But when bullets are coming and a handler’s dog is out in the open and unprotected, this mentality doesn’t always prevail. Handlers have put themselves in harm’s way protecting their dogs; some have even died trying to save them.
The moon cast an alabaster glow across the base, but then sometime around midnight the wind kicked up an angry bluster. A sandstorm swirled, drowning the sky; darkness swallowed up the night. There was no visibility; not even the strongest light could cut across the impenetrable black. It would mean a delay of the route clearance mission—and for that, Army Specialist Marc Whittaker was glad.
It was the Fourth of July, 2011, in Afghanistan. Earlier in the evening, Whittaker had woken with a bad feeling, a dread so strong that he wanted to refuse the assignment outright. But this of course was not an option. Still, the sandstorm filled him with a small hope; maybe the whole thing would be scrubbed. There was no way a medevac or any other kind of air support could navigate through the darkness and wind. The rest of the soldiers who had also roused in the middle of the night milled around, waiting. Whittaker and his explosive-detection dog Anax hadn’t been stationed at Forward Operating Base Shank in the Logar Province for very long; the dog team had only been on a few missions since they arrived from FOB Salerno in the Khwost Province.
Anax had noticed the drag in Whittaker’s mood and, though the three-year-old German shepherd wasn’t prone to affection, he stayed close to his handler, nuzzling his head under Whittaker’s hand. In a matter of hours the storm cleared, leaving behind gusty winds, but the threat was gone. The mission was back on.
By the time the sun made its entry into the sky and the temperature began its rapid climb, Whittaker’s unit had been walking for miles. He started to sweat. Anax wasn’t showing any signs of distress, taking the heat in stride. They made it through the village to their destination without disturbance; the roads were quiet and seemingly empty. All was clear and the resupply convoy got the okay to move ahead.
At the outpost he, Anax, and the rest of their team—about 20 soldiers—
took a beat to catch their breath and rest in the shade, waiting for the convoy to catch up. They’d only been there a few minutes when a call came in from a neighboring village that another unit had stumbled onto what they thought was an unexploded ordinance. Whittaker and Anax walked over with a Czech EOD team. It turned out to be a simple detonation, and the Czech team made fast work of disposing of it.
By the time they returned to the outpost the convoy had already made its drop-off and was ready for the return trip—the mission was nearly over.
Whittaker’s team pulled their gear back on and headed toward the village, this time choosing an elevated path, an alleyway that ran high along the hillside giving them a clear, downward view of the main road and the convoy. By now civilians were bustling about, busy with their early-morning routines—getting to work, opening the shops, taking their children to school. Whittaker and Anax stuck to the center of the group as it spread out. He watched the first few convoy trucks roll along the road, and then he heard an RPG explode, followed by the sound of gunfire. The convoy was getting ambushed.
Whittaker heard orders coming in loud over the radio, instructing the unit to move from their position on the hillside, to go into flanking maneuvers and to engage the enemy in an effort to draw the fire away from the convoy so it could make its way out of the village.
Everyone began to run, moving fast down the hill over small rising walls and ditches, racing through the twisted alleys, closing the distance between Whittaker’s unit and the convoy. Whittaker had his hands on his weapon while Anax, still hooked to his side on the retractable, kept pace beside him. The dog was just as amped as the rest of them, feeding off their anxiety and adrenaline, but the dog didn’t make a sound, not a bark nor a whimper. The locals they passed were unfazed by the barrage of bullets and assault weapons, their faces serene and unafraid. A man rode by on his bike. It was as if they were operating on another plane of existence. The sounds of war had become so commonplace they were only background noises here, like the ringing of church bells.
They continued to run, feet and paws pounding on the ground as Whittaker and Anax neared the wall, the final obstacle remaining between them and the road. Bullets ricocheted off of the houses, echoing throughout the valley, making it impossible to determine the enemy’s position. They jumped the four-foot drop to the road and into the line of fire.
They say that when bullets make a whizzing noise, you know they’re close. When you can hear them cracking, they’re even closer. As soon as they hit the ground, the sound of cracking flooded Whittaker’s ears. He and Anax were stuck, pinned down in the wide-open middle of the road.
Without his body armor, Anax was exposed, and Whittaker instinctively threw himself across the dog, using his own body as a shield. If bullets were to hit them, they would hit his vest. But under his weight Anax squirmed, fighting his hold. He snapped his jaws at nothing, at everything and finally made contact, sinking his teeth into Whittaker’s hand, three of his canines piercing through his glove and skin. A full-mouth bite, his jaw closing around the whole of Whittaker’s hand—catching him near his thumb and down around his pinky finger. But in the heat of the commotion, Whittaker barely registered the sensation.
The barrage lasted two full minutes, and then the air shifted and Whittaker noticed the shots sounded different—it was his guys who were laying down suppressive fire, not the enemy. If they were going to move, they had to move now. He pushed himself up off the ground, ready to run, but his dog, who was always out ahead, wasn’t even moving. Whittaker glanced back and saw that Anax’s eyes were open; he looked as if he wanted to follow but couldn’t. He was frozen. And that’s when Whittaker knew something was very wrong.
He grabbed Anax by the collar and, giving up hope of reaching the others, dragged the dog to the nearest cover, a solid wall just a few feet away. Whittaker’s hands flew along the dog’s body, assessing him from head to tail. The dog was breathing, but he was whining and twisting in pain. And then Whittaker saw the blood on the dog’s hind legs.
Fear set in. He didn’t have his medical kit with him. He’d left it on the truck, still over at the dismount site. He pulled the bandages from his own medical kit, pressing gauze to Anax’s wound to try to stem the bleeding. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. The thought hurtled through his mind again and again.
By that point, an air weapons team had been called in and the firefight was basically over. Whittaker finished wrapping the gauze around Anax’s leg as best he could. A lieutenant got on the radio to let command know they needed an IV for Anax, as well as a helicopter to get him to treatment.
But the medic couldn’t help Anax: he was occupied treating a civilian, a contractor riding in the convoy who had sustained a head injury when it was attacked. A medevac had already been called for the injured man and was on its way to the dismount site. All they had to do was get there in time and the medevac would transport Anax to a hospital.
The site was a mile and half away.
Whittaker took Anax in his arms and heaved him up, cradling the dog. He tried for one short, stilted step and then another, but as he trudged forward he could feel the dog’s fur slide from his grip, the pair of them nearly dropping to the ground. Anax was just 80 pounds of dead weight in his arms. It was after nine in the morning and they’d been out in the hot sun for hours, having walked for miles. Whittaker was drenched in sweat. He was so exhausted he could not carry his dog more than a few feet.
The Czech EOD guys who had stayed with Whittaker and his wounded dog rushed to help. Stripping off their blouses they tied the fabric together, knotting their shirts into a bridge of cloth. Together they pulled the dog up, but with his wriggling and writhing his canine body slipped out of the makeshift stretcher, slowing their efforts to get him to the medevac with every step. Now Whittaker’s panic was full
blown; they weren’t going to make it. Anax’s eyes were glazing over, his gaze was distant—the dog was about to go into shock. Even if they made it back to the dismount site, he knew that the medical kit alone wouldn’t be enough now; Anax needed emergency care.
Whittaker shouted at the lieutenant, “I need to get my dog on that bird! We have to get on that bird!” He yelled it again and again.
Then Whittaker heard the sound of a truck. It was an Afghan local. Whittaker heard the voices, the sounds of negotiation. The EOD guys managed to communicate the urgency of the situation, and the Afghan man agreed to loan them his truck. They piled in. There was the blur of movement, the jolt of the rocky road beneath them. They were moving, they were moving.
When they pulled up to the medevac site, the signal smoke marking its spot already billowed high in the air. Within minutes the helicopter was on the ground. They made it.
They just made it.
Four
Beware the Loving (War) Dog
The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is the dog. . . . And when the last scene of all comes, and death takes his master . . . there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws and his eyes sad but open, in alert watchfulness, faithful and true, even unto death.
—George Graham Vest, September 23, 18701
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in ad 79, the volcano sent rushing waves of scorching toxic gases running at temperatures estimated to have been as high as 570 degrees, smothering Pompeii in pumice and ash. Death was virtually instantaneous.2 As one surviving witness to the eruption, Pliny the Younger, recalled a few decades after, “You could hear women lamenting, children crying, men shouting. . . . There were some so afraid of death that they prayed for death.”3
The eruption claimed some 16,000 lives. What was left behind, revealed when the dust had settled, was a ghastly scene of horror and panic, frozen in time. It’s said one untethered dog was found among the bodies solidified in ash, standing resolute, squarely facing the approaching danger. The dog was protecting a small boy, curled between the animal’s legs. Against all odds and the instinct of flight, this dog had remained with his boy.4
When it was exactly that man and dog first began their relationship is still being debated. Most scientists and researchers believe the dog originated around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, while others have determined it was only somewhere between 12,000 to 16,000 years ago.5 Also contested are the versions of how we met and came to forge such a strong friendship with dogs. For many years the prevailing theory was that dogs were the descendants of scavenging wolves who made early and convenient partnership with humans while picking off the trash along their villages. More recently, however, other ideas of how the dog really did become man’s best friend have pushed their way to the forefront. The theory that seems the most sensible is articulated by Mark Derr in How the Dog Became the Dog. “It’s fair,” he writes, “to say that the humans and wolves involved in the conversion were sentient, observant beings constantly making decisions about how they lived. . . . They were social animals willing, even eager, to join forces with another animal to merge their sense of group with the others’ sense and create an expanded super-group that was beneficial to both in multiple ways. . . . Powerful emotions were in play that many observers today refer to as love—boundless unquestioning love.”6
Derr calls upon the December 1994 discovery of the Chauvet Cave, inside of which are the oldest paintings ever found, dated at 32,000 years old.7 Perhaps more important is what was found on the cave’s floor—two sets of footprints, dated at 26,000 years old.8 They belong to an eight-year-old boy and a wolf. Little else could be discerned from the prints, for there are too few to determine where they went or why they were there, except that they were traveling together, in tandem, as friends.
The annals of dog lore are full of stories exemplifying canine devotion and the depths of their loyalty. There are great yarns that tell of dogs who, after accidental or untimely separations from their human companions, crossed the length of countries to be reunited. More extreme still are accounts, some thousands of years old, of dogs who went to remarkable lengths of sacrifice, facing death or, in the rarest of cases, committing suicide rather than be left behind in the land of the living, alone.
When King Lysimachus, one of Alexander the Great’s ruling successors, died in 281 bc, his dog Hyrkanus dove into the flames as the man’s body was being cremated during the funeral service.9 A few hundred years later, a dog belonging to Titus Sabinus, the rightful heir to the Roman throne, remained steadfast after his master was jailed and then executed by the reigning emperor. First, the dog followed his persecuted master to jail, and then, after Sabinus’s body was unceremoniously dumped in the Tiber, he jumped into the water and tried in vain to keep the corpse afloat.10
Somewhat more recent reports of dogs who were so forlorn after their owners died that they lived afterward in a perpetual state of mourning, made the canines into local, even national, celebrities. Greyfriars Bobby, a small Skye terrier, took up permanent residence in the cemetery where his owner, an elderly farmer by the name of Gray (known as Auld Jock), was buried in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1858. When it became clear the dog was there to stay, the groundskeeper took pity on him and gave him food and shelter. Even during the most treacherous weather, it is said that the dog made every effort to remain by the grave, keeping his vigil going strong for 14 long years until he died in 1872.11
In the 1920s in Japan, a dog called Hachiko was renowned for a similar display of undeterred devotion. Hachiko would meet his owner, a professor at the University of Tokyo, at the end of every day at the train station. One day in May 1925, the professor suffered a brain hemorrhage and died, never making it home again to meet his dog at their usual time. But Hachiko continued his prompt meeting of the three o’clock train for ten years, until his own death in 1935.12
The noted dog author Albert Payson Terhune called these dogs “Professional Mourners” and suggested that the dogs behind these canine campaigns of loyalty were little more than opportunists who took advantage of public sympathy and free meals.13 Yet even if the slant of these stories is too fanciful or, after being passed from dog lover to dog lover, details were exaggerated, these dogs were not just a passing phenomenon. Modern-day reports are too widespread to ignore or dismiss such abject devotion.
In the spring of 2011, terrible landslides ravaged the city of Teresópolis, Brazil; one photo of the devastation showed a brown dog next to a mound of red-clay dirt. She leaned against a fresh grave, one of hundreds lined in neat rows. The caption noted that the dog, called Leao, had reportedly been there for days, refusing to leave the side of her buried owner who’d been killed in the disaster.14 A few months later that same year, inhabitants of the small village of Panjiatun in China decided to build a kennel by the grave of Lao Pan, a 68-year-old resident whose dog, a mutt with ears the color of butterscotch, had kept watch since his interment. Numerous attempts to coax the dog away failed, so Pan’s former neighbors simply continued to bring him food and water.15
Known for their fidelity, their courage, and their capacity to love without judgment or duplicity, dogs have become an archetype: the iconic end-all be-all of a loyal and unselfish friend. It is this wholly emotional devotion we perceive on the part of a dog that makes any act of loyalty a heroic and indomitably heart-wrenching note in the narrative of war. There is plenty of battlefield evidence—testimonies of dogs leaping into bullet spray, braving poisonous gas, or ignoring the deafening roar of bombs to stay at the side of their handlers—to prove a canine’s preternatural ability and willingness to protect and defend human life even when it comes at the expense of his own.
In the deep blue of a February night in 2010, in the Paktia province of Afghanistan, so near the mountainous Pa
kistan border, a group of US soldiers retired to their barracks, many of them preoccupied with the near-bedtime business of writing letters and sending emails. Others were already sound asleep.
Little else but dust stirred as a cool breeze swept through the compound. Then a growl rumbled, low and threatening. One of the dogs resting by the gate had caught scent of something she didn’t like, and her warning caused the fur on the backs of the two dogs beside her to prickle in anticipation. Maybe it was the scent of the unfamiliar man approaching, or there was something repellent in the odor of the 24 pounds of C-4 explosives the intruder had strapped to his body. Or maybe the dogs just sensed that someone was coming to do their caretakers harm.
The dogs startled the man, who had crept into their compound wearing a stolen Afghan National officer uniform, but he made a rush to his target—the barrack’s door. The dogs charged him. Target and Rufus sank their teeth into his legs, ripping and pulling at his shins, while Sasha bared her muzzle, barking and dodging in front of him, blocking his path. The commotion roused the soldiers inside and they called to the dogs to keep quiet. At the sound of the men’s voices, the insurgent grew desperate and detonated his bomb.
So powerful was the blast that it rocked the barrack walls, knocking out an entire side of the building. The flying shrapnel and spray sliced through the air, injuring five men. There was chaos and smoke, but the men started digging in the rubble for the dogs until they were found. Sasha the puppy was so badly hurt she had to be put down. The other two dogs, Target and Rufus, were wounded, deep gashes stretched across their bodies flashing wet with blood. But these were not military dogs: they were strays who’d found their way onto the compound and had taken up a welcome but informal residence on the grounds. But to the soldiers who took them in, the dogs were more than just three Afghan mutts lying injured on the ground in front of them. They were comrades in arms, creatures who, in the minds of these soldiers, had just saved the lives of 50 men. Protocol be damned, all the medical resources at their disposal would be employed to try to save these dogs.16
War Dogs Page 8