Soldier Dogs (3 page)

Dogs help normalize life where it has been overshadowed by constant threat of Taliban violence. These everyday paws-on-the-ground heroes and their human partners help clear villages and towns of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of explosive devices. Safar, for instance, had become a ghost town. People would not venture out. The once-thriving Safar Bazaar marketplace had been shut for months; there were so many IEDs that someone would be injured or killed there nearly every day. With all the people virtually trapped in their homes, commerce almost entirely ceased.

The dog teams came in and changed all that. In an operation that took several weeks, the village was cleared, the market declared safe. “It gives me goose bumps to think about the change. It went from dead to alive,” says Corporal Idriceanu, who spent weeks helping clear the Safar Bazaar with his dog. “People could live again. I’m honored my dog and I could be part of that.”

It is hard to quantify how many lives deployed soldier dog teams save by way of their detection skills. Figures range from 150 to 1,800 lives per dog. A dog who finds a bomb just as a squad is about to pass by could save several lives, depending on the bomb’s strength. Maybe there would have been no lives lost, just a slight injury. Or not even that. It’s impossible to count exactly how many people did not get hurt by a bomb that a dog discovered.

In any case, military working dog teams in Afghanistan were credited with finding more than 12,500 pounds of explosives in 2010. The number is probably at least slightly higher, officials say, since dogs are not always given credit for finds. Still, when you think of the damage even ten pounds of explosives in an IED can do, you can get a sense of the importance of these dogs to our military capability.

The Department of Defense has some 2,700 U.S. military working dogs in service worldwide and about six hundred serving in war zones. Another two hundred are contract dogs. Contract working dogs are trained by contractors, and their handlers work for the contractor, not the military. Most handlers in this world are former military handlers. Many got out of the military because the money is purported to be better on the contract side. Others just wanted a little more control of their jobs. If they don’t want to go into a war zone, they don’t have to. That’s not something they could pull off when working for Uncle Sam. The Department of Defense maintains these contracts because the Military Working Dog Program can’t supply enough dogs for the current need.

Even as troops start to draw down in Afghanistan, the dog teams don’t show any signs of staying home for long. Because of their vital role there, many in the military dog world think the dog teams could keep deploying steadily to the end of U.S. involvement. This could put them at higher risk. Already, seventeen handlers have been killed in action since 2001, and forty-four military working dogs have died in war zones since 2005, the first year for which figures are available. (The number of dog deaths includes dogs killed in action and dogs who have died from heat injuries and other causes. The Department of Defense does not yet have a full report of causes of death.)

Military working dogs are incomparable troops, superbly well suited for their tasks. But there’s something else that draws us to these dogs and their stories: For all their remarkable feats, they’re not only our heroes, they’re our pals. We share our homes and lives
with their cousins, whose loyalty, intelligence, and unconditional love make them part of the family. When we see or read about how they’re involved in war, the war becomes a little closer. It gives us a little more skin in the game. The irony is that soldier dogs make war a little more human.

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W
hile I’ve yet to meet Cairo (or as some reports say, “Karo”), I have had the pleasure of meeting a nearly one-hundred-year-old military dog named Sergeant Stubby. The highly decorated World War I military hero died in 1926, was stuffed, and put on display at the American Red Cross Museum for nearly thirty years. His skin and hair eventually began to deteriorate, so he was taken off display. Eminent war-dog historian Michael Lemish wrote about him in his book
War Dogs: A History of Loyalty and Heroism
. He had found the dog stored in a shipping crate in an old artifacts room at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The crate read:
STUBBY THE DOG—FRAGILE
.

While in Washington, D.C., I decided to see if I could pay homage to this granddaddy of U.S. war dogs, and I called ahead to speak with someone who knew where the old relics were stored and how I could get access. I learned that Stubby had been refurbished from nose to tail and was now once again on display. He’s down the hall from Dorothy’s ruby slippers, toward the end of the large exhibit called
The Price of Freedom: Americans at War
.

Stubby became a war hero at a time when the United States didn’t have any semblance of a war-dog program. The small stray pit bull was taken in by a man who would make him the mascot of the 102nd Infantry in 1917. When the man went to war, he smuggled Stubby over to France by ship. Stubby provided comfort to the wounded and was devoted to his troops, but he became more than a loyal mascot. His “hero” title came to him from such feats as when he warned a sleeping sergeant of a gas attack, so that soldiers had adequate time to don their gas masks. He also bit a German infiltrator, who was hobbled by the bite and captured. The dog later suffered a shrapnel wound.

His popularity was immense, and he was grandly—if unofficially—decorated. He had to wear a blanket (given to him by several French women) to hold all his medals and pins. The dog went on to tour the United States, and he hobnobbed with three presidents.

Eighty-five years after he drew his last breath, I gazed through a glass barrier at Sergeant Stubby, who was now surrounded by a mannequin in a gas mask, an old wooden arm prosthesis, a well-preserved carrier pigeon, and other relics from the war. World War I has been relegated to a small, almost parenthetical, portion of this exhibit. Stubby looked a little plasticized, and his lip contours were bizarrely black, almost Herman Munster–ish. But this was Stubby, in the flesh, or at least in the fur.

Stubby’s procurement was not a formal process, but back then in the United States, there were no rule books for war-dog procurement. In fact there was no war-dog program here at all. During World War I, European armies were using dogs to great advantage, particularly as first responders and messengers. The Red
Cross suggested a procurement process be initiated, but no appropriation was made. Someone in the General Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces proposed setting up a program to buy a supply of five hundred dogs every three months from the French and then setting up kennels in the United States to create a canine corps. Nothing happened.

Still, there are plenty of great stories like Stubby’s, of dogs serving in combat in American units during the war, not just as mascots, but also as sentries and messengers. And certainly thousands of soldiers saw the huge benefits of using dogs in wartime. But after the war, as military budgets were drawn down, the idea of starting a war-dog program faded.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American Kennel Club and another group, Dogs for Defense, led by a prominent breeder, appealed to dog owners across the country to donate their pets to the war effort. The public response was overwhelming. And so began America’s first formal military dog procurement program.

The army’s logistical arm, the Quartermaster Corps, acquired thousands of dogs spanning thirty breeds during the next three years. Based in large measure on the British experience in World War I, a K-9 Corps was built around five breeds: Belgian sheepdogs, giant schnauzers, collies, German shepherds, and Doberman pinschers. In all, of about nineteen thousand dogs acquired, more than half were trained. Of those, the vast majority became sentries. As the war progressed, the need for scout dogs increased, and some 436 dogs served in the island campaigns in the Pacific.

Because so many dogs loaned during World War II proved unfit for duty—and the expense of having to return them to their owners fell to the military—the army changed its procurement policy after the war to buy its own dogs. Moreover, it set out to select dogs who could perform all the various assignments in all climates and who were bred extensively. The procurement specifications are intriguing.

Hard wall-cushioned paws?

One by one, breeds were discounted. Climate was one deciding factor. Dobermans worked well only in temperate climates; collies, Siberian huskies, and Alaskan malamutes in colder climates. Labs and other sporting breeds were not considered dependable because of their gaming instinct. In the end, the German shepherd became the dog of choice as the Korean War began in June 1950.

But with all the talk about how successful dogs had been in World War II and the forging of a real procurement policy, as the curtain went up on the Korean War only one dog unit went into action: the Twenty-sixth Infantry Scout Dog Platoon. It did well, and there was a plan to attach a scout dog platoon to each division, but then the war ended.

And that marked a hiatus in the military’s dog program. The procurement stopped. The army war-dog program was defunded, and rumors spread that the program would be abandoned entirely. This drew an emotional, angry public response. The program survived; the air force took it over and started a training center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as America’s involvement in Vietnam intensified, and as the air force began to see the labor-saving advantages of sentry dogs, demand outstripped supply. Moreover, there was no military pipeline, or even a civilian pipeline like Dogs for Defense, to bring more dogs to the effort.

The result was that the military was forced into a hurry-up scenario, and quickly sent out small teams of recruiters to bases around the country to buy up dogs from neighboring communities. The price paid was usually not more than $150 per dog. The breeds of dogs procured once again expanded, and Labradors and even hounds were among those drafted. Some 3,800 dogs would serve during the course of this war.

War dog procurement is partly a matter of selecting breeds for combat and then drawing a steady supply, but it’s also a matter of demilitarization and repatriation. That was assumed after World War II but forgotten after Vietnam, when thousands of dogs were left behind, either to replenish supplies for the South Vietnamese
Army or to be eaten, as some have asserted, or simply euthanized. Some handlers even chose to reenlist so they could be with their dogs as long as possible, in hopes they might be able to prolong the dogs’ lives and perhaps even adopt them.