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Curt always loved the ocean and diving. At fifteen, he began an open-water Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) program when he was staying with his father for the summer in the mountains near Santa Cruz. Scheduling conflicts prevented him from making the last open-water dive, so he didn’t get certified. “I was definitely disappointed at not being able to follow through to the end, but the really funny thing is that I was a terrible swimmer. My parents had the hardest time teaching me. I got to the point where I could just get by in the pool, but there was something about being under the water.”
His interest in diving started when he attended a private school. For a six-week period, as part of an enrichment program, the students were encouraged to pursue an interest. Curt chose diving. Once again, he took a certification course, but again he failed to complete it. He also didn’t finish his education at that private school.
“I got kicked out. I was one of those classic ‘does not apply himself’ types. Looking back on it now, failing to finish those first two dive programs was typical of how I approached a lot of things. I’d start something, get all fired up about it, lose interest, and then move on to something else. But those failures were more like delays. Those interests didn’t just die out completely, they’d end up in the back of my mind, and eventually I’d get around to finishing what I’d started.”
Curt was one of the fortunate few whose recruiter seemed to recognize something in him. He’d never heard of the SEAL Teams, but his recruiter mentioned them to him because Curt had expressed an interest in getting certified as a diver—hoping that the third time would be the charm.
“I was so clueless about the SEALs that I asked the guy, ‘Do they do any kind of diving?’ He just looked at me and said, ‘Yes. They do.’ Then I asked him if the training for the SEALs was hard. Again I got a kind of puzzled look, and the recruiter kind of stuck to his script: ‘No. Not really.’ Then they showed me the video, and it looked like what the SEAL Team members were doing was a lot of fun. I think I even said those exact words to the guys in the enlistment office.
“But the good thing was, I enlisted and was a part of the Dive Farer program. I did my basic training in Florida and then on to Millington, Tennessee, for my A school. I spent a few months learning my PR (parachute rigger) requirements. I think that it had another name—Aircrew Survival Equipmentman. From A school, I went straight to BUD/S. That was an eye-opener.”
Curt was a good student of human nature. “I developed a game plan right away once I realized how tough this was going to be. I saw some of these guys; they looked like chiseled Greek-god statues, and a whole bunch of the others gravitated toward them. They all projected this attitude—‘arrogance’ I guess is the best word to describe it—and I just didn’t want to be a part of that. I wasn’t a ‘Mister Popular’ type guy; I wasn’t a hero worshiper either. The thing is, when those studs fell by the wayside, so did their followers, eventually. They saw their leader go down, they must have thought, If this guy I admire so much can’t handle it, then how can I possibly do it? In a way, my being a kind of loner type, even back in high school, paid off for me.”
Despite Curt’s early habit of not finishing what he started, he did graduate from BUD/S in class 180 in 1991. He was then assigned to SEAL Team 1. He felt he had a bit of bad timing. “There wasn’t any real combat in the world at that time. I just missed the Gulf War. The last platoon heading into that theater left a month or two before I graduated. Our first workups were in Southeast Asia to do Foreign Internal Defense (FID) assignments. That was okay—doing that kind of teaching and goodwill work. At least it wasn’t all the same, since we’d lead dive courses, some segment-pair operations, jumps. The best part was Cobra Gold. But I don’t know anybody who graduated from BUD/S and didn’t want to put all their training to use as an operator.”
Each year the United States conducts multilateral training exercises in Thailand under the name Cobra Gold. The U.S. government has a strong investment in the security alliances we’d developed there as well as with Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, and the Republic of the Philippines. We’ve been conducting these “cooperative engagements” there since 1982. Initially, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps were involved, but the U.S. Army also participates. Similarly, these exercises were solely for the Royal Thai Navy, but the number of countries participating has expanded. As a result, for those six weeks in April and May, thousands of troops from a variety of countries train together.
Curt moved on to become a sniper and later a sniper instructor, went to language school to learn Thai, and then went on another deployment out of Guam doing more FID work. In 2000, he volunteered to become a free-fall instructor. A great need for those instructors existed, so Curt “jumped” at the chance. Once qualified as an instructor, he taught SOF and other Department of Defense (DOD) candidates the fine skills needed to use nonstandard parachute equipment. He spent the next three years in Yuma, Arizona, doing that work. Next, he rejoined SEAL Team 1 and started working up to go to Iraq. Once deployed in Iraq, he served as a member of a security detail protecting high-level Iraqi government officials. It was during that time that he had his first exposure to working dogs. “Some civilian contractors had bomb-detection dogs, and they were assigned to our unit. I’d never seen a Dutch shepherd or a Malinois before, and I just thought they were the most incredible-looking dogs. My family had a Pekingese growing up, not what I’d call a real dog, but I wasn’t that into having him around. He was fine, a good pet, but not a dog I especially bonded with or anything, so seeing these other dogs was a revelation. They did more than just bark and sit on your lap.”
It would be another few years before Curt was able to fully appreciate exactly what SOF K9s were capable of. Because that need for free-fall instructors still existed, Curt returned to Yuma. Finally, in 2008, he changed assignments, working for Support Activity 1, a unit that deals with high-security-clearance intelligence. The job proved to be more administrative than Curt would have liked.
“I’m a self-diagnosed attention-deficit-disorder type, and being behind a desk and dealing with all kinds of written reports wasn’t working out too well for me. Intelligence work is important, but it’s definitely not that active an assignment. Definitely not a James Bond experience. In fact, I felt like the relative inactivity was draining the life out of me. The command had just acquired the multi-purpose canine unit from Naval Special Warfare Group One, and I was asked if I had any interest in going over there. Once again, this was a case of somebody being shorthanded. I thought to myself, That program is about my speed. I think I have the attention span equal to a dog’s, so why not? I loved being outdoors, and this desk wasn’t a good fit.”
Curt was right; he was a better fit for the new position. As much as he makes noises about his ADD affliction, he immediately got interested in every aspect of the canine training. “The first thing I remember about Odin was that he didn’t look like any German shepherd dog [GSD] I’d ever seen before. I did my research and found out that the breeding lines and what was considered proper conformation had changed since the 1950s. Odin, though, looked like a classic GSD from the 1940s and earlier. He has a really big head and large paws and a very straight back. The dogs bred from the newer lines are smaller generally—paws and head—and they also have more of a swayed back. I always think of a Pinto—the old Ford car from the 1970s—when I describe how that spine differs. It’s just my opinion, but that classic look, the lines of dogs like Odin, are just much more beautiful.”
Not only did Odin look a little different, but he was also in a way a black sheep among the new trainees. He had been sitting in a kennel, mostly untrained, for a year when he was paired with Curt. He was a “green dog,” an inexperienced and unrefined dog that hadn’t been trained in any of the dog sports and didn’t have a firmly established foundation in obedience. “Odin’s big problem was his refusal to give up his toy. Getting a dog to release something is pretty essentia
l. Odin thought it was kind of a game, and he was better at it than the rest of us. When we tried to trick him into giving the ball or whatever back, he always outsmarted us. It was like he had a perimeter-limit-warning device: he’d let you in only so close before he’d dart away or just sit there turning his head away so that you couldn’t get it out of his mouth. Smart dog, but that’s frustrating.”
Like some of the others in the program, Curt didn’t like some of the methods, but he had to do what he was being trained to do. “Choking a dog off a toy isn’t a good idea. It creates resentment in the dog, and distrust. After you do that a few times, every time you approach the dog, he’s going to think that you want to choke him off that toy. All you’re doing is reinforcing that drive to hang on to what he’s got.”
Curt noticed that an instructor/trainer was observing from the sidelines as they put the dogs through their routine in the basic-handler course. “Every time we used the collar on the dogs, to choke him off the bite or anything else, I’d look over and see that man shaking his head. I went over to him a few times to get his take on things. He was pretty highly regarded in Germany, and he just said that our use of compelling the dogs to do what we wanted instead of encouraging or rewarding the dogs was just making some things worse.”
Curt learned more and more about operant conditioning and the importance of timing a correction or a reward as the program went along and later when his interest in dogs and training methodologies increased. “That reward has to be instantaneous. Bonding with a dog is all about the dog learning to trust you. If you get a dog to the point where he knows you have his best interests in mind, and you do that enough times in different situations, you earn some credit with that dog. It’s just like with humans. You have to earn someone’s trust. What we might call treating a dog with dignity and love translates in their minds to one thing—trust. Start with the small things and work your way up the scale.”
Odin exhibited, from the outset, some of the “symptoms” that affected Cairo, only more openly in this case. All dogs are different, but loud noises can trigger lots of things in them. Odin was not fond of helos from the outset, but by the time he and Curt had been together in training and in deployment, he was so relaxed inside them, he’d fall asleep at his handler’s feet.
In a variation on Start with something small and work your way up, Curt also noticed something important about detection work. “When you’re a SEAL, you learn about explosives from one perspective. I’m simplifying, of course, but basically we learn how to use them. We rely on the dogs for detection, and one of the things that surprised me was that the amount of an explosive being used can sometimes confuse dogs. Their noses are so sensitive that, let’s say, fifty grams of RDX or other explosive ordnance are being used in training. Well, a ton of RDX is going to smell different to a dog than that small sample. So, in training, we have to work at exposing the dogs to varying concentrations so that they won’t be confused. The other thing is that RDX is the major ingredient in C-4, so if your dog can detect RDX, he is going to be able to pick up C-4, because that’s essentially 94 percent RDX plus some plasticizers and fillers. What was made clear to me is that we as humans can walk into our kitchen and smell beef stew cooking. We may be able to pick up traces of the ingredients in that stew, but for a dog, that stew’s odors are immediately broken down into its component parts—beef, potato, carrot, onion, and whatever else is in there. That’s why those efforts to disguise drugs or explosives or whatever with masking odors don’t work. If you open your dog’s mouth and he’s got black patches, he has a better olfactory sense than a dog with a completely pink mouth. A dog with solid black or almost solid black is even better. Odin had quite a bit of mottling with pink and black.”
I do know of a specific study done at Auburn University that details the point that Curt raised, and I’ve definitely looked at this physical trait in the dogs I’ve acquired and trained and would agree 100 percent with that study. I have to make this point clear, however. Just as two people can have the same genetic propensity that might make them successful at something—say they are both seven feet tall and are agile, which would be advantageous on a basketball court—that doesn’t mean they will automatically become NBA superstars or that they will even be interested in playing the game. It’s those inner drives—prey drive, hunt drive, or whatever term is applied—that will assist a dog with that genetic advantage to really excel.
Curt and the other handlers became vagabonds of a type, and that appealed to him. The theory, just like with human troops, is the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in the war. He and Odin were taken all over the country to train in different types of environments—jungle environments, desert environments, urban environments, and high-elevation environments. Frequently they went to heavily populated skiing areas and traveled up to eight, nine, or ten thousand feet of elevation with four feet of snow on the ground to do explosive-detection work under those conditions. This was necessary because humidity, barometric pressure, wind, altitude, snow cover, all of these things affect explosive odor— how it travels, how much it permeates. A dog that can find any odor you want in a regular and familiar environment is one thing, but when you take him to nine thousand feet and bury it under fifteen inches of snow, that’s a completely different ball game.
Curt and Odin did all that, but even those extremes and the incredible amount of training they had to do didn’t fully prepare them for the rigors of deployment to Afghanistan. Even though they weren’t deployed to the mountainous regions of Zabul Province (which makes up approximately 40 percent of the land), the work was intense. Operating out of an FOB with SEAL Team 3, Curt and Odin took the usual first step—familiarizing the members of the team with Odin and his duties.
“Even though we walk point, that doesn’t mean that we take on the full responsibilities of the point man. That’s a prestigious job, and guys wouldn’t like it if you came in there and just acted like you were taking over. I told them that my job with Odin was to make sure they didn’t walk over any IEDs. They were still responsible for navigating the route and making all the decisions that goes along with that. I often looked back at that point guy and keyed off what he was indicating to me. The only time I would divert them from a route was if Odin detected something or showed early indicators that he was on explosive odor.”
Just as the dog’s apprehension skills are refined so that the K9s are a nonlethal force, the main job of a canine team is to save lives. Curt and the other handlers I’ve worked with find that responsibility completely in keeping with what they were taught as SEALs.
“From the very beginning, we have it drummed into our heads that as much as we’re out there fighting a war or trying to take out bad guys, we’re really looking out for one another. When you’re in combat, like we were, that becomes even clearer if such a thing is possible. All the other stuff—the politics of the war and whatnot, how the host nation civilians feel about our being there—that goes away. I’m there to save my teammates’ asses and my own.”
Very early in the deployment, Odin did something that earned the trust of the members of SEAL Team 5. The region they were assigned to was primarily made up of agricultural fields—mostly pistachios. They were in a fairly broad and flat valley, and the region was dotted with grape arbors. “I don’t know much about wine, but apparently extremes of temperatures are good for them. It was a hundred and ten to one-twenty during the day, and then at night, at that elevation, it dropped by thirty to forty and sometimes more degrees. We came on one fairly large vineyard, something I didn’t expect to see in Afghanistan, and a call came over the comms that Odin and I needed to check something out. A drying hut, one of the larger structures in the area, that was maybe twenty meters high, a stone building with gaps at the top for ventilation, needed to be checked out.”
The interior of the drying hut was essentially one large room with a few pieces of framing-type lumber serving as partitions. Given the building’s size—it was rou
ghly 750 square feet—Odin had a fairly significant amount of ground to cover, especially after a day in which he’d walked more than ten kilometers (six miles). (Not all of the distance covered, strictly speaking, was spent in detection work). The search came up empty. As they were exiting the building and about to rejoin the rest of the members of the team, Odin, as Curt put it, “keyed up on something, and he started pulling me. We came to a motorbike, a small single-cylinder thing that looked about the size of a moped. It was beat to hell, and the engine cases were crusted with oil and dirt, and the metal had that yellowish patina from gas leaking onto it and drying. I could only imagine what it smelled like to Odin, because the thing reeked of all those odors in my nose. But he made a strong indication on that bike and he sat on it. Not really sat on it, but sat next to it, letting me know he’d found something.”
Curt saw that a small package was under the frame’s top tube that supported the gas tank and the seat. He called the EOD man over, who normally walked right alongside him and the dog. “He wanded it, and then the point man came up behind us. We could all see something was there. The EOD man got the package out of there, and he discovered a dozen or so rounds of ammo. The package was wrapped up in a kind of tape, feet and feet of something like duct tape. It was all wound into this very intricate pattern, almost like it was woven. Obviously, whoever had done that didn’t want to have ready access to it, but they also really didn’t want anybody to know what was in there. In terms of its potential threat to our safety, that package posed minimal danger. Sure, those rounds could have been used against us, but nothing was rigged to explode.”
That wasn’t the important point. From a distance of more than one hundred yards, through a mixed-odor vapor of petroleum and gasoline, and shifting winds and swirling dust and packing that may or may not have been designed to contain that explosive odor, Odin had discovered it. As someone who’s very experienced in working with the kinds of multi-purpose dogs that the SEALs do, I wouldn’t get knocked off my chair by news like that. I’d be pleased, but my more measured response would be due to the fact that I’ve seen and experienced much more. That’s not to take away from Odin’s work. This was early in the deployment and relatively early in the SEAL Teams’ use of canines. Like many things in life, timing is important.
Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines Page 20