Soldier Dogs (12 page)

After an injection of a cocktail of sedatives, Fred appears a little drunk and within a couple of minutes slumps into the waiting arms of a vet assistant, who helps steady him onto the stainless-steel operating table. When Fred is completely out, assistants turn him onto his back, withdraw some urine from his bladder via a needle and syringe, put an endotracheal tube down his throat for anesthesia, and secure his paws to the table with ties. His floppy ears, splayed out on the steel, make an easy surface for the vet tech, who spends about twenty minutes tattooing his assigned number (R739) on the
underside of his left ear. As her tattoo pen buzzes away, Nye shaves the dog’s stomach, vacuums the loose fur off the dog, isolates the incision area with blue surgical drapes, and poises a scalpel over Fred’s bare belly….

Won’t hurt a bit.

     17     

T
he world’s largest dog school—aka the Department of Defense Military Working Dog School, 341st Training Squadron—lies on a flat, featureless chunk of land on the outskirts of San Antonio, at Lackland Air Force Base. Sprawled out on nearly seven thousand arid acres, Lackland is a place for newcomers. Each year, thirty-five thousand air force recruits come here for basic training.

Also among Lackland’s newcomers every year are the 340 relatively young dogs who will be trained as military working dogs and the 460 two-legged students who come through Lackland to learn the basics of dog handling.

The boot camp program where trainers build military working dogs from the ground up is referred to as dog school. The program that teaches handler skills is called the handler course. Pretty much all soldier dogs and handlers across the military are trained here. (The exceptions are Special Operations dogs and dogs for the IDD and TEDD programs, which are dedicated to a faster turnaround time for certain explosives detector dogs. These dogs are trained by contractors.)

Dogs who are selected to go the dual-purpose route—and that’s the vast majority of the dogs—will have a total of 120 days to learn all the skills necessary to certify in explosives or narcotics detection as well as patrol work. Single-purpose detection-only dogs do it in about 90. Contrary to what many on the outside think, with the exception of a couple of smaller programs (combat tracking dogs and specialized search dogs), dogs are not matched up with handlers at Lackland; they’re assigned to handlers once they’re shipped to the bases that request them.

But before the dogs can even start to get the rigorous training they need in order to one day become soldier dogs, they have to go through a rather grueling initial time at Lackland—one that may make boot camp for their two-legged friends look like a walk in the park.

Every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine must go through some form of induction when entering the military. A haircut, health exams, reams of paperwork—all the less glamorous aspects of serving one’s country need to be taken care of before getting down to the business of boot camp.

Soldier dogs go through a more rigorous induction process, including time on the operating table. The road to becoming a military working dog entails being poked, prodded, cut open, sealed shut, and wearing a bucket around your head for a few days.

After a ten-day quarantine, during which they’re visually evaluated every two hours, the dogs get physicals, blood work, vaccinations, and flea and heartworm treatments. The rest of a dog’s induction is done under full anesthesia. Female dogs get spayed, males with undescended testicles get neutered. (The U.S. has one of the few militaries that will purchase these “cryptorchid” dogs.) But
otherwise males generally remain intact. The thinking is that these dogs are more aggressive and primed for action with those hormones coursing through their bodies. Also on the list of induction events: Both sexes get their tattoo number inked into the inside of their left ear while anesthetized.

And these days, every dog over thirty-five pounds also undergoes a potentially lifesaving surgery called a gastropexy. The surgery will prevent a syndrome known as bloat from becoming fatal. Not long ago, 9 percent of U.S. military working dog losses resulted from complications of bloat. That number has dropped to zero since all large dogs started getting “pexied,” as it’s called in soldier dog circles.

Bloat, aka gastric dilation-volvulus, is a dangerous condition that mainly affects large, deep-chested dogs—precisely the kind the military favors. Bloat occurs when the stomach becomes overdistended with gas for any of a variety of reasons—not all known. This alone can be deadly, since it can cut off normal circulation when the enlarged stomach presses against major veins. Respiration can also be affected, since the stomach is pressing against the lungs. If you ever ate way too much in one sitting and found it hard to take a good breath, you’ll have a feel for what the beginning of that phase of bloat can feel like.

But it’s when the stomach twists at both ends (at the top the esophagus and at the bottom the pyloric valve) that bloat becomes especially lethal. Gas in the stomach can no longer escape either way, and circulation is severely impaired, leaving irreversible cell damage. Shock and cardiac arrest can occur within hours without emergency treatment.

On a visit to Lackland’s brand-new Medina Military Working
Dog Clinic—so new you can still smell the happy scent of paint over the scent of dog—I watch Nye operate on his reluctant patient. He has done at least four hundred of these surgeries in the last few years. Fred may not realize it, but he is in good hands.

As Michael Jackson’s “Ben” cuts through the static of the radio that’s propped up on a shelf, Nye makes the incision. It’s only about three inches long. The surgery will take no more than an hour, and in the end, Fred’s stomach will be sutured to his ventral abdominal wall. His chances of dying of bloat will have been virtually eliminated.

Nye stitches Fred’s abdomen, the dog’s paws are unstrapped, tubes are withdrawn, and Fred is taken back to a recovery kennel. He will be checked frequently to make sure the Rimadyl and opiates he’s getting are keeping the pain at bay and that the incision is healing well.

To keep Fred’s mouth and teeth from exploring the surgery site, and to prevent his back paws from scratching at his fresh tattoo, Fred will wear a bucket over his head for the next several days. It’s an old, scratched-up, dark blue plastic bucket with the bottom cut out, and it’s fitted with ties that secure it to his collar so he won’t be able to get it off. Not exactly the traditional “Elizabethan” collar civilian dogs wear after surgical procedures, but Fred doesn’t mind.

Air Force Staff Sergeant Richard Crotty was stationed in Iraq when he got in touch with me. He wanted to relate this story of his first working dog, Ben B190, a German shepherd.

For seven months in 2006 Crotty and Ben served at the Eskan
Village Air Base in Saudi Arabia, with the Sixty-fourth Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron. Their main duties were to search vehicles, conduct foot patrols, and participate in random antiterrorism exercises in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. They lived the life of expats, in a villa on base where they could have Chinese food or pizza delivered. Ben spent most nights on Crotty’s bed. It was the good life for the pair, who preferred being together nearly 24/7 to life in the States, where dogs have to spend most of their days and nights in kennels.

They returned to Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico in August 2006, and Ben’s nights were once again spent in kennels. Crotty missed the camaraderie of those days and nights in Saudi Arabia, but he knew there was nothing he could do to keep his dog with him Stateside. On the night of January 7, 2007, Crotty went to say good night to Ben in his kennel and found Ben lying on his side—something the dog never did. When Crotty went to pet him, Ben urinated. Crotty noticed that the dog’s stomach was rock hard—a sign he could have bloat. Ben had not had prophylactic gastropexy. Most male dogs back then hadn’t.

With no time to lose, Crotty picked Ben up, put him in a patrol truck, and raced to the vet, sirens blaring. The immediate diagnosis called for emergency surgery. As he looked down at his dog on the operating table, Crotty’s eyes were so filled with tears that “I could not see him as I was looking down. It was like it was my child. When the vet finally cut him open, the floor turned completely red.”

It was too much. Crotty left the operating room. “When my kennel master came out of the operating room, he just shook his
head. I lost it right there. My best friend for the last two years was gone.”

In the end, the cause of Ben’s fatal condition was not bloat. The vet had found inflammation of many organs, which had caused internal bleeding. Crotty was never told the reason for Ben’s death, and he’s not sure the veterinarian ever figured it out.

     18     

S
tudents enrolled in the handler course at Lackland have paid their dues typically for months, but sometimes years, helping around kennels at their bases, cleaning poop, working the dogs, assisting handlers with their duties, and generally proving to their field commanders and kennel masters that they are devoted.

Nearly all students in the handler course are military police. They’ve had to go through some intensive training in order to get to become MPs (or MAs—masters-at-arms—in the navy, or security forces in the air force). But little can prepare them for one of their first exercises: