War Dogs

by Rebecca Frankel

  In March 2012, at the ISAK course in Yuma, Arizona, a large German shepherd named Jessy stares down the long, sandy stretch of unpaved desert road. She is uneasy. There are bomb-sniffing aids buried about 100 meters from where she is standing, and her Army handler, Sergeant Sabrina Curtis, is trying to coax her forward, commanding the dog to search alone, off leash.

  But something holds Jessy back. She moves cautiously, haltingly, casting her head back as if at any moment she expects to turn and find Curtis vanished. Curtis, a diminutive handler with a soft but firm voice, repeats her command to search, this time with more force. Jessy puts her nose to the ground and sets to work, eagerly moving about ten feet ahead. She gives all the cues to indicate she’s working on detecting an odor, which is promising. But then she suddenly pulls up away from odor to check again on Curtis, looking torn, almost doleful. After a few more hesitant steps and nervous glances backward, it’s clear this dog is more than merely reluctant to search away from her handler.

  Jessy’s tail is clipped in a short bob, uncommon for her breed. The tail’s stubby end looks odd as she walks but it doesn’t seem to impede her. When Jessy’s previous handler went on leave the dog just broke down, his sudden departure setting off a bout of separation anxiety. During his absence she would spin compulsively in her crate, so frequently that she broke her tail not once, but twice. The veterinarians who treated her removed the length of it rather than have her suffer any further breaks.

  They give it a few more tries before Sergeant Charlie Hardesty, who’s been observing the pair, walks out to join Jessy, leading the dog to the source of odor to make the find and reward her with the Kong. She still looks back at Curtis, but sits at the source and, when Hardesty praises her, she responds well. The handlers want to keep things positive for Jessy and get her to associate reward and affection with working, rather than with whatever is keeping her from feeling confident and secure on patrol.

  To see Jessy’s lack of confidence is to know that war wounds—whether skin deep or the kind that are made on the inside—can have an equally damaging and similar effect on a dog.

  Canine post-traumatic stress disorder, or CPTSD, is a relatively new term that’s only more recently been accepted as a concept, being applied in a serious and consistent way in the military veterinary field. When the number of dogs on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq reached its height in 2011, it was reported that 5 percent of the 650 dogs deployed were developing CPTSD. The chief of behavioral medicine at Lackland Air Force Base’s MWD hospital, Dr. Walter E. Burghardt Jr., estimated that half of those dogs would have to retire from service.31

  The war dogs that come through the veterinary clinic at Bagram Airfield are right in the midst of the fighting, constantly around the popping of bullets and large explosions. Sometimes they even have to be medevaced for PTSD and treated with drugs, the equivalent of canine Prozac. But it’s a tough thing to treat. “You can’t tell a dog it’s going to be okay, you can’t explain to him what’s going on,” says Captain Katie Barry. Researching the topic is especially challenging, because you can’t replicate the trauma of combat at home, nor would you want to, and as a result, research on CPTSD is still scarce and evolving.

  Part of the problem might just be that some of the dogs shouldn’t be brought into a combat situation to begin with. Not every war dog trainer is like Chris Jakubin, who pushes the dogs at the US Air Force Academy kennels by exposing them to different types of environmental situations—dealing with large crowds, loud noises, even flights of stairs—that they’ll encounter in the field. He does it to test their resolve; a dog that might be a daring detection dog inside a quiet building may quickly lose his drive in an unfamiliar setting or a place he finds stressful.

  During the ISAK’s March 2012 course, the instructors were concerned with 3 of the 17 dogs that attended. These were dogs they felt would need more than three weeks of training before they could be deemed deployment ready. It was possible that these were dogs, like Jessy, whose war dog days were already behind them. It was possible that these were dogs who shouldn’t be responsible for the safety of others in a combat zone.

  But even capable teams and dogs who show promise and courage in training—giving all the signs that they are ready to tackle a combat

  deployment—are still just as susceptible to being traumatized once they’re downrange.

  Which is what happened when US Army handler Staff Sergeant Donald Craig Miller and his Belgian Malinois Ody deployed to Afghanistan in late September 2012, but returned only a few months later in January 2013. What was supposed to be a yearlong deployment ended early. A great detection dog, Ody hit odor and rarely fell victim to distraction during patrols or searches on base back home. When Miller left their home station—Fort Rucker in Alabama—he felt confident in his dog, knowing they would be able to handle the elite missions they were going to be executing.

  When they got to Afghanistan, they were attached to a MARSOC unit, bunking in a compound near Camp Leatherneck, the 1,600-acre Marine Corps base that is home to 10,000 troops in Helmand Province. Their initial training together on base went well; Ody was his reliable, happy-dog self, adjusting well to the temperature and their lodgings on base. Miller’s pale complexion pinked under the sun and after some time in Afghanistan his strawberry blond hair gave way to a grizzly, paprika-colored beard.

  A few weeks into their deployment Miller and Ody went on a mission with the MARSOC team. It was zero dark thirty; they were pressed into the Chinook helicopter with about two dozen other Marines, and he and Ody had the spot closest to the ramp so the dog could stretch out and lie down. The weight of Miller’s 90-pound rucksack was weighing down on him, pushing his muscles deeper into discomfort, pinching off his circulation as he crouched on the floor. When the Chinook lowered and they went to make the short drop to the ground, Miller could barely feel his legs.

  Into the dark they jumped, running under the loud whir and rush of the blades, kicking up dust and rocks, like a hurricane hitting them hard in the face. As they started to move forward, an air support assault erupted around them. The sound was deafening. As a C-130 shot down from above and the rushing of bodies swarmed around them in the dark, Ody pulled at his leash, practically dragging his handler along the ground, desperate to get away. Miller’s dog was freaking out.

  Miller tried to calm Ody, offering first a Kong and then the tug toy he always carried with him on missions for Ody. But the dog refused them, and he wouldn’t focus on anything, milling aimlessly. He showed no interest in sniffing or investigating anything around him. Ody was in a state of fear and shock.

  Miller kept an eye on Ody through his NVGs as they continued with the mission. But even just moving from one point to the next, Ody kept trying to walk underneath his handler, moving against his handler’s legs. When Miller took a knee, Ody would push at Miller with his paws, trying to dig underneath him, to get to the only place it seemed he felt safe.

  When they got back to Leatherneck, Miller took Ody to the vet right away. He was told to keep him content for the next few days, to just let the dog relax. The dog was locked up the whole night and all the next day—he wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t sleep, or even relieve himself. He finally started to relax the following day, spending most of his time in Miller’s bed.

  But Ody didn’t show much sign of improvement beyond that; the trauma from that night hadn’t left him. He was jumpy around anyone other than his handler. Miller worried that Ody might bite someone, which, for a dog as easygoing as Ody, meant he was still very afraid.

  Despite their poor performance during the mission, the MARSOC team wanted to keep the dog team around. Miller and his team leader decided that Ody should get a three-week retraining session. Their goal was to slowly and gently rebuild the dog’s confidence. Each week they introduced a new kind of weaponry at the range—from pistols to rifles, from machine guns to RPGs and mortars—getting louder and lo
uder. On base Ody still proved to be a solid detection dog, doing well on every search drill. So they decided to try a low-intensity mission, a basic foot patrol during the daylight. But as soon as they stepped off the base and outside the wire, Ody tensed up, all his skittishness returning. He knew he was leaving the place where he felt safe.

  Miller could have tried another night mission with Ody, but MARSOC uses a lot of mortars and rockets. When he asked himself if it was worth the risk, Miller knew the chance of doing more harm than good loomed too large in the end. Ody’s lack of confidence was too big a risk factor, both for him and for the Marines on their missions.

  When the pair returned to Fort Rucker, Miller could see the difference in his dog as soon as they drove up to the kennels. He was like a kid on Christmas: Ody knew he was home. Miller is confident, however, that Ody will be a superb garrison dog. He just wasn’t meant for war.

  Nine

  The Never Again Wars

  Many an American boy will survive this war and be restored to his family because some dog gave him warning of an enemy in time to seek cover, or sought him out as he lay helplessly wounded in some jungle thicket. Time and again these dogs have proved their worth in saving human life.

  —Clayton C. Going, Dogs at War1

  It was Iraq, 2005. Sergeant Justin Harding and four other Marines sat in a Humvee, blocking a bridge that connected southern Ramadi to the Tameen District and stood over the Tameen Canal, a man-made tributary that ran into the Euphrates. The bridge had once been a railroad thoroughfare, but trains had long since stopped running across these tracks. Instead, pedestrians used it as a walking bridge.

  After noticing a suspicious looking speedboat down along the canal, their platoon commander ordered the five Marines to take the Humvee across the train tracks to the other side of the bridge. They rolled along slowly, singing “this shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s,” a line from a Gwen Stefani song, joking because there was barely any room on either side of their large vehicle and no protective rails, if anything went wrong, to keep their Humvee from dropping 20 feet off the side into the fast-moving waters below.

  The Marines had watched civilians walk over the bridge safely all day, so they hadn’t even thought to sweep it for explosives. Yet it turned out that there were two IEDs hidden under that bridge. The first blew up right in front of them, the Humvee’s grill and hood absorbing the blast. Another second later and it would have exploded right under the vehicle’s belly, probably killing everyone inside. The Humvee continued on for another 500 meters before the vehicle overheated. Harding suffered a severe back injury, the pressure from the explosion compressing several discs in his spine. The driver’s knees were bruised, and their gunner suffered a bad concussion and had to be medevaced out. As they were waiting for the Quick Reaction Force to come get them, the Medical Humvee was making its way back across the bridge and the other bomb, the one that failed to detonate on their first trip, exploded. The vehicle, nearly destroyed, limped across and everyone inside was put on other trucks.

  Harding deployed to Iraq four times; he was there for the initial push of US forces in 2003, deployed two more times in 2004, and returned for a final tour in the US troop surge of 2007. During these four deployments he was hit by more IEDs than he can keep track of. During his second deployment, from 2004 to 2005, he suffered no fewer than three direct hits, a handful in which he was within 50 meters of the blast and another dozen that exploded between 50 and 100 meters away. During one of his Iraq tours in 2004, the Humvee he was in got hit with an RPG. It went through the armor and through their driver, killing him instantly. It took off the leg of their gunner, set another Marine on fire, and knocked out the man sitting behind him. The blast sent shrapnel everywhere, hitting Harding in the face. And then, he says, “we crashed.”2

  Hanging on the wall of Harding’s office now is a photograph of ten Marines who were with him in Iraq. Nine of them were killed by IEDs.

  These men are the reason why Harding volunteered to be a supervising officer with the Marine Corps Improvised Explosive Detector Dog (IEDD) program, one that pairs single-purpose detection dogs with infantrymen, introduced in 2007 in response to an “urgent-needs request” for bomb-sniffing canines.3 In 2010, three years after Harding returned from Iraq, he was on his way to Afghanistan, this time as a gunnery sergeant and as the supervisor for a team of 17 IEDD handlers and their 13 detection dogs. Having survived his combat tours, Harding wanted to do something that would help keep young Marines from getting killed by IEDs.

  During their seven months in Afghanistan, Harding calculated that his dog teams were responsible for finding approximately 500 IEDs. And while he is infinitely proud of that number, Harding believes that even if only one dog had only found one bomb in the entire seven months that would have been enough. At the very least, he figures, one bomb found would have equaled one Marine’s life saved.

  At the end of wars, sometimes it’s the numbers that make the difference.

  In World War II, it is said that war dogs saved 15,000 men. In Vietnam, the dogs were credited with saving the lives of 10,000 men, but many handlers who served there feel that this number is grossly underestimated. Of approximately 87,000 missions, the dogs uncovered 2,000 tunnels and bunkers and enabled 1,000 enemy captures and 4,000 enemy kills.4

  How big that number will be many years from now, when we are in a position to tally the lives saved by dogs in Iraq and Afghanistan, one cannot say. But Technical Sergeant Justin Kitts was awarded his Bronze Star in 2011 for his detection work with Dyngo during their Afghanistan deployment, and for having secured the lives of 30,000 US, host nation, and coalition forces. And that was just for one dog team on one tour of duty.5 Equally impossible to tally are the lives that have been recovered, even in some small way, by a dog’s cathartic presence, on a battlefield or in a wounded warrior treatment center.

  From war to war, these numbers are often forgotten.

  It is an unfortunate scenario that’s already played out twice in the United States: post–World War II and post-Vietnam. The value of war dogs has been lost as often as it has been found.

  These events usually go a little something like this: the United States engages in a conflict. Someone, a person or group, with great resilience and spirit, petitions the military to adopt a canine fighting force, touting their many lifesaving skills. Someone in a position of power gives an order, and a small contingent of dogs is procured, trained, and deployed. Once in-country, the dogs prove to be of great value on the battlefield and save many lives. Next comes an “urgent need” request from the combat arena: “Send more dogs!” And so efforts are pooled, handlers and dogs are trained with fervor and speed. Sometimes concessions are made, sometimes shortcuts are taken, but more dogs are sent to war. The military parades the dogs’ successes, the media seizes upon their stories, and headlines capture the hearts of civilians at home.

  The wars slow down and eventually end. The tremendous canine force is scaled back, as are the combat-ready aspects of the dog programs, until they are virtually nonexistent.

  If the war was unpopular, the lessons are lost all the more quickly. This tendency of the US military to strategize with a selective memory is one with which John Nagl, coauthor of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual along with Generals David H. Petraeus and James F. Amos, is well familiar.

  The Pentagon is traditionally accused of preparing for the last war. But according to Nagl, who was an operations officer of a tank battalion task force during the Iraq War,6 that’s not exactly what happens. We prepare to refight the last war only if it was the kind of war we had wanted to fight. The wars the US military is interested in fighting again are wars where they’ve had success, such as the American Civil War and World War II.

  The irony of this, Nagl explains to me, is that in recent decades, the American military hasn’t spent its time fighting big and successful wars like these. In
stead, we have fought small wars, irregular wars—the kind of wars waged with IEDs. Despite this reality, the military still builds the capabilities it needs for those “big” wars, not the capabilities it needs for what Nagl calls the “small nasty wars of peace.”7

  And when the military tries to do that, it makes mistakes, which is when the lessons learned become especially important. In fact, Nagl says, “we have rediscovered many, many lessons that we actually learned and paid for in great cost in Vietnam.” One of those lessons, Nagl says, “is the utility of working dogs, who were invaluable in Vietnam. [We] couldn’t get enough of them; didn’t ever have enough of them.” But after Vietnam, he says, the skills of those dogs, as with almost everything about Vietnam, was purged from our memory. “And that’s a lesson we had to relearn. We are in danger of forgetting a number of those lessons,” Nagl tells me. And that includes the dogs.

  In the years following the Vietnam War, the US military began to disassemble its war dog programs little by little, dismantling ten years of combat readiness. In a shroud of shame, the dog programs slipped away—first the tracker dogs, then the scout dog school at Fort Benning. There was no outside organization watching over the military efforts for the dogs deployed to Vietnam as there was in World War II.

  The Vietnam chapter, which will remain a perpetual blemish in the United States’ war dog history, is perhaps the most troubled and difficult to reconcile. But each war has its own dogs—from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam—and each war has its own saga. How the dogs came in, and how they came out again, is as important, in some ways, as what they did while they were there. Their entry and exit unearths a relevant truth. This discernable pattern of US war dog history is one of building to a great success that is later shelved and forgotten, only to be rebuilt again when the need arises. It’s a precedent that creates the kind of disadvantage no one would be able to fully realize until 2004, when it was time to send the dogs back to war, so many years after Vietnam.