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

by Michael Ritland

  From day 3 to day 21, we do what’s called “biosensor stressing,” which sounds a lot more complicated than it is. Biosensor stressing is simply this: it’s messing around playfully with the puppy. But there’s a structured routine that we put them through in that first couple of weeks. When you pick the dog up, you want to do a couple of things. One, you want to tickle its feet. Usually I’ll take a Q-tip and stick it between his pads and his toes, basically making sure to stimulate each one of his paws. Doing this gets them used to being handled by humans and in a way desensitizes them to the kind of probing that’s a necessary part of maintaining and assessing their health and ability to work. Along with that, I’ll hold him completely upright, in other words, with his head directly above his tail. I’ll place him up next to my face to let him smell me. I’ll breathe hot breath on him, and I’ll talk to him.

  In those first few days, dogs’ sight and their hearing are not fully developed. So early on, neither my smell nor my physical presence is as fully recognizable to them as it will eventually be, but I want them to have that early sensory experience as soon as possible. That way, as they’re developing those senses more fully, they’ll have that early experience of what I smell like, what I sound like, and what I look like already in place. I want them to be comfortable with me. I also have multiple people do it so that the dogs get exposure to as many people as possible to establish that comfort level with humans. At a minimum, I want adult males and adult females and several different children to be around these puppies, but I bring many people around them. As you can probably figure out, it’s not hard to get people to hold and play with puppies.

  Besides that first phase of tickling the dog’s feet, I hold him upright, hold him upside down, hold him on his back, and then put him belly down on a cold, wet washcloth for just a couple of seconds. Then I put him back in with the group and grab the next one out, and do that with every one of them. I’ll usually do that routine in the morning and at night. And then throughout the day also, I’ll constantly be picking them up and just kind of playing with them, holding them—like I said, putting them up next to me against my face, letting them smell me, see me. As they progress, that human input will be valuable.

  I also start to play CDs of random noises. Several different companies make noise CDs that are typically used to expose police horses to various auditory stimuli. Essentially, they are antispooking noise CDs. They have train engine noises, whistles, firecrackers, thunder, machine guns, different farm animals making noises, creaky doors opening, cars driving by, mufflers backfiring, engine sounds, sirens, honking, and so on. Imagine any big city’s soundscape, and that’s what’s recorded; I play it back repeatedly. Again, this is all about getting the dog accustomed to what is a very large part of their environment—sound. Dogs have sensitive hearing, and our selective breeding of them has enhanced that ability over their other canid relatives (wolves). Also, because of the structure of their ears, they can hear sounds coming from a greater distance. Pointed, erect ears are most effective at capturing sound waves. I’ve read claims that a dog can hear sounds coming from a distance four times greater than the distance from which a human being can hear. These mentions don’t cite the specifics of the studies or how they were conducted, what breed of dogs were used, or the like. As a result I’m dubious at best about quantifying a dog’s superiority in terms of the distances over which it can detect sound waves. That’s not really one of the detection scenarios we train for.

  I’ve seen more credible studies that put a dog’s audible sound range from 40 Hz to 60 kHz. Humans, by comparison, have an audibility range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. What that means is that dogs can hear sounds of a higher frequency than we can.

  Obviously, a dog’s hearing is an asset on the field. However, if we were to select a working animal to detect sound, and we did that solely on the basis of the animals with the most acute hearing, we’d probably want a rabbit or a gerbil. I’ve read studies, again reported with less than ideal accuracy about the methodology, that claim that those animals and others have far superior hearing than even dogs do. They wouldn’t be as effective in the field for a lot of other reasons, and our technology has advanced to the point where devices do that kind of work incredibly well. Also, you wouldn’t want to put up with the kind of teasing and jokes you’d have to endure with your working rabbit.

  The point of our exposing the pups to these different sounds isn’t to improve their auditory acuity; it’s just to get them to not be startled by new and strange sounds. Anyone who has had a dog can attest to the fact that certain sounds, like the whine of a vacuum cleaner’s motor, can really irritate a dog. We don’t want to overstress the pups, but we do have to get them accustomed to hearing a variety of noises and at various volumes. Later, when we do helicopter training with the candidates, that early exposure almost always pays off. All you can ever do in training is simulate how the real world of their working lives will be; how they respond in those real world instances is never a certainty. Training is all about enhancing the likelihood of a good outcome down the road.

  At about the time the pups are weaned (at four weeks), I’ll stop using those noise CDs and shift into another phase of their early training. At that point, I begin to work with them on evaluating and enhancing their prey drive. To do that, I’ll take a rag, like a dishcloth or terry towel, and tease them with it. I want them to get their eyes focused on it so they will chase it. I tease them a little bit, then they chase, chase, chase. Bam—I reward them by letting them get it. We play a little bit of tug, and then I reward them by letting them have the rag. They’re tearing their prey off, basically.

  One of the other things I do is wean the dogs very early. Some people will wait until they’re seven or eight weeks old to start getting them off the mom. I get them off the mom as soon as possible for two reasons: (1) it’s a lot easier on her; (2) I want to be present to teach them some manners while still allowing them to get some of their mannerisms and character from the mother. I also want a lot of human interaction at that point. I’ll go into this concept in far greater detail in talking about the advanced phases of their training, but the single most important aspect of a dog’s training for the work they do is to establish a bond of trust between handler and dog. That begins in those early days with getting the dogs accustomed to human contact.

  Why is this so important? Even among animal behaviorists, and among trainers and breeders, there is some disagreement about the extent or even existence of the pack mentality. It’s beyond the scope of this book to get into this in any great detail. Based on my observation, I would say that, yes, to an extent dogs do possess this instinct. However, it is something that is easily overcome, and there are likely very few dogs that are aggressive, or more aggressive, when around other dogs. There are many more components that make up a dog’s aggression toward humans than just simply to say, “That’s their nature.”

  I will say this: if they’re left with littermates, a litter the size of eight, for example, and they have no human interaction, they’re going to be very, very pack oriented, or very, very animal dependent. On the flip side, dogs raised this way are going to be much weaker when they’re isolated. So I try to get them by themselves with me, with other humans, solo humans, as early as possible, because that’s the environment they’re going to be in for the rest of their lives. They’re going to be paired up with a human, they’re going to be in kennels and crates and in different environments doing all these exercises. So I ingrain in them that this is the standard, this is the routine from day 1, and then they don’t know anything else. We don’t ever want them to be thrown off too much by being in a new situation that may cause them to get confused or to lock up.

  The same is true with human beings: new environments and stimuli can cause us to not perform at our peak. The navy has long realized this, and that’s why training exercises are so important. The closer the simulation can be to the real thing, the better prepared you’re going to be when immerse
d in the real-world situation. That point may be obvious, and for all the work a pilot or tank commander may do in a simulation, or the more times a soldier uses a sophisticated kind of video game, the more comfortable they will be in an actual scenario. Nothing beats the real deal, but short of that, simulations work with dogs and humans.

  Of course, the first time you attempt something, whether you’re a dog or a human, things can get a little bit ragged. The notion of practice makes perfect is definitely true with the dogs we prepare. It’s also equally true that the first time we do anything new with the dogs, we see the pointy end of the learning curve—and sometimes that pointy end can pierce you.

  Because of the nature of the work that SEAL Teams frequently engage in, being comfortable and beyond competent in the water is a must for human members of the team. The same is therefore true of the dogs. Most of the dogs that we get have had some “exposure” to the water. That term can mean a lot of things—from drinking it to actively swimming in it. Like most of the training they receive before they come to us, those experiences aren’t the most positive reward-based training exercises they have. As a result, we have to do a lot of reward-based work with them to get them comfortable with swimming. Like most things we teach or learn, we start out small and basic and advance from there. We toss a ball into the water and let the dogs chase it, tossing it farther and farther over time, so that those first few opportunities in the water are equivalent to wading before we get into the high-pawing/paddling/splashing technique that some of them employ early on.

  Eventually, after many repetitions and rewards, we get to the point where the dogs have to go out on what I call conditioning swims along with their handlers. Obviously, as SEALs, these guys are quite capable in the water, and the dogs have definitely developed a “near to the beach” comfort level. At this point, we stretch them out in the ocean, or in Balboa Bay or elsewhere, to the point where they can no longer see the shoreline.

  Once, when we went out on a group conditioning swim, the handlers and dogs were in a loose pack with the dogs on a modified type of lead. We were all headed on an out-and-back swim beyond a buoy. The dogs and handlers were all doing well past the first five hundred yards or so. I was with them, and I saw one of the dogs, Luke, get a look in his eyes that I’d seen before.

  The dogs are smart and have great instincts for self-preservation. They are all not just looking ahead and around at the other dogs and the handlers, but they’re taking a peek back to their origin point. Well, Luke took a glance back, and all he could see was water. When he turned his face back toward me, I could see the panic in his eyes and his face. Pretty soon, that panicked looked turned into a sodden expression of anger. Luke took off after my partner in training, Wayne, and it was clear he was bent on destroying someone or something. It was as if that dog had decided that if he was going down, he was taking someone with him.

  Also, in Luke’s mind—and I’ve seen this in dozens of other dogs that weren’t quite so aggressive or pissed off about it—he viewed anything bobbing in the water along with him as a bit of land he could find safety on. For about fifteen minutes, I thought I was in the middle of Jaws 1D—1 dog. Wayne did his best to fend off that dog, flanking him while Luke turned tight circles, his paws like a razor-sharp paddle wheel, his bared teeth like white shark fins. Every time Luke got close, Wayne would push Luke’s hindquarters away from him. When he couldn’t get to his flanks, Wayne had to resort to pushing at Luke’s neck and the side of his head. It was quite a battle, and the rest of us, as you might expect, got quite a laugh out of Wayne’s struggles

  I’d been in that position myself, not with a dog as bite-aggressive as Luke, but with dogs that were so scared, the rate of their paddling and their desire to climb on top of you to get up out of water combined to potentially turn you into human cole slaw, and it had you at wit’s end. The thing that Wayne couldn’t do, and none of the trainee handlers could do in this situation or in any other, was to give in and let the dog have its way. If you did, you had a major problem on your hands. That dog would then rise thirty places in his mind on the mental totem pole that signified his status. Cave into a dog like one of these once, and your life could be hell. As it was, many of us ended up getting parts of our bodies raked by the thumbs and dewclaws of a panicked swimming dog, and those raised welts became just another way that we all earned our stripes.

  Far better to endure that pain on the so-called practice field than in a real game. The price we’d pay in lives lost if a dog panicked during a swimming insertion was not something I wanted to think about, but it was certainly something I wanted to prevent. As tiresome and frustrating as it might have been to do that kind of work with the dogs, in an environment that is relatively foreign to them, it made me realize just how important patience and follow-through were in doing this kind of training. It also reminded me of a mission I participated in, and how the right preparation can make all the difference.

  In the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom in early 2003, I participated in a bit of navy history. As a part of our general maritime exercises (you can even go to the SEAL’s Web site to see photos of these drills), we climb up to an oil/gas platform’s superstructure from a NSW rigid-hull inflatable boat (RHIB) piloted by Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen (SWCC). We did those types of exercises often, but when we knew that an upcoming mission would involve this kind of work, it took on a new sense of urgency.

  Six weeks prior to the onset of the ground warfare, we learned that we were tasked with taking over two oil terminals in the Persian Gulf. This was going to be my first big mission. Because of the sanctions and embargoes levied against the Iraqi regime, these two oil terminals had taken on strategic importance. They were a bit dilapidated, but because of where they were, the Iraqis had used them increasingly to smuggle oil out of the country. Supertankers would berth there and then sneak out again loaded with crude. The two forty-eight-inch pipelines that ran along the floor of the gulf were pumping millions of barrels of oil, and the fear was that the regime, anticipating that they were soon to be invaded, would blow those pipelines, preventing the allies from using that oil and also creating a huge environmental disaster and distraction. They’d also make us look like the bad guys and blame us for the resulting explosions, fire, and oil spill.

  We also had had some intel at the time that said that the platforms were rigged with explosives and that they were going to be blown up as soon as we got on board. At one point we heard that there were more than a hundred Iraqi Republican Guard troops stationed on the rigs and that they were going to stand and take their death fighting us if we came and tried to take over the rigs.

  So it was pretty harrowing because we had thirty-two guys in a couple of small RHIBs that we were going to ride in on to assault this target. So if the intel was correct, we were pretty badly outnumbered, and they had the platforms rigged to explode.

  Even without knowing all of that, we would have taken our training seriously, but we took it up a notch. We built an exact replica of those platforms, which were separated by several miles of open water, by the way, and practiced and practiced a coordinated assault on them both, along with on a metering station and pipeline manifold many miles away from those two rigs. We had three big targets to neutralize at the same time. We figured that if there was any slipup in the timing, one or the other of the locations would have a communications system in place to notify the others to detonate the explosives placed at all three.

  So, I was taking part in the largest operation in the history of Naval Special Warfare. All of SEAL Team 3, all eight SEAL platoons, were assigned to take down these targets simultaneously. To put it mildly, this was a huge logistical nightmare. If we pulled it off, that would be spectacular. If we somehow didn’t, it could be a spectacular disaster.

  The platforms were enormous, sixteen hundred meters (approximately one mile) long, with a berthing station at one end and smaller substations running the length of each one—all potential places where
the Iraqi soldiers could be hiding out. We knew the rigs were manned, but didn’t know the exact numbers. I can’t tell you the number of times we rehearsed that operation, but dogs and men both learn by repetition, and overrepetition doesn’t exist. We had multiple scenarios, including the use of two helicopters to aid the assault, and the list of what-ifs and what-to-dos in case those what-ifs occurred became my waking and sleeping reality.

  By the time we set out in our heavily armed Mark V boats—their superior firepower and cruising speed made the journey from the Kuwaiti Naval Base to the point at which we transferred to the RHIBs in two hours—I was dry mouthed and the pucker factor was high, but I was also ready; our training couldn’t have been any more thorough. I still remember looking over at our embedded journalist, Steve Centanni of Fox News, who had accompanied us on the Mark Vs, and wondering what the hell he was thinking—how did he get in on this?

  By the time we transferred to the RHIBs, I no longer cared what he was thinking; I had a job to do. My one last, stray thought as I looked out across the gulf’s waters to the winking lights of the Iraqi mainland was, Holy shit, I’m one of among thirty-two guys who are kicking this whole freaking thing off. If that can’t get you excited, you’re a dead man.

  Ultimately, we found twenty-three Iraqi soldiers on board, a mixed bag of Republican Guard and Fedayeen Saddam guys. We also captured a few Iraqi intelligence officers and a couple of their navy divers. We struck in the middle of the night and took them totally by surprise. They never got to use the explosives or the antiaircraft artillery (AAA) piece that was positioned to take out approaching watercraft. We basically caught them completely off guard. We discovered a treasure trove of weaponry and ammo, but with our element of surprise, we captured them all without a single casualty on our side. I was one of the main breachers, using a shotgun to open about thirty metal doors to begin clearing each of the areas. In total, it took six hours to take the whole thing down, including prisoner handling and doing initial interrogations.