Soldier Dogs (20 page)

Haliscak figures his dog’s last thought was “Oh, toy!!!” (“That toy was everything to him,” he says.)

The explosion knocked Haliscak and the two other men off their feet. They had no idea what had happened. They thought they were going to get ambushed, so they prepared to fire. When there was no ambush, Haliscak looked for Patrick. He was nowhere to be seen. The handler started searching in a circle around
where the blast had gone off. As a hunter, he is used to looking for downed animals. He peered through his rifle’s 4X scope. In the distance he saw that the grass in a field was bent over. Then he saw Patrick’s body, or what remained of it.

“At that point I lost it.” Haliscak, who had a high-grade concussion from the explosion, tried to run over to his dog, but the EOD tech stopped him. It was enough death for one day. The EOD tech and the engineer got close enough to see there was nothing to be done. They did their post-blast work on the IED and the other one from the morning. It was nearly nighttime when the two men put Patrick on a piece of canvas, covered him up, and carried him back to the patrol base. Haliscak had known the dog for three years, been his handler for one and a half years. “I lost my best friend. He was my hero. Without him and his great ability to work off leash, I’d be toast.”

Once they’d brought him back, Haliscak looked at his dog. All four of Patrick’s legs had been blown off. Only his head and rib cage were intact. “It’s truly terrible to see your best friend like this.”

Dual-purpose dogs are officially considered on-leash dogs. It’s thought that the patrol part of them is too dangerous to let go off leash, so they don’t receive off-leash detection training during boot camp, and often are not even at their home bases. Some handlers work on it on their own—particularly handlers with kennel masters who are wise to its benefits. But it’s still far from standard procedure.

Gunny Knight has been working these dual-purpose dogs off
leash for a few years—since before it was even a remotely accepted technique. “I knew this was right. When I know I’m right, a thousand people can think I’m wrong, but I stand alone and know I’m right.

“I believe in a verbal leash. Your leash may be six feet and leather, but mine comes out of my mouth.”

Single-purpose bomb dogs, like EDDs, IDDs, TEDDs, and SSDs (see
chapter 10
if you have not retained every letter of every acronym of every MWD job) are trained to work off leash. But these are usually sporting breeds, like Labrador retrievers, and they are not trained to attack. They can be trusted not to maul anyone in their path as they trot around sniffing out IEDs.

It’s estimated that with our current situation in Afghanistan, about 95 percent of a dual-purpose bomb dog’s job is sniffing out explosives—not going after bad guys. Having a bomb-sniffing dog with off-leash capabilities makes sense. The farther from the handler and other troops a dog is when alerting to an IED, the safer for everyone. Except the dog, of course. It’s called stand-off distance. Some might argue that this isn’t very kind or humane, that these dogs don’t realize the dangers and we’re sending them out as canaries in a coal mine—almost as sacrifices.

But with the dog out front, even on leash, he’s always the most endangered. The idea behind using soldier dogs is that they save lives by detecting explosives before someone can get killed by one. If a dog ends up dying while the men and women behind him live, he will be greatly mourned and remembered as a hero.

Nobody wants to see a dog die. “It just sucks. It’s a shitty situation,” says Master Chief Thompson. “It hurts a lot. Just about as much as it does to lose a handler.”

Gunny watches as Navy Master-at-Arms Second Class Joshua Raymond tries working his dog Rex P233 off leash for the first time while looking for roadside explosives. The dog doesn’t want to get more than ten feet away from Raymond. The handler explains that he’s not allowed to have his dog off leash at his home base.

“We can get another Rex,” Gunny tells him, “but we can’t get another you. Parents who lose their son or daughter out there, it stays with them for the rest of their life. Children who lose a parent, it’s tragic. But tough as it sounds, if your dog dies, sad as that is, you get to come back and take out Flea Biscuit Two and start all over again.”

Raymond and Rex walk down the hot dirt road, no shade in sight, just rocks and sand and dried dirt, with the occasional bit of plucky scrub poking through. Rex goes on in front about twelve feet, but then turns around and waits for his handler. The dog is accustomed to feeling the end of the leash well before now.

“Put your toy away, show your dog your hands,” shouts out Gunny as Raymond keeps walking. “Tell him ‘I don’t have it, but there’s a way of earning it,’ and you gotta send him back down there. Good boy, keep going, good boy, keep going! Don’t let him think for himself! Find that command, maybe it’s ‘forward,’ maybe it’s ‘go,’ use your body and step into him. The dog doesn’t know he’s allowed to be that far away. There you go!

“Now back up! Now the dog takes a picture and, hey! I can be away! He can go twenty-five feet and you can back up twenty-five feet, and now you have fifty feet between you.”

About twenty minutes into it, the dog looks like he’s getting
kind of used to the idea of being off leash. He’s walking down the road and off to the sides with more confidence, not stopping so often to wait for his handler. “They all want to be free, with a little guidance, of course,” says Gunny. “No one wants to have something tugging on their neck all the time.”

Raymond is clearly impressed with what his dog has been able to do. But it goes so much against the navy protocol he has been trained to follow that he can’t imagine being able to “get away with” using it.

Gunny explains that inside the wire (on an FOB), leashes are mandatory. “But I’m here to tell you for a fact that you are authorized to not only work your dog off leash here, but also when you go outside the wire in Afghanistan. If anything ever happens, call Master Chief Thompson. I guarantee he’ll offer his career to back you up. So will I.

“If you find something out there, no one’s going to be like ‘Hey, leash up!’ I guarantee, in fact, that you will get an extra scoop of mashed potatoes and a tent with AC for you and Rex.”

Because of the off-leash capabilities being taught here, Gunny and his staff go a step further than the usual deferred response training. When a dog responds to an IED, the people who teach this course don’t just want the dog to stay there staring at it until he gets paid. “In the real world, the handler’s not going to walk way over to where the dog is responding,” Porras says. “The dog has to be able to leave the odor and come back to you. It’s safer all the way around.”

It’s not that hard to teach, as it turns out. The dog gets his
million-dollar reward only when he comes back to the handler—and not when he responds to the explosive. Getting strong on the recall command (“Come!”) can serve these dogs well for other reasons as well in Afghanistan. Feral and stray dogs are commonplace, and dogs have gone MIA chasing after them. As well, dirt roads can appear seemingly out of nowhere, with surprising traffic.

“You don’t want to let your dog be done in by these dangers,” Gunny Knight says. “There are enough of those as it is. A whole lotta shit can go wrong out there.”

     28     

A
ir Force Technical Sergeant Adam Miller walks with his German shepherd, Tina M111, down a dirt road toward a small village, rifle poised. On the right, a white mosque topped with blue and gold. A billboard asking for help for Afghan schoolchildren. To the left, a service station with one nonworking gas pump. A crashed, abandoned pickup truck. Up ahead, several mud-walled buildings, some small, a few two-story. A heap of concrete walls from what looks like a bombed-out building. Several stalls making up a tiny marketplace. In the background, intermittent gunfire.

Miller and his dog walk on—Miller wearing full kit, Tina in harness and leash, which attaches somewhere on Miller’s beltline so his hands can be free to use his rifle. It’s 11
A.M.
, 114 degrees. Suddenly more gunfire. “The dog’s down!” shouts someone on his team, and without hesitating, Miller reaches down to Tina, hoists her over his left shoulder, and with rifle still ready to take out anyone intent on harming him or his dog, moves a little faster now,
toward shelter, anything that will protect them while he tries to save her.

Within two minutes, they make it to a cube-shaped mud-and-concrete building—more of a hut, really. They disappear inside.

This was not in the script. What just happened? I jog over to look in through a window opening, and there’s Miller crouched over his dog, working furiously to fix her. This was supposed to be a simulation. We’re at the Canine Village just a couple hundred meters away from the dog kennels where we started the day at YPG. But there on the ground, incongruously—sickeningly—is Tina’s severed leg. It seems to have been blown completely off her body, and there’s an IV flowing into it. How in God’s name did this happen?

And why would you put an IV in a severed leg, anyway? I try to look at Tina. She is lying down, and the earth beneath her is wet. Miller is wrapping bandages around her and talking to her. I can only see her front end, but her face does not look like the face of a dog whose leg is two feet away from her. Miller moves, and I see that all four limbs are firmly attached to Tina. Then in the corner of the room, I see someone looking on. She offers Miller advice about the wrap. In a moment, she suggests he do something with the IV on what’s called a Jerry leg around here.