War Dogs

by Rebecca Frankel

  From day to day, their job was mostly running traffic control points, or TCPs, in different locations along the main routes in and out of Fallujah. Lulofs and Farnsworth eventually got their own Humvee from two other Marine handlers so they could travel with their dogs. It was a Frankenstein hybrid, a blend of ill-fitting pieces—part pickup truck, part jeep, part tractor. After a couple of months, it took on the look of a hardened scab—dinged, dented, scorched, and bruised.

  When Lulofs and Farnsworth started taking the vehicle on missions, making the trip between Camp Baharia and Fallujah, the Humvee didn’t have any armor—nothing, not even a bulletproof windshield. They were given a couple of Kevlar blankets, which couldn’t have stopped a bullet or warded off shrapnel. Still, it was all they had, so they draped them along the carriage in the back where they kept the dog kennels. It was a paltry safeguard, especially as Lulofs and Farnsworth knew that without Aaslan and Eesau they had no real place in this war. Bit by bit they clamped on additions to their Humvee, stitching together mismatched patches of metal and canvas, adding the L-shaped armored doors for the driver and passenger side, and the homemade AC unit they jerry-rigged to a generator and lobbed onto the roof. It was an eyesore of a combat vehicle, one that stood out in any convoy, and it became a prime and sought-after target.

  It didn’t take long before there was a bounty on their heads—Lulofs’s and Aaslan’s, Farnsworth’s and Eesau’s—handlers and dogs together. Shortly after those first teams arrived in 2004, the going rate for taking them out was $10,000. Lulofs was hell-bent on pissing off the enemy so much that by the time they left Iraq the bounty would be worth at least $25,000.6

  Early one day in August they were riding in a convoy on their way to set up a TCP. There were very few cars on MSR (Main Supply Route) Mobile that morning. Lulofs could feel that something was off as soon as they rolled out onto the paved thoroughfare; it was too quiet. The main six-lane highway that traverses the outside edge of the city of Fallujah usually saw more traffic at this time of day.7 They guessed that word of some impending threat had spread among the people living in the city, and so the civilians were avoiding their normal route, using instead the makeshift dirt road that ran alongside MSR Mobile.

  After some back and forth on their radios, Lulofs, Farnsworth, and the other Marines in their convoy determined that what they were looking at was likely a single IED attack. So they slowed down their normal speed of 45 miles per hour to about 25, taking the road nice and easy. Lulofs drove, keeping his eyes locked on the road, looking for disturbances—a suspicious bump, a rock pile—anything that could be a bomb.

  They’d been creeping along for some time when the convoy pushed past a certain point and there was an explosion. But it wasn’t just a single IED—that was just the trigger signal. The enemy, lying in wait, now had the target in its sights and started unloading its arsenal. The onslaught hit the convoy from the left side, so while Lulofs was driving, focused on steering around any IEDs, he was also aiming his weapon out the window, shooting as they pushed ahead. Farnsworth, who didn’t have a clear shot from the passenger’s seat, kept his eyes glued in front: watching for danger, calling out directions, and reloading Lulofs’s weapon. The incoming fire pelted them as they pressed forward on the road, like ants in a line unable to scatter.

  One of the rounds hit their Humvee—a bullet piercing its armor, passing right between Lulofs’s knees, striking the steering wheel column and then ricocheting up, exploding the dashboard and spraying little blackened bits of shrapnel everywhere, breaking the skin along his hands, legs, chest, and arms.

  Lulofs barely had time to react when Farnsworth shouted, “RPG!” Lulofs flinched and slammed the break, keeping the rocket-propelled grenade from hitting the driver’s side door. The barrage continued; Farnsworth was so pissed that he climbed out his side of the vehicle while it was still moving to position himself so he could return fire over the back end of the truck. He wasn’t there for very long—within a few minutes’ time they’d almost made it out of the danger zone. The guys in the vehicle behind theirs watched as Lulofs’s and Farnsworth’s Humvee got slammed and counted at least six RPGs that sailed past or hit the vehicle. Each time, they missed or hit without detonating, clanking against the armor at an angle and flying back up into the air. It had been a relentless, nonstop hail of bullets and mortars that lasted the full stretch of a mile.

  When they finally were able to pull over, the first thing they did was check on their dogs, who were still in their kennels in the back. While Aaslan had weathered the barrage, Eesau had not; he refused to get out of his kennel. Even after Farnsworth managed to coax him out, Eesau still wouldn’t work. The stress was so great, the dog just shut down. The dogs had protection against bullets, yes, but it had been modest at best. And as each round hit the side of their vehicle close to where the dogs were riding, Lulofs couldn’t help but think that they’d been killed or at least wounded. Amazingly, they weren’t even scratched. But they had come close. On the outside of the vehicle, right by the dogs’ kennels, was a compartment where they kept their MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, the prepackaged field rations. Later, when they opened up an MRE, they found a bullet lodged inside.

  It was after that August ambush that Lulofs began to change. He’d been deployed for nearly six months, and the devout man he’d been when he arrived in Iraq was seeing things differently. Where before he’d have shaken his head in offense at the sound of swearing, profanity now spouted freely from his mouth. Farnsworth noticed the difference in his friend and tried to talk to Lulofs about it; he reasoned that if a guy who wouldn’t even utter a curse word put his Bible in a bag and never touched it again, it meant something wasn’t right.

  But it was more than that. Lulofs had grown complacent. It wasn’t laziness but a kind of mania that gripped him. When they went out on missions, Lulofs stopped carrying his rifle, taking only his sidearm. He started to think himself invincible, believing that bullets and bombs couldn’t touch him. He’d already faced them all and survived. God wasn’t going to let him die, not here. Not in Fallujah.

  The nearer he came to the end of his deployment, the more the thought of going home began to consume Lulofs. He began to approach each mission with a ravenous sense of purpose, working his handlers and their dogs to the breaking point. On one mission during those last weeks, he worked his team with such belligerent intent that he didn’t even realize they had pushed their way past the front line—putting his dog teams between the Marines and the enemy. When he finally noticed they were in the kill zone, Lulofs simply told his handlers to keep moving even as they were getting shot at, telling them to ignore it. They were less than 100 yards from artillery shells. He knew how dangerous it was but he didn’t care.

  Lulofs rationalized away the risks he was taking. The sooner they were done with this mission, the sooner they could begin the next and then, only then, could they leave this godforsaken place and go home.

  A single moment of clarity managed to prick its way through the fog of Lulofs’s complacency. While he and Farnsworth were out together on a mission, Lulofs saw a master gunnery sergeant, with Special Ops standing a few feet away, watching the pair of them. The sergeant walked over and looked Lulofs straight in the eye. “You two have been here too long,” he told him.

  The sense of fearlessness and invincibility he felt on missions was, he would realize later, purely selfish, and it put him recklessly close to the edge of death. Looking back now, Lulofs believes he survived the war because of two things. One of those things was luck; the other was Aaslan. The dog had been his lone emotional crutch and the real reason why he’d been able to retain as much of himself as he could hold onto in Fallujah.

  The other men relied on Aaslan too. During their deployment in Iraq, Lulofs had one rule about his dog. No one could pet Aaslan while they were working. The Marines on their patrols knew this rule and respected it. They would wait for each mission to b
e over because that’s when Aaslan was free—free to be loved on, free to play.

  There would be a lot of bad days in Iraq, “bad” meaning that they had severe casualties. After one very bad day, Lulofs and Aaslan were waiting with the Marines to remount so they could get back to their base. Lulofs watched while one Marine broke down, put his head on Aaslan’s shoulder, and wept.

  Any handler who has brought a dog with him or her to war will say it made all the difference in the world. They will say that the dog by their side provided them with something more than just a living, breathing piece of home—the dog acted as a talisman, insulating them from whatever horrors unfolded, bringing them peace in turbulence, offering companionship in times of loneliness. The dog’s presence made the path through war bearable, the unendurable somehow endurable, and many will say they came through the other side more stable.

  During wartime or otherwise, no matter how far one strays from working dogs, whether to venture into different military jobs or once back in civilian life, K-9 is a lifelong state of mind. It’s like a bloodline, deep and tangled, the mark of which lives on long past the dogs, long after the wars are over.

  Sean Lulofs knew he wanted to be a handler when he was five years old. His mother brought him to a police demonstration. He watched as an officer placed a bag of cocaine in a woman’s purse. Then a dog was brought in and, within minutes, found the cocaine. Awestruck, he turned to his mother and declared his life’s goal—to become a K-9 police officer.

  Dog handlers are their own breed. In Lulofs’s estimation handlers have their own place in the military world; they are like drops of oil floating in water—distinct, separate. It’s all part of the personality, he says. They see themselves as outsiders within the larger world of the military. Shunned, misunderstood. “Leadership doesn’t understand us,” he says, “because they don’t understand our mindset. They don’t quite grasp us because they don’t understand dogs.”

  Even though he didn’t fully leave the MWD program, Lulofs stopped handling dogs in 2009 to take a managerial role. Advancing as a dog handler in the military often means giving up the work he loves—the higher the rank, the further into the world of administration one goes, and the further he is from working with the dogs. Still, the familiar ring of K-9 pride colors Lulofs’s voice. It’s the same sound that carries in Ron Aiello’s voice, just as it does with most handlers whether they’re retired or active, young or old.

  A scout dog handler who served in Vietnam, Ron Aiello still beams with pride for Stormy, the dog who accompanied him to war. From the way Aiello talks about her—immediate, vivid, and joyful—it’s as if Stormy is somehow still at his feet or dozing in the next room, instead of a memory from a lifetime nearly half a century old. She did more, Aiello believes, than merely save the lives of the men on the patrols he led through the jungles of Vietnam, alerting them to snipers, ambushes, and explosives. Had it not been for Stormy, he says, “I would’ve come back a different person.”

  When Ron Aiello was a little boy, he would spend Friday nights riding in the front seat of his grandfather’s taxicab. When they dropped off a fare, his grandfather, a heavy man who’d immigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager, would tell their passenger, “Give the tip to my grandson,” and Aiello would collect a dime or, if he was really lucky, a quarter. It was a lot of money for an eight-year-old kid in 1953.

  Even then Aiello knew he would become a Marine. He grew up in his grandparents’ home in the Italian section of Trenton, New Jersey, in a house filled with love, food, dogs, and family. One of Aiello’s favorite uncles was a Marine. So in the summer of 1964, when he was 18, Aiello threw some clothes into the back of his ’57 Cadillac and drove down to Virginia Beach and enlisted. A few weeks later he was an infantry grunt stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. One day coming back from maneuvers Aiello spotted a guy posting a three-by-five index card on a bulletin board. It was asking for volunteers for dog school. Aiello thought if he had to go to Vietnam, what better way to do it than to go with a dog?

  By December 1965, he was assigned and training with the Army’s dog program at Fort Benning in Georgia. It was there Aiello met the dog he would take to war with him, an 18-month-old German shepherd mix named Stormy. The first time he approached her kennel he did so cautiously, leash in hand. She was smaller than the male dogs and she stood in the back of the run, staring at him. She didn’t bark or move. And so Aiello held still too, looking back at her. They both just stood there, staring. Ten minutes must’ve gone by before he got up the courage to open the kennel and walk in. Day after day they trained together—day patrols, then night patrols, learning how to follow airborne scent and alert on booby-traps, the scent of gun oil, and the sound of snipers high in the trees. The training drew them close, and pretty soon it felt to Aiello that Stormy could read his mind. In 1966, the 21-year-old Marine corporal and his scout dog were on their way to Vietnam.

  As a scout dog team, their role was to lead night patrols through the jungle undetected and in one piece. Aiello always kept her leash wrapped tight around his left wrist. Stormy, confident in her job, would lead out in front. When the leash was taut and pulling, the tension held between them, she was moving and it was safe to follow. But as a soon as the leash went slack, it meant Stormy had stopped; it was her way of alerting him. Aiello would then halt the troops behind them. Whatever held her attention, whichever direction her head was turned, that was where the threat could be found.

  Before each mission Aiello would sit with Stormy and talk through his orders with her. “Stormy,” he’d say, bending his dark head of Italian hair down to the dog, “We’re going out on a patrol tonight. We’re gonna go to an old cemetery.” As he would talk his way through the mission, mapping it out klick by klick, she would sit, listening intently, studying his face. And when Aiello heard his name called up, he’d look down at her and say, “C’mon, Stormy. Let’s go.” All the worry had gone out of him because she’d been there to listen.

  Stormy was a loveable, friendly dog. In fact, she was so friendly that when a senior officer instructed Aiello to use Stormy to intimidate a Vietcong they were holding captive for questioning, Aiello panicked. Stormy was too gentle a dog to be violent without provocation, without some kind of imminent threat. As Aiello approached the man—who was on his knees, blindfolded, with hands tied behind his back—he tightened his grip on Stormy’s leash, not because he was afraid she would bite the prisoner, but because he was afraid if she got too close, she would lick his face.

  But that sweet disposition would change if warranted. One afternoon on base, Aiello was crossing a field with Stormy. Tired and deep in thought, he didn’t notice a South Vietnamese Army soldier who was also crossing the field and heading right toward him. The soldier was similarly unaware of Aiello and his dog. Stormy however, had seen this man coming at them and, perhaps because she didn’t know him or because she smelled his gun, had marked him as a threat. She stopped in front of Aiello, crouched to the ground and growled. The soldier, reacting, pointed his gun at the dog. Aiello reached for his .45-caliber pistol and pointed it at the man’s head. He had no idea if the Vietnamese soldier would understand him but he told him anyway, “If you try to shoot my dog, I will blow your head off.” The soldier lowered his weapon and very slowly backed away. Aiello lowered his weapon and then, sensing that someone was close by, turned around. Behind him were three other Marines who’d watched this soldier point his gun at Stormy and had their M-14s raised, ready to shoot the man who would harm her.

  After one handler was shot and wounded, Aiello and Stormy took over his assignment for a day patrol; their orders were to search a village suspected of harboring Vietcong. Before they began their search, an airstrike came through to clear the village. Artillery hailed down in front of them, and the sound of roaring jets filled the air above them. The ground shook as the 500-pound bombs hit the village, rattling the earth.

 
; They stood on a hillside and watched as the village started to burn, blazing into a fiery inferno. While they waited for it to cool, a sick feeling filled Aiello; he knew they weren’t prepared for what lay ahead. Aiello was drenched with sweat from the intense heat, from all that burning, from sweating at the sight of it. The trees were still scorching, the lush green leaves smoldering and smoking, like coals in a fire, their ash lifting into the mess of black clouds above them even as they made their way to the bottom of the hill.

  When they entered the village, Stormy made a sound Aiello had never heard before—a deep, strangled moan. As they pushed deeper into the wreckage, she kept moaning. The dog had been trained not just to alert on ammunition and gun oil but also on human scent, and she was overwhelmed by the smell of charred flesh—it was all around them. Aiello realized there was no way she could work like this. But in the end it didn’t matter. As they walked from village to village, Aiello couldn’t understand what the hell they were doing there, there was nothing but bodies left to find—in pieces and parts strewn everywhere. The village was like a hotbox, the temperature upward of 120 degrees. It was as if they’d entered the underside of hell.

  The memory of that day would be one he would repress, hiding in the recesses of his mind until it reemerged on a steamy summer night nearly 40 years later.

  On July 4, 2000, Aiello was sitting on the porch of his New Jersey home, a lit cigar between his fingertips. It was late in the evening; the day was fizzling to an end. Earlier, his teenaged sons had set off roman candles and firecrackers in the yard. Maybe it was the sound of the fireworks, or the starbursts pluming in the distant sky, or even the hazy heat of the night, but the vision hit him suddenly and clearly, as did the sensation of being completely soaked. He flashed back to his younger self, standing at the top of that hill in 1966, surveying the burning wreckage of that Vietnamese village.