by Mike Ritland
“You had to figure that anybody running around out here had to be up to something,” said Lloyd. Even though the dictator Saddam Hussein had been deposed, the area was home to some of his strongest supporters. This was one of the hottest zones in the war, and the intermingling of religious conservatives, various insurgent groups, al Qaeda members, and fierce anti-American sentiment made life that much more difficult (to put it mildly) for U.S. troops there. The efforts to clear dozens and dozens of small towns spread throughout the region were critical to the overall effort to curb insurgency violence and to provide support for the interim government in Iraq.
So Lloyd unleashed Cairo, and the dog went tearing after that lone figure, running away from Lloyd’s position. Even with his night-vision goggles on, it wasn’t so easy for Lloyd to follow the dog as he ran. “I could see the clouds of sand he was kicking up but not a whole lot else at that point,” Lloyd recalled. “He was flooding down, and I could just make out the ‘target’ going into one of the buildings, nothing more than a hut, really.”
At that point, Lloyd and his teammate followed Cairo to the entrance. Cairo hadn’t indicated any odor; if he had, he would have sat down. Instead, he had just stood at the door with his tail fanning. Deciding, then, that it was safe to approach the hut, and using techniques they’d been taught, practiced, and employed hundreds of times, Lloyd and his teammate followed Cairo inside.
Cairo sat down immediately. They were face-to-face with a dozen or so Iraqi women, children, and men. Upon seeing the soldiers and the dog, the Iraqis immediately all put their hands in the air.
“Cairo could have gone blasting in there and gone after any one of them,” Dave said, explaining the importance of how the dog had behaved. “It could have just been a really bad situation for us. In that area especially, we were trying to win hearts and minds. In the Sunni Triangle you could just feel that vibe, that distrust and most likely hatred being directed at us from all over. I couldn’t imagine what would have happened if Cairo had done what he’d been trained to do when he finds people, namely his apprehension bite work. But he had some sense, that dog. He just sat there, looking fierce as hell, and nobody moved. I could tell they were all scared. They sat there wide-eyed and looking like they were seeing the devil, but Cairo just held them there.”
Lloyd and his teammate did a quick search of the room and a check on the Iraqis.
“Things could have gone down worse in so many ways, but with Cairo leading us in there, we knew that we didn’t have to worry about our access point being rigged or even someone fleeing from that location,” Lloyd went on. “We took the guy we’d seen running into that building in for questioning. We never found out the result of that, but we knew this. The guy was alive, and he might have also provided valuable intel to us, all because of Cairo. Without Cairo being there, we would have likely opened fire. Who knows how many other people might have been wounded? I can’t say that Cairo saved our lives in this case, but he helped save some of our credibility. And we were able to fully demonstrate our operational commitment in the area. He helped us let folks know that we weren’t going to come in there to hurt people and destroy their lives. The great thing about dogs is that they are a nonlethal force. Our being able to safely apprehend that man who was running was important.”
* * *
During that same operation, over a three-day stretch, Lloyd and his platoon continued their search of buildings in the same area. Cairo went into more than fifty compounds and countless structures to search for explosives. That kind of repetition can dull your awareness and your sense of potential dangers lurking. Lloyd was well aware that, especially under these conditions, complacency could set in despite anyone’s best efforts to fight against it.
“If you’ve never cleared a building, you can’t know how taxing that is mentally and to some extent physically,” Lloyd said. “That was especially true on that deployment, because we’d heard reports of all kinds of insurgent activity in the area, and from car bombs to snipers to IEDs to ambushes, we’d suffered some pretty heavy casualties. That weighs on your mind anytime you go into some building. Having Cairo on point eased a lot of that anxiety over the unknown. He’d proved himself to the platoon while doing those road sweeps. They knew that they could trust that Cairo would hit on either the bad guys or their weapons or explosives. Going into a room wondering is not the best way to do it. Cairo minimized that worry.”
Cairo remained at the top of his game, too, never giving in to complacency. Each time he approached a new structure he acted as alert as if it were the first and only one he had searched. This proved to be extremely valuable, as Lloyd explained. “We entered yet another of the small stone structures,” he said, “and at first glance, it looked just like the previous thirty-five of them had. There was a wood floor, a carpet, a few pieces of furniture, and not a whole lot more. Cairo did his thing, and he hit on odor and just sat right down in the middle of one room. We checked it before moving it, but once a table was moved to one side, and Cairo stayed right on that spot, we figured something had to be under the floor.”
They removed some of the flooring, and in the space between the floor joists they found a cache of weapons and ammunition.
“You know, in conventional warfare, if you find a few AKs and dozens of rounds, that’s probably not a big deal,” Lloyd said. “But fighting the way we were, in small teams, and not knowing if any of the Iraqi nationals were insurgents or with al Qaeda, getting those few guns and rounds was huge. All it takes is one weapon and one round, and somebody could be killed.”
* * *
In the time before Cairo came up with these finds he and Lloyd had already worked on miles and miles of road clearance, looking for IEDs. Lloyd remembered it this way. “We did so many that it started to blur together. Cairo was just working and working. After a while, I noticed that he would start to show signs of anxiety whenever I wanted him to load up in a vehicle, let alone a helo.”
That was a strong indication that the dog was getting stressed. As Lloyd put it, “He definitely loved his helo rides. A lot of the other dogs got spooked in training, but not Cairo. He’d see one sitting there, rotors going or not, and he’d take off like a shot. He always wanted to be the first one on. Or if he saw them coming in to land, he’d spin circles in excitement. I’d just let him loose once they touched ground, and he would jump in the hold and sit in your seat, happy as could be.”
In country, Lloyd and Cairo hadn’t experienced any helo-related close calls or anything similar, so Lloyd reasoned that Cairo couldn’t be associating bad things with the transport machines themselves. There was nothing Lloyd could point to precisely to explain the cause of Cairo’s reluctance to mount up. He knew that Cairo was fine physically, and, importantly he’d noted no decline in the dog’s capabilities to detect explosives. Cairo’s mood wasn’t any different either.
Lloyd suspected that Cairo’s negative associations with vehicles and choppers might have had something to do with the change in the nature of their operation. Those miles and miles of road clearing were accompanied by search after search through compounds, most of which were empty but nevertheless required careful detection work. For a short while, Cairo had made no finds.
“I wondered if maybe he was like a lot of dogs,” Lloyd said. “When you throw something for them to fetch and they can’t find it, they get upset. They’ve failed to retrieve, and that’s just not their nature.”
He realized that Cairo’s long few days of no hits did roughly coincide with his newfound reluctance to mount up. Regardless of the cause, the effect of a delay to board was potentially dangerous enough that Lloyd knew he had to break that chain of Cairo’s associating vehicles with not finding anything. He decided he needed to do some in-field retraining work with the dog.
Lloyd had worked with Cairo long enough that he sensed this wasn’t a case where a correction, a negative consequence, was going to achieve the desired goal of getting Cairo more comfortable with climbing
into an armored personnel carrier, a helo, or anything else that moved. Lloyd figured that he had to take a few steps back from the actual boarding routine and replace Cairo’s new negative associations with positive ones.
“Cairo was, and is, a ball dog,” Lloyd explained. “Like most of the dogs in the program, his prey drive was off the charts. That meant ball chasing was a huge reward for him.”
Lloyd put Cairo’s vest on him and let him play with a ball for a bit. Then he attached his lead and repeated the ball-playing scenario. With every activity that led up to going operational and then actually getting into a vehicle, he let Cairo get his reward. The point was that if Cairo had those positive associations with every step up to and including getting into a vehicle, he’d get over his stalled entrances. Lloyd’s retraining worked, and within a few days, Cairo was back on track. Shortly after that, his string of no finds came to an end, too.
* * *
Lloyd and Cairo had not always understood and trusted each other that way. In fact, shortly after they were first paired in training in 2008, this duo got off to a rather rocky start.
As part of a drill to simulate an actual firefight to accustom Cairo to the potential reality of what he would face when deployed, Lloyd had been firing his Heckler and Koch MK 23 Mod 0. The next thing he knew, in an instant, the leashed dog was on him, his jaws snapping, spit flying, and the sound of his fierce barking a counterpoint to the sound of the other trainees’ weapons discharging.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” Lloyd recalled. “I knew that Cairo was a bit gun-shy, but to have him turn on me like that was a bit of a surprise. I was out there without a bite suit on, and this dog was giving me his best. I had to throw a few punches at him to try to subdue him. Here I was in the desert in eastern California locked in hand-to-hand, well, hand-to-jaw combat with this 75-pound dog I’d only been working with for a few weeks. Finally I was able to wrestle him to the ground, and I had my hands around his neck. His muscles are so well developed, it was like I had a giant anaconda snake in my grip. I kept choking and choking, and finally he submitted. I’d been around dogs long enough to know that I had to let up immediately. It was like he’d said ‘uncle,’ tapped out like a wrestler might or whatever. If I kept going, his brain would switch from ‘okay, you got me’ mode to ‘okay, this is a life-and-death struggle and I’m going to kick into another gear’ mode. Glad it didn’t come to that.”
Cairo’s reaction to the gunfire was extreme, but he eventually overcame his aversion to become the first West Coast Navy SEAL canine warrior to be deployed. Lloyd and Cairo’s pairing tells the story of the earliest days of the SEALs’ use of canines and their training for a SOF environment. Those first efforts necessarily, were a case of expediency over experience. By that I mean that the command decided that the other SEAL teams should have access to the same “weapon,” meaning MWDs, that SEAL Team Six had already been utilizing. However, there was no ready supply of dogs and trainers who could do the kinds of specific training that we do today. So the navy initially obtained a lot of its dogs from the civilian community. The closest thing that anyone had to the kind of dogs needed was “attack” dogs, as Lloyd called them, who worked for law enforcement agencies.
The vendors and trainers in those first few training classes had years of valuable experience providing and training dogs for the tasks required by civilian security forces. They weren’t prepared to make these dogs the best possible partners to help SEALs carry out a mission-specific set of tasks. They didn’t have the tactical experience. This isn’t a knock on anyone, not the navy, not the breeders, the vendors, or the trainers. In fact, it was all just pretty much the way it is whenever something new starts up. You learn as you go and grow.
For Lloyd, being part of something new was enormously appealing. When word first came down that the SEALs were looking for volunteers, he was eager to get started with the program. A dog lover and not someone who adapted easily to a desk job, Lloyd saw this as the ideal opportunity for him. He had no formal experience in training dogs, but he wasn’t alone in that. Actually, as a kind of blank slate, he was in some ways better off than someone who came into the program with preconceived ideas and habits that needed to be broken.
Lloyd soon realized he wasn’t comfortable with all the training methods that were being used, but he followed the instructions he was given, trusting that what he was being told was the right thing. In order to correct the dogs, in those early days a correction stick, which was a cross between a riding crop and a billy club (a soft leather instrument), was used frequently. This is obviously not what you want to use if you’re training a dog using positive reinforcement. Lloyd didn’t like the idea of batting Cairo’s snout with it, but it seemed to work. However, Lloyd is now pretty certain that Cairo’s attack on him during the weapons-firing exercise wouldn’t have happened if they’d been employing other training methods earlier on, in those days before I was involved with training.
“I knew that Cairo was a bit gun-shy, and he also saw me, because of how I was taught to correct him, as someone who caused him discomfort a lot of the time,” Lloyd said, thinking back to that time. “Dogs are thinkers, but not on the most sophisticated level. He saw and heard me doing something he didn’t like. He also saw me not so much as someone he didn’t really like but someone he couldn’t completely trust, and who, at times, he even feared. I was the source of most of his discomfort, so when the opportunity came along, and he was really uncomfortable and wanted to make the noise stop, he did what his breeding and his instincts told him to do—he came after me and tried to shut me down. I don’t know exactly if rewarding him more during training would have helped us avoid that situation, but I think it would have.”
Ironically, it was after that battle Lloyd and Cairo waged that their relationship changed significantly for the better. Perhaps they each sensed and respected the power of the other and decided it was best to work together as a team. It had been clear to Lloyd from their very first meeting that Cairo was a supreme alpha dog, but right from the start he knew, too, that the dog could be a calm presence.
“We weren’t given a choice of which dog we were going to be paired off with,” Lloyd recalled. “I was given a number and then told to go to the kennels and find the corresponding number. That was going to be my dog. I was also handed an ear-protection headphone-type device. Even with that on, the noise level in the kennel was incredible. My first response was to wonder what I had gotten myself into. I walked in there and these dogs were barking like mad. Some were chewing at the mesh in their kennel; a few were spinning around. It was pandemonium. When I got to my number, there was this dog just sitting there. He was high and tight, squared away like a good sailor, sitting there with his back straight, his head high, and his ears up. That’s how he carried himself later, too, especially around the other dogs. He was very dominant, and I liked that about him.”
* * *
In those early days of the program, the training facilities were not a part of any base. Training took place on the property of the breeder or trainer. The trainers believed that bonding with the dogs was important, so on that first day, the handler trainees took their dogs home. Actually, since they were far from their home bases, they took their dogs to nearby hotels. While the places allowed dogs, it’s unlikely they were prepared for all these dogs and their handlers.
“We were all kind of surprised,” recalled Lloyd, “that after just meeting these dogs for the first time and only going through some basic introductory information, filling out paperwork mostly, we were sent home with these clearly aggressive, high-energy dogs. We looked at each other and said, ‘What are we supposed to do now?’”
The trainers had incorrectly assumed that Lloyd and the other members of this SEAL canine group had prior experience in handling working dogs. Lloyd vividly remembers those first few minutes in the hotel room. Cairo trotted in, using that high-stepping gait that the breed is known for. He sniffed around the room, checking out
every corner of it. After a few minutes, he settled down on the floor, watchful but quiet.
“I got off easy,” Lloyd said. “That night, in the room next to mine, I could hear this dog going crazy. It sounded like he was just chewing the place to pieces. I could hear things crashing to the floor. The next morning I asked the guy what was going on, and he told me that it wasn’t as bad as what one of the other guys had gone through. After the dog tore up the room, that handler had put him in the car, figuring he could do less damage there. The dog ended up tearing up a headrest. He just chewed through the thing until all that was left of it was a metal frame and a pile of stuffing.”
As time went on, Lloyd came to have a great deal of respect for Cairo’s independent and fierce spirit. “He was tough. He wouldn’t back down. A few simple corrections with the stick often weren’t enough, he was that strong-willed. He knew what was right and wrong, but I think he sensed that I was new at this whole deal and he really tested me. As a result, I think in the end, he ended up teaching me much more than I taught him,” Lloyd recalled.
Like most of the other handlers, Lloyd had had a successful naval career prior to joining the dog program. After graduating from BUD/S, his first assignment was with SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team (SDVT) One on the West Coast. The SDVT platoons are a subset of the SEAL teams and also fall under the Naval Special Warfare Command. They trace their origins back to World War II, when they worked with Italian and British combat swimmers, and their job is to deliver SEALs via submersibles to where they need to be to accomplish their mission, along with their equipment.
Lloyd also did a tour on the East Coast with SEAL Team Four, doing jungle work as well as participating in the effort to stop the flow of illegal drugs in South America. After two other assignments, and an opportunity he passed on to work with the navy’s mammal program, he wound up exactly where he wanted to be—with Cairo.