Soldier Dogs (27 page)

F
enji 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.”

     40     

T
he 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.”

     41     

F
or 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.