Soldier Dogs (10 page)

B
ut it’s hard to judge every dog’s passion for the ball. Sometimes a dog goes to the United States and passes through training, only to fail in advanced training school.

I watched an army dog and his handler, who would be deploying to Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as they tried to work on exercises at the Inter-Service Advanced Skills K-9 (IASK) Course, at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The dog was listless and didn’t seem to want to do the exercises. The ball didn’t mean much to him when he got it. He’d take it for a few seconds and drop it. Part of it may have been the heat (114 degrees Fahrenheit), but some of the problem was simply that he didn’t care enough about the ball to go through the rigors of this level of training. The man in charge of the course, Gunnery Sergeant Kristopher Knight, said he could tell when he first saw the dog that the dog didn’t care enough about the reward.

“If I made you run three klicks in this heat and told you ‘OK, now do what I tell you and I’ll give you this nice cold water,’ you’d
do just about anything for that water at that point.
That’s
how a strong dog feels about his toy.
That’s
the passion this dog lacks.” The dog did not end up deploying and is working with his handler on trying to improve his love for his “paycheck.” If that doesn’t work, he will no longer be a soldier dog.

The buy team also makes time to test an innate skill that’s vital to a good sniffer dog: how quickly a dog can learn to associate a ball with a weird odor. It’s the cornerstone of detection training, and once at dog school in the United States, dogs have only sixty days to master detect eight explosives scents, so the team does not want slow learners. How does a dog come to associate a ball with an odor?

Doc or someone on the team gets a dog searching for her ball inside the barn. Suddenly the dog hits this weird-smelling scent she’s probably never encountered before. Testers used to use substances like marijuana or potassium chlorate, but these days they don’t want to expose a dog to narcotics or drugs so early in the game. There’s a chance it could confuse a dog if, for example, she was exposed to marijuana during testing and went on to become an explosives detector. There’s a lot of weed in Afghanistan, and you don’t want an explosives dog alerting to it. This olfactory separation is even more important for narcotics dogs. If a drug dog alerts to that early memory of potassium chlorate, but handlers think she’s found a stash of drugs, it could be a very big problem.

The scent that the team uses for testing could be something as simple as vanilla or licorice, which Doc refers to as “arbitrary odors.” When the dog, who is looking for her ball, hits this new odor, all sorts of things happen. The dog thinks, “I’ve never smelled this
before!” and shows a tiny change of behavior, perhaps stopping or wagging or tilting her head. At that moment, someone throws the ball so it lands right on the source of the odor, and the dog is cheered on for her “feat.”

This happens a few more times, placing the odor in various places in the room and having a ball “magically” land on it when the dog successfully sniffs the odor. Many dogs learn extremely rapidly to associate an odor and a ball. The odor becomes a totem for the ball. It’s a Pavlovian process that works wonders. Once they are at dog school, it becomes the way dogs once again begin associating scents with a reward—only the scents at school will be the real deal and not something you’d find in Granny’s pantry.

Dogs who will do patrol work have more testing ahead of them. This is something the breeders and their trainers have worked on extensively. The dogs need to show aggression in response to a decoy (a human posing as a “bad guy”) dressed without obvious bite equipment, and they must show great interest in biting and holding decoys who are wearing bite sleeves. The bites need to be strong and full, and the dog has to hold steady while biting, even if under threat. The type of bite is important. A shallow, weak, or shifting bite (in which the dog does something known as “typewriting”) is not desirable and could be cause for elimination.

The buy team’s goal is to buy sixty to one hundred dogs per visit to Europe; some dogs will go to the TSA’s detector dog program, the rest to the Department of Defense’s dog school at Lackland, for basic training. Once the dogs have been chosen, they tend not to stick around with the vendors for long.

Let’s say the team finishes at the barn site, where members
selected several dogs. Often within hours, the dogs are packed up and driven via truck to Frankfurt, where they are taken out of shipping crates, walked, and their crates cleaned. There, they wait for the eleven- or twelve-hour flight to Houston, which they’ll make in the cargo hold of a commercial airliner. Once the dogs land, they’re put in an air-conditioned truck for a three-hour drive to Lackland. They’re met by handlers, veterinarians, and technicians at Lackland’s Medina base kennels. The dogs—who have been on the road for between two and six days, depending on transportation availability—are unloaded and given a cursory exam.

Veterinarians at Lackland occasionally find dogs arriving from overseas to be underweight and to harbor skin, ear, or other infections. It’s surprising, because the buy teams would have seen the dogs from two to six days earlier. The teams tend not to take dogs with these problems, because, as Doc Hilliard says, “we don’t subsidize neglect of dogs.” The problems are treatable, but if you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on a dog, you would hope that the dog would have been given adequate kibble and care before arriving.

On a visit to the Medina clinic, one of the many dogs I saw being checked out was Lobo R705. He was a long-haired black shepherd, but you could hardly tell. He had received a buzz cut the previous week in order to get rid of the badly matted fur he arrived with from the vendor in Europe. Under the mats his entire chest had been bright red and inflamed from urine burns. He also had a raging ear infection. A veterinarian prescribed a regimen of antibiotic salves and ear meds. Upon recheck, Lobo’s skin had healed, as had his ears. A staffer congratulated him. “Good job, boy!”

Of course, many of these freshly arrived dogs don’t speak English; that is, they don’t know English commands, so trainers may start saying things like “
Bravver hund!
” (Good dog!) or “
Aus!
” (Let go!). Eventually the dogs learn English. The only vestige of their foreign tongue may soon be their name.

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D
ogs are named by their breeders, so when you’re among military working dogs who hail from the kinds of places these dogs do, it is not surprising to hear names like Patja, Fritz, Pasha, Frenke, Caffu, Biko, Banzi, or Wolka. Or Fenji.

But the most common four dog names across the services, I found out after the Defense Department did a little digging for me, are Rex, Max, Nero, and Rocky. I know of no dogs in civilian life named Rex (or Fido, for that matter), so it’s nice to know that this old-fashioned name, which means “King,” is still being used for these noble dogs.

Not all names are so magisterial, though. In fact, dog program administrators and some handlers who are in the loop seem to think that breeders may sit back and chuckle when they name some of their dogs—dogs who will be at the forefront of the war on terror, being called time and time again by whatever name the breeder assigned them. “I’m pretty sure they’re messing with us sometimes,” says one insider. And a military veterinarian chuckled
and shook his head when he told me, “I think they do it on purpose.”

This would account for a brave war dog, Davy, whom we’ve already met. The name wouldn’t be a problem, except, as you may recall, Davy is a girl. So is Bob. The gender switching seems to go the other way around most of the time, though, with big, tough boy dogs getting girly names. To wit: Freida, Kitty, and Judy. “Calling him Freida bothered me,” former handler John Engstrom said. “It was just wrong.”

I’ve heard stories about two male dogs named Kitty in the military. Both had reputations as very aggressive dogs. Remember Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue”? Same syndrome, perhaps.

Then there are the awkward names, including a dog named Bad. Talk about sending mixed messages when calling your dog. And let’s not forget Sid. “Anytime you said Sid, it sat,” Engstrom told me.

It seems that breeders in foreign countries are greatly influenced by American pop culture for kids. Perhaps they even let their children name the dogs. On a list of thousands of military working dog names from the last several years, there are the requisite
Sesame Street
characters, including Ernie, Bert, Elmo, and Oscar. Disney classic animation characters score big, with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Duey, Louie, Pluto, Goofy, Winnie, Tigger, Baloo, King Louie, Mowgli, Bambi, Beauty, Beast, Belle, Ariel, and Simba. Breeders also borrow from any famous dogs out there, including Snoopy, Benji, Scooby Doo, Toto, and Rin Tin Tin.

Let’s not forget the oddball names. Some are embarrassing,
others are just weird. Imagine being downrange in a life-or-death situation and shouting for “Baby Cakes!” “Baby Bear!” “Busty!” or “Moo!” Breeders may have been hungry or thirsty when they named Cheddar, Cherry, Chips, Cider, Coffee, Cookie, Ihop, and Kimchee.

Some names seem to be commentaries on a dog’s personality: Bleak, Calamity, Funny, Grief (RIP: he died in Afghanistan not long ago), Grim, and Icky. Wait a minute. Icky?! Time for a serious, calm chat with one’s commanding officer about just changing this poor dog’s name.

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G
oing to Europe to buy dogs is a necessity, says Doc Hilliard, because there just aren’t enough strong military dog candidates in the United States. Thanks to the long tradition of dog sports like Schutzhund and institutions like the Royal Dutch Police Dog Association, Europeans have a deeply entrenched source of dogs cut out for the types of duties military working dogs perform. “I’d love nothing better than to be able to buy American, but the dogs just aren’t here,” Doc says.

American vendors sell dogs to Lackland in much the same fashion as European vendors do, but because they sell in rather small numbers, the vendors usually go to Lackland with their dogs rather than have a buy team visit. Ironically, most of the dogs the U.S. vendors sell to the Defense Department were purchased in Europe.