Soldier Dogs

by Maria Goodavage

  Sporting breeds, like Labs, appear to be more prone to PTSD than traditional dual-purpose dogs, like German shepherds and Malinois. Burghardt is not sure of the reasons, but he and Mann and a small team at Lackland are starting to investigate this and dozens of other questions about the disorder, including how to prevent it and how to best treat it. Right now, affected dogs are given time off and get a combination of drugs and different therapies. A dog who is shaking and hiding may be given antianxiety medication; one who is withdrawn could get antidepressants.

  The success rate is not great so far. About one-fourth of soldier dogs being treated go back to their jobs. One-fourth are assigned to less stressful jobs, in which deployment is likely out of the question. Another fourth need long-term therapy, from three to six months.

  About 25 percent will not be able to work again and end up being retired from service. Depending on their condition, they could go to a police force or be adopted by a family or an individual, as Buck has been.

  Burghardt and Mann are studying dogs like Buck to investigate what can go wrong inside a dog. They’re also looking at dogs who face unthinkably violent and terrifying conditions and are able to return to service with a bounce in their step.

  Dogs in horrendous situations … As Burghardt describes the hell some dogs have been through, I think about Fenji….

  46

  SEMPER FIDELIS

  Marine Sergeant Rosendo Mesa immediately looks up toward his EOD partner when he hears the explosion. He’s afraid of what he will see. Only last week an IED detonated on another EOD partner as he was defusing it.

  But when Mesa looks toward the other tech, who is working on the first of four IEDs Fenji has alerted to this morning, he’s fine. Then they both see it; a rising billow of dark smoke a hundred meters away. It’s coming from where they had last seen Corporal Max Donahue. He had been lying down, rifle poised, ready to engage against an ambush if needed. Fenji had been lying just a few feet away, attached to him by her leash.

  One of the roles of an EOD tech is to run to an explosion where there may be an injury, give emergency care to any victims, and investigate the IED. The other marines stay put, ready to fire, to protect the mission and the EOD techs. Mesa and his partner sprint toward the smoke. There’s a hole where Donahue had been keeping watch. Fenji is lying near it, bleeding from her ears, unable to get up.

  They find Donahue ten meters from the blast hole. He’s on his back, in a pool of blood, left leg gone at the thigh, right leg missing below the knee. He’s blinking, but Mesa doesn’t think he knows what hit him. Mesa has seen years of blast injuries, and it’s not just the fireball that tears people up, it’s the earthquake in the skull. The air itself becomes like shrapnel. And sure the vest takes the brunt, but you’re talking about ten pounds of ammonium nitrate and aluminum, encased in a metal container planted a foot deep in the ground.

  Donahue had been lying right on top of the bomb. It had been the perfect lookout spot. And it wasn’t by chance that this bomb went off. While the other EOD tech works on Donahue, Mesa finds a cord leading from the IED to about two hundred meters south, to a small village. The cord is roughly hidden under dirt. He doesn’t follow it all the way. He knows enough. This is what’s called a command wire IED. All the enemy on the other end had to do was wait for a good opportunity and put a battery to the cord.

  Even the best marine, the best dog, can’t always catch these things. Instinct fails. Or there just aren’t enough atoms floating above the dirt to detect. Or maybe somebody was tired, or assumed something. It happens. It’s nobody’s fault.

  Just as the EOD techs get the tourniquets on Donahue and the major bleeding stops, the marines start taking fire. The two men quickly lift Donahue between them, like you would if a friend had twisted his ankle. They just grip him for life and run. They run down the dirt road in the 117-degree heat with bullets flying at them, as the other marines fire on their assailants. The corpsman (a medic everyone calls “Doc”) follows them, and in about three hundred meters they come to a place on a tributary of the Helmand River where they can cross. They set Donahue down, and the corpsman tends to severe wounds on his abdomen, where even his body armor couldn’t completely protect him.

  The techs run across the river, which is about thirty feet across at this point and only knee deep. On the other side, they pull out their metal detectors and start sweeping the area as they continue to a place where the Black Hawk can land. Once they’ve checked the area for bombs, they run back, grab Donahue, and carry him across the river—not an easy feat, with the slippery rocks. They run to a wide-open spot and throw a red smoke marker down so the helo pilot can see them. They’re still taking fire. The Black Hawk comes down in smoke and dust. And a minute later Corporal Max Donahue is lifted out of his hell and gone.

  Later in the day doctors had to amputate one of Donahue’s arms. His mother, Julie Schrock, sick with worry when she heard the news, took refuge in the fact that he was alive. If anyone could make a good life with three limbs missing, it would be her son. “He’d be joking around in no time, flirting with the nurses. He’d be an inspiration for anyone else who had to go through this.”

  But at 4:30 A.M. on August 6, 2010—two days after the explosion—she got the call from a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Her son was brain dead. “Words can’t describe the excruciating pain of that message,” she says. “If only I could have just been there to hold him so he wouldn’t have been alone.” He wanted to be an organ donor, so Schrock was told they had to keep him alive another day until they could operate. That’s why his official death date is listed as August 7.

  The next day she got a package in the mail. It was from Max. A DVD, with photos and video snippets from Afghanistan. His family got out the laptop and watched it on the kitchen table until the last frame. It was a photo of him in full combat gear, just him and his rifle in the desert. Across it, these words: “See you soon—I miss you guys.”

  In death, as in life, Donahue was there for others. His death saved three lives in Europe. His liver helped a thirty-four-year-old man in liver failure. His right kidney went to a sixty-seven-year-old man who had waited for a kidney transplant for more than ten years. And a fourteen-year-old boy’s life would change forever because of Donahue’s left kidney.

  His casket rolled slowly off the plane in Denver. Six marines dressed in their blues saluted in perfect unison. Schrock caught sight of her son’s dog tags on the casket handle. They were undamaged, yet her son, inside his final resting place, was broken beyond repair. The thought made her nauseated and angry but mostly just numb.

  At the packed funeral on August 13, his father said this:

  “I loved the way you always stood up for the little guy or were willing to help someone in need. You hated bullies. And it didn’t matter how big they were, either. They knew they had their hands full with Max Donahue. When you were growing up, all the little kids liked to hang with you because they felt they were safe. They knew you wouldn’t let anything or anyone hurt them. You were their hero.

  “… I’m going to miss you, your laugh, your passion and compassion, and your love for life. You literally lived it to the ‘max.’ We all love you. And we’re all so very proud of you. And every American that values their freedom should be proud of you, too, for the way you so bravely served your country. I know at times as a father I’ve let you down, but as a son you have never failed me. You’re my hero. God bless you, Max.”

  47

  CYCLE OF LIFE

  Any soldier, sailor, airman, or marine who has ever served during wartime knows that with serving come loss, triumphs, partings, tragedies, and unbreakable bonds. But for dogs and handlers, it’s all doubled, in a way, because there are two of you. You’re a team within a team within a team, and you have your own dramas, your mutual losses and joys.

  And while you’re stronger because of each other, you’re also each more vulnerable. Everything one of you does affects the other. If one of you g
ets hurt, the other is at a loss. You have to stop working. Without your other half, you can’t function, and in fact, you are not allowed to keep working on your own. If it’s bad enough, you mourn, and eventually you find a new teammate and go through the months of bonding and training and certifying that lead to life with a new other half. And you begin again.

  But even without a loss of life or limb, bonds and partnerships are routinely forged and broken in the military dog world. Perhaps your dog needs to deploy before you can, so he goes off with a new handler. Or if you get shipped to a new base, in most cases your dog will not travel with you.

  And so it is, comings and goings, beginnings and endings—a never-ending cycle of life and death is enacted all around you, both in your own microcosm of soldier dog and handler and in the universe of war that’s your backdrop.

  And when you think about all that this means, you see more clearly than ever that a soldier dog is so much more than just a piece of equipment. And you wonder: If these dogs also risk losing life and limb in combat, how should they be treated when they can no longer serve their country? Should treatment reflect their status as equipment, or as brother species-in-arms?

  These questions lead to many others, some of which are tuned to cultural debates. Is man’s best friend entitled to rights or just compassionate regard? What’s fair treatment of these dogs? What’s the right thing to do?

  On their long nights of patrolling near the Panama Canal in the mid-1990s, Army Sergeant John Engstrom and Max P333 forged an indelible friendship in the midst of the dense jungle. When you walk together six miles every night in a foreign environment, the bond comes easily, as it tends to with expats. Engstrom and the long-haired shepherd would talk about politics and life while on alert for trouble. It was a one-way conversation, really, but that didn’t matter to Engstrom. Max listened, looking intently at Engstrom when he came to emphatic points.

  Max kept Engstrom’s mind from the jungle laden with large spiders. In an elephant versus mouse scenario, the robust 195-pound man hated the creatures, and they were everywhere. During one patrol where Engstrom had to crawl on his belly alongside the canal looking for someone Max had alerted to, Engstrom ended up covered with hundreds of ticks—spiders’ bloodthirsty cousins. They embedded quickly, and by the time the hospital started taking them out hours later, many were round and soft with Engstrom’s blood. On their long patrols, Max couldn’t keep the arachnids away physically, but the dog’s presence kept them from overtaking Engstrom’s imagination.

  Max was an aggressive partner when he needed to be—a “real dog” in handler parlance. He bit the bad guys hard and with confidence. But with Engstrom’s wife, the dog turned to mush. Max would start out dignified and well mannered, but within thirty seconds of her kindly attentions, “he’d wag so hard his ass shook, his ears would go back all happy and goofy.” Max had almost nonstop ear infections, despite the best treatment, and she’d rub his ears just the right way, and the lethal weapon would purr.

  Engstrom had to say good-bye to his partner in early 1995. They had been reassigned to others. Later that year, Engstrom left Panama because U.S. presence was drawing down. But he didn’t forget that dog.

  Back in the U.S., Engstrom ended up at Lackland Air Force Base, instructing green handlers from all services in the art of working with military dogs. As part of the job, he’d routinely take them on tours of the base. In June 1997, he was showing a small group the dog hospital. He saw that there was something going on in the necropsy lab.

  A military dog necropsy isn’t the relatively tame affair you see on NCIS. A series of knives, one bigger than the other, hang on a magnetic strip on the wall, as at a butcher shop. Dozens of smaller, shiny cutting-and-grabbing instruments lie on a tray off the foot of the necropsy table: hemostats, tweezers, clamps, rib cutters, a steel mallet. Sinks and vats catch fluids and parts. It is a scientific business. Since there is no chance of an open-casket funeral, dogs are cut and opened with everything hanging out in ways you don’t want to imagine. Sometimes just the head is recognizable. Sometimes not.

  Engstrom opened the door to the necropsy lab and brought his students in. They approached the table on which the splayed mess that was once someone’s comrade was ready for disposal. And then Engstrom saw it. The head, the odd Cyrillic tattoo from his original breeder, and the other tattooed ear he knew so well from all those ear infection solutions he’d massaged in.

  It was Max.

  Engstrom doesn’t remember much after that. Just shock, followed by a sick, empty feeling. A hole in his own gut. “Man, they cut him apart.” He went home after that. Or maybe he didn’t. He can’t remember. The nightmare fogged the day. You don’t want to see a friend like that, he explains. You should never see a friend like that. For months it was hard to shake the image, the sickening shock. He never tried to find out why Max had been euthanized at age eight. He thinks the dog had hip issues, but he just couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  48

  “THE WORST KIND OF ANIMAL ABUSE”

  Necropsies are performed on every military working dog who dies in service. The extent of an ailment isn’t always apparent on the outside. These dogs have so much heart and drive that it masks signs of just how bad things are on the inside. And then you cut them open on the necropsy slab, and you’re stunned that a dog with that kind of cancer or other great physical problem could still carry on.

  Before the law changed in 2000, when federal legislation dubbed “the Robby law” passed, bite-trained dogs who were no longer able to work were considered unadoptable. The liability was deemed too much. They were sometimes transferred to other law-enforcement agencies, but more often they were euthanized.

  Many people, even those steeped in the military working dog world, are under the impression that before 2000, the Department of Defense euthanized all dogs who were unable to be working dogs, if they were not transferred to law enforcement. It turns out this is not true. I’m told that non-attack-trained dogs were usually adopted out. Lackland provided me with a spreadsheet of dogs adopted by individuals from 1983 through 1999. There are 192 dogs on the list. Their ranks include a number of beagles and Labrador retrievers, and even a cairn terrier. But the majority of the dogs on the list are Belgian Malinois or German shepherds. It can be assumed that most of these dogs were purchased by the Department of Defense and then didn’t make it through training. They may have been lovers, not fighters. More puzzling to me are the few dogs who have “Patrol” or “Patrol/Explosive” listed as their occupation. Maybe these dogs were so old and decrepit that they were harmless. Perhaps they even went to their handlers, who knew how to deal with them. Fewer than two hundred dogs in seventeen years is nothing compared with today’s thriving adoption program, but it is a worthy footnote in the history of military working dog adoption.

  The routine euthanization of most dogs outraged people like former Marine Captain William Putney, who had commanded a war-dog platoon in World War II and watched dogs giving their lives for their country for years during the war.

  “To use animals for our own use and then destroy them arbitrarily when they can no longer be of use to us is the worst kind of animal abuse,” he would write in a letter that was read to Congress in support of the Robby law.

  He never got over the bravery and loyalty he saw in these dogs. And decades later, he was still struck by incredible feats he saw and the bonds he witnessed.

  In 1944, Putney was leading a patrol to find some entrenched Japanese during the invasion of Guam. Suddenly there was gunfire, and a bullet slammed into a Doberman named Cappy and tore a hole in his chest. The dog was walking just in front of Putney, and the bullet would have been his if not for Cappy. The dog’s handler was overcome. He “picked the body up and held it in his arms with blood all over his face—he was crying, just rocking back and forth…. He’d lost his buddy,” Putney told The Washington Post in 2000.

  Putney, who became chief veterinarian of the Marine Corps after the war, d
id not buy the idea that these dogs were a liability—something the Department of Defense would put forth for the next fifty years. “It is not true that once a dog has had attack training, it can never be released safely into the civilian population,” he wrote in his letter.

  He knew from experience that the majority of these dogs could be safely re-homed: The 550 marine war dogs serving at the end of World War II had all been trained to attack, but he says only four were put down because they could not be “detrained” well enough for civilian life. The rest of the dogs were adopted out. He says that to his knowledge, none of those dogs ever attacked or hurt anyone. This was done throughout the military with similar success.

  But that lesson was lost in the Vietnam era. Some thirty-eight hundred dogs deployed there and are credited with saving many thousands of lives while protecting troops, leading jungle patrols, and detecting ambushes and mines. But the military deemed the dogs too dangerous to return home. Indeed, many of the sentry dogs had been trained to be so vicious that even their handlers had a hard time controlling them.

  But sentry dogs were just one type of dog in the war. There were others, including scouts and trackers. Still, only about two hundred dogs would ever return home. Besides the behavioral issues, there was worry that even the less violent dogs would carry disease from Southeast Asia—something that could have been circumvented by a quarantine once they were home.

  The majority of dogs were left behind or euthanized.