War Dogs

by Shane Bryant

  One time, Jason left Nero with me in the hooch when he had to go and clean the kennel after Nero had spewed in it. ‘You gonna be OK with him?’ Jason asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  Nero sat on the floor of the hooch between the bunks with his conk – his ball. Ricky was locked in his kennel, as there was no way we could have the two of them loose together in a confined space. Nero would have eaten Ricky for lunch. ‘OK, Nero?’ I asked.

  Nero looked up at me and bit down on his conk. He flattened his ears and started to growl.

  ‘Settle, dude.’

  That made him growl louder, and lower. His lip curled and he showed me his teeth. I looked down at him and thought, fuck, this thing wants to take me out. I got up, slowly, and started backing out the door.

  ‘What’s up, Shane?’ one of the Psyops guys asked as he walked down the hallway that linked the hooch rooms.

  ‘Um, nothing, man, I just . . .’

  I’d turned my back on Nero for a second and out he came, still growling, pushing the door open. I was the dog handler – the expert – so I couldn’t very well scream ‘Fucking run for your life!’ to the Psyops guy. ‘Good boy, Nero,’ I said in a less-than-confident voice. Nero snarled. I was sure he was going tear my arse off and chow down on it. I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him – no easy task – back into the room, then banged the door shut on him, while I stayed out in the corridor, catching my breath.

  When Jason came back, Nero calmed down straightaway, thank God. He was a one-man dog and when Jason was around, and Nero felt comfortable, he could be quite sociable. But he was also a fear-biter – a dog who bites when he’s afraid – and he was also very aggressive when he was in his kennel. The most important thing in a working dog is that it has a good relationship with its handler, but you also don’t want a dog that’s too aggressive. You have to have the confidence of the soldiers you work with, and if they’re apprehensive about working close to your dog, then that dog can be a liability.

  Now, in among the mountain of shit the other two handlers had left in their room, we actually found a bite sleeve. It looked sturdy enough, but there was no way I was going to put my arm in Nero’s mouth.

  The artillery guy was keen to have a go as the rag doll for the bite training, and a circle of soldiers gathered to watch the games begin. Boredom’s one of the enemies at a FOB, so a gladiatorial competition between artilleryman and dog was a must-see event. First up, I waved the sleeve in front of Ricky, teasing him with it, and encouraging him to bite down on it and try to take it away from me, as though it were a bigger version of his ball. He seemed to take to this, so the artillery guy put the sleeve on and waved it in front of Ricky.

  ‘Good boy, get him,’ I said to Ricky, egging him on as he tugged and worried the sleeve.

  Nero was in his element and when he got the green light, he leaped at the poor dude with the sleeve and nearly ripped his fucking arm off. If the artilleryman hadn’t been wearing the sleeve, he would have bled out from the way Nero was ripping into him. Nero shook his head from side to side, like he was shaking something to death, and I think the American and his buddies might have thought the man was going to end up with a broken bone. The other soldiers were cheering the dog and laughing while the volunteer was dragged around the square.

  The way a dog behaves is partly to do with its particular breed, but it’s also a reflection on the handler. Unlike in the regular army or police force, where a handler can spend years with a dog, contract dogs can end up having multiple handlers for relatively short periods of time. A dog that’s handled roughly might become angry and resentful. By the same token, Mals like Nero tend to be naturally highly strung and aggressive, which is why they’re sometimes selected to be attack dogs.

  Like most of our dogs, Ricky had been born in the US and flown to Afghanistan on a military transport. He never did become totally comfortable around Afghanis, and when we did start mixing with the local population, he’d occasionally try to bite one of them. He also had a thing about motorcycles – he hated them, and would always try to chase and attack them. I don’t think Ricky had ever been mistreated by an Afghani kennel attendant, or by anyone on a motorcycle; he was just, by nature, suspicious of people he didn’t know and of two-wheeled vehicles.

  EIGHT

  Kandahar, Canadians and Koh Samui

  August 2006

  ‘Did you smoke anyone, man?’

  I finished my cigarette, pinched off the end and put the butt in my pocket. ‘What do you mean, “Did I smoke anyone”?’

  The big redneck, Chuck, grinned, and kind of rolled his eyes, like he was talking to some dumb arse he couldn’t waste his time with. ‘I mean, did you kill anyone, man?’

  ‘Um, not that I know of. No.’ I’d fired off plenty of rounds during my first missions at Cobra, aiming in the general direction of where the rest of the Green Berets had been shooting, but I’d never actually seen a Taliban, or had any idea if I’d hit anything, or anyone, at all.

  ‘Got me one. Yeah, I plugged one of them Taliban motherfuckers.’ Chuck was an American ex-military dog handler, and built like a gorilla. He was one of those guys who screams like a woman giving birth when he bench presses weights.

  ‘Congratulations.’ Dick.

  It was stinking hot. I was only just realising how hot it could get in this fucking dustbowl of a country; some days, it was hitting the mid forties. We were out on the hard-baked dirt strip at Tarin Khowt, waiting for a bird to take us to Kandahar. I’d finished my stint at Cobra, filling in for the guys on vacation, and was on my way back, via Tarin Khowt, after a little under a couple of months. Chuck and his dog had been working – and, apparently, smoking motherfuckers – at Tarin Khowt.

  I found a sliver of shade for Ricky, who was in his travel kennel, and filled his water bowl and slid it in. Chuck’s dog, another shepherd, named Benny, was cooking in his kennel, out in the sun. We heard the deep whop-whop-whop of the Chinook’s blades clawing at the hot air, and turned our backs as the chopper flared its nose and touched down, enveloping us in dust, sand and grit.

  With the rotors still turning, we lugged our dogs and gear out on to the pad and slid everything inside. I was sweating like a pig and plastered with dirt as I slumped into the cargo seat and buckled up. We lifted off. Past the loadmaster and his door gun, I could see the Tarin Khowt firebase below. I hadn’t had a chance to look around Tarin Khowt, as I was only in transit. It was bigger than Cobra, and Australians were based there as well as US SF. The Dutch also had a big presence at the base. There was an Australian special operations task group made up of SAS and Commandos from the 4th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, and a reconstruction task force based around an engineer squadron. There were probably a few guys I’d served with there, but I was now well and truly in the American fold as a contractor.

  As the Chinook shuddered and whined with the effort of staying airborne, I checked on Ricky to make sure he was OK. He was fine. However, I could see that Chuck’s dog, Benny, was standing in his kennel, his face pressed against the metal grille door. I ducked my head and saw that his water bowl had been up-ended and was preventing him from sitting down.

  ‘Hey,’ I yelled in Chuck’s ear, over the scream of the engines, ‘you want me to move your dog’s bowl so he can sit?’

  ‘Nah, fuck him.’

  Chuck had just elevated himself from knob to fuckwit. You don’t treat your dog like that. The fact he’d say this in front of a stranger made me wonder what sort of life Benny led behind the scenes.

  We touched down in Kandahar, but I wasn’t happy to be back at the larger coalition base. I felt like I was just settling in at Cobra and starting to establish a rapport with the SF team there. I’d been on a couple of missions and proved, to myself at least, that I could do the job, but then it was time to go. However, just like in the army, when you work for a private contracting firm, you go where you’re told and, besides, the dog handlers who usually worked at Cobra were back fr
om vacation.

  As well as training, all the dog handlers and dogs had to work on vehicle checkpoints when they were in Kandahar. The base is huge, with more than one gate, and hundreds of vehicles, military and civil, come in and out every day. Vehicle searches are incredibly boring and, despite searching hundreds of trucks and cars, my dog and I never found a single thing. It was necessary work – even if only as a deterrent – but I’d had a taste of life out in the FOBs, and knew that was where Ricky and I were meant to be.

  My mate Guy, the other Aussie I’d almost flown to Kyrgyzstan with, had been out at another SF FOB at Deh Rawood, while I was at Cobra. He and I teamed up again, and we were ordered to pack our gear and travel to the Canadian army firebase at Spin Boldak, south-east of Kandahar on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  We travelled to Spin Boldak by road, in a Canadian light armoured vehicle. I never felt comfortable riding in those vehicles. It was like riding inside a tin can; I couldn’t see out and I wouldn’t be able to shoot if anything happened. It’s funny, but I felt more secure in the relatively open gun position in the back of a GMV humvee than I did in an armoured vehicle. Although the 80-kilometre drive only took about two hours, I was very conscious that, despite their armour, these things were getting totalled by IEDs all the time. Unlike the US SF, the Canadians were happy to use the roads, which made them an easier target for landmines, bombs and ambushes.

  The Canadians were from Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Regiment. Arriving at their base at Spin Boldak was, for me, in many ways like going back in time to when I served in the Australian Army. On one hand, the Canadians were, by and large, pretty good blokes; but, on the other, this was a conventional regular army regiment, complete with all the regimental bullshit that non-SF units like to carry on with.

  It was made clear to Guy and me, early on, in the way we were treated that we were civilians and not part of the military structure. Of course this was true, but in the US SF FOBs we were, eventually, treated as part of the team. We were each expected to function as an extra man on the gun truck and to pull our weight doing picket in the night and chores around the base. The onus was on us, as individual operators, to fit in, but with the Canadians, we were there strictly for use as K9 handlers.

  The Canadians, for example, would have had a fit if Guy or I had jumped behind a machine gun on one of their light armoured vehicles during a TIC and started shooting back at the Taliban. It just wasn’t done for dog handlers to be anything other than dog handlers in their army.

  All that aside, as individuals the Canadians were easy to work with and I made some lasting friends at Spin Boldak. Guy and I were assigned to work mainly on vehicle checkpoints. We’d do set shifts in the morning and afternoon, as regular vehicles came and went from the base, and then we’d be on call for the rest of the day, in case anyone else showed up unexpectedly at the gate. It wasn’t hard work but, as at Kandahar, I found searching vehicles pretty boring.

  Everyone was expected to go about their business in full uniform, whereas the American SF guys would get around in shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps, and bits and pieces of uniform. Green Berets also grew beards and let their hair grow long, but the Canadian infantry had military haircuts and shaved every day.

  Alcohol was technically banned on all US bases in Afghanistan, but often someone would sneak a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, or something similar, back from vacation and if you didn’t start acting like a drunken arsehole, you’d get away with it. At Spin Boldak, however, there was zero alcohol and zero tolerance for rule breaking. What made it worse was that a French Canadian unit had occupied the base before the English-speaking Canadians and had built several bars. It was just cruel to be sitting in one of those pubs drinking Coke, when you knew the French Canadians had been living it up. There was no internet access in our room and, instead, I was issued a card that gave me a pin number and a certain amount of time on the communal internet computers, and a shared satellite phone if I wanted to call home.

  I hadn’t realised how good I’d had it at Cobra. There were only two laptops with internet connections at Spin Boldak, and Guy and I had to queue with the rest of the Canadians to have a short time online. It’s funny when you think about how soldiers in previous wars communicated with their loved ones by snail mail, and that a phone call was probably an unheard-of luxury. In the middle of Afghanistan – one of the most primitive places I’d ever seen – we had internet, satellite phones, instant messaging and Skype, and it was annoying when we didn’t have unlimited access. After a while, Guy and I got to be friends with an American ETT detachment – an officer and a sergeant, named Dan and Pat – who were also based at Spin Boldak, and they would connect our laptops to their internet connection, which was run as a separate network from the Canadians’.

  The camp sergeant at Spin Boldak was a top bloke, named Darryl. He was good to Guy and me, and Darryl and I soon became friends. One day, I wandered over towards the wooden building with the internet computers, and Darryl intercepted me. ‘Sorry, no internet today, Shane.’’

  ‘How come? Is the system down?’

  Darryl shook his head. ‘One of our soldiers was killed this morning.’ He explained to me that every time a Canadian soldier was killed in Afghanistan, all their bases shut down their internet and satellite communications to Canada until the family, or families, of the dead, could be notified. This stopped relatives from hearing about it accidentally, on the grapevine or via the media. The soldier who had been killed this time wasn’t based at Spin Boldak.

  Food was all cooked fresh at Spin Boldak, and I could choose how my eggs were cooked for breakfast; this was a nice change from Cobra, where all the food was cooked in Kandahar, frozen in plastic bags and air dropped from a C-130, before being reheated and slopped on to plates.

  ‘Shane, Guy,’ Darryl beckoned to us one evening after chow, as we were heading back to our accommodation. ‘Come ’round to my place later on.’

  ‘OK.’ I thought he probably wanted just to chat or something, but when I got to the camp sergeant’s room, he checked the corridor, ushered me in, then closed the door behind me.

  ‘Have a look at this.’ Grinning, he produced two bottles of French red wine from under a camouflage shirt.

  ‘Where the fuck did you get that?’

  ‘One of our guys handed them in. Can you believe it? There was a loose wood panel on his wall and when he was trying to push it back, it came off, and these were hidden behind it. God bless the French, eh?’

  God bless the dude who’d passed the bottles into the camp sergeant, more like it. The wine tasted like arse, but it was good to have a drink again and I figured it would be rude not to get drunk with the camp sergeant, who was, after all, responsible for maintaining discipline on base.

  The first missions that Ricky and I went on with the Canadians were very different from the patrols I’d done with the US SF. Rather than driving out and looking for a fight, the Canadian infantry’s approach was more about providing security for the locals, and winning their hearts and minds, in the hope that the people would support the Afghani government. Guy and I would take turns going on missions, one of us staying behind to do the daily grind of vehicle checkpoints.

  One time, Ricky and I left the base in the back of a Bison and went out with the soldiers to a village called Kochi Nawe Awmi, where the Canadians planned to run a MEDCAP – a Medical Civic Action Program. MEDCAPs provided basic medical care to Afghani civilians, and the troops would also distribute some humanitarian aid, such as rice, flour, prayer rugs, shoes, and solar and hand-cranked radios permanently tuned to a government station. To make sure we weren’t walking into a trap or an ambush, Ricky and I were given the task of searching some compounds and houses around where the Canadian medics would set up their temporary clinic. This was the first time I’d been out on foot in a village.

  With Afghani civilians everywhere, and because it was still early days for me in the company, I followed the rules a
nd kept Ricky on his lead while we began searching. I didn’t want him running off and eating a child.

  The first time I walked into a mudbrick house was an education for me. The Canadian infantry had emptied the houses and compounds, so Ricky and I were free to search. I paused to run my hand over a wall. The mud was a lot thicker than I had imagined, which, I guessed, gave good insulation from the heat and cold. Also, looking at the structure up close, I realised that it would easily stop a bullet from a 240. On the bare, hard-packed earth floor were the rolled-up bedrolls this family slept on. Hanging from hooks in the ceiling and embedded in the walls were simple cooking utensils. Outside the front door the remains of a small charcoal cooking fire were still warm to the touch. Ricky poked around, sniffing in corners and under the thin mattresses, seemingly as curious as I was about this new, alien environment.

  A compound could be home to an extended family, with relatives living in adjoining rooms built into the walls. In the open courtyard of the first one I searched, there were a donkey and a goat. There was animal shit everywhere and, to my surprise, human crap as well. Generally, I was discovering, the people had an area set aside where they all went to the toilet, but on this occasion I found a human turd just lying out in the open. How the fuck, I thought, could people live like this? I was trying not to be judgmental, but this place was so different from Australia, it was beyond belief.

  The villagers were gathered in knots around their houses, under the supervision of the Canadians, while I did the search. The women were covered from head to foot in burqas, while little girls, who didn’t have their heads covered, would intermittently peek at me and Ricky from behind the young boys, who were a bit bolder. On other occasions, the kids would come right up to me, fascinated by my working dog. While on missions, the Americans would sometimes throw lollies to encourage the kids to hang around them, working on the theory that the Taliban were unlikely to open fire on soldiers surrounded by children. This sounds cynical but the other side did the same thing, and I was sure that sometimes there were Taliban spotters present during those humanitarian aid distribution and MEDCAP missions, mingling with the women and children so that they could get a close-up look at us and our gear.