A few hundred yards off to the right of his sector, Willingham could see the Tigris—wide, winding through an area of thick palm groves and grasses of the Tigris River valley. He thought about the times he and his dad and some friends would float down the North River in canoes and flat-bottomed boats for hours and hours, just float through miles of western Alabama. After a while, they’d set up camp in just the right clearing, grill burgers and gulp cold drinks, take some .22s and shoot targets and go fishing.
Willingham sensed the wall of rushing heat a split second before he heard—and felt—the explosion. He swung around and saw a ball of flames receding and a section of cinder-block wall twenty feet away in rubble. Another blast, farther away, sent a tree and nearby foliage into flames. The work of rocket-propelled grenades, RPGs.
Immediately the compound began taking fire from PKM machine guns and AK-47s. Willingham adjusted his position so he had some protection from behind a high post, and fired his M4. The soldiers did the same, including one with an M249 machine gun. Radios exploded with communications from the platoon leader and the other soldiers.
As Willingham fired, he noticed that Lucca had jumped up and was wagging her tail, excited, as if they were playing a game. He realized what was going on. It was a game, at least to Lucca. They’d done so much gunfire training together before deployment, with constant praise and rewards for being calm, that it was just more fun in her view. Out of habit, up on the scorching roof during a firefight that was anything but a game, he began praising her as he returned fire.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
“Good . . .”
Pop. Pop.
“Girllll!”
Pop. Pop. Pop . . .
When it was over, he gave her a Kong and she went back to her blanket to enjoy her reward as if nothing had happened.
BREAKFAST MRES WERE slightly more appetizing to Willingham than lunch or dinner MREs. It was just too hot later in the day to enjoy eating food that came out of pouches and was supposed to be heated in the flameless heater enclosed in the package. He chose from his stash a meal ready to eat containing a cheese and vegetable omelet with hot sauce on the side, hash browns with bacon, toaster pastry crackers, apple butter, and a cinnamon scone.
He ate as much as he could, not bothering to heat anything. Lucca’s eyebrows shifted as she glanced at the food. It was hard to be subtle with dark eyebrows like hers. She didn’t beg. She peeked, discreetly. Willingham thought she looked like someone trying to see what was on the plate of a fellow customer at another table in a restaurant. He wanted to try to keep her diet as close to normal as he could, so he refrained from giving her his leftovers. She never pushed the issue, and he was glad, because after he saw how she’d handled the firefight the day before, he might have been tempted to give in.
Time to gear up. Before putting on his flak jacket, he pulled the chest panel’s protective plate out of its pouch a few inches and looked at the photo he had taped at the top with electrical tape. His favorite photo of Jill. She was smiling—beaming, actually—with her face turned three-quarters to the camera, her hands on her hips, and a red rose tucked into the deep V-neck of her form-fitting olive-green shirt. When he was in Israel, she’d gone to a restaurant back home with some friends, and they decided to take a photo to send her husband halfway across the world. He’d kept it with him since.
Willingham took Lucca for a quick walk in the area they had already swept, and then met up with the soldiers gathering at Route Gnat.
“Hey, Lucca!” a soldier called. Lucca turned her head toward him and gave a wag of recognition, in what Willingham thought was kind of an “Oh yeah, hi, sorry, I don’t remember your name, but you look familiar” way.
“Hey, dog guy, have a good one!” he called to Willingham, who didn’t mind if others didn’t know his name. He enjoyed being dog guy.
He and Lucca were ready to go. With her BADASS harness on, she knew it was work time. She stayed by his side, glancing up at Willingham, looking down the road and back up at Willingham. He smiled at her eagerness. It was as if the firefight the previous day was an appetizer, and she was hungry for whatever came next.
“Soon, Lucca, hang on.”
She lay down alongside the road, nose pointed south, while they waited for their spotter, who would keep his eyes out for bad guys and his rifle ready to fire. You don’t walk down roads like this without someone with a weapon watching your back.
Willingham reached into a small pouch on the side of his pack and pulled out a set of dog tags—the one his father had given him, from his time in Vietnam. He rubbed them between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the raised letters on the warm metal as he thought about this man who had been through such hell but never showed it. Never talked about it, either. He tucked the tags back in the pouch.
The spotter arrived, they discussed the plan, and the workday began. “Forward,” Willingham told Lucca in a gentle voice, not demanding or commanding, but like he was asking a child to do something. Lucca walked down the left side of the road, sniffing intently for all those scents she knew he wanted her to find. When she got about fifty yards away, he called her back. They did the same on the right. She didn’t detect anything. A large route-clearance vehicle rolled slowly ahead for fifty yards and waited for them to sweep the next strip. The vehicle looked like a combination tank and tractor and was equipped with ground-penetrating radar for detection of buried explosives. Mine detectors like this had a good reputation, but Willingham would stake his money on Lucca’s nose any day.
Fifty yards at a time down Route Gnat, machine followed dog. With Lucca doing her job on the sides and the vehicle clearing the center of the road, it was safe for the rest of the vehicles to follow. As they pushed south, the Bradley fighting vehicles, which were lined up in a long convoy, began spreading out and setting up blocking positions. It wouldn’t do any good to spend all that time clearing a road if you weren’t going to protect it afterward. The armored Bradleys, with their cannons, missile launchers, and machine guns, provided the muscle to prevent insurgents from backfilling the cleared areas.
After a couple of hours of this, no one—dog team or route-clearance vehicles—had found any explosives. Lucca was panting, slowing down. Willingham returned to the Humvee with her and asked the driver if she could rest on the empty seat.
“Hop in, Lucca! We’ve got air-conditioning!” the driver said. It wasn’t strong air-conditioning, but it would give her some relief.
Willingham walked back up Route Gnat to see how he could help without his dog. He wanted the platoon leaders to know that he was dedicated, that he’d do what it took to contribute to the mission, even when Lucca couldn’t work. He wanted them to see he was serious about their safety and that he should take her up front on missions.
ROADS HAD TO be swept for bombs, but so did every structure along the road, and the roads leading to those structures. Not only were the troops looking for IEDs and insurgents; they were seeking information and building a database. Most people seemed to welcome their presence, letting them into their homes, talking behind closed doors in a way they could not do on the streets.
Interpreters explained the importance of an all-inclusive database. Willingham was surprised that few people balked at having their photos taken or supplying iris scans and fingerprints to Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT) and Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE). In other areas of the surge, BATs and HIIDEs had already been proving effective at matching fingerprints on IEDs to people in the database.
Most searches in the early days of the operation, before there was much intel, were “soft knocks.” Soldiers surrounded a compound, effectively cordoning it off, knocked, and used an interpreter to explain that they were going to search the compound. At first, Willingham would take whatever position he and Lucca could get to search the compound—from open areas and courtyards to inner rooms. They weren’t first in. S
ometimes they were last.
Within a few searches he got the platoon leader to understand that it was better for his dog to go through a building as soon as it was cleared of people—before other soldiers went through and disturbed odors of possible hidden explosives. He and Lucca began going in first, once the residents were no longer inside. After finishing the search, the two would go outside while the soldiers did a hand search. He knew most people there would not be comfortable with a dog in their home—even if it was Lucca.
So far Lucca had found only a few weapons, nothing to raise concern. People were allowed to have certain firearms. Willingham was making progress with the platoon leader, but he wasn’t where he wanted to be yet—walking point down a stretch of Route Gnat to the next set of compounds.
But during a morning search on the fourth day, Willingham heard the words he had been waiting to hear. “You and Lucca can walk point.”
“You won’t regret it,” Willingham said.
TO LUCCA, IT was just a walk down a road on a warm afternoon, sniffing for scents that made Willingham happy. He wondered if she thought it was strange that he would become so excited when she responded to certain odors. He was glad she didn’t know the stakes. If she got distracted, or if the explosives were buried too cleverly, it could prove fatal—to her, to him, to anyone near, including local children.
They’d been working toward this since they met, and he felt a calm exhilaration walking out front with Lucca. The morning of walking point had gone without incident. That was fine with him. He didn’t need Lucca to find IEDs to know his dog was great. Just so long as she didn’t miss one.
The soldiers reconvened later in the day, when the sun was less taxing and everyone had rested. They needed to clear a portion of a smaller dirt road off Route Gnat on their way to check some compounds. In sections of the road, tall concrete compound walls jutted in close on both sides, so there was no way to get out. People going through would have to funnel closer in. It was still a wide enough road, but Willingham knew chokepoints like this could be deadly.
When they approached the first two chokepoints, he went farther ahead than usual with Lucca so she would have time to investigate before the others got there. No sense in the others being delayed as she searched. The system had worked well so far. They were making good progress.
He saw another chokepoint coming up.
“Lucca.”
She looked at him.
With his open right palm facing to the left, he sliced through the air while looking at the left side of the road.
“Forward,” he told her. He wanted her to be on the left, since the wind was blowing from the right. That way she could catch scents from the whole width of road. Knowing how to use the wind to the dog’s advantage is an everyday component of dog handling.
She walked up ahead, nose down, intent on her job. She got to the place where compound walls infringed on the roadside, and her pace picked up. Back and forth, back and forth, tail wagging. Each time she turned, she took fewer steps as she seemed to narrow in on a point of interest. She stopped, her tail went up slightly, and she looked at Willingham. He could see she was about to sit to indicate she had found something, but Willingham had seen enough. He didn’t need her to go through the whole response.
“Come!”
She trotted back, and he praised her. No Kong here, too dangerous. She didn’t seem to care. By this time the platoon leader had caught up. Willingham briefed him. EOD was summoned, and everyone moved away to a safe distance. The technicians assessed the situation. Since there was a lot of debris on the road—a thick layer of dusty dirt, pebbles, bits of dry vegetation—the techs couldn’t see any sign of an IED. They decided to use propelled water from special bottles to clear the debris and see if there was anything obvious underneath.
Almost as soon as the water hit the ground, there was a huge blast. Willingham could feel it rumble inside his chest.
The explosion left a crater in the middle of the road, twelve feet across by five feet deep.
If Willingham had let Lucca sit at what proved to be a highly unstable IED, it could have been over for her, maybe for him, too. If she had been a typical leashed bomb dog, or if Lucca weren’t so good at her job, that could have been the end of the road for at least the two of them.
“Luuuucca! Mama Lucca! Look what you found!” Willingham rubbed the sides of her face, the top of her head, stroked her back.
It was getting dark, so they started back to a compound they’d secured for the night. The platoon leader walked up to them.
“Hey, great work. From now on, you two are out front.”
5
Triangle of Death
LUCCA KNEW. SHE just knew. Something down this gravel walkway, something she had to find. She was leashed now, because Willingham always leashed up when there were lots of people around.
She pulled Willingham forward.
“Whoa, ma’am, what’s up?”
Her nose tracked along the ground as they crunched down the path. He could hear the rapid inhalations, sometimes stacked on top of one another with one quick exhale to clear the nose and start again. Ears up, tail straight out with an occasional quick wag, she trotted ahead in the heat. A dog on a mission.
She turned a corner, never looking up, just following her nose. She arrived at the entrance to their tent, pawing to get in, tail wagging like an out-of-control metronome.
She looked up at Willingham and burst in, with Willingham right behind.
“Kory! Cooper!”
Two barks from Cooper, happy greetings between handlers, and tent number thirteen instantly filled with the sounds of old friendships renewed. It had been only about three weeks since they saw each other at Slayer, before Wiens and Cooper flew down to FOB Kalsu, and less than a week since Willingham had set out from this place for Marne Torch. It felt like much longer.
Lucca and Cooper play-danced around the tent, nails clicking on the plywood floor as they chased each other around the cots, banging into supplies, sending food bowls skidding. Cooper barked a single bark again and lifted a paw onto the side of Lucca’s neck. She pulled away and butted him with her flank, sending him flying forward. He came back at her. Lucca spun out of his way and Cooper skidded to a stop and returned for more.
Willingham and Wiens laughed at the antics. They were eager to catch up but happy to watch their dogs, reunited and having a ball. Wiens told him he’d been sent here for a couple of weeks or so and then would return to FOB Kalsu. Willingham filled him in on Marne Torch, the missions so far, what they were finding.
“You got way more going on up this way,” Wiens said.
Willingham had come back to FOB Falcon to send after-action reports to Roche in Baghdad. He was looking forward to a couple of days here. After a week pretty much devoid of personal hygiene, he needed a trip to the shower trailer. And food. Food at the chow hall—still with the mandatory admission of a filled sandbag—was going to taste like gourmet cuisine after a week of eating out of pouches. The folding steel cot would be a welcome luxury, too.
Now he understood why the FOB was a good place to come back to, mortars and all.
For the next two days, they talked and ate. Wiens hadn’t lost his appetite in the heat. They also waited out a mortar attack in a bunker. Willingham noticed that everything was more fun when Wiens was around—even avoiding mortar.
At night, he watched, amused, as Wiens stretched out on top of his sleeping bag on his cot and called Cooper to come to bed. Wiens scooched all the way to the side, and Cooper hopped on and settled right into all the spots that weren’t filled with his handler.
Lucca looked at the two on the cot and at Willingham. It wasn’t a look of longing to be close. If anything, she was thinking the same thing he was: I love you, but don’t even think about getting that close to me in this heat.
In the early mornings and
again in the evenings, when it wasn’t too hot, they trained the dogs on explosives odors unique to the Triangle of Death. Willingham had obtained the materials from an EOD technician who understood that it was important for dogs to be fluent in the local scent language. He and Wiens paired the scent of explosives with a Kong. The dogs sniffed the strange new smell, reacted, and got rewarded with a Kong and praise. Positive association—the core of military dog training—creates eager learners. Voilà! Before long, the dogs had added a few more explosives to their olfactory repertoire.
HE WISHED HE could be in two places at once. Jill was his first crush, at age eight, the only girl on the Badgers community baseball team. She was from the less rural area of Tuscaloosa. One day he came to a game with his sleeves rolled up a little higher than usual, hoping she would notice the Statue of Liberty tattoo he had bought and applied to his upper arm, just for her. He thought it was a most patriotic design and was very proud. Jill smiled politely when he finally pointed it out to her. They met again when they were sixteen, at a youth group in the church Willingham’s family had begun attending. The two started dating in 1996. He was well into his career in the marines when they married on March 23, 2002. She had become more than a crush, more than cute. He had come to admire her—to adore her.
Still did, more than ever.
He also loved his job. He hadn’t been planning on staying in the marines very long. He wanted to be a narcotics officer, like his dad, out there saving lives and having big adventures while putting bad guys behind bars. But when he found out that military police (MPs) could become military dog handlers, he was hooked. He’d grown up with dogs on the farm, and he couldn’t imagine a better fit for what he loved doing.
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