Top Dog

by Maria Goodavage

  Lucca looked up at Mohammed when he spoke. To Rod, it appeared as if somehow she knew what he was saying. Or maybe she smelled his authority. But whatever the reason, when he spoke, she paid close attention.

  PROVERBS ARE FAR more popular in Afghanistan than they are in the United States. They come up regularly in conversation, pepper everyday speech, turn the mundane into the poetic.

  The proverb that seemed most fitting for Parker on this deployment was a simple one. “The first day you meet, you are friends. The next day you meet, you are brothers.”

  The first time he met Rod and Cornier was on a very cold winter evening when the handlers were manning the small guard-post area on base. It was located outside, and shifts were long. Parker was with two friends, Navy EOD1 Sean P. Carson and Lieutenant Christopher Mosko, also a navy EOD specialist, who happened to be out at the same time as Parker, so they joined him.

  Parker was a Bravo, the team’s weapons sergeant. Teams usually have two soldiers with this military occupational specialty, but on this deployment, Parker was the only one. As the weapons sergeant, he was in charge of the security at the camp, so he went to see the new guys. When the three approached Rod and Cornier, it was clear that despite being fairly bundled up, they were very cold. So Parker, Mosko, and Carson collected some wood and came back and built them a fire. They stayed with them and talked. They felt like they’d known one another for years. Friendships were natural and fast and quickly became solid. Brothers.

  Parker never expected two marine dog handlers and two navy EOD specialists to be among his closest friends on deployment, but then again, it didn’t really surprise him. Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan were used to working with men from other branches of the military when they needed expertise beyond what was available to them within SF. It was all about the mission, not about the uniform. And formalities are out the window. Everyone was on a first-name basis, and to a great extent, even rank didn’t come into play when it came to friendships.

  That meant it was easy for Parker when he decided everyone on the team needed to learn some Pashto. He’d already given some very basic English lessons to the local police stationed at the outpost. He didn’t need to do this. They could get by just fine without English. It was more about building that all-important rapport. The dozen or so men who showed up seemed to enjoy it, and Parker had fun spending time with them.

  He wanted the Americans to learn some Pashto for the same reason—creating trust and understanding with locals. So at a weekly meeting, he passed out worksheets he made up. He listed several key words and phrases, in transliteration. Things like:

  Stah num tsa dhe—What is your name?

  Ta sanga yee—How are you?

  Da khoday pa amaan—Good-bye.

  Simple stuff, but it could make a difference. If the Afghans trusted them and wanted to work hard with them, everyone was safer. There could be more intel. There would be less chance of green-on-blue surprises. As an article in the National Review said, “The old joke that you cannot buy an Afghan, you can only rent him has much truth to it: Afghan troops are very loyal until they are not.” Learning some of their language could go a little way toward gaining the coveted loyalty.

  Parker reminded the Americans whenever he saw them that they needed to study their words. In a couple of weeks, he gave a pop quiz. Those who didn’t do well had to write and rewrite the phrases during the next week until they memorized them.

  When he was assigned Pashto as his language back in the Special Forces Qualification Course (aka the Q Course), he wasn’t thrilled. Most of his friends were learning Spanish or other Category I languages. He and his four Pashto classmates were still struggling through the Pashto alphabet while the guys in Spanish were learning basic sentences. Their course lasted weeks longer than the Spanish course did. They went to class five hours a day, five days a week, for six months. And there was a lot of studying after hours. But in the end, he was glad he’d been chosen to learn the language. It brought him closer to the Afghans, and he hoped in turn, that would bring the Afghans closer to the Americans.

  Lucca was already doing a pretty good job of that herself.

  ROD REACHED AROUND Lucca and unbuckled her harness. He had received a new harness for this deployment. Instead of one side reading BADASS, he had customized it with a smaller name tape with the word LEGEND.

  “When it comes to the military dog world, she’s a legend,” he told Willingham when he showed him the patch.

  Rod and Lucca were back at their Special Operations outpost in Nahri Saraj, just settling in at an outdoor table for dinner after a three-day patrol. Within a minute of her harness coming off, a young member of the Afghan Local Police approached her.

  “Looooka?”

  Rod nodded and smiled. “Yes, Lucca.”

  “Loooooka!” He cautiously stroked her head, and when he saw that she seemed to like it, he grinned and petted her in earnest.

  Parker walked over to Rod and Lucca.

  “Ready for some real food?” he asked.

  “Absolutely.” Rod didn’t mind MREs as much as some guys, but he was hungry for a decent meal.

  They walked in the direction of the kitchen, avoiding the flooded and muddy areas along the way. Inside, a small Afghan man named Rauf was dishing out a local chicken-and-rice specialty he had cooked.

  “Spay sarray!” he greeted Rod. When Rauf first started calling him this, Parker translated. “He said, ‘dog man,’” a name Rod was used to, only in its more casual American form, “dog guy.”

  “Salim!” Rauf greeted Parker with his Pashto name. Rauf ladled fragrant-smelling chicken with red sauce on top of a mound of rice that was dotted with raisins. One of the perks that came with being in Special Forces here was hiring local cooks when possible. It helped village relations, brought a little money to the locals, and boosted morale around the outposts. A from-scratch hot meal was a luxury few at such remote outposts took for granted, even if it wasn’t the kind of food they were used to back home.

  At the outpost, Rod, Cornier, Lucca, and Darko shared a small room. The handlers slept in bunk beds. The dogs slept on an exercise mat their handlers had taken from the makeshift gym there. Darko liked his space, so they cut the mat in half so the dogs would have more room. They topped the mats with green wool blankets.

  One evening, Rod and Cornier left the dogs in the room by themselves for a couple of hours when they went to eat and watch TV in the common area. It was something they’d done several times, and the dogs were usually sleeping when they returned. But when they came back this time, the dogs were awake, sitting and looking blankly at them, surrounded by mauled MRE containers, torn-up bags of Jolly Ranchers and Starburst fruit chews, and slobbery wrappers that had once contained granola bars and potato chips. It looked like a party gone bad.

  “What?!” Rod and Cornier shouted at the same time.

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Rod! Look what Lucca did!”

  “Not my Lucca! That’s Darko’s work!”

  Lucca’s dark brows darted diagonally over her eyes as she glanced from Darko to the mess to Rod and back. Her ears wilted alongside her head. Darko appeared to get physically smaller.

  Mosko and Carson came out to check out the commotion. They burst out laughing when they saw the mess of care-package contents and MREs. Rod and Cornier started laughing, too.

  On seeing the reaction, Lucca’s eyebrows relaxed and her ears perked up. Darko inflated back to his normal size. Their tails wagged, and Rod thought they looked not only relieved that they weren’t in trouble, but pleased with the merry and impromptu gathering in their room.

  The handlers cleaned up and stayed up late to make sure the dogs were OK, giving them a couple of extra walks. They vowed never to leave food anywhere within reach again.

  When they finally went to bed, Lucca snored heartily. Despite his f
atigue, Rod had to chuckle.

  “So much for my perfect princess,” he said before drifting off.

  THE RAIN CAME down in plump drops that rolled off Lucca’s thick fur. She was walking point down a narrow dirt trail between farm fields. As she kept her nose to the ground, droplets ran off it in little rivulets.

  “She’s like the postman,” one of the Green Berets walking next to Rod said. “Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night . . .”

  Lucca approached a ten-by-ten mud-wall structure at the edge of a field. One of the sides had crumbled from age and the elements, revealing a mound of old hay stacked inside.

  “Forward, Lucca.” Lucca knew exactly what he wanted. She trotted over to the structure and sniffed to the right, along the open front. Her wet nose then inspected the bottom perimeter of the three walls. Finding nothing to report, she trotted back to Rod.

  “She’s a great dog,” the Green Beret said when she continued walking point.

  “She’s amazing,” Rod said.

  Rod knew how special her talents were. Most dogs need to be directed to search the exteriors of buildings and vehicles, often with handlers using sweeping hand motions wherever they want the dog to search. Lucca didn’t need any guidance with these tasks. It was her job, and even though it had been more than a couple of years since the end of her last deployment, she hadn’t lost her touch. She knew what was expected.

  Each time he asked her to search a car or structure exterior, she gave him a split-second glance of confirmation, as if telling him, Don’t worry. I got that.

  Right . . . left . . . around . . . checking any door seams, every perimeter . . . done.

  The Green Berets, Afghan Local Police, Rod, and Lucca continued for a couple of klicks. Along the way, the rain stopped, and Lucca shook the excess off her coat. They came to a small road that dead-ended into a walled courtyard. There was no house structure, and the ground appeared to have been ripped up in places. It was already drying. Around here, with the earth so dry most of the year, it takes a lot more than a downpour to keep the ground wet.

  “I don’t like it,” Rod told Parker. “Looks shady to me.”

  After having Lucca check around the outside of the wall, he sent her inside the walled area to search without blow-by-blow instructions from him, trusting her nose to lead her where she needed to go, and following closely so she wouldn’t get so far ahead that he couldn’t spot red flags. If she found nothing, he would direct her in a more systematic search.

  She walked in, continued for about fifteen feet, stopped, and looked up at Rod with a little tail wag.

  “Lucca, come!”

  She ran toward him, and he praised her up for a few seconds before telling the guys behind him what they’d already come to know. Lucca had another potential find. They set up a security perimeter so no insurgents could surprise them. The Green Berets faced outward with their M-4s, and the Afghan Local Police did the same with their AKs.

  A Special Forces engineer checked out what Lucca had responded on. It was buried loosely under some dirt, and he didn’t want to move it. He set up some C-4 close to it and ran a fuse back to a safe distance.

  A fiery flash, a boom, and the IED was history.

  Compliments all around.

  “Nice work, Lucca!”

  “Loooooka!”

  She looked up from where she was lying and wagged a couple of times. But she had a Kong to chew and got right back to business.

  “HAYSTACKS ARE NICE at home, not so nice in Afghanistan,” Rod told Lucca as they approached the first of three haystacks along the mission route. Whenever they came to areas where intel indicated Taliban activity, every haystack was suspect. The five-foot-high mounds of hay or straw were popular hiding places for weapons caches. They were easy to access, and if the weapons were found, no one could take the rap for them—unlike those found within the walls of someone’s compound.

  The caches posed no immediate threat. The greater danger was when insurgents—knowing haystacks were subject to inspection by their enemies—concealed IEDs in or near them. Most haystacks were just haystacks. You couldn’t tell the good ones from the bad ones without a dog.

  “Seek, Lucca,” Rod told her when they got close to the haystack. She needed no more guidance. She went in, nose down, and circled around the haystack. She sniffed upward in a few spots and was done in thirty seconds.

  The second haystack also turned up nothing.

  A little farther away, Lucca walked up to the third haystack, went partway around, came back a little, then back and forth a couple more times, as if narrowing in on a cone of scent. Rod knew what was coming next.

  Lucca stopped and stared at him.

  “Come!” She trotted over to him, wagging. “Gooood girllll!”

  “Lucca responded over here on this haystack,” he called out to one of the Green Berets behind him. The engineer walked over as Rod was giving Lucca a belly-rub paycheck. Rod stood up and indicated where Lucca had responded.

  Everyone cleared out. The engineer tossed an incendiary grenade to the bottom of the hay. Even though the hay was still damp from the recent rains, once the grenade activated, it burned quickly, heaving up light gray smoke. For a moment, Rod wondered if it was a false alarm.

  An explosion put an end to that question.

  Parker walked over and fist-bumped Rod. “Lucca does it again!” He reached down and scratched her behind the ears.

  “I hate those things,” Parker told Rod. “IEDs are like snakes. You keep messing with them and you’re gonna get bit.”

  12

  Rock-Paper-Scissors

  THE ALARM ON Rod’s 32 GB iPod Touch went off at 0430. He shut it off, turned on a reading light, and looked down at Lucca from his raised cot. She glanced up at him, yawned, and shut her eyes again.

  “No snooze alarm today, Mama Lucca. Time to rise and shine. Got a long day ahead.”

  He climbed down from his bed, crouched beside Lucca, and stroked her head.

  “Come on, sleepyhead. Wanna eat?”

  At the sound of the word eat, she opened her eyes and propped herself up on her elbow.

  Her tail thumped her mat a couple of times as she watched Rod pour two scoops of Science Diet into her portable bowl. She moseyed over and dug into breakfast.

  “I don’t know how you can be hungry at this hour, Lucca.”

  He was happy she had a good early morning appetite. Whenever they went on missions, he had her eat two hours before the patrol to help prevent bloat, a life-threatening digestive emergency most common in large-breed dogs with deep chests—like most military working dog breeds. Fortunately, the gastropexy surgeries all dogs larger than thirty-five pounds undergo prevents the deadly part of bloat. Still, handlers take no chances.

  Rod let Lucca out for her morning constitutional at the adjacent dog area and knocked on Cornier’s door. Cornier and Darko had gotten their own room when the navy EOD techs moved to another base. The two handlers had each other’s backs when it came to making sure they weren’t oversleeping on mission days.

  “You up, bro?”

  The door opened, he heard a “Hey” from the room, and Darko walked out.

  Rod said, “Hey,” and went back inside his room. There was no rush to get ready. They weren’t meeting the others until just after sunrise, at 0630.

  He hit the portable latrine, brushed his teeth, came back, changed into his cammies, and checked his pack to make sure he had all the essentials. Today’s patrol was supposed to last all day, into evening. He could get by with one MRE and a couple of scoops of kibble for Lucca, but he always packed more food and water than necessary. You never knew where you’d really end up at the end of the day around here.

  Lucca strolled back in and walked straight over to a small desk with two boxes of treats. One was from Rod’s mom, the other from the mother of a Green Beret w
ho wanted to thank Lucca and Darko for helping keep her son safe. Rod took a couple of treats from each box, put them in a plastic bag, and stuck them in a side pocket of his pack. Lucca walked over, sniffed the pack, and wagged expectantly.

  “Those are for later, Lucca. We’ll save them for snack time.”

  Rod found her brush and called her over to his chair. He usually groomed her after missions, and outside, but it was still dark, and there wasn’t much else to do. Lucca stood with her eyes half-closed in pure pleasure. Her neck dropped slightly. Her tail went limp. When he stopped brushing she gave him the look, as he called it, and he continued.

  Eventually he walked over to the kitchen to get breakfast. Other guys were already there, prepping their morning meals. They toasted Pop-Tarts, ate fruit, microwaved scrambled eggs, poured heaping bowls of cereal. It was every man for himself. Rauf, the local cook, made only dinner.

  Rod ate a chocolate chip Clif Bar and drank a bottle of water. It was all he could stomach at this hour. He grabbed a few energy bars for later. Back at his room he let Lucca out one more time. When she returned, he geared up and clicked on her harness, and they walked to meet the others outside the command room.

  A few Green Berets had already gathered for “pregame.” It was starting to get light. As more gathered, they did radio checks to make sure all radios were in working order. The sound of static and amplified voices punctuated the quiet morning. Everyone made sure they had enough of what would take them through the mission; water, food, working batteries. Someone noticed that the Afghan Local Police guys weren’t there yet.

  “Hey, Parker, go get your kids!”

  Not that it was his job, but of anyone there, he had become pretty tight with the Afghans. Knowing the same language helped, but there was something beyond that. They seemed to have come to trust him, and he enjoyed their company. Parker jogged off to find the Afghans who were supposed to join them. They were late, but that wasn’t unusual. Parker often had to act as their alarm clock.