Navy SEAL Dogs

by Mike Ritland

  As I also said, Luke was pretty bite aggressive. All these qualities allowed him to excel at apprehension training. In fact, one of the challenges a decoy had during an apprehension training exercise with Luke was catching him. He was always really, really good at feinting and faking. He’d come at you, looking for sure like he was going to come at you hard, low, and left. Then, at the last split second, he’d switch it up and catch you off guard. As a decoy, you take pride in not being knocked down because you do it so often that you get good at it. You get comfortable, and then you start to get a little cocky, thinking that no dog’s going to take you down. Then Luke comes along, of course.

  One night a few years ago, Wayne and I were on an apprehension-training exercise with a group of about six dogs and handlers. Wayne grew up mostly in Florida and spent a lot of his early years in the swamps, tracking and hunting wild hogs using dogs. I don’t know of anyone else who can read a dog like Wayne can, and I also don’t know anyone else who can work as a decoy any better. He’s also a trainer, and one of the German shepherds he had was titled in seven or eight different disciplines, which is an almost unheard-of accomplishment. Wayne seems to have an extrasharp sense of anticipation about what a dog is thinking of doing. So he and Luke were quite the match.

  That night, just like we always did, Wayne and I headed up the mountains in advance of the others. We were “on comms,” in communication with the handlers and our assistants. We got several miles out ahead of the other men and the dogs and radioed back when we selected a good hideout. Then it was time for the dogs to detect human odor and alert their handlers. Each handler would give the “Reviere” command, and the handler and dog would come looking for us. We were suited up, of course, wearing middleweight bite suits with a neoprene underlayer. It’s kind of like a wet suit, but the bottom layer offers additional padding. The outer layer is slick, which makes it harder for a dog to grab hold of it.

  It generally takes the dogs twenty to thirty minutes to cover the few miles between our find position and their release point. We did a debrief after each dog went through his exercise, taking notes so that we could do a full-blown evaluation of each dog and handler at the completion of the entire exercise. After the first five dogs, we took a break. Then Wayne was due up as the decoy again. I looked at him and said, “You know who’s coming, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Yes, I do,” he said, sounding both a bit prideful and on edge. It was going to be Luke.

  I said, “I bet you can’t esquive Luke.” Esquive is a French word that means “to dodge or to sidestep.”

  Wayne shook his head. “I’ll esquive him all day long.”

  So I said, “Okay, well, let’s bet dinner on it. Winner’s choice.”

  After a few minutes, I climbed to a little ridge where I could see better. It was a fairly well-lit night, not quite full-moon bright but close. Over the comms, about fifteen minutes before, I’d heard, “Dog out,” so it was going to be just a few minutes until the action started. I sat there thinking, All right, I can’t wait to see this.

  Keep in mind, Wayne is the best decoy I’ve ever seen. He’s so quick on his feet that, if anybody could esquive Luke, it would be Wayne. Honestly, I thought he had a pretty good chance of doing it. Then, when I saw Luke coming, I was a little disappointed. He was charging at Wayne from much the same direction as an earlier dog, Duke, had come at me. I knew Wayne had seen how that went down—it turned into one of those times when I thought my arm was going to be crushed. So Wayne was going to have the advantage of seeing my mistake.

  Suddenly, though, still running at close to full tilt, Luke didn’t come uphill at Wayne. Instead, he went around a few scrub bushes from the windward side and buttoned up back around. As a result, Wayne had to spin around fast. As any good soldier knows, it’s important to take the high ground, and that’s exactly what Luke did. He took Wayne completely off guard, hit him right in the chest, and just pancaked my good friend. Wayne is 6′2″ and weighs between 220 and 225 pounds; Luke blitzed him as if he were a bag full of leaves.

  Wayne managed to get up and finish out the exercise, but afterward he was reluctant to own up to his loss. “I knocked that one on purpose. I didn’t want the dog to get hurt,” he insisted.

  Whatever.

  “Dude,” I said to Wayne, “don’t give me that excuse. I want my dinner.”

  Wayne made good on his promise, and I also had good ammunition to throw at him for the next few weeks about how Luke outsmarted him. The combination of Luke’s cunning and strength was extremely impressive.

  * * *

  In any school there are star students, the ones whose performance in the classroom or on the playing fields makes it clear that they are going to succeed at whatever they choose to do. Sometimes they live up to those expectations, and sometimes they don’t. The same is true with the dogs that we train. Every time a governmental agency, a military group, or even a private individual looking for a protection dog comes to view the prospects that I have, I mentally compile a list of the dogs that I think are the sure things among the bunch, the ones who are, undoubtedly, in my mind the ones worthy of the purchase price.

  As often as not, my mental rankings are a lot like those preseason polls and predictions in football—some of them prove to be true, and nearly as many prove to be off target. Everybody who views dogs during their workouts and showings sees something slightly different. I’m biased, of course. I think that what I see in the dogs is the “truth” about them, but as the saying goes, “The customer is always right.”

  Because I’ve been involved in the breeding, training, and sale of dogs for more than fifteen years now, you might think it’s easy for me to say good-bye to the dogs I’ve worked with. In one sense that’s true. I’m glad to see them go and do what they were bred, born, and trained to do, but there’s always going to be some emotional attachment to the dogs. As much as I’ve talked about them and their abilities, these dogs aren’t machines. They all clearly have distinct personalities, like Luke.

  One dog in particular, who shall remain nameless, got my attention very early in the process. Immediately after we brought him over to the United States, I went to his crate to let him out. It was like I’d released a Tasmanian devil. That dog got up on his hind legs, spun around in circles like a tornado, snapped his jaws like the maniac he was, and generally said to me, “Hello, my name is Havoc.” Essentially, this dog was announcing to me that I was going to have my hands full just to get him through the most basic obedience training. As much as I’ve talked about what near-perfect physical specimens these dogs are, because they’ve been bred to preserve the high energy and tenaciousness necessary to go at it in hostile environments, they are seldom docile. I developed a tremendous amount of respect for the spastic Tas-like dog, but I can’t say that I ever really developed a bond of affection for him.

  That wasn’t the case with one of the first dogs to work with a SEAL team. Rocket is like one of those kids you can’t help admiring or hating. You know, the kid that is good-looking, athletic, and friendly. All the kids like him, the teachers and administrators get along well with him, and he never puts on airs.

  On Rocket’s second deployment to northern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, he and his handler, Brent, arrived at a firebase that was still under construction. This was in the dead of winter in January 2007. The troops were living in open base tents while the buildings were being completed. To put it mildly, life there was a mixture of dealing with bone-chilling cold and frozen tedium.

  Handlers have to be very careful about how they integrate themselves into the SEAL teams and with other military pesonnel. They have to be sensitive to the fact that each of their comrades brings a different set of associations and experiences to being in close contact with a MWD. Some of the men are fearful. Others are curious. Still others are disdainful out of ignorance about the roles the dogs will eventually play, and so on. For a handler and a dog, it’s just like being a newbie in any situation
; you have to earn the respect of your teammates.

  Brent wanted to make sure that everybody understood from the get-go that Rocket was there to be a help and not an impediment. He also let them know that his relationship with Rocket was a kind of one-off—that the two of them had forged a real bond in the nearly two years they’d worked together before being deployed.

  In order to respect the other troops and their safety and their personal space and gear, Brent and Rocket needed segregated housing. Basically, they needed their own room. The Seabees, the navy’s construction battalion who were building the firebase, were assigned to build a partition with a door within the shared tent where Brent and Rocket were to rack out.

  As luck would have it, the pair was already assigned to a tent where the Seabees were quartered. In the first couple of days, before the wall could be built, Rocket did what dogs do: He foraged for food. The Seabees had a few snacks that Rocket sniffed out and consumed. Brent apologized, and he could tell that a few of the guys were cool with it, while others looked a little anxious. One thing was clear, no one was going to complain too loudly or confront the fierce-looking dog. A compromise was reached. Until the wall and door could go up to keep Rocket away from their stuff, they’d just put it out of his reach.

  Brent noticed that as the days went on, and some of the guys in the tent had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to do a watch, they’d come back and find Rocket sacked out in their rack, snoring away. The displaced guys let the dog keep on sleeping there. Brent found a couple of guys sleeping on the floor while Rocket happily snoozed more comfortably. At first Brent thought that they didn’t dare wake up and roust Rocket out of their rack because they were afraid of him. He finally asked some of the guys about it. They said that they didn’t mind Rocket sleeping in their beds; they actually kind of liked the idea of having him around. Rocket became a kind of mascot, a four-legged, furry roommate, and he took full advantage of the attention and affection he got. Not every MWD has his temperament; there was just something about his big ears and quizzical expression that let you know that he was easygoing when off duty. The only complaint the guys had was that Rocket sometimes farted while sitting in the middle of everybody, an “end result” of them sneaking him foods he wasn’t accustomed to getting. Not that much different from the rest of the guys, in reality.

  The wall that was supposed to keep Rocket from the rest of the guys never really got built. At first the framing went up, then it was sheeted, but no door was hung. The Seabees and others confessed that they liked having Rocket around, and they knew that once that door went up, he’d be separated from them. In time, the wall came down completely. The guys were told by the officer in charge (OIC) that it had to go back up and a door had to be installed. Once again, the guys came up with excuses to delay building it. Finally the wall went up, but for the duration of that deployment, no door was ever hung, and Rocket was free to mingle with the rest of them. Maybe he was like having a bit of home for some of the guys, but I do know that as much as that, it was a tribute to Rocket’s amiability. His big brown eyes melted a lot of hearts and earned him his share of treats. By the end of their deployment, Brent told me, he had a list of names a mile long of guys who wanted first dibs on one of Rocket’s puppies.

  * * *

  Some say that dogs are nature’s greatest con artists, that they’ve finagled for themselves a pretty soft gig compared to most animals. They’re certainly not parasites, though, and the kinds of relationship we and canines have negotiated over the years have truly proved beneficial, just as Rocket’s role both in the field and on station did. All I will say is that whatever ease dogs have accrued as a result of their domestication, we’ve frequently asked a lot from them in return. That’s particularly true as it applies to our long history of using them in warfare. Another way to look at it is this. The people we allow to take advantage of our kindness are generally not strangers—they’re usually family members and close friends. We benefit from those relationships, or have benefited from them in the past and hope to in the future. So really, nobody is truly being conned. You can also look at it from the dog’s perspective. We’ve taken advantage of their good nature and their desire to share their companionship with us, and we’ve used them to our advantage. Everything’s a trade-off, I suppose, but in my estimation, we humans have come out far ahead in the canine-human transaction.

  11

  THE BOND AT BOTH ENDS OF THE LEASH

  A dog can have a great personality and be very well bred, athletic, and smart. That still leaves us with a lot of work to do before a dog is ready to be deployed. A key component of that work includes the dog’s handler. Not unlike the dog that will be at the other end of the leash, each handler has to go through his own extensive training. I’ve spent a lot of time training both handlers and dogs, sometimes separately and sometimes together. I’ve found that even though someone is a great SEAL team member, that doesn’t mean he’ll function well as a handler, and just because a dog has earned his title, that doesn’t mean he’ll make a great SOF dog.

  A handler and a dog that do qualify as individuals still have to function seamlessly as a team within the larger SEAL team and the battlefield into which they are deployed. There needs to be extraordinary trust, understanding, and respect between a handler and his dog, like the kind Brent and Rocket have for each other. Another amazing duo is Aaron and Castor. These two serve as a template for the kind of heart and mind necessary to take on the task of being a Navy SEAL handler-and-dog team. Aaron’s dedication to his dog differs only slightly from the devotion that most pet owners feel toward the four-legged friend in their lives.

  Like me, Aaron grew up knowing what he wanted to do with his life. Living in South Dakota, just outside Rapid City, he couldn’t see Mount Rushmore, but he had a much closer and living, breathing example of our country’s greatness—his grandfather. Aaron’s grandfather was a member of the “Greatest Generation,” meaning he grew up during the Great Depression and went on to fight on the battlefields of World War II. Like my own grandfather, and like so many others, he didn’t sit around spinning yarns about his exploits. In fact, no one else in Aaron’s family except for Aaron seemed to place much emphasis on Grandpa Jim’s experiences. “I was just extremely interested,” Aaron said. “There was something about the military that I liked, so I started asking him about World War II. And once he started talking, he opened up and just told me all kinds of amazing stories.”

  Aaron’s grandfather was one of those patriotic Americans who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor and became a boatswain’s mate on three different ships. He was also one of those fortunate Americans who served for the duration, including a lengthy stint aboard the USS Portland, which saw duty in major naval battles in the Pacific. From Guadalcanal to Corregidor to Okinawa, the men aboard the USS Portland served with distinction. Aaron’s grandfather didn’t glorify the war, and Aaron recalled some of the horrific elements of naval combat he was told about, but mostly he remembered what his grandfather told him about the camaraderie among the crewmen and the lifelong friendships he made. “Basically, he said that those experiences were the best and worst times of his life,” Aaron said.

  Aaron described himself as a rambunctious, semidelinquent kid who frequently found himself in trouble. That led to his desire to join the military. “I wanted to be sneaky,” he said, “and I thought Special Operations were cool.” He’d heard about the marines’ Force Reconnaissance from a neighbor who was a part of that group and was initially interested in finding out more about them, but that changed when a friend’s brother returned from the U.S. Naval Academy over the Christmas holidays. Aaron had never heard of the SEALs, but he began to do research. “I was big into swimming,” he recalled. “I loved doing martial arts, so as soon as I read about the Navy SEALs, that was it.” From the time he was thirteen years old, Aaron knew that he one day wanted to belong to an elite SEAL team. He told himself that as soon as he graduated from high school, he was
going to join the navy.

  As much as he liked swimming, Aaron wasn’t on the swim team, but he did play water polo. Actually, “play” isn’t exactly the right word. “Because I didn’t have the cardio fitness of the other guys and couldn’t even complete all the practice laps, the coaches just told me to go into the other pool while the other guys practiced and scrimmaged,” he said. “I kind of realized I was a terrible swimmer.” Eventually Aaron overcame that, but it took some time and a lot of hard work.

  “I’m a big reader,” Aaron said, “and I love to research things before I get into them, so I knew what I was getting into when I decided I wanted to become a SEAL team member. But I really underestimated how hard it was going to be. When I showed up for BUD/S training, I wasn’t ready. When I showed up at BUD/S, out of a class of 186 or so guys, I was the second slowest runner in the class. After the first day, the slowest guy quit, so I became the slowest.”

  Aaron can laugh about the situation now, but at the time, it took all his mental strength to get through it. He’d enlisted at the tail end of 1993, then spent nearly three years training to become and then serve as a corpsman in a military medical unit before he graduated from BUD/S in 1997. As a member of his SEAL team, he served initially in the U.S. Pacific Command Theater out of Guam. “We traveled a lot doing Foreign Internal Defense training with other countries’ special ops guys,” he recalled. “I was in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, the Philippines.”

  In 2004, on his third deployment to Iraq, he was doing Direct Action Missions, hunting down high-value targets there. Later, like me, he transitioned from chasing bad guys to protecting good guys, serving on a personal security detail for members of the interim government. After his fourth platoon deployment, he was assigned shore duty for one year. That didn’t sit well with him. “I had a desk job working with the medical department,” he said. “I basically was responsible for assigning other corpsmen to be on hand when the SEALs were doing training exercises. If a SEAL platoon went to the range to shoot, they needed a medic there. I was the guy who sent a non-SEAL corpsman to those locations.”