War Dogs (20 page)

They were doing pretty well until McCoy's lane, but after that trip wire, Beauchamp got frustrated and just lost it.

But just like McCoy said, failing this time is the whole idea.

Few of the handlers coming through Yuma arrive ready to hit the ground running—neither do their dogs. Some of them have deployed before, but others are new handlers, some of them just a couple of months out of Dog Training School. Some haven't picked up a weapon, a real weapon, since basic training; others have never even held NVGs before, let alone been trained on how to use them properly. They're meant to learn it all here in three weeks.

And they are meant to make mistakes. The handlers' frustration during drills is palpable, and there is a lot more than tactical training going
on. The instructors are imparting life lessons in the most base sense of the word: humility in the face of failure; lessons on patience and tolerance; how to accept that some things cannot be rushed; how to accept that it might be your time; how to not be so afraid of getting hurt or dying that you worry yourself into failure when failure is not an option. If you fail, they teach, you die. And if it's not your time then, well, you still could be risking the lives of the people following behind you—the people who trust that when you say it's safe, that it is truly safe to walk this road.

McCoy, Keilman, and Hardesty take the time to coach each frustrated handler, especially the handlers who take out these frustrations on their dogs. There is no room for this. Stay positive, stay gentle, stay patient. Do not rush. Do not breach doorways. Do not let your dog breach doorways. Each time a handler crosses that threshold and trips the wire, McCoy presses them as to why they were moving so fast. Were you given a time limit? he asks. Their answer is always no.

Which is what McCoy asks Stone, when he and his dog Atos go through the lane and set off the trip wire. Take your time, McCoy tells him. But Stone seems unconvinced. “Even if we're in a hard knock?” he wants to know.

McCoy is adamant. Even in a hard knock, he tells Stone. Even, he says, if there's all types of crazy shit going on, you—the handler—have to be firm and careful. You have to do a thorough search before crossing any door seams.

“Yes, sir. I'm not gonna die anymore,” Stone says, making a stab at self-deprecating humor. But as far as McCoy is concerned there isn't any room for jokes. He tells Stone a story about what happened to six men from the 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment when he was with them in Afghanistan. The regiment didn't want to use the dog guys. And one day, when they came under enemy attack, these six soldiers ran into a building. They made it over the first threshold, he says, but the second threshold had a trip wire. All six were buried alive. All six died.

Stone is reinvigorated, ready to go again, and gives McCoy a loud, firm “Yes, sir!” before he and Atos move forward onto the next section of the lane. McCoy instructs him to clear the building while skipping the
courtyard, then to come out, hook left, and clear the left side of the lane. As Stone searches, it's clear he's taken McCoy's words to heart. There are the sounds of a washing machine door banging and the clamor of the dog's nails scraping the wall as he sniffs high toward the ceiling. They are in this part of the lane for a long time, which doesn't upset McCoy. But when Stone breezes through a corner, he stops the handler. Clearing a corner should be simple and methodic—high, low, square, deep—he tells Stone, that way you don't miss anything. If Stone had taken the time to do this, he would've had the find even faster. McCoy shakes his head. A lot of people try to do short cuts, he says, “and short cuts get people killed.”

Despite the many likely hazards
waiting for them in a warzone, most of these handlers are excited to get downrange. Some are at the beginning—their next deployment will be their first deployment, while others are on their second or third. Still others have deployed as many as six times. The high number is surprising, especially given how young they are. If they aren't actively excited to go back, then they don't seem to mind it. If they've been to Iraq, they're looking forward to a tour in Afghanistan. They want to go.

The reason why so many of handlers join up in the first place varies. A lot of them cite 9/11 or talk about doing their patriotic part, serving their country. Others have relatives, fathers or grandfathers, who served, and they're just following in step with a family legacy. For others still, reaching the combat theater promises a more complete sense of purpose—it is the place where they can put into practice all their training, all their hard work with their dogs. Many of them don't want assignments working base patrol—manning military base entry and exit points, or conducting traffic checks. As far as they're concerned, these jobs are rote, boring. As far as they're concerned, these jobs aren't the fucking point.

Keilman did his stint as a handler in Afghanistan, and he hadn't liked the country or the culture; he hadn't found any beauty in the landscape. His seven months were all with the same Special Forces team. For most of the time he was there, he and his team lived without air-conditioning or
regular showers. He said they were constantly locking horns with their partner force and working with Afghans whom he felt had not just resented, but hated them. Still, he smiles when he talks about it. The guys he was with made the difference to him. They became his family. “Some of the worst times are the best,” he says.

Combat has its own intoxicating allure; battlegrounds are their own kind of conquerable new frontier. It's an idea that journalist Sebastian Junger comes back to many times in his book
War.
“War is a lot of things,” he writes, “and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. It's insanely exciting.”
8

For handlers the draw of deployment holds more than just the satisfaction of seeing through a successful mission with your dog, or saving lives—combat zone life is a rush. After Lance Corporal Joshua Ashley and Sirius arrived in Afghanistan, Ashley would tell his older brother that going out on a mission was the best adrenaline high he'd ever had.

The intoxicating thrills of war aside, going downrange is the most intensely intimate time there is for a K-9 team. Combat-experienced handlers like Knight say it's the best time for the dogs, because they're with their handler upward of 20 hours a day. And it's the best time for a handler to learn everything he can about the dog.

Even Chris Jakubin, who never deployed to a combat zone or worked outside the wire in either Iraq or Afghanistan, admits that he has mixed feelings of gratitude and envy when he thinks about what it would have been like if he had deployed to war. When he talks about this hole in his otherwise vastly extensive dog-handling experience, his voice is regretful, even as he acknowledges that it may well have been a blessing.

Kitts describes being downrange with Dyngo as unlike anything he's experienced on assignments here in the States. It's where the trust a handler has in his dog is truly tested. By the time a team finishes all their training and gets downrange, the handler has to have confidence that his dog can and will find explosives. He has to trust his dog with his life. To walk outside the wire without that mentality could easily thwart a handler's chance of surviving. He remembers the first time he went outside the wire, the
very first step. His stomach was full of butterflies, but for him it was like stepping out onto a sports field. Once he and Dyngo started working, everything fell into place and the nerves died down.

But inevitably doubt can creep in and take hold of a handler. Knight says he's had students who've come to him to express fear about deploying, fear about being blown up. But there is no room for doubt with this job, Knight says, and what he tells them is: “Don't cry to me about it.”

Hardesty more readily admits that theirs is a daunting job. And a little bit of fear, he says, is healthy. But he agrees that if a handler is just straight scared, it isn't the job for him. A handler leading a patrol has to be mindful of his job and all the responsibility that comes with it. A handler has to accept that when he and his dog clear a path, there are lives on the line. “It's not about you,” Hardesty says. “It's the guys coming up behind you. You're leading the way. You're the one making it clear or safe for everybody else to travel. That's a huge responsibility. If you aren't humble and honest with yourself and what you're really capable of, then you need to get the hell out of the way and let somebody else do it.”

Sometime in the wee hours
of that March morning, after the ruck, after the missions and hours of chaos in the K-9 village is nearly finished, the EOD crew comes around to collect and lock away the explosive materials, their headlights cutting through the black. After a night of dark, the white streams of light are blinding. Somehow I feel wide awake. Hardesty and Kitts stand around waiting for EOD to wrap up, playing songs from their cell phones, faces lit with incandescent blues and whites. Hardesty plays a twangy Johnny Cash song and I hold up my iPhone, offering Bob Dylan's “Girl From the North Country,” the version he recorded with Cash in 1969. Compared to the dizzying music and the simulated noise of AK-47s and RPG blasts that have been sounding all night, this melody is oddly jarring. Hardesty smiles at the sound of it, nodding his approval. The voices—Dylan's young and sweet, Cash's deep and aching against the strum of guitars—fill the space around us.

The song breaks and then lifts the night of war practice hovering in the air—the shouting, the rushing of bodies, the adrenaline. I feel suspended between worlds, between the green halo of NVGs that still clot my vision when I blink and the cars that would deliver us home parked just a few hundred yards away. The sensation fades further as embers in the oil barrel die out, but the reality of what this preparation was all for, that place they'd all be going, is palpable. Tonight that distance between here and there was pulled in closer, tightened like a stitch along a loose-fitting seam. Yuma is the place between places, somewhere between here and war.

A satellite image fills the screen
at the front of the room. The map is colored in shades of slate browns and grays; the higher land is darker and stands out like veins on the underside of a leaf. There are red dots on the image, marking places of significance: rallying points, targets, and safe houses.

Hardesty is in front of the classroom at the podium. He's giving the group orders for the night's mission. It's approximately one klick long, and each dog team will have an hour to carry out their task. In between the scripted instructions Hardesty interjects little reminders—check the wind, he tells them, and the ambient temperature.

“What happens when the temperature gets warmer?” he queries the group, but then answers it for them. “The odor spreads out. The colder?” he asks. “Depending on the wind, you could be 100 meters from odor tonight,” Hardesty tells them as he looks around the room. But then he smiles at them. “It's gonna blow your mind.”

Tonight the teams are only to use white light inside the buildings. If they turn on their lights outside he warns them they're going to light it up like a Christmas tree. These handlers have to get used to working in the dark with their NVGs, and they have to learn how to maneuver comfortably with their dogs when there is no light.

“What happens when you are in a unit that says no white lights?” This time Hardesty scans the room expectantly; he wants an answer.

“You're screwed,” Beauchamp says from his spot in the back with the rest of the Marines from II Marine Expeditionary (MEF) based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. This group of Marines—Ashley, Peeler, Beauchamp, and Garcia, having all come from Lejeune together—is the most colorful and raucous of the bunch. They're always laughing, joking, giving a play-by-play of their weekend, pieces of what they remember after a night of heavy drinking.

Hardesty fixes them with a hard look. “What are you going to do?” he repeats. No one speaks out of turn this time. “Adapt and overcome,” Hardesty says. “Right, guys?” Then he warns them to be careful working the dogs off leash; there will be donkeys and coyotes roaming the area tonight.

There's a graveyard marked on the laminated map being passed around the room. Master-at-Arms Seaman Raymond Jones, the youngest handler to come through the March course at YPG, has been peering at the map with rapt attention. He's not only young, but he looks it too, with a string-bean frame. Hardesty mentions the graveyard again and Jones's face blanches; he asks, probably without thinking, “Is that a real graveyard, a real one?”

Hardesty rolls his eyes—the “graves” are built out of plastic, nothing more than overturned kiddy pools. But he is deadpan. “Yes, that's where we take all the teams that fail.” Everyone laughs, and Jones looks embarrassed but somehow still unconvinced. I wouldn't realize until later, months later, the double meaning in Hardesty's joke. I don't think any of us did.