And then I begin to feel the actual weight of what I am doing—it’s as if the vest and backpack are straining to meet the ground, threatening to take me with them. All together I’m still only carrying about half the weight the handlers are—their packs and plate carriers average around 70 pounds, bearing extra water for their dogs, who are attached to their handlers’ sides by the leashes they keep strapped to their waist. The troop is moving at a rigorous clip, a speed that, even without the gear, would have registered for me as a steady jog.
I stop to adjust the straps on my pack and look up. I’m alone and already trailing behind.
About an hour into the march, modest relief comes on a teasing breeze, one that promises that a more temperate night is on the way. A good sign for everyone, including the dogs, as many of them, whose home stations are in cooler or more humid climates, are unaccustomed to steady exercise in such dry heat. Kitts is even hoping for rain. But after tonight, after Yuma, steady heat is what awaits these teams in Afghanistan or Iraq. Up ahead the sky is turning a buttery orange; the silhouettes of the handlers and their dogs blacken against the horizon, moving like upright shadows.
Keeping a brisk pace behind the last handler, Knight has brought along his dog Max, a Belgian Malinois puppy he’s training privately. Max is tireless, tenacious, and a favorite playmate of all the instructors. He noses his way into the classroom during briefings to drop a slobbery tennis ball on unsuspecting laps, poised for the chase. While the other dogs are in work mode tonight, focused and marching in synch with their handlers, Max is off his leash and bounds ahead of Knight, dipping on and off the road, his big ears flopping out of rhythm with his wild, young-dog energy.
“Look at him,” Knight calls over, unabashedly proud of his rambunctious charge. “He could do this whole march at that pace and still not be tired.”
Knight’s deep baritone rings in the space between us. At 40, he is barrel chested and gives off an air of impenetrability, projecting the very essence of the prototypical, badass Marine. It’s a deadly kind of calm that smacks of testosterone and is communicated more with the look of his dark eyes. Though he doesn’t say so, I suspect Knight is walking the eight-mile ruck with Max tonight to keep an eye on me. A thought that comforts and slightly alarms me.
Marine Gunnery Sergeant Kristopher Reed Knight wrestles with Max, a Belgian Malinois puppy in March 2012.
When I had first arrived in Yuma, I’d called Knight from my hotel room. It took a few minutes before I was convinced that he’d still been expecting me; after giving me a flat “Yeah, okay,” he went directly into fast and to-the-point directions. When I started to say my good-byes he cut me off to ask what kind of cell service I had. I named my provider and he made a snorting sound. “Yeah, you won’t get shit for reception out here,” he told me. I pointed out there wasn’t much I could do about that. “Well,” he said. “Don’t get lost.” And then he hung up.
Knight does not have a reputation for being a warm, fuzzy type. He’s known instead for the lengths he’ll take to enforce his high, uncompromising standards. Before arriving in Yuma, I’d heard a story about a handler from Buckley Air Force Base who’d had orders to fill an instructor position out at Yuma under Knight’s command. But when he had found out that she had no outside-the-wire experience, he called her and told her not to bother coming. In his mind, without having done it herself, she couldn’t offer anything worthwhile to handlers on their way to war and therefore was no use to him. Supposedly the movers had been there at her house, packing her stuff while this conversation took place, but it hadn’t mattered. He didn’t want her, so she wasn’t coming.
He’s not Jewish, but Knight wears a Star of David on a thick gold chain around his neck. He met his wife while he was training dogs with the Israel Defense Forces in Israel in 2006. He loved Israel and loved the handlers he worked with there, loved the way they handled their dogs.
Knight was raised on the outer cusp of a wealthy suburb of Cincinnati. His father was white, “a redneck” who drank too much, so Knight lived much of his childhood being raised by his black mother’s parents. Knight adored his grandfather, a generous and patient man who taught his grandson the value of self-reliance, a quality that Knight has cultivated in himself to an almost obsessive end.
If there’s one person I don’t want to see me struggle through this march, it’s Knight. Right after I put on the gear, he’d passed me in the hangar and watched me pop a stick of gum into my mouth. “Huh,” he smirked. “That gum’s not gonna save you.”
But now that we’re moving, Knight is my only company. He shouts again for Max, who, like a tiny gazelle, pops back into sight from behind a sloping mound of sand, his pink tongue flapping out of his mouth to the side, his eyes alight with adventure.
When Knight deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 with his dog Brahm, he was the senior officer in charge of three other Marine dog teams—another Specialized Search Dog team, a combat tracker team, and a Patrol Explosive Detection Dog (PEDD) team. He and his fellow handlers had been called out on a mission to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Castle in Khan Neshin, Afghanistan, located about 150 kilometers south of Camp Leatherneck, in Helmand Province.
After they’d been on-site for days and had yet to be assigned any missions, Knight had begun to wonder what the hell they were doing out there. He remembers that during the day, the temperature was so high, holding out his hand into the sun was like sticking it directly into a hot oven.
Frustrations had been building, and not just because of the baking temperature. Knight had already had trouble getting enough water for their dogs from Command, and there was no air-conditioning or special shelter for their use. Instead the handlers had to get creative about how to keep their dogs from overheating. There had been so little shade that the men had dug holes in the ground under their own cots so the dogs could try to keep as cool as possible.
On one afternoon, around midday, a young lieutenant runner jogged over to where the canine unit had been setting up their gear. He told Knight that he and another handler would need to pack up everything and be ready to leave with a convoy in 30 minutes.
“Well,” Knight told him, looking around at all the stuff they came with, “we’ve got quite a bit of gear here. Where are we going?”
But the younger officer had no answer. Knight suggested that he find out. The lieutenant made a call. “You’ll find out when you get there. It’s need to know,” he told Knight. No mission had been discussed at their early morning meeting and the request had come with almost no detail, not where they were going or for how long. Given the hour, it was already too hot to work the dogs. It wasn’t quite noon and the temperature was already approaching 130 degrees. The dogs were panting, salivating around their mouths. The heat in the air was deadly.
So without more information Knight refused to budge. And, after another series of back-and-forth that included speaking to the lieutenant himself and a strong attempt to convey that his need to know was a matter of safety for his dogs, the reply had been the same: no further information.
That wasn’t good enough for Knight. He told them he wouldn’t be going and that none of his men or their dogs would be moving either.
His rebuff had not gone over well and it prompted the major, whose orders Knight had just refused, to come out to confront the dog teams himself. A heated confrontation ensued and escalated until, finally, the major was shouting at Knight through an open window of a vehicle.
As he stood there and listened, Knight had prayed that this man would actually come out of the vehicle, that he would put his hands on him and initiate physical contact, because at that point all Knight wanted to do was snap his neck.
In the end the confrontation was venomous but contained, and afterward the major sent over two officers who read Knight his rights for refusing a mission in a combat zone and for disrespecting an officer. Knight signed the statement, thou
gh nothing ever officially came of it. After that he called for a flight off the FOB. Before the whole episode was over, a lieutenant colonel finally got involved and tried to diffuse the situation. He had asked Knight to stay with his dog teams, but Knight declined.
It took four days for their ride to come and collect Knight and his dog teams, and they sat, stagnant and disconnected from everyone else on the FOB. They had become pariahs. When the bird landed, they had to pick up and carry all the gear they’d brought—a month’s supply for the four handlers and their dogs—the 400 meters to where the helicopter was waiting in the dark. They were not permitted to put lights on, so they had to move everything in the pitch black. No one helped them. Knight bit his lip, did not complain, and they left.
The way Knight remembers it, after they left with their dogs, that same unit would suffer a lot of casualties during the war. But, he says, those guys were a bunch of cowboys, guys who didn’t want to listen to reason, guys who didn’t even try to work with his team or his dogs.
As far as Knight was concerned, shame on them.
“You ready for this?” Knight asks me with his sly-dog grin.
I don’t know what you would call it—a hill, a modest incline—but as the midway point of the ruck comes into view all I can see is a mountain, a big, insurmountable rise in the earth coated in slippery pebbles and loose sand. I watch a couple of handlers shoot up to the top, pushing themselves through the worst of the steep, their dogs panting but bullying their way up alongside them. No one falls down. I’m in no hurry to be the first. I just shake my head in Knight’s direction as we take the first few steps and try to laugh as if I am having the time of my life, but I am breathing so hard the noise I let loose sounds more like a horse choking.
“Here,” Knight says, holding out Max’s leash. The young buck of a puppy is making wheezing sounds similar to my own, but unlike me he’s actually yanking hard to race to the top. I cannot keep pace with this dog. I shake my head again. I am starting to question Knight’s motives, wondering if the instructors had taken bets on when I’ll pass out and we’d just hit his payout mark.
But Knight won’t let it go: he puts the leash in my hand and pushes my shoulder. “Lean back,” he tells me in a low voice. And suddenly my addled brain catches on—Max, beautiful, inexhaustible Max, so desperate to get to the other dogs, is going to pull me with the force of a tractor-trailer all the way to the top. I use my weight to counterbalance his tugging and all I have to do is hang on and lift my feet. We smoke past the other teams trudging their way up the hill on either side, hurdling with the grace of a tiny tornado through the middle of the road.
At the top of the hill the handlers have broken off into separate pairs, maintaining a few feet of modest but necessary distance while they rest. The group is quiet for once, and it feels symbolic to see them joined not en masse, but each handler with his or her dog, just as they would be on a mission, a team of two. Staff Sergeant Robert Wilson kneels in front of his dog Troll, taking his temperature while Bowe looks on. Peeler is sitting on the ground, his pack slumped up behind him still strapped onto his shoulders, and he leans back into it, his weapon flat across his bent knees. Lex is on the ground by his ankles, the sides of his body moving as he takes in each deep, rapid breath. Lance Corporal Eddie Garcia is about two yards down the slope from Peeler, his dog Lubus curled on his side against him. Lance Corporal Joshua Ashley is one of the few still on his feet, standing to the left of the truck; he’s holding his gun at the ready. His dog Sirius has taken position by Ashley’s boots. Hardesty and McCoy make the rounds and check in on the dogs, watching the handlers as they take rectal temperatures of their dogs, water them down and bring them in turn to the orange coolers placed around them for a nice, long drink. Most everyone keeps on his gear.
And then the day is gone. The sunset’s blushing oranges have burned down into the horizon and a dusky purple rises to color the sky. My eyes adjust to the dark as the chem sticks that each handler has put on his back, or has tied to the bottom of his helmet, begin their neon glow. The break is over, the ruck is back on.
Packs lift and the descent begins. Max’s leash stays with Knight; our trick to get me to the top won’t work the same on the way down. The dogs don’t seem to have any trouble picking their way along the slant of the hill. I watch the camo-clad legs of the handlers and copy their side-to-side steps, trying to grip the hill with the bottoms of my feet.
From the base of the hill the dog teams start the walk back to the K-9 village. My bones and joints are already protesting the movement. I hope for numbness. While we walk one of the dogs defecates, and the smell smacks into us, overwhelming as it lingers on the air.
“That’s one thing I’ll never get used to,” Knight says, shaking his head hard as if he can forcibly toss the stink of it from his nose. His eyes are watering. There’s little in life that bothers him, but that smell is one of them. That, he says, and seeing small children get hurt. Something he saw too much of in Iraq. While he had been on tour, an Iraqi man had brought his young son in for emergency treatment. They’d been riding on the man’s motorcycle and the small boy had tumbled off as they were driving. When Knight had seen the boy, his body was lifeless, his face drained of color, and the blood gushed from his head. Knight said he could barely stand to look at him.
Behind the braying bravado, the crass jokes, and the don’t-fuck-with-me eyes, Knight is a man who cares deeply about what he does. Almost a month after the night of the ruck march, Knight would find out that the Air Force intended to start its own advanced course and would be pulling not only its students from the ISAK program, but also its instructors from the course. That meant Knight would lose Staff Sergeant Philip Mendoza, Kitts, and Keilman all at once. On top of this news, other changes were weighing on his mind—pending budget cuts loomed over the whole of the Marine Corps, threatening the ISAK course’s funding. That night in April he calls me from his car while he waits for the new class to finish up their ruck. Our conversation rounds a corner, and it is like a tight coil inside of Knight springs out of shape, launching, directionless.
He is sick of others in his field doing the bare minimum, the people who just put checks in boxes. The only ones who get hurt are the handlers, kids he says that, without the proper training, will be sent to fight a war, to offer a service they’re not capable of delivering. To him it’s like using a weapon that’s missing parts, or a gun without any bullets. Knight’s voice grows louder and louder, angrier and angrier. “We’re just going to send them into the wind and pray it doesn’t come back on us. That’s not the right way to do it.”
The overflow of his frustration has something underneath it—not weakness exactly, but something more straining. It feels like helplessness.
“If the fucking mothers of America knew what their kids were over there trying to do, running at half speed at best, looking for 40-pound and 200-pound bombs,” he said, “they’d be disgusted. They’d break their own kids’ leg so they couldn’t go.”5
At the end of the ruck march, the instructors stand together behind the open doors of their trucks and the golf carts that everyone calls gators parked at the edge of the K-9 village. They are waiting for the dog teams to get ready for the night’s “missions”—the drills that will extend well into the morning hours. The taillights and the glow from the car interiors cast a hazy, purplish pale over them, and I can make out the approving grins that meet me as I limp my way over to them. Keilman asks me how I feel.
My bones ache. My knees, which have been reduced to unsteady knots, wobble, and my shoulders scream for mercy—it’s like the places where my joints ought to meet no longer want to hold together. But my face stretches into a smile so big it is beyond my control. Keilman smiles back and tells me he’s proud, raising his hand to give me a high five.
Knight and Max are waiting for me to walk the final yards—about the length of a football field—back to
the hangar. But in a moment of adrenaline-fueled mania, I offer to take Hardesty’s pack up to the office for him. As he helps hoist his 70-pound rucksack over my much smaller backpack, I teeter, my hips nearly giving out. But I smile the smile of delirious triumph and suck whatever air I am able to harness into my lungs. I can do this, too, I tell myself. By the time I make it over to Knight I know I’ve made a terrible mistake. After taking one look at me he knows it too, and pulls the pack off my shoulders and carries it the rest of the way.
There is one phrase a handler must know forward and backward. It is as much a mantra as it is an instruction. “Where I go, my dog goes. Where my dog goes, I go.”
This is the line Staff Sergeant William Stone repeats as he delivers his Spotter’s Brief to McCoy. Stone says this part fast, rushing the words that culminate in one of the most important things he will communicate to a commanding officer before a mission. (They teach the handy acronym YMCA—You, Me, and Course of Action.) It’s a monologue the handlers have rehearsed endlessly these last few days at ISAK. The message is: See this dog here with me? We are not to be separated.
This is followed by instructions on how to handle the dog—if the dog is a biter, if he is protective of his handler—as well as the location of the Kong and the muzzle the handler carries on him at all times. Handlers also carry a card that they give to the medic before a mission. It lists basic emergency care for anyone who might be able to administer life-saving measures if the dogs are injured downrange. Things that even a medic might not know, like, for example, that dogs require more morphine than humans.6
War Dogs Page 16