“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!” the others shouted. Diaz had a big smile on his face, like he was really enjoying my humiliation.
“And Corporal Dempsey will only respond in a baby-talk voice. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!” they replied.
“Good to go.” He turned back to me. His eyes narrowed and then he spoke in a high-pitched voice that I never would have imagined a man as big and mean as Gunnery Sergeant Woodward could produce. “Gewd to gow, wittle Dempsey Wempsey?”
“Good to go, Gunnery Sergeant,” I yelled back, but Gunny just raised his eyebrows at me. “I mean … er …” I stammered.
This was not my finest moment.
I sighed and let it out. “Gewd to gow, Gunny Wunny,” I squeaked.
He froze. The rest of the guys froze. I swallowed hard. We all held our breath.
I was pretty sure no one had ever called the Gunnery Sergeant “Gunny Wunny” before. He had two tours in Iraq under his belt, and one in Afghanistan. During the Battle of Fallujah, he’d earned a bronze star and a purple heart for dragging three marines from a burning truck while returning enemy fire with a pistol in his free hand and a bullet in his hip. He had more ribbons and medals than most of us would see in our lifetimes.
Although he was shorter than me, he stood tiptoe to my face, nose to nose. His nostrils flared just like my mother’s when she got mad. I imagined dragon’s breath about to spew out, engulfing me in flames.
His fists tightened.
Maybe I’d just crossed the line and was about to get drummed right out of the IDD program … or beaten right out of my skin. All my hard work for nothing.
Then he sang out in a piercing baby voice: “Gewd wittle Dempsey Wempsey! Dat’s a gewd mawine!” He grabbed my head and pulled me to him and gave me a loud, wet-lipped zerbert right on my cheek, slobbering all over me.
Everyone lost it — the other marines, the instructor, even Gunny himself. They all just cracked up. Gunny was laughing so hard he had to lean against Hulk to keep from falling over.
I stood there in shock, not knowing how to react. I don’t think I’d ever been given a zerbert before, and I know I had never been given one by a tough-as-nails NCO in the United States Marine Corps.
Dog handlers were a different breed, I guess.
“Hey Dempsey Wempsey!” Diaz called out. “Can you give Mama Bear an itty-bitty ‘oo-rah’?”
“Oo-rah,” I grumbled. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I said I could prove myself as an infantryman.
“I kewdn’t hear youuuu!” Diaz said.
“Mama Bear!” Gunny yelled at Diaz. “Let the corporal focus on his imaginary dog!”
Diaz went back to work, stuck now forever with his new nickname: Mama Bear.
The rest of the guys were baby talking to Diaz now too, like his misfired joke took the target off my back. It’s a rule of messing with people, I guess. If you mess with someone, you’re opening yourself up to get it just as bad as you give it. I kept my mouth shut after that, and everyone seemed happy to focus on Mama Bear.
I gave Gunny a look of gratitude.
“Wittle Dempsey!” he yelled at me.
“Aye-aye, Gunny Wunny!” I responded.
“Grab your itty bitty imaginary puppy wuppy!”
I picked up the ammo bucket filled with concrete. It wasn’t so itty bitty. It weighed about eighty pounds.
“Take an itty bitty run wid your itty bitty puppy,” he cooed. “Firing range and back. Twenty minutes.”
“Oo-rah,” I said, which wasn’t baby talk, but he didn’t seem to mind. I lifted that heavy bucket to my shoulder and started running. The firing range was on the other side of the base, and I’d have to sprint to get there and back in twenty minutes. Sprinting the whole way would be hard even without an eighty-pound ammo bucket in my arms. But with the heavy bucket, this run was going to really suck.
There’s an unofficial Marine Corps motto that went through my head as I started running across the base: Embrace the suck.
A DI — remember, that’s drill instructor — back in boot camp always used to motivate us on long, hot runs in full, heavy battle gear by saying, “I know it sucks! It is always going to suck! You might as well enjoy it! Embrace the suck!”
And I was embracing it now. Running my heart out, my legs and arms burning after only two hundred yards, and knowing I had a whole day of baby talk ahead of me when I got back. But it was all going to be worth it when I got that dog handler certification.
After I checked in again eighteen minutes later, soaked in sweat, my muscles on fire, I set my ammo can down and gave it a loud, high-pitched “Good boy!”
Gunny nodded.
By the end of the day, I had my command, correction, and praise voices down. The instructor checked us all off, one marine at a time.
Watching the guys baby-talk one another and sing praises at cans of concrete, you would never have guessed that we were all trained killers getting ready to go to war.
But that is exactly what we were.
We’d been sitting all day in a stuffy classroom, stuck behind school desks, reviewing our first aid and basic dog handler information on slide after slide of a PowerPoint presentation. Hulk kept looking out the window with longing etched all over his giant face, and Diaz was fighting to keep his eyes open.
I had learned in the six months since enlisting that the marines produce three things really well: more marines, confusing acronyms, and PowerPoint presentations.
One by one the instructor tested us on our first aid knowledge. One by one we watched one another go up to the plastic dog to demonstrate that we’d mastered all the emergency techniques. There wasn’t much question that we’d all pass. We had worked hard. No one wanted to wash out of the program before we’d even met our dogs.
We were all tired and bored when Gunny came into the room, and we jumped to our feet in a clatter of chairs and desks to stand at attention.
“At ease,” he said, and we could relax a little bit. “Tomorrow morning you will be meeting your dogs.” He had a stack of files in his hand that he held out. “Tonight, you will study their training reports and histories, and by morning you will know that dog better than you know the backs of your eyelids. Understood?”
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!” we said in unison.
Gunny called marines up one at a time and handed each one a file. Diaz got a dog named Joker. Hulk had a dog named Axl. I was last.
“Dempsey!” I came forward. “You’re a special case, Corporal Dempsey, as usual.” He handed me a file. “Tomorrow morning you and Instructor Maxwell are going to the airport to pick up your dog, Loki.”
“He’s not on base, Gunnery Sergeant?” I asked.
“Why would you need to go to the airport if he was here on base, Dempsey?” Gunny grunted at me. He shook his head. “Some top-of-the-class marine you are. Standards sure are falling in my beloved Corps.”
“Top of the class, Gunny?”
Gunny shook his head. “I don’t like to repeat myself, Corporal Dempsey. Your dog is coming in from overseas. It’s in the file. Read up and be ready to meet Instructor Maxwell at oh-five-hundred. And wear your civvies. We don’t need this turning into some kind of Support Our Troops photo op. I need you back here ready to work by thirteen-hundred. Good to go?”
“Good to go, Gunnery Sergeant.”
He exhaled once and turned to leave, stopping in the doorway to look back at us. “Remember,” he said. “Your dogs outrank you, so make sure you salute when you meet them.”
He chuckled as he vanished into the hallway to go deal with all the other classes of marines rotating through his training company.
We all looked at one another nervously, wondering if Gunny had been serious about saluting. It was true that our dogs would outrank us. That’s one of those crazy military elf customs too. The dogs always rank one step higher than their handlers. I’m a corporal, so my dog would automatically be a sergeant. I guess it’s so we
’re forced to treat them with respect, as we’d treat any superior officer. I wondered how that worked, though, since the dogs would be taking their orders from us.
Once we were dismissed from the classroom, I lay down on my rack and flipped through the file I’d been given. A grin spread across my face. Because of how well I’d been doing since that baby voice incident, I was being assigned a veteran IDD dog. (Yeah, I know the elf talk has gotten crazy. IDD is IED detector dog, so why add dog after it, right? That’s like saying IED-detector-dog dog. But it’s just what everyone says.)
My dog was a four-year-old black Labrador retriever named Loki. He was coming in from Afghanistan, flying through Germany. So not only did he outrank me, he’d seen way more of the world than I had. He was the veteran; I was the noob.
I was pretty sure I’d have to salute him.
I stayed up most of the night reading about Loki and why he was being assigned to me.
He had been assigned originally to another handler, a Corporal Eliopulos, who was almost exactly my age. He’d dropped out of high school to enlist, but he’d excelled in basic training and infantry training. He was one of the first grunts picked for the IDD program, and Loki was one of the first dogs trained for it. They deployed downrange together to get one of the worst areas of violence in Afghanistan under control.
They’d only been there for three weeks when Loki and Corporal Eliopulos were searching a section of road ahead of a convoy to make sure it was safe. As Loki ran ahead, sniffing at the road, they came under enemy fire. Eliopulos dove on top of his dog when the shooting started. They didn’t have any cover, and he had on body armor. Loki didn’t, and Eliopulos knew the bad guys would be aiming for his dog.
Loki survived the attack. His handler didn’t.
After Corporal Eliopulos died, Loki was flown to Dog Center Europe, the main military hospital in Germany for treating wounded military working dogs. His minor scrapes were fixed up, and the top military brass decided that the dog still had service to give his country.
He was assigned to me. He’d only been out of combat for two weeks, but he showed no signs of combat stress. The report didn’t explain what “signs of combat stress” could mean in a dog.
I hoped I didn’t find out.
I drifted off to sleep and had crazy dreams about Corporal Eliopulos calling out to me in a high-pitched praise voice as bullets kicked up the ground all around me.
I couldn’t move.
My feet were stuck in a bucket of concrete. A dragon reared its head in front of me and Zach stood watching from behind it, waiting to see if I could slay it, waiting to see what kind of a hero I was. My mom was on a hill in the distance, watching through binoculars.
“Good boy!” Eliopulos called. “Sit! Stay! Come! Dempsey! Dempsey Wempsey!”
All around me, I heard dogs howling.
They were all made of plastic.
“Dempsey Wempsey!”
I woke up with a start, soaked in sweat. Hulk was towering over me.
“Dude, you gotta go. It’s dog day!”
“Unleash the dogs of war!” Diaz played air guitar in his boxer shorts and made screeching heavy metal noises.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. The sun wasn’t up yet. I was still dressed, lying on my cot with Loki’s file resting on my chest. I checked my watch.
0452.
I had eight minutes to meet the civilian instructor so we could drive to the airport to get my dog. I flew out of bed, pulling myself together as fast as I could. I ran past Hulk and almost knocked Diaz over as I rushed to the door of the barracks.
“Hey!” Diaz called out, laughing. “Don’t be rude! You’ve got over five minutes!”
I hadn’t hustled like this since boot camp, but I was not going to screw up getting my dog. Everyone else would have theirs just by walking over to the kennels, but my dog was better, so I had to be better. I cursed myself for oversleeping.
“Morning, Corporal Dempsey,” the instructor said, leaning on the black SUV and giving me a quick once-over from head to toe, his eyebrows raised. I worried my fly was open.
It wasn’t. Why was he looking at me like that? My hair was too short to need combing. My camo fatigues were a little wrinkled, but not so bad that I looked like I’d actually slept in them. What was the problem?
Oh.
My fatigues.
Gunny had said to wear civilian clothes. But I’d slept in my uniform. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I need to go back and change. I’ll be fast.”
“No time,” he said, opening the driver’s side door and getting in. “Can’t be late. Don’t want to leave our new partner waiting at the airport, do we? He’ll be nervous enough.”
“Yes, sir.” I sighed and climbed in, hoping Gunny hadn’t seen me leaving in uniform.
“You can call me Jeff, by the way,” the instructor told me.
“Gus,” I told him. “You can call me Gus.”
“Roger that,” he said.
We drove in silence for a while. I watched the trees race by along the shimmering country roads. It was one of those January days where it was cold and sunny at the same time. The trees had lost their leaves. Some houses still had Christmas decorations up.
I thought about Mom and Zach taking down the Christmas decorations without me. Baxter and TJ would be on the couch, watching them, offering their snores for support.
“Loki’s a special dog, you know,” Jeff said, interrupting my thoughts. “I actually trained him myself when he was a puppy, before …”
I nodded. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to that. Jeff let the thought hang in the air, realizing his mistake, bringing up “before …”
The last handler, KIA.
That’s the worst bit of military elf I know: KIA. Killed in action.
“I’ll never forget my first dog,” Jeff changed the subject. “Gunner. He was a German shepherd, big, stubborn brute. I was a Navy master-at-arms, trained at Lackland to be an MWD handler. Served in the Gulf, back in ’91 … Just guard duty, no combat patrols or anything like that. Different times.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“You couldn’t even adopt the dogs back then. After Gunner got too old to work for the Air Force, they sold him to a police department in Texas. I don’t know what happened to him after that. Nowadays, they let the handler adopt his dog. Although I don’t know about these IDD dogs. The program’s so new, it hasn’t come up yet. Loki’ll be the first dog to go back after …” His voice trailed off again. He kept talking himself into trouble.
That was one of the reasons I didn’t care for talking. It wasn’t that I was unfriendly, like Diaz and the others thought. It’s just that I knew once I got to talking, I’d probably get myself in trouble. I could talk to dogs because they didn’t care if I said something stupid, but with people, it was just better to keep quiet.
Jeff didn’t take the hint, though.
“Of course, I know what you marines think of us Navy guys, right?” he smiled. “Taxi drivers? Someone’s got to drive you around the world, deliver your mail, do your laundry. Am I right?” He laughed too loudly.
It was true that the marines sometimes looked down on the other branches of the military, especially the Navy, which was like a nerdy brother, but it just wasn’t funny when someone else said it. He glanced my way and then back at the road. Then he turned on the radio and classic rock replaced the need for talking.
We got to the airport in about an hour, parked, and found our way to the special services desk near baggage claim, where Loki was supposed to be waiting for us.
As I stood there, excited and anxious to meet my dog, I noticed the other people standing around the luggage conveyor belts looking over in my direction. A few of them gave me little nods, like we were old friends. One older couple came over to me. The husband had a thick white beard that made me think of Santa Claus, and his wife wore a sweatshirt covered in sparkly sequins in the shape of a palm tree. She smiled warmly and shook my hand.
“Thank you for your service,” she said.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I told her. Her husband shook my hand too.
“Lava Dogs,” he said, nodding gravely. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Excuse me, sir?” I asked.
“I served with the One-Three Marines in Da Nang,” he said. “Our nickname was the Lava Dogs. Long time ago.” He nodded again, his eyes looking past me, like he was watching a movie play out in his head, some war memory looping over and over in his brain. They call it the thousand-yard stare. Soldiers get it after they’ve been in combat.
I felt guilty standing in front of him, having them thank me. I hadn’t done anything yet. I hadn’t even left the United States. The farthest I’d been from home was California; the most dangerous thing I’d done was put on a bite suit and get attacked by Ccujo in front of some school kids.
“Anyway, we’ll let you be, son,” his wife said, steering her husband back over toward their baggage carousel. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am,” I answered, although I really didn’t know why I said it.
I looked around and saw more people watching us. A young mother was whispering to her son and nodding in my direction. They snaked their way over through the terminal.
“Sorry to bother you,” the woman said. “My son Jackson wanted to tell you something.”
I looked down at Jackson. He was about my little brother’s age, wearing a Tar Heels basketball jersey, his hair sticking up in crazy directions, just like Zach’s; his arms thin as twigs, just like Zach’s.
“Tell him,” his mother nudged.
The boy spoke quietly, but he looked me square in the eye, mustering all the confidence his twelve years had given him. “Thank you for your service,” the boy said.
I nodded at him and shook his hand. He had a firm grip. He wasn’t much like my little brother after all. Zach would never go up to a stranger and look him in the eye and shake his hand. Zach was more like me that way. We kept to ourselves.
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