War Dogs

by Rebecca Frankel

  And tonight all bets are off. It’s FINEX, final exams, for the dog teams; all the work of the last three weeks is about to be tested. Instructors are observing from a distance and communicating only through walkie-talkies. Kitts drives the truck and McCoy rides shotgun, filling out the FINEX evaluation sheets on a metal clipboard. Hardesty sits in the back. The air in the car is a jiggling mix of something like parental anticipation, confined frustration, and midsummer-night mischief. Sitting in the car for eight hours observing from a distance is proving tedious. The instructors are wound up; there’s more than a passing grade on the line tonight.

  These are the last hours they will have with their students, the last time they can impart any lessons to them, the last hours in which to convey helpful instruction—to say the thing that might stick, the thing that might keep them from getting blown up. Tomorrow they have to let them go, and away they will go to the real thing. Someone else will have planted bricks of C-4 just like the ones stacked behind a wooden board in a hut in the palm grove—except finding them won’t be an exercise for the dog teams; it will be life or death.

  Ashley, Sirius, Beauchamp, and I set off, taking the road that leads away from the kennels. All the lights across the area have been cut specifically for tonight—a mandatory blackout. This means no headlights on cars, no white lights of any kind allowed in the vicinity. Again Yuma’s night sky is flush with stars, and again somehow the moon is out of sight, nowhere to be found. I’m beginning to wonder if Yuma has no moon. Ashley sets a confident pace. He, Sirius, and Beauchamp are moving quickly, talking their way through the path ahead, deciding which route to take from the road up into the palm grove that we are meant to search. They are both using their NVGs. I hold mine tightly in my hand but I’m reluctant to use them. Instead I train my eyes on their feet, watching the heels of their boots so I can follow their exact steps rather than forge my own route.

  I’ve decided to shadow Ashley and Sirius in part because I’ve kept close watch on their tactical training throughout the course, but also because I trust, from what I’ve seen so far, that Ashley will do a good job. We won’t, for example, spend 20 minutes heading in the wrong direction (as one team does), and I’m certain my presence won’t ruffle him. Ashley’s self-assuredness is evident and is so seemingly unshakable it borders on arrogance. And I choose to follow them because I know, with Beauchamp as his spotter, this team of three will be fun.

  Marine Lance Corporal Joshua Ashley and his partner, MWD Sirius, look for buried aids during a training exercise at YPG in March 2012.

  The palm grove comes into view, and Ashley takes a knee, scoping out the target, instructing Sirius to down. The dog drops beside him. His obedience to his handler is quick, and their communication is easy and smooth. Sirius keeps his eyes trained on his handler as Ashley radios to “base command” and waits for the area to be “cleared.” A few explosions sound, followed by bursts of light. In tonight’s exercise, this is achieved by hitting the button to the remote-controlled blaster from the SUV. The booms are simulated but powerful. Ashley gets the okay from Kitts to move forward.

  We leave the road and move onto uneven ground. Beauchamp starts turning back to make sure I don’t pitch and fall, cautioning me to watch my step. I squint and squish my eyes, trying to pinch whatever light I can out of the night, and I realize I’m not going to make it far without the NVGs after all. My depth perception shifts as I close one eye and open the other into a world of green. I stumble and drop, and my uneven footsteps make sounds as the bottom of my shoes scrape against the sand and stone.

  The palm grove is the only irrigated spot at YPG’s K-9 course and as we approach, it lifts in front of us like a mirage, lush even in the dark, the palm fronds bending with the wind. The huts inside are squat, square structures that, in the daytime, are orange and dusty, just like all the others in the nearby K-9 village. Here, they feel almost tropical.

  Earlier in the day I watched Hardesty and Kitts stack explosives, little blocks that resemble oversized sardine cans, using them to completely fill the bottom of a window frame. In the dark I’m disoriented; I can hear Beauchamp, Ashley, and Sirius moving around, but I worry that I won’t be able to find them. It seems only too easy to get turned around in this filtered nighttime world, to lose entirely one’s sense of direction, even in the small palm grove. There’s the sound of trickling water and the ghoulish white of the night sky reflecting in enormous puddles that break up the ground.

  Ashley works methodically, his voice low and melodic as he coaxes the dog through the search, while Beauchamp calls out helpful directions—

  reminding him of doorways, letting him know which directions are clear. And then Ashley sends Sirius into the hut with explosives, his body taking up the entire length of the doorframe. Sirius moves under the “hot” window and his response is swift. The dog lowers his haunches, his hindquarters sinking in slow motion until his tail finally meets the ground. He casts a look back at his handler. They’ve found it.

  “This is Gingerbread Man,” Beauchamp says into his radio. He alerts the instructors that they have a positive response, identifies the location of the hut, and requests EOD backup.

  Kitts’s voice comes back over the radio. The find is good, the first part of the mission complete. Ashley and Beauchamp relax and walk down a deep slope and back up the road toward the K-9 village. The next leg of the mission includes a cordon search of a building with low beams and plywood walls where the bats will fly so low that everyone has to duck their heads. Kitts and McCoy are waiting outside when we arrive. McCoy comes around to Ashley. “You did good, man,” he tells him. “You did good.”

  Ashley and Sirius pass that night of FINEX with 100 percent. And this is the memory that comes to my mind later, months later when the unthinkable happens.

  Seven

  The Fallen

  If there are no dogs in heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.

  —Will Rogers1

  Lance Corporal Joshua Ashley arrived in Afghanistan in May 2012, two months after he and the other handlers from the March class finished their stint at the ISAK course at Yuma Proving Ground.

  He wasn’t the only handler from II-MEF to deploy to Afghanistan. But it didn’t take long before the teams scattered—going out on different missions, assigned to different units. In mid-July a few of them crossed paths at Camp Leatherneck and, for a brief intermission, were together again. They sat around the same fire smoking Cuban cigars, catching up, sharing their stories. Ashley talked about how much he loved deployment, how satisfying it was because he was doing what he came to do. He’d already signed up for reenlistment. It was the last time the guys from II-MEF would see him alive.

  On the night of July 18, 2012, Ashley and Sirius, assigned to a Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) unit, were patrolling along the Helmand River. Ashley was following Sirius, wading through a canal when he stepped onto a pressure plate and set off an IED. The force of the explosion blew him backward. His unit called a medevac and cleared the area as quickly as they could; they managed to get him to Camp Leatherneck, but he died the following day.2

  Ashley’s was not the first fatality the handlers from II-MEF endured during their 2012 summer tour in Afghanistan. On July 16, Lance Corporal Kent Ferrell and his PEDD Zora, a German shepherd, were on a foot patrol. Zora walked up ahead of her handler as they cleared an alley; a combat engineer was also with them. A grenade came sailing over the wall like a bird, and they watched as it landed on the ground in front of them. The engineer veered sharply and started to run. Ferrell yelled for Zora. She came toward him but the grenade exploded. Shrapnel went flying, a shard struck the engineer in the elbow, but Zora, caught between the engineer and the explosion, absorbed the brunt of it. She took five or six pieces—one to the neck, two to her face, and two directly to her chest. The marks were so small they could hardly make out t
he entrance wounds. When Zora reached Ferrell a few moments later, she lay down next to him and died. It took less than a minute for her to go.

  The vet who performed the necropsy said a piece of shrapnel had nicked Zora’s heart. Even if the vet had been there the moment it happened, there would have been nothing he or anyone else could have done to save the dog.

  Because handlers and their dogs are never separated—“Where my dog goes, I go. Where I go, my dog goes”—Ferrell had traveled back to Camp Leatherneck with Zora. He was there when they brought Ashley in to try and save him. So Ferrell, who had lost his dog, was there to become a surrogate caretaker to Sirius, the dog who’d just lost his handler.

  As the flight crew prepared for takeoff on the C-130 that would deliver Ashley’s body back home to his family in the States, Ferrell and Sirius stood together on the tarmac during the night of the ramp ceremony at Bastion Airfield on the main British military base northwest of Lashkar Gah, in Helmand Province. A crowd of servicemen and women came to pay their respects.

  It was quiet, unearthly quiet for an airfield. Someone in the mass of mourners watched Sirius from afar. He saw the dog was in distress. And when the ceremony finished—Ashley’s body gone, boarded on the aircraft—the tarmac emptying of people, Sirius kept turning back to look at the plane.

  While 2010 and 2011 saw record losses for canine handlers, 2012 was proving to be an especially brutal year for the military working dog community. The losses that started in April 2012 continued through the summer, almost without pause.

  On April 12, Marine Lance Corporal Abraham Tarwoe was killed in action. Two weeks later on April 26, Army Staff Sergeant Dick A. Lee Jr. was killed in action. In May, two handlers were killed “during combat operations”: Marine Corporal Keaton Coffey on May 24, and, six days later on May 30, Navy handler Petty Officer 2nd Class Sean Brazas was shot in Panjwai, Afghanistan.3 There was a brief respite in June, and then Ashley died on July 19. Two days later, on July 21, Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael J. Brodsky succumbed to the injuries he sustained from an IED blast on July 7.

  During those same months, military working dogs Fibi, Zora, Nina, and Paco were all killed in action in Afghanistan. There were also canine wounded: Layka, a Belgian Malinois Air Force dog, lost her leg after being shot protecting her handler4; and JaJo, a German shepherd and part of the Army’s Tactical Explosive Detection Dog (TEDD) program, was seriously wounded along with his handler by an IED explosion during a ground patrol on September 15 (no limbs were lost).5 And then there were the dogs and handlers who made it back, whole in body but not so in spirit.

  For the most part, when it comes to K-9 it doesn’t seem to matter what branch handlers serve—they’re all part of the same community, and in a combat theater, they are all searching for the same bombs. Word of injuries and death travels quickly.

  It’s Kitts who calls in July to tell me that Ashley was killed. “We lost another handler,” he told me. “You know this one.” Ashley had been Kitts’s favorite student. Three days later Kitts is again the one to deliver bad news; he texts me to tell me that Brodsky has died. “Three students in three months,” Kitts writes. “How many more friends do I have to lose?”

  When Hardesty heard about Ashley’s and then Brodsky’s death, he was still teaching at Yuma, working with a new class of handlers, running them through the same tactical drills, getting them ready to go on to the deployments that were awaiting the group. He texts me to make sure I’ve heard the news about Brodsky. I reply that I have and ask him how he’s holding up. “Praying for a better tomorrow,” he writes back.

  One night during that summer while Hardesty and I talk on the phone, I ask him if he’d lost very many friends to these wars. He says that he feels lucky; he’d known quite a few people who’ve been injured, some of them pretty badly, though he says for the most part he hadn’t lost a lot of people close to him.

  “But,” Hardesty clarifies, “I guess that depends on what you think of as ‘a lot.’”

  I tell him one sounded like a lot to me. “Well, then it’s been a lot.” He kind of laughs as he says this, but the sound is sad.

  News of the recent losses had been hard for all of the instructors out at Yuma. The only slight consolation was that neither Coffey nor Brazas was killed because they had failed to learn and apply the lessons of their training. One thing ISAK can’t teach is how to dodge bullets.

  The night Tosca and Wrinkle died there was a knock at the door. It was July 31, 2011, Army Veterinary Specialist William Vidal’s second night in Afghanistan, and he’d barely been in-country 48 hours. The voice on the other side of the door told him to get ready, a body was coming. He roused and dressed; this was part of the job, and he’d known that going in. Vidal’s first act in Afghanistan would not be as healer, but as undertaker.

  Earlier that night, three MARSOC Marines stationed in Western Afghanistan had died in a fire.6 It had started in their living quarters and quickly burned out of control. The bodies were brought to Bagram Airfield by plane; there were enough servicemen on hand to give the fallen Marines honors, so the group formed a line, passing the bodies from one set of hands to the next.

  One of the litters coming off the plane was draped in an American flag like the others, but it clearly held a body that was much smaller than the rest. Vidal and the others in the Army’s 64th Medical Detachment (Veterinary Services), Captain Katie Barry and Sergeant Alyssa Doughty, placed the small black body bag into their truck as some of the soldiers and airmen gave a final salute to their fallen comrade: Tosca, a Belgian Malinois who had died in the fire alongside her handler, Marine Sergeant Christopher Wrinkle.

  The veterinary team brought Tosca’s body into the examining room and opened the bag. Vidal could barely make out that what was on the table in front of them had once been a dog: Tosca’s distinguishing features had been all but erased; only the collar remained intact. Captain Barry removed it before they zipped the bag back up. She cleaned it later, after conducting a necropsy, so she could return it to the Marines who’d brought the dog to them. A single thought ran through Vidal’s mind: Welcome to war.

  Early the next day, one of the Marines from Wrinkle’s unit was waiting for the vet team. He was grief-stricken. Wrinkle had been his best friend and he’d come to make sure that Tosca’s remains made it out of Afghanistan on the same flight as Wrinkle’s body.

  Vidal took him down to the incinerator, but when they got there they were told the machinery needed cleaning and that it would be 24 hours before they could manage another cremation. But that would be too late. The Marine pleaded with the technician, begging him to hurry along whatever it was that needed doing. He said it was for his best friend and told him how Wrinkle had run back into the fire when he heard Tosca barking, and died trying to save his dog and partner. They belonged together, he said, and the man finally relented.

  The Marine cradled Tosca in his arms and gently surrendered the dog’s body into the incinerator. He sat and waited for the four hours it took for the flames to finish their work. He didn’t move from his post once the entire time, so that the dog would never be left alone. Vidal found him sitting there later with Tosca’s urn held tightly in his hands. He made it back in time to get her on the plane with Wrinkle and they traveled home together.

  It rained the day of Wrinkle’s funeral in his hometown of Dallastown, Pennsylvania. Poured, actually. Reporters said there were two coffins in the church. The handler and his dog were buried together at the Susquehanna Cemetery.7

  When someone dies, it is customary in the Jewish tradition for a living person to sit with the body, to act as guardian from the time of death until the time of burial. The Talmud says that during these brief hours before a body is laid to rest in the ground, the soul hovers in a space between this world and whatever lies beyond. The job of these guardians, called shomrim, is to comfort that soul by reading psalms and prayers aloud whil
e keeping watch over the body to prevent any kind of desecration. It is a practice that I find reassuring; it makes death and whatever comes right after seem a little less lonely, and that’s likely the true service the shomrim provide—a consolation for the bereaved the deceased has left behind. As the poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch writes, the rituals we “devise to conduct the living and beloved and the dead from one status to another have less to do with performance than with meaning.”8

  Captain Barry, Sergeant Doughty, and Specialist Vidal, the veterinarian team stationed at Bagram Airfield, are the ones who waited with wounded or dead dogs and comforted their handlers until the flights came to take them home from Afghanistan, no matter the hour, day or night. They acted as the shomrim for the souls of the departed dogs.

  Tosca and Sergeant Wrinkle were the first combat deaths that Vidal had ever experienced. During the opening stint of his yearlong deployment in Afghanistan, much of what he encountered treating military working dogs seemed extreme. It wasn’t the deaths that had come as a shock. He was used to treating sick dogs, but Tosca had been a healthy dog. As far as he could reason, she was the victim of circumstance. Her death was sudden and violent, and it was this he found so jarring. As the days of his tour turned into weeks and then months, this all started to feel routine. Seeing dogs get blown up became normal. So Vidal numbed himself to it.

  Vidal hadn’t known Tosca or Wrinkle, but Captain Barry had. That night as they viewed Tosca’s body she was transfixed by the tortured corpse—the thing that no longer resembled a dog. What, she wondered, must the Marines who died in that fire look like? She couldn’t drive the thought from her mind.