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

by Michael Ritland

  “I stood there shaking my head, trying to figure out what this guy’s deal was. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two other men in uniform. They were seated at desks, and a glass partition separated them from this marine and me. They were both smiling and laughing a bit, and the navy recruiter stood up and walked over to his door and stuck out his head. ‘Dude, why don’t you come on in here?’”

  He sounded like somebody Dave could better relate to, so he went in, and after a couple of introductory exchanges, Dave mentioned his interest in the Navy SEALs. He was handed a brochure, shown a brief video, and that was all it took.

  “Sign me up,” Dave told the recruiter.

  Unfortunately he didn’t sign Dave up for the Dive Farer program. Dive Farer was a way for the navy to identify potential candidates for the SEAL teams. They do additional training beyond what the rest of the recruits do. Dave assumed that when he got to boot camp, he’d be with the Dive Farer candidates. When the group was to formally muster, his name wasn’t called. Dave went to his basic-training instructor and asked about the omission. There’s that old saying about recruiters “getting” guys, and this was one of those cases.

  The instructor looked at his list and then at Dave. “Let me guess,” he said, “your recruiter told you were going to be a SEAL?”

  Dave nodded.

  The recruiter shook his head. “No. He got you. You’re going to a big old gray ship when you’re done here.”

  Following basic training in 1992, the future SEAL Team member was assigned a Machine Repairman (MR) rate and put to work. At first he was looking for a way to get out, but he was told that he’d made a four-year commitment. Dave decided that he was going to have to learn to live with his situation. He also learned that no tricks had been played on him. The recruiter had said that he could qualify for the SEALs; Dave had passed the initial physical fitness qualifier, but he hadn’t scored high enough on a written test to make the first cut.

  In high school, before he’d dropped out, he’d taken the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test. His score had been his undoing.

  “After scoring so low on that exam was another time when I could only do what I knew best—work my ass off to prove that I could get things done.” He proved to be a hustler in the most positive sense. “Being an engineman wasn’t my idea of making it to the top and proving myself. I figured that if I had to do my time, I’d take full advantage of every opportunity I had.”

  That attitude translated into him taking as many courses as he could, earning citations for exemplary work, and doing everything he could to stand out, in a positive way, from the rest of his shipmates. He picked his spots, but he let his superiors know that he was still interested in going into BUD/S training. His plan worked. When told that if he made the next rank, he’d get his shot, he made sure that it happened. It took three years to get into BUD/S, and when he did, he made the most of that chance.

  Only later, when he started to work with Samson, did Dave realize that the two of them had been prejudged. Dave, first by that marine recruiter who took him for a typical kid off the street (Dave admits that maybe his Hey, bro, what’s up? attitude sent the wrong signal), and later Samson, when the striking contrast between his slight frame and his oversized head made him appear to be a less-than-ideal candidate. Actually, Samson’s head was a slight advantage. If you remember the study done on dog’s skulls to determine bite strength, the longer the lever (jaw) and the broader the skull, the greater the pressure a dog could exert.

  Shortly after working with Samson, Dave discovered that advantage when the decoys reported back on the tenacity of the dog’s grip. He could hold on, and so could Dave. Prior to entering the canine program to become a handler, Dave served for a total of thirteen years, deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Like most of the other handlers, he’d had exposures to dogs as pets and had seen them work with other handlers as MWDs before becoming a handler. Some of his perceptions about Samson were shaped by his childhood experiences with Rottweilers.

  With his father working many hours, and Dave being the youngest, Dave was frequently left at home alone. For companionship, nothing beat having a dog to come home to from school. Dave’s family had a series of dogs, but the ones he remembers most fondly were the rottweilers they had while his parents were at work. Coming home from school to a dog’s greeting helped to ease some of the pain he felt at his mother’s departure. The dog was often an escape of sorts for him. He would take the dog for long walks, and though he had no real idea of how to formally train a dog, he made his efforts at it. From the beginning, he paid close attention to his dog, and he learned from it. He was able to identify that the dogs had different barks in different situations. For example, he was eventually able to identify when the dogs barked whether a stranger was coming to the door or a family member was approaching. Dave laughed when he told me how that ability came in handy: when he and his siblings were doing something they shouldn’t have been, the dog served as an early warning device that they had to stop and clean up their act before Mom or Dad came through the door.

  With the other dogs, he saw them as the younger siblings that he didn’t have. When his human siblings left, and especially after his mother left, the dogs helped to fill the void he felt from their absence. One dog in particular, Rebecca von Hufning, a female rottie, played that role particularly well.

  Dave became such a regular in the neighborhood walking his dog that at one point, he was out exercising the dog when a man approached him with another rottweiler. The man was about to go to prison, and he wanted to be sure that his beloved dog would be well cared for. He offered Dave the dog, and Dave accepted. His father wasn’t too pleased with idea of having another canine mouth to feed and sometimes used the threat of expelling the dogs from the house to get Dave to do what was asked of him. Father and son had some tension between them, but the threat was never made real. Dave knew that both his father and he relied on the dogs too much to have them be sent away.

  Because of Dave’s love of dogs, he was an ideal candidate to become a SEAL Team dog handler. Every handler has different motivations for volunteering, and not all of them share Dave’s affection for dogs. They admire and respect what they can do, but for some of them, one of the key training mantras we have—“Watch your dog every minute so that you know him better than you’ve known anybody”—isn’t always easy for them to apply. With Dave, that wasn’t the case. One of the reasons why we want handlers to be so familiar with all the dog’s traits, habits, and even its body has to do with monitoring the dog’s mental and physical well-being. As much as we try to re-create realistic battle/operations scenarios, with our SEALs and with their canines, how they might respond when in theater may be different.

  A handler has to be able to detect when a dog is not at his best, has been worked too hard, or has developed some negative association with some phase of an operation. If a dog is not working to full capacity, that’s like a soldier being distracted by events back home, like a weapon that hasn’t been maintained properly and might misfire, or a piece of communications or other equipment that has either been overused or somehow damaged. All those things become a liability. When Dave talked about the stress that he felt, he was talking about this aspect of the canine-human pairing. The dog, because he doesn’t have the ability to speak our language, can’t “tell” you when he’s not at his best. He can’t do that in words, but there are other “tells,” like a poker player who scratches his ear in order to appear casual but his opponents realize it reveals that he is bluffing.

  An important thing to remember about these dogs is that because they are bred and trained at such a high level, like any supremely competitive athlete, they want to be in the game all the time despite how they feel. The signs of a dog’s not performing 100 percent are often subtle. The years spent in training and the developing of the bond between handler and canine help to familiarize the human with dog so that he can better spot those minor fluctuations. Da
ve was a keen observer, and he recognized very quickly some of Samson’s behaviors that helped him figure out what his dog was thinking and feeling. Early on, he noticed how Samson interacted with other dogs, particularly ones that he didn’t like. “If he doesn’t like a dog, he’ll shake his tail—wave it back and forth three or four times and stop, then three or four times and stop, three or four times and stop. He’s almost luring the dog in, because when they wag their tails, they’re letting the other dog know that they’re friendly and that everything’s okay. He was kind of disguising his real intentions.”

  Anyone who’s ever owned a dog knows that they are “creatures of habit.” Put another way, they exhibit habitual behaviors. Any break from that normal pattern is something that a handler has to investigate. Ironically, that kind of surveillance is something that is also essential in warfare. Soldiers are trained and develop habits, and habits are something that they are trained to look for in observing the enemy in their environment. That constant examination of what is usual, regular, and what breaks from that normalized pattern is one of the fundamental elements of modern warfare as it has been practiced in recent years in fighting insurgencies in both urban and nonurban environments.

  In man’s earliest battles deception played a relatively minor role in warfare. Columns of soldiers marched against one another, weapons drawn. Of course, even in antiquity, some didn’t fight “fair.” The use of the legendary wooden horse of Troy is the most obvious example, but there are others. As several handlers have pointed out, one of the things that they found intriguing about the SEAL Teams was how much a part deception and the cover-of-darkness element appealed to them or was suited to their personalities. The SEALs and other members of the Special Operations Forces community are at the tip of the spear in developing and utilizing these kinds of tactics. All branches of the military and nearly every unit within them rely to a certain extent on deception.

  From the use of camouflage uniforms to ships and planes being painted to either blend in to their surroundings or “dazzle camouflage” (complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colors, interrupting and intersecting each other to make it difficult for an enemy to estimate the size, speed, and direction of a moving object) to entire units whose sole purpose is to deceive the enemy to propaganda campaigns—these are part and parcel of what soldiers must deal with. In fact, in World War II, the army took advantage of the talents of some of its inductees—actors, painters (Ellsworth Kelly among them), designers (Bill Blass), and others with nontraditional military skills—and placed them together in a platoon called the Twenty-third Headquarters Special Troops that operated out of Fort Drum, New York. In his book Secret Soldiers, Philip Gerard tells the story of this unique assembly of men and tactics, detailing the use of inflatable tanks and artillery weapons to dupe the enemy into believing that, based on aerial reconnaissance photos, our troops were one place when they were actually in another. They even had actors impersonating officers to deceive civilian informers and spies about the whereabouts of key figures. The Twenty-third Special Troops utilized their skills in a way that I see as similar to the way we use the dogs that I’ve trained and that the SEALs deployed.

  These dogs have nontraditional military skills: their sense of smell isn’t something every soldier needs to have refined to a great degree. Dogs are also incredibly stealthy: combine the relative quiet of their footfalls with their incredible speed, and you have a “soldier” that can sneak up on and subdue an enemy in ways that a human just plain can’t. Given the nature of warfare today, which is frequently conducted in modern urban environments or in other places with natural hiding places or places that appear “ordinary,” and the dog is an ideal weapon.

  Put simply, dogs working to detect or apprehend aren’t easy to fool. Their incredibly sensitive noses and ears, in particular, make them ideally suited for the environments I experienced in Iraq and that other SEAL Team members have dealt with in Afghanistan. The term “clearing operation” has become so associated with these two theaters of operation that it’s easy to assume that we all know what’s meant by that. Much has been written about the effects that modern insurgency tactics have had on soldiers. Similar to what I discussed regarding Vietnam, when you fight in an environment in which the enemy so often is indistinguishable in appearance from noncombatants, or when the locale in which the battles are being conducted offer so many options for the insurgents to blend in or to hide, our fighting men have to be on high alert all the time. Most experts agree that this has contributed to the high rate of post-traumatic stress disorder among the troops who’ve conducted operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  What’s important to understand about dogs is that they’ve given us an advantage in the deceptive-tactics battle. While insurgents, members of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and other jihadists have made attempts to disguise explosive odors, for instance, the dog’s ability to “focus” on a particular component of a mixed odor and identify it despite the presence of other odors and the minute concentration of the target odor makes them virtually impossible to deceive.

  One element of explosive detection that Dave found particularly interesting and that ultimately provided very useful intelligence was Samson’s and other dogs’ ability to detect what wasn’t there. During his multiple operations, Samson hit on explosive odors in places where there were no explosives to be found. That may sound like a failure, but it wasn’t. Invariably, when interpreters questioned cooperating Afghani civilians, they were told that a site at which Samson had discovered an explosive odor, the Taliban had just moved either bomb-making materials or the IEDs themselves from that location. They had since been moved, but Samson was right. He’d detected residue and remnant odors, and by our team’s being able to note these locations, and others, they were able to plot the Taliban’s movements and detect patterns and variances from those patterns. All of that is very useful intelligence in combating what was a real scourge of a deceptive maneuvers in both Iraq and Afghanistan—the use of IEDs.

  As I mentioned above, the term “clearing” is one that most of us understand, but in real-world applications in the military, a clearing operation can be anything from moving downed trees from a road to going from house to house or room to room to find bad guys, with a number of stops in between. We’ve all seen images from World War II of men walking in front of armored vehicles and troop carriers with a device that looks like a Frisbee attached to a curved handle. Land mines have been used in many different wars, but the insidious nature of IEDs seemed to be at its peak (or at its nadir, from the perspective of those against whom the devices were used) when employed by the insurgents in Iraq and by the Taliban and other terrorist enemies in Afghanistan.

  According to report released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

  A total of 224 U.S. soldiers in Iraq were wounded by IEDs in 2010 through October 1st, or about 25 per month, with a peak in February. This compares to 305 in the same period in 2009, or about 34 injuries caused by IEDs per month. These numbers demonstrate a dramatic drop in IED injuries from previous years. Between 2004 and 2008, the average number of U.S. soldiers wounded by IEDs was roughly 336 a month.3

  Obviously, there are a number of factors that contributed to the dramatic decline in the number of casualties related to IEDs, including relative troop concentrations, improvements in armor plating of vehicles, and a concerted effort to detect these explosives. How much canine detection contributed to this is not something that has been quantified, and given the somewhat scattered nature of the use of dogs by the military, that is likely not something that will ever be noted exactly.

  All we have to go on, then, is the anecdotal evidence. Ask any fighting man who worked with a canine team how important explosive detection was to his life either being saved or not terribly altered by an IED, and he’ll tell you that contribution was huge. In human terms, if not in numerical terms, dogs like Samson were invaluable.

  Dave told me one story of how S
amson contributed to this reduction in casualties. While still serving with the same team whose one SEAL’s gear had been piss-baptized by Samson, Dave and the others were billeted within the city limits of Kandahar. By this point, after Dave’s introductory statements and introductions, the members of the platoon understood what Dave’s and Samson’s roles were. They also knew that, as Dave put it, “This dog was like my kid. I wasn’t going to needlessly put him in harms way and get him blown up. I had made sure the guys understood the limits of what we could and could not do.”

  This was Dave and Samson’s second deployment, and Samson had clearly learned some things their first time in country. The high operational tempo during their first deployment had been tough on them both; nightly missions for weeks on end had strained them both. Toward the end of their six-month deployment, Dave had noticed that Samson wasn’t eating with his usual gusto and had some digestive issues. But Samson had come back and rehabilitated nicely, and to that point Dave was satisfied that Samson was at the top of his game both physically and mentally. He was still observing Samson intently and was glad that even though they were in a particularly hot zone in terms of engagements with the enemy, Samson seemed little worse for wear halfway through the duration of their assignment.

  Operationally, the weather played a significant part in Dave’s concern about Samson’s well-being and his performance capability. In June and July, Kandahar averages slightly more that 350 sun hours, less than 5 mm of rain, and a daily high temperature of 39 degrees Celsius (102.2 Fahrenheit). Nighttime lows average 19 degrees Celsius, or 66 degrees Fahrenheit. Those nighttime cool temperatures plus the cover of darkness make late-night operations in some ways ideal and in others anything but. The operational tempo can be dictated by the frequency of the missions but also by the irregular nature of them; anyone who works a schedule that is a mix of daytime hours and nighttime hours can attest to the toll that takes.