8
Like me, Aaron grew up knowing what he wanted to do with his life. Living in South Dakota, just outside Rapid City, he couldn’t see Mount Rushmore, but he had a living, breathing example of our country’s greatness near at hand. His grandfather was a member of the Greatest Generation, and, like mine and so many others, he didn’t sit around spinning yarns about his exploits. No one else in Aaron’s family seemed to place much emphasis on Grandpa Jim’s experiences, but as Aaron said, “I was just extremely interested. There was something about the military that I liked, so I started asking him about World War Two. And once he started talking, he opened up and just told me all kinds of amazing stories.”
Aaron’s grandfather was a boatswain’s mate on three different ships and was one of those patriotic Americans who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor. He was also one of those fortunate Americans who served for the duration, including a lengthy stint aboard the USS Portland, which saw duty in major naval battles in the Pacific. From Guadalcanal to Corregidor to Okinawa, the men aboard the USS Portland served with distinction. Aaron’s grandfather didn’t glorify the war for him, and Aaron recalled some of the horrific elements of naval combat, but mostly he remembered what his grandfather told him about the camaraderie among the crewmen and the lifelong friendships he made.
“Basically, he said that those experiences were the best and worst times of his life.”
Aaron described himself as a rambunctious, semidelinquent kind of kid who frequently found himself in trouble. That lead to his desire to join the military. “I wanted to be sneaky, and I thought Special Operations were cool.” He’d heard about the marine’s Force Reconnaissance from a neighbor who was a part of that group. His plans to join the marines changed when a friend’s brother returned from the United States Naval Academy over the Christmas holidays. Aaron had never heard of the SEALs, but he began to research, and from the age of thirteen on, he knew that he one day wanted to belong to those elite teams. He told himself that as soon as he graduated from high school, he was going to join the navy.
“I was big into swimming. I loved doing martial arts, so as soon as I read about the Navy SEALs, that was it.”
As much as he liked swimming, Aaron wasn’t on the swim team, but he did play water polo. “Play” isn’t exactly the right word. “Because I didn’t have the cardio fitness of the other guys and couldn’t even complete all the practice laps, the coaches just told me to go into the other pool while the other guys practiced and scrimmaged. I kind of realized I was a terrible swimmer.” Eventually Aaron overcame that, but it took some time and a lot of hard work.
“I’m a big reader, and I love to research things before I get into them, so I knew what I was getting into. I researched the hell out of the decision to become a SEAL Team member. But I really underestimated how hard it was going to be. When I showed up for BUD/S training, I wasn’t ready. Out of a class of one hundred and eighty-six or so guys, I was the second slowest runner in the class. After the first day, the slowest guy quit, so I became the slowest.”
Aaron can laugh about the situation now, but at the time, it took all his mental strength to get through it. He’d enlisted at the tail end of 1993 and then spent nearly three years training to become and then serving as a corpsman before graduating from BUD/S in 1997. As a member of his SEAL Team, he served initially in the PACOM (Pacific Command) theater out of Guam. “We traveled a lot doing Foreign Internal Defense (FID) and training other countries’ Special Ops guys. I was in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, the Philippines.”
In 2004, on his third deployment to Iraq, he was doing Direct Action Missions, hunting down high-value targets there. Later, like me, he transitioned from chasing bad guys to protecting good guys, serving on a personal security detail for members of the interim government. After this fourth platoon deployment, he was assigned shore duty for one year. That didn’t sit well with him. “I had a desk job working with the medical department. I basically was responsible for assigning other corpsman to be on hand when the SEALs were doing training exercises. If a SEAL platoon went to the range to shoot, they needed a medic there. I was the guy who sent a non-SEAL corpsman to those locations.”
Aaron wasn’t happy being a desk jockey, but orders were orders. One day in 2006, he was asked to send a corpsman to accompany a SEAL Team doing dog training. Aaron sent one, but his curiosity was piqued. “Even before our guy came back and told me about how awesome it was to see what they were doing with these dogs, I was asking questions when the request came in. After he told me about it, I had to see this for myself.”
The next time a corpsman was needed, Aaron tagged along for a day to watch the canine training. He watched the handlers working the dogs on explosive-detection scenarios and came away impressed with the dogs’ capabilities. Later, watching bite-work exercises, he was even more impressed. He’d heard about MWDs and seen a few in Iraq during his four deployments there, but seeing them up close made a major impression on him.
“I’d worked briefly in Iraq with dogs from conventional forces—marines and army—but basically we told their handlers how things were going to go: We’re going to go hit some house, and if a bad guy runs out the back, you send the dog after him. That was the limit of my interaction with dogs to that point. After seeing those training exercises, I realized there was a lot they could do.”
He found out from the OIC that they were looking for volunteers. Aaron asked the question that every military man considering volunteering for a program would: “What’s the catch?”
He was told there was none. He would have to make a two-year commitment at minimum. He’d be given a dog, be trained as a handler himself, and then he would get to deploy.
“That was the magic word. This was still wartime, and the dogs were guaranteed to deploy to the hottest spots because, obviously, that’s where they were needed the most.”
Aaron wanted to make certain he had things clear in his mind, “So I said to the OIC, ‘So you’re telling me if I come over here right now, you’re going to give me a dog and I’m going to get to go to combat?’ When he said yes, I said, ‘Oh, shit yeah, I’m there.’”
By 2007, Aaron was among the first handlers, outside of SEAL Team 6 on the East Coast, to be working with dogs. The program was so new at the time that, as Aaron put it, “You could have asked any SEAL if there’s a dog team, and most would have said no. A few would have said, ‘We don’t, but Team Six does.’ Basically, we existed before anyone outside our group knew we existed.”
Fortunately for Aaron, and for the dog-team members, he was a corpsman by training. That likely contributed to his transfer request being approved, and he served double duty as the corpsman and handler. His medical duties also included caring for the dogs, and he served as a kind of veterinary technician for them. Eventually, he took as many courses in canine medicine that he could to get up to speed.
Not everything Aaron had been told by the OIC proved true, but that was okay. The program was in its infancy but well funded. Along with other members of the team, Aaron got to travel to Germany and Holland to observe the basic training regimens the dogs underwent. Aaron needed that kind of exposure since he had never worked with dogs. His family kept dogs as pets, but he wasn’t what he’d consider “a dog guy.” After the first few months of training, he was hooked. “I fell in love with it. This was the best time in my career.”
Part of that had to do with being liberated from a desk job, but a lot of it had to do with his interactions with his dog, Castor. Aaron laughingly talks about Castor being a first-round draft pick. At the time, the Special Operations Command realized that there was a great need for dogs all across the Special Operations Forces spectrum. Vendors were found who could supply dogs, and then representatives of the Green Berets, MARSOF (Maritime Special Operations Forces), the SEAL Teams, and the Rangers all went on site to view and select the dogs. At each “draft” camp, one group would be given the first pick, and then at a later one, anothe
r group would get the first selection, and so on. Aaron knew going in that the West Coast teams had the first pick. Before the skills demonstration began, they got to view the candidates.
“It was an extremely tight-quarters kennel, and the smell was horrendous. The sound level was ridiculous as well. We were all walking through there, and some of the dogs were barking, some were spinning tight circles, and just about every one of them was going nuts in some way. Then I saw Castor. He was sitting there, staring back at this group of strangers staring at him. He was just chilling, and nothing fazed him at all. I called him over so that I could pet him, but he just kept staring at me like, Yeah, whatever; I’m not doing that. So I bent down and looked at him, and I knew he was the one. I liked his calm demeanor. I’m a pretty calm guy, and pairing him with someone like me had a lot of appeal. I told myself I was going to keep my eye on this one.”
During the selection and bite work, Castor stood out. Later, when talking with trainers/vendors, they confirmed that Castor had great skills. The rest of the Special Operations guys seemed dubious.
“We were all relatively new at this and didn’t have a lot of experience with training dogs and none with working in the field with them. Most of the other guys wanted one of those really big and aggressive types that had been so disruptive in the kennel. What convinced me that Castor was the right one was when we got to do some early socialization work with them.”
For this part of the selection process, Castor was muzzled and led out of his kennel. Aaron got Castor to lie down and then joined him on the ground. He’d hop over his back and then wrap his arms around him. The point was to see what kind of human aggression the dog would demonstrate toward a handler. Castor took it all in stride. Aaron also picked Castor up, something that makes even the mildest of dogs edgy, but again, Castor showed no discomfort.
“A lot of these dogs, you touch them and they want to eat your ass. They’re just angry animals. But Castor was like, Yep. Just another day. I knew this dog was perfect for me because he was a superstar in the drills and he was completely social.”
Though Aaron wasn’t an experienced dog trainer, he innately understood the point I’d made about how important the bond of trust is between a dog and his handler. That Castor allowed himself to be touched and picked up without complaint meant that he’d adapt easily to working with a new person and that the basic level of trust of humans was already in place. Castor sensed that this person wasn’t going to hurt him. That trait demonstrated itself later during helicopter training in preparation for fast-roping insertions.
Aaron had strapped Castor into his tactical vest, which is equipped with a handle at its top. To expose the dog to that environment takes some time. Initially, just getting a dog used to the sound of the engines and the wind-whipped air is enough. Eventually, though, you have to get the dog in the helo and off the ground. Most dogs are resistant to not having all four paws firmly planted on the ground, so you can imagine how difficult it would be to get a dog to climb out of a helicopter’s bay into thin air. Aaron and the other early handler trainees employed a sink-or-swim approach.
“I had to take Castor and grab the handle of his vest, lift him up, and then dangle him out over the lip of the helicopter. He thought I was throwing him out of the bird, and he freaked out—paws thrashing, his torso twisting. Once I let go of him, and of course he’s tethered to me, he dropped a couple of inches more and then just hung there. He was immediately totally calm, and I imagined he was thinking, Oh, okay, cool. This is fine. Dad’s got me.”
That kind of trust is essential to the relationship between a MWD and his handler. Castor and Aaron had it from the outset, and that bond only hardened as time went on. Much of that was due to Aaron’s dedication. Though admittedly not a dog person and someone who saw the SEAL Team’s use of dogs as a way out of a desk job and back into combat, Aaron put the research and reading skills that he had utilized in making the decision to enter the navy and the SEAL program to use in working with dogs. Unlike some of his fellow SEAL handlers, Aaron was an early convert to operant conditioning, partly based on his research and partly on his relationship with Castor. “He was my friend. I didn’t want to have to correct him. I didn’t want to have to jerk him around. If I could make him more receptive and get better results without all those negative punishments, then, even though I was going against the grain, nobody could say anything against me. To me, it wasn’t enough to go through the handler program and get dogs to do their jobs. I wanted to know how they thought, how they learned, and what I could get him to do without inflicting pain on him.”
Aaron took the same approach to his job as a dog handler as he did with everything else in his career as a SEAL. He knew that the job the dogs would eventually do was too important for him not to learn as much as he possibly could. At that point in the early development of the program, those training the handlers only had fairly limited experience with old-school methods of training and disciplining dogs. Aaron was concerned that those methods might have their limits.
“I want to be the best at every single thing I do. I also have a lot of natural curiosity, so I wanted to learn as much as I could. More important, if I show up in Afghanistan or wherever with my dog, and I introduce myself to the unit I’m assigned to, I have a great deal of responsibility on my shoulders. If that dog accidentally bites one of my guys, or if that dog doesn’t detect some explosives and guys get wounded or killed, that’s on me. That’s my fault, not the dog’s. And what if that guy who got bit has to be sent home, and then his replacement comes along and something happens to him?”
The downside of having that kind of bond with a dog, if there is one at all, may be in what Aaron felt as additional pressure—not just for his fellow soldiers, but with the dog that he’d come to care so much about.
“When you’re walking point with your dog, you’re the first one to see bad guys. If anything happens to anyone else, it’s your fault. That’s a lot of pressure to carry around. Even so, when I’m out walking point and I’ve got my dog in front of me looking for explosives, I’m also worried about his well-being. When you’re doing that detection work, your sole focus is on wind direction. If you’re patrolling down a trail and there’s only one way to enter this trail that is tactically sound, and if you’re unlucky enough that on that particular night the wind is at your back and not pushing those odors toward you, the stress gets even more intense. Castor could step on a pressure plate even before he smelled those explosives, just as easily as a human could—some of those antipersonnel pressure plates are that sensitive. The thought of getting that dog hurt, because he trusted me enough to go there, added to the burden. We love each other. I can honestly say that if Castor got injured, I would have as hard a time dealing with that as I would if something happened to other team members.”
Part of the reason why Castor and Aaron bonded is due to the qualities that dog possessed. On a training exercise, Castor and Aaron were moving through a heavily wooded area. They were patrolling along a road during this bite-work exercise, when Castor came on human odor. Aaron released him, and Castor ripped through the woods in pursuit. Aaron watched as Castor leapt through some brush and then disappeared. Eventually Aaron caught up to the trainer in the bite suit, fully engaged with the dog near a rocky outcropping. Blood spattered the gray stone. Aaron began calling for Castor to release, fearful that the dog had punctured both the bite suit and the human underneath it. Instead, what he saw was blood gushing out of his dog’s chest. On closer examination, he could see that Castor had impaled himself on a sharp stick. It entered his body with such force that the stick was still underneath his skin, extending down from the entry point on his chest and down his flank for about twelve inches. As horrified as he was, Aaron was also impressed that a wound that severe hadn’t slowed Castor down a bit.
Regulations required the dogs to be kept on site, so in order to treat Castor, Aaron had to drive home to get additional equipment he kept there. He also brought hi
s wife back to serve as a surgical nurse. In the field, Aaron had removed most of the stick, but he could feel that more was still buried beneath his skin and fur. Castor didn’t show great signs of distress, so Aaron didn’t anesthetize him. Even without a muzzle on the dog, Aaron and his wife felt safe performing minor surgery on the dog—removing the remaining pieces of stick and flushing the wound with various antiseptics. Following that and a few sutures, Castor was out of commission for only a week. Obviously, not every handler can provide their dog with that kind of medical treatment, but as I pointed out earlier, letting your dog know that you provide for his needs is an essential step in building that all-important bond of trust.
In ways large and small, Aaron did that, and he was rewarded with a dog whose performance in the field was outstanding. Aaron also went above and beyond some of the training standards of those early days and had Castor laser trained. One of the skills that dogs possess is their ability to follow nonverbal commands—hand signals, for example—but they are also capable of following our gaze. If we first engage the dog to get its attention and then look elsewhere, the dog will look where we look. In the field, that has limited applications, but getting a dog to follow a laser pointer’s red dot is especially useful. The SEAL Teams also have a pointer that is not visible to the naked eye but can be viewed through our night-vision goggles. Castor was trained on the visible type, utilizing this “look where I look” capability.
In the field then, Aaron could get Castor’s attention, show him the laser apparatus, and then point the beam into a specific area, and Castor would go to that point. When on the bite command, for example, Aaron could have multiple targets in front of him and use the laser to tell which of the ten people in front of him is the one that Castor should apprehend. Additionally, Aaron could target with the laser a particular door or wall among a series of them and direct Castor to that area. Again, keep in mind that this could be done either in full daylight or in pitch blackness, and from a distance of two hundred to three hundred yards. Once Castor has the sook command to find an object and is off-leash, he will go immediately to that specific area.
Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines Page 15