Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines

by Michael Ritland

  “I’d hate to think what would have happened if he wasn’t with us,” Seth said, echoing my thoughts exactly. “Instead, here we are.”

  There wasn’t much I could say, so I didn’t.

  Seth set his beer down and reached into a wooden planter on the picnic table. He drew his lips back and let out a soft whistle. Duco stood, assumed the position, his ears tilting forward and pointing heavenward, his expression intent. Seth reared back and fired the tennis ball over the enclosure’s fence and into the post-holed lot beyond. I watched as the ball arced and bounced wildly, and then I followed Seth’s gaze from the ball’s landing zone to the dog, no longer obscured in shadow but in the warm glow of the setting sun.

  “Okay,” Seth said at last.

  Like a bow pulled tight and finally released, Duco shot out across the lot, kicking up dust. At the fence he didn’t hesitate but easily bounded over the top rail, looking like a dressage champion horse at some grand prix. Duco had overcome a bunch of obstacles to become a distinguished member of our most elite Special Operations Forces (SOF), and it was good to see that he still surmounted them. I had to laugh as, in his eagerness, he stooped to clamp down on the ball and, his front legs splayed and his rear ones still churning, he nearly went, as my granddad might have said, “ass over teakettle.”

  His prize captured, Duco trotted back, munching on the ball, his mouth twisted into a kind of silly, giddy grin. He hopped the fence again and came onto the deck to show us what he’d managed to capture. He sat at Seth’s feet, then lowered himself into a relaxed, paws-crossed lie-down, still working the tennis ball.

  Seth looked at me half-embarrassed, half-pleased. “That’s my one concession to his retirement.”

  I nodded, knowing that in training Duco would have been told to drop the ball fairly quickly at his handler’s feet. Those extra moments of reward, gnawing on that bit of felt and rubber, weren’t all that he was getting. Seth stroked Duco’s head, working his fingers around the backs of his ears as Duco cocked his head in pleasure.

  Seth said, “Los,” and Duco released the ball.

  Seth picked it up and offered it to me. I looked at the spit-frothed ball, it’s optic yellow cover frosted in white, and declined.

  Laughing, I said to Seth as he stood to throw another one for Duco, “Wilson. U.S. Open hard court. You’ve got expensive taste.”

  Settling back into his seat after letting Duco go bounding off to complete his appointed rounds, Seth sipped his beer and said, grinning with satisfaction, “Nothing but the best for my boy. He deserves it.”

  I couldn’t agree more.

  My trip to visit Duco and his handler wasn’t just a social call. After having served in the U.S. Navy for almost thirteen years, eleven of which I spent as a SEAL Team member, since 2009 I’ve been training and providing working dogs for the military, various government agencies, and private individuals. Going to see Duco was a part of another responsibility that I take very seriously. I founded a nonprofit organization to make certain that retired military working dogs are able to live out the remainder of their lives in positive and beneficial environments. Though I knew that Duco was well cared for, I still wanted to check in on him, just like I frequently make contact with fellow members of SEAL Team 3, and members of other SEAL Teams I’ve come to know in my new role. Whether you’re a canine or a human, having been a SEAL Team member means you’re a brother, and we are all our brothers’ keepers for life.

  By the time you finish reading this book, I hope you’ll come to understand that there’s not an ounce of disrespect intended when I make the comparison between what military working dogs in the SEAL Teams have contributed and what their human counterparts have done. Though the canines don’t have as long a history as the humans—the SEAL Teams first utilized their own dogs a few years after 9/11—dogs and SEALs have occasionally worked side by side for decades. It wasn’t until 2004 that the SEALs began to use dogs specially trained to meet the specific needs of the teams in-house. I’m proud to have been associated with the later development of dogs for use with the SEAL Teams specifically and with the Special Operations Forces community generally. As you’ll learn in the pages that follow, the training and implementation of dogs in combat has evolved over the years in the U.S. military. I’m especially proud of how the latest in training methodology has benefited both man and dog, made for more humane treatment of our animal brothers, and that the dogs operate in the field with tremendous courage and tenacity. These dogs have saved countless lives and prevented innumerable horrific injuries. As a nation, we owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude. By telling the story of some of these dogs, I hope to increase awareness of the vital role that military working dogs play, especially at a time of transition within our military.

  Like most people, I knew that the military utilized dogs. Growing up, I’d seen enough war movies and viewed enough scenes of dogs held tightly leashed by handlers who were mostly members of the military police. While my knowledge of the role that dogs played in war evolved somewhat over the years, it didn’t change much until I actually saw them in use in Iraq. There, I experienced one of those “lightbulb” moments, when I knew that the course of my life was going to see two paths joined together.

  In April of 2003, a sixteen-member SEAL Team I was a part of was deployed to Iraq. This was the very early stage of the ground war, and we were tagging along with the First Marine Division. After a brief stay in Baghdad, we were tasked with taking the key city of Tikrit. Our convoy, consisting of twenty-five thousand U.S. Marines and my platoon, stretched out some thirty miles along the 119-mile route. Eventually we piggybacked with the Second Battalion and approached the city from the east, while other battalions (Light Armored Reconnaissance and Light Armored Vehicle) approached from the other cardinal directions. We spearheaded the approach, entering through a wealthy portion of the city near Saddam Hussein’s palace. This was one of those hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-standing-up kinds of moments. The streets were deserted, and there was no sign of activity anywhere, but you knew that people were around despite the dead silence and the empty streets.

  I experienced a similar kind of sensation, this time for a better reason, when we met limited resistance and took the palace down. The building was so massive, it took us more than an hour to clear all the rooms. We were there for four days and spent part of it on the roof of the palace, at the highest point in the city, overlooking the Tigris River. Beyond that lay the airfield where hundreds of pounds of cached weapons and munitions had been destroyed by the air force bombers with Joint Direct Attack Munitions (J-DAMs) and other smart bombs. As we sat on the roof, we watched sympathetic detonations, and at night it was like watching solar flares. Only this went on all day and all night, the explosive sounds and sights becoming the sound track to a once calm city now roiled by our munitions.

  One night that stillness was broken by the sound of explosions close in—about 350 yards from our position. I was doing my four-hour block—between 0200 and 0600—when I saw three little flashes of light off in the distance and then a few seconds later those big explosions. The three flashes and then the explosions continued to our south, advancing to within 100 yards of the palace. As I was getting on the radio, I saw an army counter-artillery unit fire up across the Tigris, that movement accompanied by the sound of electric transformers, a mechanical whizz-bang electronic sound, followed by the sound of heavy weapons fire. In a matter of seconds those blips of lights we’d seen erupted in a massive flash, and whoever it was were wiped off the map. I sat there wondering what might have been. If those Iraqis had gotten their rounds off directed at us, who knows?

  Those who-knows-what-might-have-happened questions are always a part of war, of course, and you don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the answers. All I knew was that I was grateful that battery had been posted so nearby. Prior to our arrival in Tikrit, we’d stopped with the convoy for a bit to review the final stages of our entry into the city and had been ambush
ed. All hell broke loose during a fierce firefight, with antitank, antiaircraft rounds going off, the whip-whip sound of returned gunfire whizzing over our heads, and 84 mm rockets being launched into a field just outside the city. So we knew that despite the ghost-town appearance of Tikrit, there was plenty of resistance we might encounter. Who knew what we might discover in the city, and all our firepower, while certainly effective, might not be able to protect us from everything. As time went on, we had another weapon available to use that proved very valuable.

  As the weeks passed, life took on a kind of routine—a combat normalcy that had you hypervigilant and never fully able to rest at any time. We had no forward operating base established, no outposts, and no real security perimeter established. We spent nights sleeping under Humvees and eventually set up tents beneath large camouflage netting hills we constructed. An hour of sleep here, a twenty-minute nap there was about all the shut-eye we got. For two months, I didn’t shower, and nearly every moment was punctuated by gunfire, shouts, or some other disruption. We’d endured sleep deprivation before, but still, a toll was definitely being taken on us.

  For that reason, and a lot of others, I was glad that a few weeks into our operation in Tikrit, several military working dogs joined those marines. At the time, as I’ve said before, the SEAL Teams didn’t have our own dogs assigned to the teams. Some did serve with us, and they were essentially “borrowed” from other units. The clearing operations we were doing were particularly difficult. The potential for them to become mind-numbing was certainly there: the repetitive nature of them combined with the lack of sleep and other creature comforts contributed to that. But they were also highly dangerous and of critical importance.

  At one point, we were in a more rural area outside the city, and I observed a small group of marines coming upon a small cavelike structure—a kind of hutlike thing with a very small entrance. I’d encountered other things similar to that one and had by that point searched thousands of buildings and other structures without any issues at all. The temptation would be to assume that all was okay, but we never gave in to that. This platoon had been assigned an explosive-detector dog, and he and his handler went up to that doorway. Immediately, the dog alerted: his ears went up and he sat down. I was on the security perimeter and watched all this through a pair of binoculars.

  Later, talking to the marines who’d been investigating that cave, I learned that a grenade booby trap had been set in that doorway. Because of the way the structure was situated, and because of the way the explosives were placed, without question, two or three of those marines probably would have been killed—the first two or three guys going in. And the next one or two probably would have been injured fairly badly. That moment was literally and figuratively life changing.

  Seeing for myself and then hearing more about how that dog just went about his business and instantly identified the danger made me want to never go anywhere without a dog out ahead of me ever again. Because it’s so easy to place explosives, IEDs, booby traps, trip wires. At the pace that we were moving, it was impossible to sweep everything where you’re going with a metal detector or have an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) guy pull open the ground. That’s not going to happen. A metal detector doesn’t cover everything anyway, because some of the devices use plastic or wood to house the explosives, so there is no metal. I also realized this: had there been somebody twenty feet inside that cave with an AK ready to shoot those marines as soon as they came in, the dog would have alerted them to that, too. I saw many other times how their ability to detect explosives and smell human beings and hear and smell things that aren’t right was so far beyond my comprehension, it’s incredible.

  I also recognized something else about dogs that made them effective fighters. Unlike us, they didn’t really act as though they were in a foreign environment. Call that naïveté or ignorance, but it worked to their advantage. In some respects they didn’t know whether they were training here or over there, other than the exception of the constant and excessive loud noises. The mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of Iraq aren’t any more out of their routine locations than the mountains east of San Diego. The mountains are mountains, and there are steep jagged rocks, and they’re searching for explosive odor, and they’re getting to bite people, and they’re doing what they were genetically designed to do. I already had some sense of just how that part of it worked, but like everything else, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know until I did it.

  I also knew that I wanted to comprehend those abilities. I wanted to be able to harness their abilities and use them as an effective weapon against the tools of modern warfare. Eventually, that’s what I did.

  I’m a very lucky man in lots of ways. A lot of men and women haven’t returned from our recent wars. I was able to, and even though a health issue forced me out of active duty overseas, I really enjoyed training SEALs before leaving the navy. Now, I combine two passions of mine—working with dogs and aiding in the defense of our country.

  How a kid from Iowa whose best friend was a black Labrador named Bud eventually graduated from BUD/S and now works with the most elite fighting force in the world with the most elite four-legged fighting force today is a story worth telling. I believe many, many frogmen and other soldiers owe their lives to dogs that so loyally serve us and ask for comparatively little in return.

  As I write this, I’ve got to take a break for a bit to tend to the dozen or so dogs I’m currently working with, as well as my own pets. The first thing you need to understand is that distinction between working dogs and pets. Like many people, I suspect, I wasn’t aware early on just how much these dogs differed from others. All I knew was that from an early age, I liked dogs and, just as important, that I wanted a career in the military. Just as I’m thankful that we all benefit from military working dogs serving our country, I’m grateful that I’ve been able to combine into a career an interest in two things I care very deeply about.

  2

  Growing up in Waterloo, Iowa, I had a pretty typical suburban upbringing. I have two older brothers, Joe and Jake, and a younger sister, Lindsey. There was enough of a gap in our ages that, in some ways, we all kind of went our separate ways a bit—not that we weren’t close, but in one regard we didn’t completely share our love. We all pestered the hell out of my dad, George, and my mom, Sandy, about our desire to have a dog. Finally, when I was in the sixth grade, my parents came home with a black Labrador retriever puppy we gave the not-so-original name of Bud. We had friends and neighbors who had dogs—bird dogs and retrievers mostly—and I’d marveled at those dogs and their willingness to endure almost anything to get the job done. I joined friends duck and pheasant hunting, and seeing those dogs use their amazing athletic abilities and their desire to seek and retrieve fascinated me. What motivated these dogs to put up with harsh temperatures, thick undergrowth, and other obstacles to get what they wanted? Their drive and desire impressed the hell out of me.

  I couldn’t get enough of hanging out with other people’s dogs until we got one of our own. As a result, I got to see dogs in lots of different scenarios. I couldn’t have known this then, but that was the beginning of my education about canine behavior and the unique bond we’ve formed with that species. At that point, I knew that I liked being around dogs, but had no real thoughts about one day making my career with them.

  Though we lived in the suburbs of Waterloo, and with nearby Cedar Falls there were about a hundred thousand people in the surrounding communities, rural farm life wasn’t too far away. My dad’s side of the family had a farm on the outskirts of town. I spent a fair bit of time out there, riding tractors, picking vegetables, and observing the various dogs that lived on the farm. They weren’t working dogs, strictly speaking, but they weren’t typical house pets, either. They basically had to survive out on the farm on their own, and they did a good job of it. From those hunting dogs and the farm dogs, I developed the idea that canines should be useful and that they were often happiest when
they had some job to do—whether it was retrieving for a hunter or taking down a critter for themselves.

  I can still picture some of those farm dogs, trotting along, their noses in the air, scenting for prey. They’d stop and go stock-still and then pounce into two feet of snow and come up with a field mouse or something else. The way they carried themselves as they proudly toted their prizes said something about what was going on inside them. Of course, their drive to find prey had to be collared sometimes. I spent a lot of time dogproofing and shagging dogs away from the chicken coop. From my earliest exposure to dogs, I saw then that they had this drive to be of use and that they were genetically designed to be very good at tracking and at using their noses to guide them.

  From the time Bud was old enough to walk a few hundred yards, to the time I left for the navy at the age of seventeen, I loved walking with him. Sometimes it was just those few hundred yards, and sometimes it was hours-long walks through the streets or with him in the fields with my dad hunting. Bud was, well, he was my boy. I’d come home from school everyday, and he would be there waiting for me, eager as all get out to go outside with me. I wasn’t a complete loner, but I also wasn’t the most gregarious kid around, so Bud and I spent a lot of time together, and I talked with him a lot, especially when I was younger. I loved sports but was a bit of a runt who didn’t develop fully until after almost everybody else my age had, and I was somewhat self-conscious about that. Bud didn’t ever seem to mind, and he never let me down, so that made him an even better companion.