Mom took a deep breath and looked up at me for a long time, studying my face. She didn’t say anything else. She just got up and started to wash the dishes, banging them into the sink louder than she needed to.
I took our dogs, Baxter and TJ, for a walk. Whenever people confused me or let me down, I knew they’d be there, forgiving, never judging, just happy to see me.
“Do you guys think I’m doing the right thing?” I asked the dogs.
They panted and bounded around our property, chasing after squirrels and sniffing at the day’s collection of new smells.
As long as you come back to us, I imagined them thinking.
I went off to basic training in North Carolina a week after graduation from high school.
Zach told me to kill some dragons and gave me a fist bump. Mom hugged me and cried.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ll do a good job. You’ll see.”
She sighed and watched me get on the bus with her arm wrapped tightly around Zach’s shoulders. I wanted more than ever to prove to her that I could do this.
But I guess she was right about the Marine Corps chewing me up.
Ccujo was definitely planning on chewing me up.
I don’t know about spitting me out, though. I sure hoped so.
“I said, stay with me, Marine!” Master Sergeant Gipson shouted this time, snapping me back to attention. He could see the look of panic on my face. So could all the kids watching from the bleachers. I swallowed hard. I’d gotten through recruit training and School of Infantry training, and I could get through this. I imagined Zach in the audience, watching me and smiling. This was like the trials that every hero in his fantasy books has to go through to prove they are ready for their quest.
“Good to go?” the Master Sergeant asked.
“Oo-rah!” I shouted back, the standard battle cry of the marines. Really, it answers just about any question you want it to. I liked the Corps for that. You didn’t need to say much to get your point across.
“Run!” Master Sergeant ordered.
I did as I was told.
I turned in my big bulky bite suit and I ran — more like waddled — as fast as I could with my back to the kids and Master Sergeant Gipson and his snarling dog. I heard the kids cheering and laughing behind me. I guess they were enjoying the sight of me speed-waddling across their soccer field.
Then I heard Master Sergeant Gipson’s voice, deep and clear.
“Get him, go!” he snapped.
Three seconds later I felt the furry missile slam into me, wrapping his jaws around my arm and pulling me to the ground backward. I screamed as if in pain, just like I’d been told to do, but the dog didn’t let go. It didn’t actually hurt, because of the suit, but I could definitely tell I would not want to be on the receiving end of this bite without the suit on.
It was just like when Baxter and TJ were puppies and would play tug-of-war with their favorite rope, slashing their heads from side to side, pulling and snarling and trying to rip it free, except with Ccujo, my arm was the rope … and he was trying to rip it off my body.
“Out, out!” Master Sergeant Gipson yelled, running over to pull the dog off me.
Ccujo’s tail was wagging and he was panting, a big doggy grin across his face like he was having the best time in the world.
“You did it, Corporal,” the Master Sergeant helped me off the ground, laughing. “You survived Ccujo without peeing your pants. Not every marine can say as much.”
“Oo-rah,” I replied again. He turned me around to face the kids and told me to take a bow. They went wild.
“That’s just a little of what Ccujo here can do,” the Master Sergeant told the kids. “He’s a trained patrol, search, and detector dog. The US Military uses working dogs like him for many important tasks, from guarding our bases to sniffing for drugs and explosives, and even to chase down bad guys, like Corporal Dempsey here.”
The kids laughed while Ccujo panted at me and Master Sergeant Gipson took questions.
“Has Ccujo ever been to war?” one boy wanted to know.
“I deployed with Ccujo to support Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2007,” he said. “We provided security for forward operating bases in some of the areas of heavy fighting, and we went out with marine infantry units to search for IEDs. Do you know what those are?”
No one answered, and I saw the Staff Sergeant smile. I guess he liked the idea that kids wouldn’t know what IEDs were.
“IED stands for improvised explosive device,” he said. “They’re bombs filled with nails and bits of metal so that when they explode, they hurt as many people as possible. The bad guys bury them under rocks and in trash piles in areas where they think our soldiers will be, and then they detonate them from a safe distance. IEDs have killed and injured more American soldiers than anything else in our current wars. But a dog’s nose is better than a human’s, and a trained bomb-sniffing dog can smell all different types of explosives, even if they’re buried in disgusting heaps of stinking garbage. In fact, Ccujo here loves sniffing around in disgusting heaps of stinking garbage.”
He scratched behind his dog’s ears, and the kids all wrinkled their noses and said, “Ewww!”
“So Ccujo and I went to Iraq to sniff out these improvised explosive devices before they could hurt anyone. We went there to save lives, and I’m very proud of the work my dog did.”
I was impressed by how well the Master Sergeant could explain things to kids. Talking to big groups of people made me nervous. I was happy to stand there sweating and let him answer the questions, but one little girl had a question for me.
“What was it like when Ccujo attacked you?”
I looked at Master Sergeant Gipson as I thought. What could I tell her? It was scary at first, but then, when he pulled me down and held me on the ground and made a chew toy out of my arm … well, I could only think of one word to describe that.
“It was awesome,” I said. “Totally awesome.”
In the truck on the way back to base, Ccujo was in the backseat, sticking his nose out the window while we drove, panting happily.
“Thanks for helping out at the demonstration today,” Master Sergeant Gipson said to me.
“No problem, Master Sergeant,” I said.
“Beats cleaning kennels, right?”
“Affirmative,” I agreed.
I’d spent the last few weeks doing a lot of the grunt work for Master Sergeant Gipson, cleaning the kennels and feeding the dogs and arranging the supply rooms. None of it was part of my job as a rifleman. But more than anything in the world, I wanted to be a dog handler in the United States Marine Corps, and Master Sergeant Gipson, as kennel master, had the power to make that happen for me. That’s why I volunteered to do all this work for him. That’s why I had volunteered to visit the school and wear the bite suit.
“You don’t talk much, Dempsey,” he said.
“I talk when I need to, Master Sergeant,” I told him.
“Relax, Dempsey.” He shook his head. “I’m not your DI.”
DI stands for drill instructor, one of those flat-hatted marines who drag us through hell and back at boot camp to make us into the best soldiers in the world.
“You like dogs, Dempsey?” he asked.
“I do. I grew up with two.”
“You’ve been working hard in the kennels,” he said. “I figured you must love dogs.”
My heart quickened. Did he want me to answer? Was it a question? I didn’t want to screw up now.
“There’s a new program starting,” he said. “We’re trying to get dogs on every patrol in Afghanistan and there aren’t enough handlers or dogs to cover the need, so they’re training regular infantry to be IDD handlers. You interested?”
“Yes, Master Sergeant!” I shouted, just like I would shout in boot camp. It was way more formal and way louder than it needed to be. Even Ccujo in the backseat perked his ears up and looked at me. But I wanted to show the Master Sergeant how serious I was.
> Ready for some big time Marine Corps elf speak? IDD stands for IED Detector Dog. And IED is Improvised Explosive Device, so IDD is an acronym with an acronym hidden inside it. It would take one of my brother’s fantasy wizards to untangle it all, but the idea is, there are specially trained bomb-sniffing dogs that need human marines to partner with them.
It used to be that the only marines who got to be dog handlers had to train to be military police first, and then they had to write an essay and get picked for dog handler school in Texas, and then, after training, maybe, if they were lucky, they would get to deploy to combat with their dogs. It could take years of work. Now, though, with this new program, us infantry grunts got a chance to become dog handlers in our first year. Master Sergeant Gipson knew that’s what I’d wanted all along. He just wanted to see my commitment.
I think I proved it to him with the bite suit.
“I’ll put your name in for IDD training,” the master sergeant told me. “If you get picked, they’ll send you out for the handler course for five weeks. You up for it?”
“Oo-rah,” I said, and I rode the rest of the way back to base feeling about as happy as the dog sticking his nose out the window behind me.
We started with plastic dogs.
The first week of training wasn’t spent with real dogs. It was spent with plastic CPR dogs so that we could learn emergency first aid. There were sixteen marines in my training group, from bases all over the country, who had been sent to this base for five weeks to learn everything there was to know about being an IDD handler. And what that meant at the moment was that all sixteen of us were on our knees giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to plastic dogs.
“I hope I never have to do this on a real dog,” one guy, Grantham, said. “The breath alone might kill me.”
“It can’t be worse than your girlfriend’s,” another guy, Diaz, joked, and everyone cracked up. Well, everyone except me. I wasn’t there to joke around. We only had one week to learn everything we’d need to know to save our dogs if something bad happened downrange, where there probably wouldn’t be any veterinarians.
Sorry … downrange = war zone. More Marine Corps elf language.
See, the insurgents — elf talk for bad guys — they know that they can’t win a fair fight with the US Military, so they plant these hidden IEDs all over to try to blow us up from a safe distance. It’s a coward’s way of waging war, but it’s what we’re up against.
And the bad guys just hate it when we find their bombs before they can use them against us, so what do they do? They do their best to take out our bomb-sniffing dogs and their handlers with snipers. As hard as we were training to stop the bad guys, they were training just as hard to hurt guys like me. That’s why we had to learn all this first aid stuff before anything else. Helicopter pilots learn how to take care of their helicopters, and dog handlers learn how to take care of their dogs.
I knew this training might just save a dog’s life one day.
“Hey, Dempsey’s not laughing,” Diaz said, pointing at me. “I guess his girlfriend’s got breath just like —”
I gave him a look that cut him off. He didn’t finish the joke. He knew I could back that look up with more than words. I wouldn’t ever start a fight, but if one started with me, I’d finish it. Kind of like the Corps itself. Diaz wiped the grin off his face.
By the end of day one, I knew how to get a dog breathing again if it stopped, how to pump its heart, and how to insert an emergency IV for fluids. The other guys could joke around all they wanted. I was there to learn.
But the other stuff we were doing was even weirder than giving CPR to a plastic dog.
On the second afternoon, the instructor — a civilian dog trainer — gave us each a metal ammo can filled with concrete.
“These are your dogs for the rest of the week,” he told us. “And you are going to talk to them.”
“We’re going to what?” said Diaz.
“Talk to them,” the instructor repeated, nodding at the ammo cans. “The IDDs have been through fifteen weeks of intense training already. Right now, our dogs are smarter than you, stronger than you, and better trained than you. We don’t want you confusing the dogs because you can’t get the different voices right. Understood?”
“Roger that,” confirmed Diaz.
The instructor demonstrated the firm “command voice” and the sharp “correction voice” and the high-pitched “praise voice” and then told us to get with our cans and start practicing. I felt like one of those kids at that wizard school my brother Zach loved reading about, saying my magic spells and hoping I got it right so I could transform my ammo can into a dog.
It didn’t go well.
I stared down at that can and all I could see was a can. I heard the other guys changing their voices up and down, snapping that can to attention like drill instructors, and squealing high-pitched good boys like they were teenage movie stars talking to their prissy poodles. I just couldn’t talk to the can like it was anything other than a can.
“Sing to it!” the instructor told me. “Raise your voice up high!”
“It’s an ammo can, sir,” I told him.
“Just pretend it’s a dog,” he said. “Use your imagination.”
I guess my brother got all the imagination in our family, because I just couldn’t do it.
“Hey, good boy,” I snapped at my ammo can, and I swear, if it could have tucked a tail between its legs, it would have. “Good boy” had never sounded so much like an insult before.
I mean, I know how to praise a dog. I talked to Baxter and TJ all the time. I talked to them more than I talked to people, but talking to a can just wasn’t working for me. I felt ridiculous.
By now, the rest of the guys were gathering around to watch me squirm.
“Try it like you’re talking to a baby,” suggested Hulk. His real name was Lance Corporal Elijah Harris, but we gave him the nickname Hulk because he’s huge, he has a tattoo of the Incredible Hulk on his back, and you would not want to make him angry. It turned out, though, that he had a lot of baby nieces and nephews and he loved doing baby talk.
“Like this,” he said. He slapped his palms on his knees and bent down toward the ammo can. “That’s a good boy! That’s a good boy!” he warbled.
I mean, if Hulk could do it, why couldn’t I?
I turned to the can again, red-faced, my pulse throbbing in my ears. I didn’t like everyone watching me embarrass myself. Marines didn’t do baby talk. But if I wanted to get a real bomb detector dog, I had to do this.
“Like a baby?” I said.
“Like a baby.” Hulk nodded.
I clenched my jaw, exhaled, and tried again.
“Good. Boy.”
If it had been a real baby, I’m sure it’d have nightmares about me for the rest of its life. The other guys were fighting back their laughter.
“Dempsey!” Gunnery Sergeant Woodward came stomping over. He was the NCOIC. That means noncommissioned officer in charge, and that made him the boss here, in charge of the civilian trainers and all the classes of active-duty marines training to be handlers. He made sure we stayed shipshape and got through the training ready to join up with infantry units.
He was also one solid, squared-away marine. He’d had the call sign Redwood when he was younger, because he was as solid as a redwood. “Are you telling me you cannot talk baby talk, Corporal Dempsey?” he demanded, right up in my face.
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!” I told him.
“What is your problem here, Marine?”
“I just can’t pretend this ammo can is a baby,” I said.
“That is the saddest thing I have ever heard in my whole life, Corporal Dempsey,” he shouted, even though his face was right in front of mine. “That breaks this marine’s tender heart! You ever read Harry Potter, Corporal Dempsey?”
“Sir?” I asked.
“Don’t call me sir,” he snapped at me. “I work for a living!”
“Sorry, Gunny,” I sa
id. Gunny’s what marines call a Gunnery Sergeant, no matter what their real names or their nicknames are. I would never call him Redwood, unless I wanted him to make me do a thousand push-ups and clean the toilets for the rest of the training course.
“Now, Dempsey, have you read the Harry Potter books?”
“Yes, Gunny. Read them with my little brother.”
“You like ’em?”
“I guess so, Gunny,” I told him, not sure why we were talking about Harry Potter. This was the Marine Corps, not a book club.
“I love every one of those Harry Potter books,” Gunny declared. “I read ’em all to my daughter and read ’em again on my own. I believe that a marine with no imagination is a sorry excuse for a marine, do you agree?”
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant,” I said.
“The woman who wrote those wizard books would be twice the marine you are, Corporal Dempsey. Do you agree?”
The other guys were loving this. I had no choice, though.
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant,” I said.
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant, what?”
The guys behind Gunny were now shaking with pent-up laughter. I wanted to hit every one of them in the jaw. This was worse than the show I’d had to put on for the kids at the school with Ccujo. At least Master Sergeant Gipson was a nice guy.
Everyone was scared of Gunny. Word was he’d ended up working in the dog program because his superior officers thought dogs might mellow him out. Can you imagine that? Even the Marine Corps thought Gunny was too intense. That made me want to impress him even more.
I told him what I had to tell him.
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant, the woman who wrote those Harry Potter books would be twice the marine I am because she can use her imagination,” I told him.
“That’s right,” Gunny said. “But we can make a marine out of you yet, Dempsey. We will get you squared away.” Gunny turned to the rest of the group, who pulled themselves together and wiped the smiles off their faces. But they were obviously struggling to contain their laughter. Even the civilian instructor looked like he was about to crack up.
“Listen up!” Gunny said, and the other marines stood at attention. “For the rest of the day, everyone will speak to Corporal Dempsey in baby talk only, understood?”
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