Bonding wasn’t all about chow. The marines spent hours every day playing with their dogs, petting them, grooming them, and just hanging out. “This is the best job in the world,” Willingham told Lucca while brushing her long auburn and black coat after they’d chased each other around outside for an hour or so.
In a few days, the handlers introduced Kongs to their dogs. The hard red or black rubber toys, shaped in the fashion of small snowmen someone had squashed a bit from the top, are ubiquitous in the military dog world. They’re the ultimate reward for many dogs—eminently chewable, virtually indestructible, and with an off-kilter bounce that resembles wild prey on the run.
Lucca quickly became obsessed with the Kong. When the toy appeared, everything else disappeared, including Willingham. She didn’t seem to hear him or see him when she was chomping on the red rubber, eyes semiclosed in bliss. “Meet me halfway, Lucca,” he implored one day when she was facing away from him with her jaws wrapped around the Kong, refusing to look at him. “We gotta get past this.”
He had an idea. A chunk of her paycheck was guaranteed: his affection and enthusiastic praise. She could have that anytime she did something good, and it would last a long time. Even when the words died down, she could sense Willingham’s pride and approval. But the Kong was a commodity that came and went quickly. She earned it, enjoyed it for less than a minute, and had to give it back. Who wants to give back a paycheck?
Willingham decided to stretch out Lucca’s paycheck in hopes she wouldn’t be so grabby with it. When it came time to take back the Kong, he tossed another Kong. She’d run for it, bring it back, and he’d throw the other Kong out. Revolving credit! Paychecks everywhere! The canine version of supply-side economics worked. With the Kong commodity less rare, Lucca learned that the guy throwing these toys was a valuable guy to know.
“LUCKY BASTARD, YOU’VE got the best dog here,” Knight told Willingham a month later, as they settled into their cots in a room they shared near the kennel.
“My Shepinois is pretty amazing,” Willingham replied, and smiled like a proud dad. After the bumpy start, Lucca was at the head of her class—excelling in basic obedience and some scent work.
Knight rubbed his neck in a vain attempt to keep a stress headache at bay. It had been another tough day. He had at least four years more military dog experience than the other handlers and was well-known as an exemplary trainer who could “talk dog.” Naturally, Michael matched him with the most challenging dog of the four.
If dogs could have attention deficit disorder, Rocky—an angular Malinois with giant bat-like ears that looked like they belonged on another, much larger dog—had it bad. The behavior issue had come to a head earlier that day when Knight and his Malinois were training together in a field near the kennels. Spring was in the air, and butterflies occasionally winged by. When this happened, Rocky stopped whatever he was doing, turned his head toward the fluttering insect, and watched it as it looped about and eventually flew out of sight.
Getting through to Rocky during these reveries was futile. Rocky was in his own world. It took several minutes for Knight to get Rocky back on task after the butterfly left the scene. This would never do in combat. Not at all. Knight had a few months to get Rocky on board. It would be an intensive training challenge.
Butterflies were the least of it, though. What took Rocky out of the game for days were female dogs in heat. Female Oketz dogs don’t get spayed, unlike American military dogs. The rationale is that the male Oketz dogs are going to be dealing with a lot of unspayed female dogs in third world countries. They have to learn to ignore those tempting calls of the wild. But when any of Rocky’s three gal pals were in heat, he was a dog undone. He couldn’t function. He drooled. His mouth chattered. He couldn’t focus on Knight.
“You look like a fool, boy,” Knight told him as he brought Rocky back to his kennel to chill.
If Rocky were the only dog Knight had to train, that would have been enough work. But he was just half the equation. Earlier that month, Michael told the marines that someone among them should take on another dog, in case one of theirs didn’t pass the rigorous training standards.
“What about this one?” Knight said, pointing to a Belgian Tervuren, who looked like a very furry German shepherd with a dark head, in a kennel next to theirs. “He’s already here in the kennel. I can take him on starting tomorrow.”
“No, no, no! You don’t want Bram [rhymes with mom].”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s crazy! Craaazy,” he said in his thick Russian accent. “He doesn’t listen to anyone. He’s one of the rare untrainable ones.”
Bram, now standing at attention in his kennel, looked as if he were intent on listening to the conversation.
“Untrainable? No dog is untrainable,” Knight said with a cocky chuckle. He gave a nod in the direction of Bram. “We’ll take that dog.”
A month later, Knight was having serious second thoughts about his proclamation.
Although Bram wasn’t being trained as a protection dog, he liked to bite—people, the ceiling of his kennel, anything that moved and anything that didn’t move. While searching, the dog bit chunks of grass out of the ground.
The bars of Tel Aviv provided Knight with the kind of setting he needed to talk Bram troubles with Willingham. One Saturday evening, after another challenging week with Bram, the two sat at the popular club, Whisky a Go Go, drinks in hand.
“He’s pissed off for having to do what I command him to do versus what he wants to do,” Knight said loudly, above the noise of the crowd. It felt good to shout about this dog.
“He’s a tough one, man,” Willingham said.
“Bram always thinks he knows what’s best for Bram,” Knight said, and took a long draft from his glass of Red Bull and vodka.
During detection exercises, instead of calmly walking or trotting to sniff out explosives, Bram raced counterclockwise full speed with his body tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. Sometimes he stopped, picked up a thick log or other fascinating object, and ran back to Knight with it.
One day after detecting an explosive, Bram scooped up the block of C-4 and, head raised high with pride in his find, galloped back to Knight. The explosive was falling apart from the pressure of his teeth when he delivered it to his handler.
“You hairy bastard!” Knight said, standing in disbelief as Bram dropped it at his feet. “Are you trying to kill me?”
Knight knew the explosive was a highly stable one that even Bram’s mouth couldn’t detonate, but he figured Bram didn’t know that.
At least Bram didn’t share Rocky’s love of the ladies. He didn’t even seem to notice when they went into heat. But he did have a one-track mind. “If you could read his thoughts,” Knight told Willingham, “it would be ‘Kong! Kong! Kong! Kong! Kong! Kong! Kong! Kong!’”
Knight often lay awake at night, trying to figure out ways to deal with this dog. He’d trained many dozens of dogs in his military career, but nothing had prepared him for Bram. Could Michael be right? Maybe. But he couldn’t give up on Bram. He could just hear Michael, with his Russian accent, admonishing him. “You see? The dog is crazy! Craaazy! I told you so!”
Failure wasn’t an option.
THE BEAUTY OF specialized search dogs is that they can follow their noses far more independently than leashed dogs. There’s a wide consensus in the military that the noses of dogs, especially the long-snouted breeds commonly used for detection work, are unbeatable when it comes to finding bombs. A good nose on a well-trained dog who has bonded with a great handler is a formidable weapon against bad guys who plant IEDs in the fields and roadways of war. Being able to trust a dog to do the job off leash is a significant force multiplier.
In the years following Vietnam—a war in which dogs were put to use as sentries, scouts, and mine detectors, and then, tragically, left behind or euthanized when t
he war was over—bomb-dog work shifted focus. These dogs became used primarily for ensuring base safety, supporting the State Department and the Secret Service with special events, and being on call for emergency explosives-detection work.
But after the U.S. put boots on the ground in Iraq, all that changed. In 2003, the Defense Department announced that a young soldier, Army Private First Class Jeremiah D. Smith, died after his vehicle was “hit by unexploded ordnance.” It was an unintentional oxymoron that revealed the military’s lack of experience in this deadly new type of warfare that was about to unfold.
Soon after Smith’s death, these explosives began taking a noticeable toll on U.S. troops. The term improvised explosive device and its acronym, IED, readily worked their way into military and civilian parlance. Al-Qaeda operatives saw that these relatively cheap and easy-to-make explosives could do the kind of damage to coalition forces that the operatives could never dream of doing in traditional combat. There was no predicting it at that time, but IEDs would become the number one killer of American troops in two wars, in Iraq and then Afghanistan.
The U.S. needed a weapon to combat these new killers.
The specialized off-leash bomb dogs got the call.
Experts usually concurred that no machine could compare with the nose of a dog for detecting IEDs. The combination of a trained dog handler’s ability to spot potential danger areas on the ground and the dog’s prowess at sniffing explosives would prove to be a formidable defense against these homemade bombs. With some extra training to acclimate them to new scents and the types of environments they’d encounter, bomb dogs were ready for the battlefield.
Most military dogs went to war on leash and still do. But a couple of years after the initial canine involvement in Iraq, leaders in the military dog world got a prototype of the specialized search dog program up and running.
Specialized search dogs learn commands like forward, left, and right and work in tandem with a handler. They listen to the handler, watch for hand and arm signals—well-trained dogs are aces at responding to these visual commands—and let their own noses take over when they’re in the right spot. They can work at distances of a few hundred yards from their handlers when they wear radios in their harness pockets. At that distance handlers aren’t able to scan the area the dog is working as well as they normally do. Signs of IEDs are more likely to go unnoticed by the human. But this distance work is a sometimes critical military dog tactic that requires unusual skill.
These canines have to be smart, dedicated, focused, and very well trained. If standard military working dogs have bachelor’s degrees, specialized search dogs have PhDs.
After a few more months of SSD training, Lucca was still the clear top dog of her class. Sometimes she’d confuse right and left, but who doesn’t? “No, Lucca, left,” Willingham would tell her gently if she went off course to the right. And off to the left she’d go. She aced nearly every skill, quickly. Obedience, scent training, detection, off-leash work. Lucca made it look easy. And she remained unruffled regardless of the task.
Lucca excelled at off-leash detection. Whether in the dry hills covered with brown weeds and dotted with craggy rocks, the forests of tall trees with spindly trunks, on the hot roadsides, or around small structures reminiscent of what they’d find if they deployed to Iraq, she seemed happy and at ease doing her searches. Even on the hottest days, she had a spring in her gait that made her look like a dog enjoying a jaunt in a park. When she found an explosive, her tail went crazy, and Willingham could see that same smile she’d worn the day they met.
When other dogs might go off focus, Lucca always seemed to stay on task. She could find a small amount of explosives scent far from Willingham while he used subtle hand signals to direct her where he thought the explosive could be, based on environmental cues. A little mound of rocks here, a haystack there, some scrapes in the ground where scrapes shouldn’t be. She never balked on strange surfaces or at loud noises, and she checked in frequently, turning around and glancing at Willingham to make sure she was going the way he intended and changing direction when she needed to. Willingham was in awe of her talents and dedication and felt the kind of pride he imagined fathers feel when their children excel.
But something was eating at Willingham. One reason the off-leash skills of specialized search dogs are so valuable is the standoff distance they create between the bomb and those out on a mission. If an off-leash dog accidentally sets off an IED while sniffing for one, the humans on the mission could well be safe from the blast. The dog, however, would likely perish.
Willingham understood the need to keep everyone out of harm’s way. One of the reasons he joined the marines was to keep others as safe as he could. He figured it was genetic. He came from a long line of military men. Lucca was becoming a fellow marine in his eyes, someone he would look out for as she looked out for him. “We’re a team, Lucca,” he told her as he sat next to her during a break one afternoon. He didn’t tell her what he was thinking: I hope you’ll never have to take a bomb for me.
BY THE TIME their six months of training in Israel wrapped up, all the dog teams had made significant progress. Even Rocky and Bram had moved out of remedial education and seemed to have a fairly bright future as specialized search dogs. They were still works in progress, but they were ready for the next step.
They flew off to the U.S. for more fine-tuned training. But first the dogs had to go through the canine equivalent of military induction at Lackland. They all got an operation called a gastropexy, in which the lining of the stomach is stitched to the abdominal wall in order to prevent fatal stomach twisting in cases of bloat. The female dogs were spayed, and all the dogs got identification numbers tattooed inside their left ear while they were still anesthetized. Lucca’s was K458, a number that seared into Willingham’s memory immediately. It was like her last name. Lucca Kilo 458.
After the dogs recovered, the teams headed to Yuma Proving Ground, in Arizona. One of the Oketz trainers met the dogs and handlers there for seventy-three days of training in an environment very similar to Iraq—from the climate to the terrain to mock Iraq-style buildings, and the loud gunfire, rocket, and mortar simulations.
The dogs and handlers polished skills they’d learned in Israel, taking them to the next level and building confidence while working in realistic scenarios. The teams may have done roadway searches a few dozen times each, but more practice meant they’d be ready for almost anything they faced in war. The handlers worked on tasks as seemingly simple as getting their dogs around a bend in the road and taking advantage of wind currents in a variety of settings. The skills had to be ingrained so they were second nature.
The marines stayed at the Best Western while their dogs stayed at the Yuma Proving Ground kennels, which were set up open-air fashion, with no walls, just a high roof. Sleeping in their kennels after a hard day’s work, the dogs were vulnerable to dangerous critters that might crawl out of the desert, so the handlers had to take turns spending the night in the office beside the kennels. Every four hours, whoever had kennel duty would pry himself from his cot and check the dogs to make sure they weren’t suffering from spider or snake bites. The four handlers were relieved when a class of about a dozen specialized search dog students came in from Lackland for their own training and took on their overnight shifts.
All five dogs from Israel were doing very well, but Lucca, working in perfect synch with Willingham, and dedicated to whatever he asked of her, was still the class star. So when it came time to do a demo for the Lackland students, Willingham figured his confidence in her was well placed. “We’re gonna smash this, Lucca,” he told her quietly. “You’ve been a freakin’ robot at distances a lot farther than this.”
The demo involved a detection problem that led to a dry creek bed. Lucca had to walk down the deeper part of the creek bed, which ran about four feet below the surrounding sand and dry dirt. The former creek was about eight feet w
ide, leaving plenty of room for a comfortable passage. Willingham’s subtle voice commands and hand signals from no more than a hundred yards away would guide her through to the other side, where the creek bed disappeared and came back to ground level. It would be like threading a needle. As she approached the end, she would be greeted by an explosives scent that would make her day, and all the students would witness the kind of skill and teamwork they could aspire to if they kept at it.
At least that was the idea.
At first, Lucca moved perfectly to Willingham’s signals for left, right, and forward. But when she approached the place where she had to follow the creek bed, instead of going straight in, she went left. She went right. She would not go forward into it. It was as if it was still filled with water and she was scared of water. (She wasn’t, of course.) No matter what Willingham did, the needle would not be threaded.
He realized Lucca needed a little time to rest and reset. He didn’t want her to get any more frustrated than she must have already been. He walked about fifty yards toward her and told her, gently, “Lucca, down.” She lay down. A few minutes later, he told her, “Lucca, forward,” signaled forward with his right hand, and waited to see what she’d do.
Much to Willingham’s relief, this time she nailed it. She walked straight down the creek bed, and as she approached the other side, she caught the scent of the explosive and beelined her way toward it, sniffing the ground intently all the way. Her tail fanned fast, making it clear to everyone watching that she was over the moon about this latest discovery. She sniffed some more, lay down, and stared at the spot where the explosive was buried. The students from Lackland cheered; Willingham loved her up and gave her her Kong. He vowed to himself that if he ever started getting too big for his britches, he’d remember this demo.
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