War Dogs

by Rebecca Frankel

  And that’s when his eyes fell on McCombe, who was lying on the ground completely still. The shrapnel had hit him square in the face and made a bloody mess of his eye, knocking him unconscious. Hardesty moved toward him, and as he got closer he could see McCombe’s body kick into survival mode—springing back to work on its own before his mind was fully conscious. McCombe drew deep, gut-dragging gasps of air back into his lungs. The medic was instantly at McCombe’s side, wrapping the wounds on his face, setting up an IV to give him morphine. But when McCombe finally came to, finding his eyes covered sent him into a panic and he started fighting the hands that were trying to help him.

  “I can’t see! I can’t see!” he shouted and tried to tear the bandages from his face. McCombe had been a boxer back in England, and he was solidly built and strong. It took four men to hold him down, to keep him from fighting the medic off.

  Shrapnel had hit Hardesty as well, a few small pieces entering the back of his head, another few under his plate carrier. But with all the chaos and adrenaline he barely noticed. He took a quick few moments and gave Robbie a more thorough check to make sure he wasn’t injured. There wasn’t any bleeding, nor were there any apparent breaks. The dog had been low enough to the ground that nothing hit him, and while Robbie continued to brave the sounds of the nearby bullets, Hardesty could see the loud noise had unnerved him.

  They had called a medevac for McCombe and had started to make a plan for their exit when someone shouted, “Freeze! Freeze! Freeze!”

  The blast had shaken the compound and the ground beneath it, shifting the sand. A circular pattern of what looked like another buried explosive revealed itself just behind Hardesty, less than five feet from where he had fallen after the initial explosion. When they ran a metal detector over it, the machine let off a shrill beep: it was another IED.

  Outside the firefight still raged, but it was still too dangerous for the unit to remain in the compound where there might be more IEDs. They marked the bomb’s position so they could safely avoid it during the evacuation. Some of the guys in their unit went into the field, settling into a ditch to lay down some supporting fire. They yelled back and forth to each other across the field while Hardesty took the metal detector and swept the rest of the compound so the Quick Reaction Force could come in to get McCombe.

  It took them nearly a half hour to safely evacuate, after which they had to walk the 5 kilometers back to their operating base. McCombe lost his left eye, and another guy, who was standing just to Hardesty’s left when that IED exploded, lost his arm. It would be two weeks before Hardesty got his hearing back.

  They would find out later that the explosives had been sitting idle for several weeks. As the ground compacted over time and rain fell in the compound, the earth around the IED had changed its shape. As a result, only 7 of the 20 pounds of buried bomb had blown up, and the blast had exploded straight up, rather than an IED’s typical outward-shooting trajectory. If things had gone differently, more than just pieces would have been gone.

  You would think having an IED explode in front of him like that, ripping away at his friends, would make a handler hesitant, afraid even, to go back out on patrol. But for Hardesty, it had the opposite effect: “After that I kind of said screw it, ‘cause if it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go. We don’t have control over squat. You think you do, but we don’t. Tomorrow you could get in a car accident—you’re dead. It’s that simple, it’s that silly, it’s that sad and stupid, but that’s how fragile life is.”

  His voice hasn’t entirely lost its upbeat turn; it’s just quieter and more contemplative. “Crazy stuff happens in combat. You do things and you think to yourself, it’s not as simple as being a farm boy from Wyoming anymore.”

  By the spring of 2012, the marines have reduced their use of the combat tracker dog, and there’s only one tracker team coming through Yuma during that March class. Hardesty sets up special drills for this team to train on—their job is much different than a bomb detection team.

  Hardesty is standing at the entrance to the “mosque” in the K-9 village, just one of the 90-some-odd structures that make up one of two massive training sites at YPG. The village was originally built and modeled after a satellite image taken of an actual Iraqi village. It is staged with considerable detail for authenticity; the huts are built from organic materials, mud and clay, just as they would be in the combat theater. Inside the village are a wide market lane, a number of alleys and courtyards, and a cluster of huts that forms its own kind of maze. Many of the buildings have two levels with access to their rooftops. In its entirety this training area stretches over nearly 80 acres.

  Today Hardesty is going to set a track and then give the handler a mission, a story with all the information that handler will need to pick up that track. That story goes like this: rumors are spreading that locals are cooperating with US forces, alerting them to areas where explosives have been planted. Tension between village leaders and the Taliban is growing. Intel led Marines to find a bomb planted inside the village mosque—thankfully before it detonated—but the insurgent who planted it there escaped undetected. US forces believe that this man has likely taken refuge in a nearby cluster of huts, but the streets are crowded with people, loud with the bustle of the day. The tracker’s job is to find him.

  I chew on this information and look out over the huts a short distance away. It’s time to think like the enemy—which route would he take and where would he hide? I can feel a pair of eyes on me. Hardesty is watching me expectantly. It’s me; I’m the insurgent.

  In about an hour’s time Marine Lance Corporal John W. Peeler and his combat tracker dog Lex will be hunting, or rather tracking, the insurgent—me—down. The task is pretty simple to lay a track, leave a scent on the ground. But there’s more to it than just walking from one place to the next. Hardesty wants to make sure Peeler and Lex get to conduct the most realistic search possible—and taking on the mindset of a Taliban insurgent is key. How would this person assess the scene in front of us? How would he navigate the rolling mounds of rocky desert and the cluster of small one-room dwellings made of bleached brick with flat roofs?

  Unlike explosives detection, for which a search dog must be able to identify several odors, a combat tracker dog is always following new and different odors. Each track is a new scent, the odor of the suspect they are chasing. It is essentially a fast-moving manhunt in which dog, handler, and the team working with them must stay close together. It’s a footprint-to-footprint search in which a team has to abandon whatever abundance of caution they might otherwise consider to push fast and far outside the boundaries of relative safety. This means closing in on the gap between human bodies and unexpected danger—booby traps, trip wires, the enemy lying in wait.

  After seeing the success the British were having with their combat tracker teams in their other counterinsurgency efforts in Kenya, Cyprus, Malaya, and Borneo,2 the United States took interest in the idea. And by 1968 the first ten American tracker teams were sent into Vietnam.3 The business of tracking is now a sparingly used skill because today’s modern warfare has other means of hunting down the enemy—air support, unmanned drones—that are favored over riskier options that stretch manpower thin on the ground.

  As we walk, I twist around to see what kind of imprint I’m leaving behind. Far from pressing distinct impressions as you might walking through snow, I can barely make out the pattern of the underside of my shoes, and their markings are faint against the pebbly ground, crossing paths with whoever else has been out where we were. But my track—whether visible or not—is quite strong. Aside from footprints and whatever odor we emanate in our wake, our trail is mostly made up of skin cells. It is a little unsettling to think that we unknowingly cast off epidermal flakes everywhere we go. It’s like Hansel and Gretel, only instead of bread crumbs, it’s microscopic flesh droppings.

  After the track sets, Peeler and Lex walk ove
r the small wooden bridge near the mosque. A Southern boy, with a thready accent to match, born and raised in Blue Ridge, Georgia, Peeler grew up around lots of dogs and horses. He has a fair complexion and soft blue eyes. Somehow the mustache on his face doesn’t read ironic or comical. He’s only been a handler for about a year and partnered up with Lex for about half that time, but he is completely self-assured when it comes to his dog. One of the course instructors had complained that Peeler was too cocky, but to me his excess of confidence reads more quiet than that. He has a settling of self that makes him, at 24 years old, seem older.

  Hardesty feeds Peeler the story about the runaway insurgent and then outlines the objective: find the bomber. Peeler kneels down to Lex and pulls the harness onto his back, a ritualistic preparation that signals to the dog that it’s time to go to work, it’s time to hunt. The change in Lex is instantaneous; he looks energized, ready to go. Next, Peeler hooks the long leash around the back of his neck, behind his back and under his arms so it rounds to the front. He is wearing gloves and lets the leash slip through his hands as fast as Lex will pull it, lacing it through his loosely closed hand like a zip line, until he decides Lex has gone far enough; then he finally grasps and holds the leash, applying a certain amount of resistance.

  It’s a technique Hardesty calls opposition reflex, and it’s unique to tracking and trail work. Putting tension on the leash, and adding that extra pulling sensation, only fuels the dog’s drive to push harder. It’s all about the reward; the toy the dog knows is waiting for him at the end of the track. The dog knows from doing this time and time before, Hardesty says, that if he pulls hard enough and smells that odor on the ground long enough, he’s going to get his reward.

  Unlike in IED detection work, where military handlers have had great success working their dogs off the leash, in combat tracking it’s essential that the handler and the dog maintain a taut-leash tension between them. In tracking, Hardesty explains, the amount of odor you’re following is very small and is supersensitive. Giving a dog a correction or command at the wrong time could too easily throw the dog off the track.

  Peeler begins by scanning the ground and finds his starting point—a spot where I gave a good dig in the ground with my heel. He directs Lex’s nose to that spot, and with a perk of his ears the chase is on. Lex’s nose is working hard; the sounds of his panting, inhales and exhales, are audible: he is a dog intent, moving with a controlled frenzy. For a tracker dog, Lex has a deliberate style and works at a moderate pace. While Lex ambles a little ways away from the path we tracked, Peeler is looking at the ground, holding his position and only allowing Lex to pull the slack of the leash. A tracker dog handler has to not only focus on his dog, but he must scan for signs of disturbance as well as other clues along the way.

  Hardesty and I follow the pair from a distance; I don’t want to get too close to the dog so that Lex can focus on the scent trail I’ve left on the ground. After some fast moving, we make an abrupt stop. Lex lifts his head and Hardesty gives me a nudge. “Dog cast his head up,” Hardesty whispers, explaining that this is a sign to the handler that his dog has lost the scent. Peeler peers at the ground hard, and his expression is inscrutable. The ground is a maze of messy earth: each patch looks nearly identical, and if he sees anything noteworthy among the scuffs and pebbles, he doesn’t reveal it.

  Lance Corporal John Peeler and his combat tracker dog Lex at YPG in March 2012.

  But, as the moments pass, Peeler remains calm and unhurried and pulls Lex back a few feet and to the left, to the last spot where the dog was really pulling him on scent. They hold there, steady almost still for a few breaths, the leash between them taut. Within a few seconds Lex’s nose hits the ground and they’re back on the move, this time even faster than before. And Lex doesn’t stop moving until we reach the spot where I had kicked out another small divot to mark the end of the track. Hardesty had planted a tennis ball, Lex’s reward, on the same spot. Peeler whoops to praise his partner on a job well done, and Lex takes his prize and hunkers down inside one of the small huts out of the sun.

  A combat tracker dog handler not only has to put a lot more trust in his dog, but he has to be very knowledgeable about the art of tracking. Before Hardesty’s deployment to Afghanistan in 2009 to 2010 with tracker dog Robbie, he took a visual man hunters course as part of his training. He learned that people leave nearly a field guide’s worth of information behind them as they move from place to place. All the trained eye of a good tracker needs is a start point; once he has that, he has a good chance of not only finding the individual but sorting out his intentions and his plan of action. Even watching the way a person moves their feet can reveal a telling amount of information about what that individual is going to do before they do it. And if you apply all that observation to terrain in an area where there is no pavement, Hardesty says, “Those tracks, that’ll tell a story right there in itself.”4

  The following week, I leave another track across the gravelly Yuma desert, but this time I’m walking by myself. There’s no dog following me. Instead, I’m following the dogs. When the sandy path gives way to a paved road, finally the steps come faster, easier. The only thing behind me is a big white pickup truck driven by the veterinary technician assigned to the night’s ruck march. In the truck, Captain John Brandon Bowe is riding shotgun. That I am still somehow ahead of the truck is nothing to be proud of; it’s their job to keep up the rear in case any of the dogs (or handlers) are injured or become too fatigued to finish out the eight-mile ruck march. If anything, I am the reason they are going so slow.

  They pull up alongside me. Bowe, a Marine and executive officer of the Military Police Instruction Company and the ISAK course’s school director, leans out the open window and calls over to ask me how I’m doing. “You know,” he says, his eyebrows crooked with concern, “I won’t think any less of you if you don’t do it.” We are barely 20 minutes into the ruck. There’s miles of tougher ground still to cover, including the incline leading to the tower, the site that marks the midway point. At the top of the hill the teams will break for a short rest and the handlers will water the dogs, take their temperatures, and collectively catch their breath.

  I feel the sweat trickling down my back and chest. I look at the backseat; it’s empty, inviting, air-conditioned. My fingers are cramping but I tighten them around the big red gun in my hands and shake my head, declining the captain’s offer. He gives me a dubious look but assents and I push ahead of them on the road, willing my unwilling muscles to put some distance between us.

  At least Staff Sergeant Christopher Keilman was rooting for me. “You tell them to go fuck off,” he’d said earlier, when a couple of the course instructors had joked that I wouldn’t make it through the first mile. An Air Force handler and instructor for the ISAK course, Keilman has dark hair and a lean frame, serious and sincere. I felt grateful that his upbeat attitude was contagious.

  This evening kicks off with the big ruck that would lead straight into the K-9 village, which is when the nighttime mission—meant to be as close to the soon-to-be-very-real assignments these dog teams would be assigned downrange—would begin. It was the second night of “nights,” the third and final week of the ISAK course when training begins every day just before sundown. Tonight would also be the last night of “hand-holding” before the students and dogs would run drills without the instructors walking alongside them—when they were to be tested and evaluated on all they have learned.

  When, a week before, one of the instructors had asked me if I planned to go on the night march with them, I’d said yes. It was Keilman who took that opportunity to press me further to see if I’d “gear up” with them as well. I hesitated for the briefest of moments, knowing there was only one answer I could give. “That’s fuckin’ badass, man.” He whooped at this. “Hey, yo,” he called out to the other instructors, letting them know I was “gonna kit up and do the ruck.” There was an exchange of r
aised eyebrows.

  Keilman helped get me into the gear, tightening the Velcro shoulder straps of the Kevlar vest while also cinching the ones that wrapped around my rib cage, trying to get the snuggest fit he could manage. He apologized when it still brushed so low it tapped against my hipbone. (The plate carrier, which belonged to a male instructor, weighs somewhere between 15 and 20 pounds.) I can still fit my backpack over the vest, which contains, among other things, my notebooks, warmer layers (layers I would have no need for), and four bottles of cold water (weighing around 12 pounds). Next Keilman handed me the red rubber training rifle (solid and heavy, it weighs roughly seven pounds); shaking his head, he quickly corrected my instinct to keep my fingers hovering over the trigger. Apparently, this was bad. When I relaxed my arms and let the rifle go slack, allowing it to point downward at my toes, he scolded me. “You can’t let it hang down,” he warned. This was also bad, as it increased the likelihood that, were this a real gun with real bullets, I might quite literally shoot myself in the foot. “You have to keep your weapon at the ready,” he said pulling the gun’s barrel upward. I adjusted my grip to keep it straight, my forearms instantly twitching.

  After doubling up some of the magazine clips on my vest, Keilman took a step back to look me over and, seeing no other room for improvement, shrugged and hopped off to join the other instructors who were already outside. His pep talk and show of solidarity had been fortifying but brief.

  Outside the dogs were fidgety while their handlers tugged on leashes to keep their line formation. The teams stood in two rows flanking the left and right of the road. Each dog team had to keep a distance from the team ahead of them—about six feet or so—as the dogs need their space from one another, mostly to keep the more aggressive dogs from fighting. Some had their muzzles on. There had been a couple of dogs struggling during the course and I pick them out—MWDs Jeny, Jessy, and Turbo—knowing watchful eyes would be swept in their direction all night. Everyone was in full gear, an expectant energy prickled in the air, boots shuffled, the dogs were twisting, ready to move. Finally, Tech Sergeant Justin Kitts shouted over the din of low chatter and the jostling gear: the ruck had begun.