demeanor. I instantly like this dog. He’s not barking, but he’s not curled up. He’s just kingly. I get his tattoo number, R262. He’s young, then, since this is an R year for tattoos. He may be two or three. He probably failed dog school. I learn that Rony has a paralyzing fear of thunderstorms. He literally bites the cage sides of his kennel and pulls his way up the kennel wall, nearly hanging from the ceiling, during storms. In San Francisco we get thunder maybe once a year. Rony wouldn’t be so tormented. I could see this dog in my house, passing the storm-free days away snoozing next to Jake. But I was nowhere in the running. I hadn’t even filled out an application yet.
I was worried about this fellow, but everyone told me there are few storms in San Antonio that time of year—especially with the wicked drought that was going on. I felt better knowing that Rony wouldn’t have to deal with storms while living in his kennel. At least next time one hit, he’d likely be in the comfort of someone’s home.
That night, as I drove to the airport, I was caught in a storm so torrential I had to pull off the side of the road with all the other traffic. The thunder was so strong I could feel it in my chest. I worried about Rony. I wished I’d filled out an adoption form eighteen months ago.
But would Rony have been a good match for our household? Would Rony have eaten Jake, lunged at family and friends? I didn’t bother finding out, because what if he was a teddy bear? I’d want to take him home even more than I already did, and that just wasn’t happening.
By the time the dogs are put up for adoption, they’ve been through behavioral testing. And any dog who was ever trained in patrol work will have gone through something called a bite muzzle test. This involves testing how much attack a dog has left in him. It’s a somewhat complex process that shows what a dog will or won’t do under various conditions. Dogs who are not at Lackland are videotaped doing the test. The video is sent to Lackland, where, together with reading about a dog’s history, behavior experts can use it to evaluate how safe the dog might be for adoption.
Even if a dog isn’t perfect, he can still be adopted. Engstrom just has to be more selective about homes. Many bite-trained military working dogs are dog-aggressive even when they retire. It’s partly their socialization (or lack thereof; the dogs don’t get to interact much with one another) and partly the stock they come from and perhaps the fact that these dogs are not neutered. Whatever the case, Engstrom obviously won’t adopt a dog-aggressive dog to a home with another dog. If dogs are a little edgy, they won’t get to be in homes with children. There are plenty of couples and single people living in remote areas who would be more than happy to take these dogs. But if the dog-aggression is bad enough, the dog is euthanized.
This dog-aggression is something that many in the military working dog world would like to see change. Some are trying to get dogs more acclimated to each other by letting them have play time together, off leash, in a fenced area. They have to be monitored carefully, but it often works well. “They have to get used to each other. It’s not safe to have so much aggression toward other dogs. The dogs are not supposed to be fighting other dogs,” Arod told me.
Many health issues won’t preclude adoption unless it would be cruel for the dog to be kept alive only to suffer. A dog with a terminal illness but who is pain free and seems to have a lot of time left could be considered for adoption. There’s no shortage of people who would adopt a dog to give him comfort and love in his last months.
Before the Robby law, Engstrom says, “it was extremely sad. We kept dogs working that had no business working, because there was no alternative. You would see dogs that literally had almost complete organ failure. We weren’t willing to give up these dogs to so easily die.”
I met a dog at Travis Air Force Base who was deploying the next day. He was twelve years old. He already had seven deployments under his belt. I was stunned that such an old dog would still be deploying. But the handlers told me that deploying was what was saving him from death: While this dog was a pussycat with his most recent handler, who had been with him for a few months, if he didn’t know you, watch out. He was extremely aggressive.
The handlers there are amazed that he is going so strong at twelve. They have a theory. They think he knows that if he doesn’t keep working, he’s done for. It’s the only explanation the handlers I interviewed could come up with. “He must know it, somehow.”
The average age of retirement is now about 8.3 years. Some people would like to see dogs retired before they start having too many physical ailments, so they can get a little pain-free enjoyment out of civilian life. But with Department of Defense budgets in distress, it’s unlikely that highly functional dogs will be let out early just to enjoy some couch time before arthritis sets in.
In 2010, the Department of Defense adopted out 304 dogs and transferred 34 to law enforcement. Eight dispo’d dogs who were healthy enough to be adopted were put down because they were deemed too dangerous for adoption. Twelve temperamentally adoptable dogs had to be euthanized because of serious health issues that would have caused intractable pain.
Some say the numbers of adoptions would increase if the government would bring dogs who are retired while overseas back home. We’re not talking about dogs being abandoned on the streets of Kabul, as some who have heard about this issue seem to think. This is mostly about dogs who are left at permanent U.S. bases in places like Germany when they’re deemed unable to work. As it is, an adoptable dog stays at the base until adopted. If people in the United States want to adopt the dog, they have to pay for the dog to return home.
The official argument is this: Dogs, as hard as it may be to swallow, are still considered equipment. When standard equipment (without a cold nose and a tail) is pulled out of operation, it’s not sent back to where it came from. So if a dog is retired overseas, you don’t send him back to the States, even if that’s where he got his initial training. And military budgets have been crippled with the economic downturn. The government doesn’t want to be paying for dogs to come back to the States if private individuals will foot the bill.
Debbie Kandoll, founder of the group Military Working Dog Adoptions, calls this hogwash. “Uncle Sam transported those military working dog heroes over to permanent bases abroad. Uncle Sam has a responsibility to get the dog back to the continental U.S.,” she says. “There is no reason that half-empty U.S. military aircraft cannot transport these dogs back to CONUS [the continental United States]. At that point the adopter can pay for transport to the dog’s new residence.”
She says many people have adopted dogs from overseas sight unseen. They get information from the kennel master and the dog’s handler, and if they like the dog, they figure out how to make it work. (On her Web site she gives tips for situations like this and provides contact information for U.S. military dog kennels Stateside and around the world.) It takes time and money to do this. I’ve heard figures ranging from $400 to $2,000 for transport, depending on location, time of year, and size of dog.
In order for retiring dogs to be flown back home on the government’s bill, these dogs would need to be reclassified as MWD veterans instead of excess equipment, Kandoll says. Her group and a few others are pushing for an amendment to the Robby law that would make this possible. “We can’t let an ocean stand in the way of getting these deserving dogs wonderful homes,” she says.
It’s not just people who adopt from overseas locations who put a Herculean effort into adopting a military working dog. While I was at Lackland, I met a couple who drove 1,047 miles, from rural Illinois, to pick up their dog. That the pickup happened to coincide with a wedding a few hours away was pure luck. “We’d have come down for her no matter what,” says Jerry Self, president of an engineering firm in Illinois.
Self heard about military dogs in December 2009, when a friend sent him a link to a video about the fact that the dogs need good homes when they retire. Shortly after, he put in his paperwork. In early 2011, Engstrom called to talk to him, to get to know more about his situation, and to give him the news that it wouldn’t be long now.
Self and his wife, Karen, had been in San Antonio for two days when I met them at Engstrom’s desk at Lackland. They were there to pick up Asta—the beautiful light fawn-colored Malinois I’d seen earlier in the kennel. They’d met her a couple of days earlier as they were looking for a good match. Self thought he wanted an old war vet German shepherd, but he and his wife saw Asta and knew she was the one. “There was something about the way she looked at us,” he told me.
Asta was only two years old. She was as green as they come. She had not received much military training, because she had gotten injured and had fractured a vertebra near the end of her spine. She had undergone surgery, but she was compromised, and the vets didn’t think it would be wise to put her into the program.
I waited to watch the Selfs and Asta meet in the adoption room and for them to walk off to their car with their new dog. But it turned out that Asta needed a couple more official clearances before they could bring her home. So they’d stay in San Antonio one more night. They were disappointed but took it in stride. “We waited this long, what’s another day or two?” Self said.
“She’s going to have a good life with us.”
We kept in touch. Asta rode the 1,047 miles home to Casey, Illinois, like a trouper, never a peep, Jerry Self wrote me. They stopped for breaks pretty often, and when they stayed at hotels along the way, Asta slept in her crate. There were no accidents, there was no barking.
Back at home, Asta was gentle with the Selfs’ grandchildren, and with their Chihuahua, who is grouchy about Asta being there. The Selfs don’t think Asta would have been a good patrol dog because “there’s not a mean bone in her body. She loves affection, and she gets quite a lot.”
Asta has a thing for Frisbees. She owns about a dozen, and while she likes to chase after them, she prefers to fold them taco style and trot around with them. When Jerry Self goes to throw them, they wobble badly because of all the teeth marks. And she slobbers on everything. And she is high energy. “She gallops around like a horse most of the time…. She is young and rambunctious and likes to jump up on the couch and office furniture, and knocks everything down,” Jerry says.
In fact, the Selfs find that at this stage, life is a bit more tame when Asta is enjoying time in a special 110- by 80-foot fenced-in area they built around their house for her. It has big trees and grass in it. Squirrels scamper up and down the trees, and the family’s three cats like to bask in the sunshine and watch the latest addition to the household. She doesn’t pay them much mind, though. She’s just enjoying her newfound life in this lush, green, bucolic land—a long, long way from the war zone where she could well be right now had she not been injured.
Which brings me back to Jake. If not for his own accident—an accident of birth—could he have been a military working dog? Would he have withstood the rigors of training, of Yuma, of deployment? Would he have learned to fiercely guard a Kong, to want it so badly he would do anything for it?
He has the spirit, the loyalty, the can-do attitude. He has patience, a great nose, no crippling fears. But does he have the drive? Would he be willing to do anything for a reward? Since I can take a Kong or tennis ball out of his mouth and have him shrug it off with a smile, his drive for that kind of reward is not strong enough.
But what about food? He lives for food. (He is a Lab, say no more.) I think he could be one of those dogs for whom food is the reward that would lift him to great heights. But the dog program tends to frown on food rewards, as do most trainers these days, and he’d need so many treats he’d probably get so obese, he’d be dispo’d anyway.
The bottom line, though, really goes beyond whether or not he could have been a contender. As much as I have tremendous, undying admiration for military working dogs and their handlers—even more than when I began this journey—and as much fun as it is to fantasize that Jake could have the right stuff to be a soldier dog, I would not want him to actually do the job. I can’t imagine anyone these days really wanting his or her dog to go to war, be in harm’s way. Even most handlers would like their dogs to be with them somewhere other than military kennels, or FOBs, or outside the wire.
That’s why so many end up adopting. “I wanted him to know what it was like to be a regular dog in a regular house, before he crossed the bridge,” I was told in various ways many times. It’s something many of us take for granted, but imagine being the dog who suddenly finds herself away from war, away from the blasts of artillery, IEDs, the adrenaline, the heat, the loud concrete kennels. Imagine living in a comfortable home, with a soft bed, and a loving family. It must be like a dream.
There’s one situation where it would be handy if Jake were a military working dog, though—especially now that he’s getting a bit on in years: whenever he needs medical care. The medical care these dogs receive would be prohibitively expensive for most of us and is first-rate. It makes my health insurance look rather primitive.
Ttitan N319 slowly slides into the CT scanner. He’s on his back, paws in the air. As he enters the tube, a red laser shines on him, creating interesting arcs and lines on his paws and then on his rear end and, finally, his tail, until he’s all the way in. A technician is beside him, making sure all is well. Outside the room, other CT pros, including two veterinary radiologists, look on, noting the dog’s image on a large computer screen in front of them. He’s a Malinois, but in black-and-white, with the perspective of this particular view from the scanner, he looks rather like a lizard.
This is a high-end CT scanner he’s in, but he’ll never know it, because he’s out cold. (He would not know it anyway, I suppose.) Nearly everything at the Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital at Lackland Air Force Base is state-of-the-art. Opened in 2008 and named after an army veterinarian who was killed in Iraq, the $13 million hospital is a unique referral center providing top-notch veterinary care for pretty much every issue a soldier dog could face. If they can’t take care of it here—for instance, if a dog needs an MRI, something the MWD hospital lacks—a dog can be taken to the human medical center at Lackland. MRIs are scheduled during non-human-patient hours.
When the veterinary hospital bought the CT scanner being occupied by Ttitan, it was better than the one at the human medical center. Ttitan is being examined for a previous injury. He’s looking good so far. My guide, Kelly Mann, a veterinary radiologist and director of the hospital, ushers us on.
Down the hall and through a few large, superclean exam and treatment rooms we come to a boxful of light blue shoe covers. Mann asks me to put on a pair, and he does the same. We then enter a small, darkened room and come to a large window that looks into a large, state-of-the-art surgical suite. It’s one of two at the hospital. A team of two veterinarians (one visiting from Korea) and two vet techs surrounds the patient. You cannot see there’s a dog under all that surgical draping, and you’d swear it must be a person until you see a tiny hint of a paw. This dog has a bad carpus (basically, a dog’s wrist) injury, and today is getting a procedure called arthrodesis to fix the carpus in place. It should greatly reduce the pain he’s been having.
After his surgery, he’ll be taken to the recovery area, which has heated floors. During his weeks of recovery, he’ll eventually end up in what they call the “gee whiz room.” This is the part of the physical therapy department that has underwater treadmills designed just for dogs. The body weight of a dog on one of these treadmills is greatly reduced, making weight-bearing exercise more bearable. It’s one of the first steps in exercise rehab.
It’s clear that soldier dogs who come to this hospital are in very good hands. Since it’s a referral hospital, the facility gets military dogs from everywhere. Veterinary care at most bases with kennels is usually very good, but the vets know when something is beyond them or their facility, and they don’t hesitate to send dogs here. (The hospital also treats TSA and Border Patrol dogs.)
You might think, “Well sure, they’re giving this equipment good treatment because they have to keep the dog ready to protect lives, just like you’d service a military plane or even a rifle.” And there may be some truth to that. The idea is to keep these dogs healthy and able to work. But many of the patients here will never be going back to work. Their careers are ending because of medical issues. It’s heartening to see that the Department of Defense doesn’t turn its back on them just because they’re no longer of use.
“We fix them at the end of their career, even if we adopt them out. It’s the right thing to do,” says Mann.
The hospital’s necropsy room is not far off the lobby of the hospital. It is very spacious, with two tables and all the accoutrements needed for the deep level of necropsy done here. This is not where Engstrom found what was left of Max; that was in the old hospital. But it’s a stark reminder that even with all the best treatment, soldier dogs die. And if you’re a soldier dog, it is pretty much guaranteed you’ll get a necropsy.
This isn’t just to see what went wrong inside a dog; the knowledge gained from these procedures can help other dogs. A dog’s tissues are sent to the Joint Pathology Center, where the samples are prepared for histopathology and read out by board-certified veterinary pathologists. Eventually, all of those results and the complete medical records are mailed to the MWD medical records repository. The end-of-life data are reviewed retrospectively by the staff epidemiologist, to keep veterinarians informed of the most common diseases being seen in the soldier dog population. This helps them refine the topics that are taught to Veterinary Corps officers and animal care specialists who are taking basic and advanced courses there, and the information helps the operational units learn of common issues to watch for in the working dog population.
So there’s a lot of potential good that comes from necropsies, but the notion of what a dog looks like—what poor Engstrom saw—after one of these makes me shudder. I would not want Jake to go through this. Most handlers want to be with their dog for euthanasia but won’t stick around for the necropsy because it’s just too much.
When a soldier dog dies, if the dog is lucky enough to have a handler (as opposed to dogs who are training aids), the dog will not be forgotten. Handlers can get the cremated remains of what’s not sent off to pathologists. Depending on the base where the necropsy occurred, the handler may get the ashes back in a beautifully engraved wood box. Some bases have memorial walls where the boxes are placed next to photos of the dog. Others have small cemeteries devoted to their military working dogs.
Amanda Ingraham buried Rex’s ashes at Fort Myer before she left for Germany with Cinte. She and her father worked together to make a cross with Rex’s name deeply engraved in it. She didn’t have time for a traditional dog memorial, but she will when she returns. And she’s not looking forward to trying to read the poem that handlers traditionally read during these ceremonies. She’ll probably have someone else do it, because she can’t get through the last few lines.
The poem, “Guardians of the Night,” speaks of the bond military dogs (or police dogs, depending on the version you read) have with their handlers, from a dog’s point of view. In the end, the poem talks about when their time has come to move on, and how for a time they were an unbeatable team, and then goes on to a couple of lines about what they’ll do if they should ever meet again “on another field.” This is where a lot of handlers break down. It’s not great poetry. But if you picture your own dog, you’re done for. (This poem is also read at handler course graduation ceremonies at Lackland, but it doesn’t pack the emotional wallop it does at memorial services.)
There’s another tradition at MWD memorial services. The dog’s bowls are placed upside down, to symbolize that the dog won’t need them anymore. The collar and leash are hung in remembrance of the dog. And if the memorial is at a kennel, the dog’s kennel door is left open, indicating that the dog will not be returning home.
Sergeant Mark Vierig, the marine we met earlier with his combat tracking dog, Lex, had worked with another dog a few years before. The dog was a dual-purpose Malinois, a big ninety-pounder named Duc B016. “He was an amazing dog,” Vierig will tell you. Their bond ran deep. Duc (pronounced Duck) was always cool under fire, with a nose that sniffed out many a bomb in his day. He’d been to Afghanistan with Vierig, and to Iraq (twice), and even Thailand.
Vierig was able to adopt Duc in 2006, when Duc was ten or eleven years old. Vierig had left the marines after his four years of active duty (he was later called back in from inactive duty, which is where he met Lex) and was living with his wife, baby daughter, and four dogs in the mountains of Utah, next to the Weber River—a fly fisherman’s paradise, and heaven on earth for the retired dog. Just the kind of place Duc deserved, Vierig told his friends.
On a summer day about a year after his grand new life started, Duc went outside and Vierig’s wife saw him collapse. She yelled to Vierig, who ran out and found Duc unresponsive. He scooped the dog up and brought him inside the “Duc Room,” a special room they had converted for Duc’s comfort. Vierig sat down cross-legged on the floor, supporting Duc’s head and upper body in his arms. He stroked his old face and neck, trying to figure out what was wrong. Suddenly Duc howled like a wolf, a plaintive cry Vierig had never heard before. Duc took one last breath and died in Vierig’s arms.
Overcome by the sudden loss, and that primal howl, Vierig held his dog, telling him how much he loved him, how much Duc meant to him. Eventually he covered Duc with a brand-new 4-by-6-foot Marine Corps flag. He lay it over Duc’s body. “He had done so much for me, I wanted to do right by him.”
Within moments, four dogs Vierig was training for police and private companies entered the room. They were all energetic working dogs—a golden retriever, two Malinois, and a German shepherd. They’d revered Duc in life. They would run around and nip and chase and tackle one another, but they would leave him in peace. Now the dogs—every one of them—lay down quietly in a semicircle next to Duc’s flag-draped body. They were not sleeping, but lying attentively, calmly. They stayed like this for twenty minutes. These independent-natured dogs never would lie next to each other—much less Duc—like this.
“They were paying respects to a dog who was deeply respected. That’s not anthropomorphism,” Vierig says. “If you’d seen it, you’d know.”
Vierig wanted Duc’s grave to be near the river, where fishermen walk by, so others would remember his friend, even if they had never met him. He wanted them to know that here lay a great dog. He dug a deep grave in a tree-filled area across the river and came back for Duc. Vierig wrapped Duc’s body in the marine flag, picked up the ninety-pound dog, and hoisted him across the back of his shoulders. He walked him out his backyard and crossed the chest-deep water of the Weber, making sure to keep Duc dry. He lay Duc on the ground under a big tree with lots of shade.
Then he placed Duc in the grave, buried him, and covered the site with big round stones from the riverbed to help keep other animals from digging down. Earlier in the day he had attached to the tree Duc’s old military kennel sign with his name on it. To this, he attached all of Duc’s medals and ribbons. There were about thirteen, but since military working dogs don’t officially rate ribbons and medals, they were actually all Vierig’s, for anything he earned while Duc was his dog.
Vierig has since moved, but he still goes up to visit his dog and replaces ribbons when they wear out.
Duc got his ribbons the way many dogs do: unofficially, and because of someone’s great admiration and respect. Dogs in the military are not officially awarded ribbons or medals from the Department of Defense. America’s canine heroes can save all the lives in their squad and get injured in the process, but they will not receive true official recognition.
When you hear about dogs garnering awards and decorations, it’s usually because someone higher up at a command knows how valuable these dogs are and wants to award their valor, their heroism, their steadfast dedication to their mission. And the dogs get the awards, but the awards don’t have the blessing of the Department of Defense. One former army handler I spoke with says he has seen dogs get all kinds of honors, including Meritorious Service Medals and Army Commendation Medals. Some dogs have also received Purple Hearts and Silver Stars. The ceremonies look official. But these are simply “feel-good honors,” says Ron Aiello, president of the national nonprofit organization the United States War Dogs Association.
For the last several years, Aiello and his group, which helps soldier dogs and their handlers, have been among a few organizations trying to get more official recognition of military working dogs. So far, the Department of Defense hasn’t budged.
Aiello’s group has been told medals and awards are only for human troops, not animals. Aiello is sensitive to the fact that giving a dog the same award as a person might be a touchy subject for some. So he proposed a special service medal just for dogs. That didn’t work, either. Finally, “because the DOD had no interest in awarding our military working dogs for their service,” explains Aiello, the group simply asked for official sanction of the organization in issuing the United States Military Working Dog Service Award. You can guess the result.
Because he and his team knew how much it meant for handlers to have some recognition for their dogs, they went ahead and created the United States Military Working Dog Service Award anyway. It can be bestowed on any dog who has actively participated in ground or surface combat. It’s a large bronze-colored medal on a red, white, and blue neck ribbon. It comes with a personalized certificate. There have been about eighty awarded so far, and Aiello says handlers greatly appreciate their dogs being recognized like this.
The move to see dogs get some kind of official recognition is gaining support from those inside, as well. In 2011, Master Chief Scott Thompson, head of military working dog operations in Afghanistan at the time, spoke at a biannual conference at Lackland Air Force Base. He said that these dogs absolutely deserve medals. “Some veterans may say it’s degrading to them, but it shouldn’t be. Most commanders have given dogs Purple Hearts, but it wouldn’t have to be the same awards. I think most people would agree that dogs have earned the right to this. There needs to be some kind of legislation to recognize what dogs do, and we need to do the right thing.”
There was once a German shepherd mix who received an official Distinguished Service Cross, a Purple Heart, and a Silver Star. His name was Chips. He performed many feats of courage and loyalty while serving in World War II, but one event in particular shows what this dog was made of. In the dark of early morning on July 10, 1943, on a beach in Sicily, Chips and his handler, Private John P. Rowell, came under machine-gun fire from a camouflaged pillbox. Here’s how Michael Lemish describes it in his book War Dogs:
Immediately Chips broke loose from Rowell, trailing his leash and running full-steam toward the hut. Moments later, the machine-gun fire stopped and an Italian soldier appeared with Chips slashing and biting his arm and throat. Three soldiers followed with their arms raised in surrender. Rowell called Chips off and took the four Italians prisoner. What actually occurred in the pillbox is known only by the Italians, and, of course, the dog. Chips received a minor scalp wound and displayed powder burns, showing that a vicious fight had taken place inside the hut and that the soldiers had attempted to shoot the dog with a revolver. But the surrender came abruptly, indicating that Chips was solely responsible.
That night, Chips also alerted to ten Italian soldiers moving in on them. Rowell was able to take them all prisoners because of his dog’s warning. Chips was lauded for his heroism and highly decorated. But William Thomas, national commander of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, was not amused. “It decries the high and lofty purpose for which the medal was created.” The War Department rescinded the dog’s awards, and the medals were returned.
Major General J. A. Ulio would go on to decree the following year that “the award of War Department decorations to other than persons, that is, human beings, is prohibited.” (You’ve got to love the clarification of “other than persons.”) But he also wrote that “if it is desired to recognize the outstanding services of an animal … appropriate citation may be published in unit general orders.”
The latter clause left the door open for an official medal or award specifically for war dogs.
It’s been nearly seventy years.
So this is how it looks if you want your dog to have a Purple Heart these days:
Air Force Staff Sergeant Brent Olson received a Purple Heart and an Army Commendation Medal for what happened the day he and his dog Blek (whom we met earlier in Part Four) were involved in an explosion in Afghanistan. Blek received nothing. At a ceremony where Olson was awarded another medal, he wanted Blek to receive his due recognition. He leaned over and pinned his own Purple Heart to Blek’s harness.
“Everybody was like, ‘awwwww!’” remembers Olson, “but I wanted to make a statement. Dogs are soldiers, too. They give up their whole lives for this. Sure they do it for the play and the fun, but the reason doesn’t matter. They work so hard and save so many lives. Not to be recognized officially is a slap in the face.”
If not a medal—at least not just yet—how about a stamp? All kinds of stamps come out every year. Among the 2012 selection are several flag designs, the ubiquitous love designs, some weather vanes, and some good-looking stamps featuring baseball greats and film directors. The year before brought a stamp featuring Owney, a really cool postal service dog from the late 1800s.
Sounds like at some point, stamps honoring military working dogs would have been a natural. That’s what Aiello thought. He and his organization have been at the stamp issue since 2000. The last petition he sent with his official request had ten thousand signatures.
Connie Totten-Oldham, manager of stamp development for the U.S. Postal Service, recently wrote him saying, “I certainly can understand your interest in such an important subject and your frustration over your long campaign without seeing an actual stamp.” She said she appreciates the many letters and petitions he has submitted through the years and that, as always, the matter is under consideration.
She suggested Aiello look into a souvenir cancellation postmark or services that provide personalized postage—you know, the kind of stamps featuring someone’s baby or favorite cat. Aiello is not going that route. “I’m not going to settle for anything less than a postage stamp featuring these very deserving dogs.” In case the postal service wants to know what it’s up against, Aiello was a Vietnam war-dog handler. He and his scout dog, Stormy, routinely led many troops safely through the jungle, successfully completing missions, regardless of obstacles….
All this is not to say that military working dogs are not memorialized or honored beyond, say, their memorial ceremonies. In fact, there are several privately funded war-dog memorial statues around the United States. A national memorial, also privately funded, and to be on public land in the Washington, D.C., area, is in the works.
And Ingraham’s dog Rex will be featured in a traveling exhibition of twenty-one bronze portrait busts of military members starting in 2013. Artist Michael Jernigan met Rex and Ingraham while in Iraq. “I fell in love with him when I saw him. He had to be part of this.”
Of course, you could ask what good are medals and stamps and statues for dogs? Do they even care? And the answer would be that no, they probably don’t grasp the significance. What’s another thing around their neck or a framed certificate on a wall? A dog would probably rather just get a treat or a Kong or, better yet, a belly rub.
The honors we bestow on canine heroes are really more for those who love them and live by them, those who have been saved by them. And who can say? Maybe the benefits of this go down the leash to the dog.
There’s one thing you can pretty much guarantee for military dogs and handlers while we’re fighting wars like this one, where a dog’s senses are so essential: When they come home—if they come home—they’re going back to war, for as long as this war endures. “It’s only a matter of time. It’s not if they go back, but when,” says Master Chief Thompson.
“If there’s a fight, the handlers and dogs will be there leading the way, and they’re going back, and the handlers know that.” Thompson pauses, trying to keep his composure. “They go back, and they don’t complain, and their dogs don’t complain. And hopefully they get to go home again….”
The Black Hawk gone, EOD tech Mesa ran back to his men and fired with them until the insurgents stopped shooting. They didn’t bother looking to see if they’d hurt or killed any of them.
A marine bolted over to Fenji. She was still on the ground, shaking. He stroked her and encouraged her to walk. She tried, and stumbled to the ground. So he picked her up. Her ears were bleeding from inside, and there was something wrong with her eyes.
A helicopter flew Fenji to Camp Leatherneck, a large Marine Corps base that’s the hub for marine activity in Helmand Province. Her eardrums had been ruptured from the blast, and the explosion had rocketed debris into her eyes. You have to wonder if she was waiting for Donahue to come help her. In a way, he already had helped her. His body shielded her from the blast, so she was not seriously injured.
Fenji got top veterinary care, and attention from the marine handlers who came through the kennels. Gunnery Sergeant Chris Willingham, who was Donahue’s kennel master back at Camp Pendleton, became a regular visitor. “We’d take Fenji for walks, spend time with her, flush out her eyes, take her to daily checkups. She was always glad for the company and had a good attitude. She was a real trouper,” he says.
She attended a memorial for Donahue at Camp Leatherneck. Before it started, she went up to the front of the tent and stared at his photo, next to the normal memorial setup of combat boots and rifle. Those weren’t his, but the dog tags and her leash hanging off the rifle were. You wonder if she could still smell his scent on them.
The kennels at Camp Leatherneck got a new name after this: Camp Donahue. At the entry point is a large concrete slab with a big ink rendition of Donahue and Fenji, created by a couple of guys in his platoon. Several marines built the structure that protects it, kind of a peaked-roof topper, with a large flagpole behind it.
Fenji gradually recovered, and three weeks after that terrible day, she flew back to Camp Pendleton. There she got more R & R and slowly started engaging in activities. They thought she’d probably retire, but as Willingham says, “She never lost her edge.” Fenji received the Purple Heart and a Combat Action ribbon—unofficially of course.
It was three weeks before she was exposed to gunfire again. At first she cowered and flinched, so they took it easy on her. But she got used to it quickly. It probably helped that she was getting lots of love and attention from handlers and higher-ups during this time. “We’d groom her and let her come into the office and hang out with us,” said Gunnery Sergeant Justin Green, who’d known Donahue for years. “It’s what Max would have wanted, and she loved it.”
I came upon Fenji at the predeployment course at the Yuma Proving Ground almost one full year to the date after she was injured. I had no idea what her background was, or what she had been through. I just saw a beautiful black shepherd wearing Doggles with camouflage frames. I’d been hoping to see a dog in Doggles during my travels, so I asked Gunny Knight about her, and he introduced me to Corporal Andrei Idriceanu, who had gone to Afghanistan with Donahue and subsequently helped care for Fenji.
We crouched under the shade of low, chunky palm trees, and I learned the main part of Fenji’s story. As Idriceanu talked, Fenji kept rubbing her face against his leg. Such affection, I thought. But that wasn’t it. She was trying to remove her Doggles. “She hates them, she’s always trying to take them off,” he said.
She was wearing them under doctor’s orders. Idriceanu thought it was because of her eye injury, but Yuma veterinarian Emily Pieracci says that although Fenji still has white spots in her right eye because of damage from the blast, they don’t seem to affect her vision. The Doggles are for pannus, a common autoimmune disease in German shepherds. It’s made worse by ultraviolet light, thus the protective Doggles. Eventually the pannus will make Fenji blind. Medication and Doggles will slow the progression of the condition. She’ll have frequent vision checks from now on to track her eyesight.
The big test at Yuma was to see how she reacted to gunfire and IED simulators. Would she cower or try to run off? Would she be brought back to one year ago, when the sounds rendered her deaf and nearly blind, and in great pain—and took her beloved handler? No. She did great. Never flinched or cowered, kept right on with her exercises. She performed like a champion soldier dog.
A couple of months after I met her, Fenji got on a C-17 and flew back to Afghanistan with her new handler for a seven-month rotation.
Once again walking point, with her handler close behind.