Navy SEAL Dogs (14 page)

Aaron described himself as a rambunctious, semidelinquent kid who frequently found himself in trouble. That led to his desire to join the military. “I wanted to be sneaky,” he said, “and I thought Special Operations were cool.” He'd heard about the marines' Force Reconnaissance from a neighbor who was a part of that group and was initially interested in finding out more about them, but that changed when a friend's brother returned from the U.S. Naval Academy over the Christmas holidays. Aaron had never heard of the SEALs, but he began to do research. “I was big into swimming,” he recalled. “I loved doing martial arts, so as soon as I read about the Navy SEALs, that was it.” From the time he was thirteen years old, Aaron knew that he one day wanted to belong to an elite SEAL team. He told himself that as soon as he graduated from high school, he was going to join the navy.

As much as he liked swimming, Aaron wasn't on the swim team, but he did play water polo. Actually, “play” isn't exactly the right word. “Because I didn't have the cardio fitness of the other guys and couldn't even complete all the practice laps, the coaches just told me to go into the other pool while the other guys practiced and scrimmaged,” he said. “I kind of realized I was a terrible swimmer.” Eventually Aaron overcame that, but it took some time and a lot of hard work.

“I'm a big reader,” Aaron said, “and I love to research things before I get into them, so I knew what I was getting into when I decided I wanted to become a SEAL team member. But I really underestimated how hard it was going to be. When I showed up for BUD/S training, I wasn't ready. When I showed up at BUD/S, out of a class of 186 or so guys, I was the second slowest runner in the class. After the first day, the slowest guy quit, so I became
the
slowest.”

Aaron can laugh about the situation now, but at the time, it took all his mental strength to get through it. He'd enlisted at the tail end of 1993, then spent nearly three years training to become and then serve as a corpsman in a military medical unit before he graduated from BUD/S in 1997. As a member of his SEAL team, he served initially in the U.S. Pacific Command Theater out of Guam. “We traveled a lot doing Foreign Internal Defense training with other countries' special ops guys,” he recalled. “I was in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, the Philippines.”

In 2004, on his third deployment to Iraq, he was doing Direct Action Missions, hunting down high-value targets there. Later, like me, he transitioned from chasing bad guys to protecting good guys, serving on a personal security detail for members of the interim government. After his fourth platoon deployment, he was assigned shore duty for one year. That didn't sit well with him. “I had a desk job working with the medical department,” he said. “I basically was responsible for assigning other corpsmen to be on hand when the SEALs were doing training exercises. If a SEAL platoon went to the range to shoot, they needed a medic there. I was the guy who sent a non-SEAL corpsman to those locations.”

Aaron wasn't happy being a desk jockey, but orders were orders. One day in 2006, he was asked to send a corpsman to accompany a SEAL team doing dog training. Aaron sent one, but his curiosity was piqued. “Even before our guy came back and told me about how awesome it was to see what they were doing with these dogs, I was asking questions when the request came in,” Aaron said. “After he told me about it, I knew I had to see this for myself.”

The next time a corpsman was needed, Aaron tagged along for a day to watch the training. He watched the handlers working the dogs on explosive-detection scenarios and came away impressed with the dogs' capabilities. Later, watching bite-work exercises, he was even more impressed. He'd heard about MWDs and had seen a few in Iraq during his four deployments there, but seeing them up close made a major impression on him.

“I'd worked briefly in Iraq with dogs from conventional forces—marines and army—but basically we told their handlers how things were going to go,” Aaron recalled. “We were going to go hit some house, and if a bad guy ran out the back, you sent the dog after him. That was the limit of my interaction with dogs to that point. After seeing those SEAL training exercises, I realized there was a lot more they could do.”

He found out from the OIC that they were looking for volunteers. Aaron asked the question that every military man considering volunteering for a program would, “What's the catch?”

He was told there was none. He would have to make a two-year commitment at minimum. He'd be given a dog, be trained as a handler himself, then get to deploy. “That was the magic word,” he said. “This was still wartime, and the dogs were guaranteed to deploy to the hottest spots because, obviously, that's where they were needed the most.”

Aaron wanted to make certain he had things clear in his mind. “So I said to the OIC, ‘So you're telling me if I come over here right now, you're going to give me a dog and I'm going to get to go to combat?' When the OIC said yes, I said, ‘Oh yeah, I am there.'”

In 2007, Aaron was one of the first handlers outside of Seal Team Six to be working with dogs on the East Coast. The program was so new at the time that, as Aaron put it, “you could have asked any SEAL if there was a dog team, and most would have said no. A few would have said, ‘We don't have one, but Team Six does.' Basically, we existed before anyone outside our group knew we existed.”

Fortunately for Aaron, and for the dog team members, he was a corpsman by training, and that likely contributed to his transfer request being approved. He served double duty as a corpsman and handler. His medical duties also included caring for the dogs, and he served as a kind of veterinary technician for them. Eventually he took as many courses in canine medicine as he could to get up to speed.

Not everything Aaron had been told by the OIC proved to be true, but that was okay. The program was in its infancy but was well funded. Along with other members of the team, Aaron got to travel to Germany and Holland to observe the basic training regimens the dogs underwent. Aaron needed that kind of exposure since he had never worked with dogs. His family kept dogs as pets, but he wasn't what he'd consider “a dog guy.” After the first few months of training, he was hooked. “I fell in love with it,” he said. “This was the best time in my career.”

Part of that had to do with being liberated from a desk job, but a lot of it had to do with his interactions with his dog, Castor. Aaron laughingly talks about Castor being a first-round draft pick. At the time, the Special Operations Command realized that there was a great need for dogs all across the SOF spectrum. Vendors were found who could supply dogs, and then representatives of the Green Berets, MARSOF (Marine Special Operations Forces), the SEAL teams, and the Rangers all went on-site to view and select the dogs. At each “draft” camp, one group would be given the first pick, and then at a later one, another group would get to pick first, and so on. Aaron knew going in that the West Coast teams had the first pick.

Before the skills demonstration began, they got to view the candidates. “It was an extremely tight-quarters kennel,” said Aaron, “and the smell was horrendous. The sound level was ridiculous as well. We were all walking through there, and some of the dogs were barking, some were spinning tight circles, and just about every one of them was going nuts in some way. Then I saw Castor. He was sitting there staring back at this group of strangers staring at him. He was just chilling, and nothing fazed him at all. I called him over so that I could pet him, but he just kept staring at me like, ‘Yeah, whatever, I'm not doing that.' So I bent down and looked at him, and I knew he was the one. I liked his calm demeanor. I'm a pretty calm guy, and pairing with someone like me had a lot of appeal. I told myself I was going to keep my eye on this one.”

During the selection and bite work, Castor stood out. Later, the trainer/vendors confirmed that Castor had great skills. The rest of the Special Operations guys seemed dubious.

“We were all relatively new at this and didn't have a lot of experience with training dogs and none with working in the field with them,” said Aaron. “Most of the other guys wanted one of those really big and aggressive types that had been so disruptive in the kennel. What convinced me that Castor was the right one was when we got to do some early socialization work with them.”

For this part of the selection process, Castor was muzzled and led out of his kennel. Aaron got Castor to lie down and then joined him on the ground. He'd hop over Castor's back and then wrap his arms around him. The point was to see what kind of aggression the dog would demonstrate toward a handler. Castor took it all in stride. Aaron also picked Castor up, something that makes even the mildest of dogs edgy, but again Castor showed no discomfort.

“A lot of these dogs, you touch them and they want to eat you. They're just angry animals,” Aaron explained. “But Castor was like, ‘Yep. Just another day.' I knew this dog was perfect for me because he was a superstar in the drills and he was completely social.”

Though Aaron wasn't an experienced dog trainer, he innately understood how important the bond of trust between a dog and his handler is. That Castor allowed himself to be touched and picked up without complaint meant that he'd adapt easily to working with a new person and that the basic level of trust of humans was already in place. Castor sensed that this person wasn't going to hurt him. That trait was demonstrated later on during helicopter training in preparation for fast-roping insertions.

Aaron had strapped Castor into his tactical vest, which is equipped with a handle on the top of it. To expose the dog to this kind of environment takes some time. Initially, just getting a dog used to the sound of the engines and the wind-whipped air is enough. Eventually, though, you have to get the dog in the chopper and off the ground. Most dogs are resistant to not having all four paws firmly planted on the ground. So you can imagine how difficult it is to get a dog to climb out of a helicopter's bay and voluntarily go into thin air. Aaron and the other early handler trainees employed a sink-or-swim approach.

“I had to take Castor and grab the handle of his vest, lift him up, and then dangle him out over the lip of the helicopter,” Aaron said. “He thought I was throwing him out of the bird, and he freaked out—paws thrashing, torso twisting. Once I let go of him, and of course he's tethered to me, so he isn't going far. He dropped a couple of inches and then just hung there. He was immediately totally calm, and I imagined he was thinking, ‘Oh, okay, cool. This is fine. Dad's got me.'”

That kind of trust is a perfect example of what is essential in a relationship between an MWD and his handler. Castor and Aaron had it from the outset, and that bond only hardened and deepened as time went on. Much of that was due to Aaron's dedication. Though admittedly not a dog person when he started and more someone who saw the SEAL team's use of dogs as a way out of a desk job and back into combat, Aaron used his research and reading skills to help him learn even more about how to work with dogs. Unlike some of his fellow SEAL handlers, Aaron began using positive reinforcement early on, partly based on his research and partly because of his relationship with Castor. “He was my friend,” said Aaron. “I didn't want to have to correct him. I didn't want to have to jerk him around. If I could make him more receptive and get better results without all those negative punishments, then, even though I was going against the grain, nobody could say anything against me. To me, it wasn't enough to go through the handler program and get dogs to do their jobs. I wanted to know how a dog thought, how he learned, and what I can get him to do without inflicting pain on him.”

Aaron took the same approach to his job as a dog handler as he did everything else in his career as a SEAL. He knew that the job the dogs would eventually do was too important for him not to learn as much as he possibly could. At that point in the early development of the program, the people training the handlers only had fairly limited experience with old-school methods of training and disciplining dogs. Aaron was concerned that those methods might have their limits.

“I want to be the best at every single thing I do,” he said. “I also have a lot of natural curiosity, so I wanted to learn as much as I could. More important, if I show up in Afghanistan or wherever with my dog, and I introduce myself to the unit I'm assigned to, I have a great deal of responsibility on my shoulders. If that dog accidentally bites one of my guys, or if that dog doesn't detect some explosives and guys get wounded or killed, that's on me. That's my fault, not the dog's. And what if that guy who got bit has to be sent home, and then his replacement comes along and something happens to him?”

The downside of having that kind of bond with a dog, if there is one at all, may be in what Aaron felt as additional pressure—not just for his fellow soldiers but with the dog who he'd come to care so much about. “When you're walking point with your dog, you're the first one to see bad guys. If anything happens to anyone else, it's your fault. That's a lot of pressure to carry around. Even so, when I'm out walking point and I've got my dog in front of me looking for explosives, I'm also worried about
his
well-being,” Aaron explained. “When you're doing that detection work, your sole focus is on wind direction. If you're patrolling down a trail and there's only one way to enter this trail that is tactically sound and you're unlucky enough that on that particular night the wind is at your back and not pushing those odors toward you, the stress gets even more intense. Castor could step on a pressure plate even before he smelled those explosives just as easily as a human could—some of those antipersonnel pressure plates are that sensitive. The thought of getting that dog hurt, because he trusted me enough to go there, added to the burden. We love each other. I can honestly say that if Castor got badly injured, I would have as hard a time dealing with that as I would if something happened to other team members.”