Navy SEAL Dogs (16 page)

Lloyd suspected that Cairo's negative associations with vehicles and choppers might have had something to do with the change in the nature of their operation. Those miles and miles of road clearing were accompanied by search after search through compounds, most of which were empty but nevertheless required careful detection work. For a short while, Cairo had made no finds.

“I wondered if maybe he was like a lot of dogs,” Lloyd said. “When you throw something for them to fetch and they can't find it, they get upset. They've failed to retrieve, and that's just not their nature.”

He realized that Cairo's long few days of no hits did roughly coincide with his newfound reluctance to mount up. Regardless of the cause, the effect of a delay to board was potentially dangerous enough that Lloyd knew he had to break that chain of Cairo's associating vehicles with not finding anything. He decided he needed to do some in-field retraining work with the dog.

Lloyd had worked with Cairo long enough that he sensed this wasn't a case where a correction, a negative consequence, was going to achieve the desired goal of getting Cairo more comfortable with climbing into an armored personnel carrier, a helo, or anything else that moved. Lloyd figured that he had to take a few steps back from the actual boarding routine and replace Cairo's new negative associations with positive ones.

“Cairo was, and is, a ball dog,” Lloyd explained. “Like most of the dogs in the program, his prey drive was off the charts. That meant ball chasing was a huge reward for him.”

Lloyd put Cairo's vest on him and let him play with a ball for a bit. Then he attached his lead and repeated the ball-playing scenario. With every activity that led up to going operational and then actually getting into a vehicle, he let Cairo get his reward. The point was that if Cairo had those positive associations with every step up to and including getting into a vehicle, he'd get over his stalled entrances. Lloyd's retraining worked, and within a few days, Cairo was back on track. Shortly after that, his string of no finds came to an end, too.

*   *   *

Lloyd and Cairo had not always understood and trusted each other that way. In fact, shortly after they were first paired in training in 2008, this duo got off to a rather rocky start.

As part of a drill to simulate an actual firefight to accustom Cairo to the potential reality of what he would face when deployed, Lloyd had been firing his Heckler and Koch MK 23 Mod 0. The next thing he knew, in an instant, the leashed dog was on him, his jaws snapping, spit flying, and the sound of his fierce barking a counterpoint to the sound of the other trainees' weapons discharging.

“I didn't know what was going on,” Lloyd recalled. “I knew that Cairo was a bit gun-shy, but to have him turn on me like that was a bit of a surprise. I was out there without a bite suit on, and this dog was giving me his best. I had to throw a few punches at him to try to subdue him. Here I was in the desert in eastern California locked in hand-to-hand, well, hand-to-jaw combat with this 75-pound dog I'd only been working with for a few weeks. Finally I was able to wrestle him to the ground, and I had my hands around his neck. His muscles are so well developed, it was like I had a giant anaconda snake in my grip. I kept choking and choking, and finally he submitted. I'd been around dogs long enough to know that I had to let up immediately. It was like he'd said ‘uncle,' tapped out like a wrestler might or whatever. If I kept going, his brain would switch from ‘okay, you got me' mode to ‘okay, this is a life-and-death struggle and I'm going to kick into another gear' mode. Glad it didn't come to that.”

Cairo's reaction to the gunfire was extreme, but he eventually overcame his aversion to become the first West Coast Navy SEAL canine warrior to be deployed. Lloyd and Cairo's pairing tells the story of the earliest days of the SEALs' use of canines and their training for a SOF environment. Those first efforts necessarily, were a case of expediency over experience. By that I mean that the command decided that the other SEAL teams should have access to the same “weapon,” meaning MWDs, that SEAL Team Six had already been utilizing. However, there was no ready supply of dogs and trainers who could do the kinds of specific training that we do today. So the navy initially obtained a lot of its dogs from the civilian community. The closest thing that anyone had to the kind of dogs needed was “attack” dogs, as Lloyd called them, who worked for law enforcement agencies.

The vendors and trainers in those first few training classes had years of valuable experience providing and training dogs for the tasks required by civilian security forces. They weren't prepared to make these dogs the best possible partners to help SEALs carry out a mission-specific set of tasks. They didn't have the tactical experience. This isn't a knock on anyone, not the navy, not the breeders, the vendors, or the trainers. In fact, it was all just pretty much the way it is whenever something new starts up. You learn as you go and grow.

For Lloyd, being part of something new was enormously appealing. When word first came down that the SEALs were looking for volunteers, he was eager to get started with the program. A dog lover and not someone who adapted easily to a desk job, Lloyd saw this as the ideal opportunity for him. He had no formal experience in training dogs, but he wasn't alone in that. Actually, as a kind of blank slate, he was in some ways better off than someone who came into the program with preconceived ideas and habits that needed to be broken.

Lloyd soon realized he wasn't comfortable with all the training methods that were being used, but he followed the instructions he was given, trusting that what he was being told was the right thing. In order to correct the dogs, in those early days a correction stick, which was a cross between a riding crop and a billy club (a soft leather instrument), was used frequently. This is obviously not what you want to use if you're training a dog using positive reinforcement. Lloyd didn't like the idea of batting Cairo's snout with it, but it seemed to work. However, Lloyd is now pretty certain that Cairo's attack on him during the weapons-firing exercise wouldn't have happened if they'd been employing other training methods earlier on, in those days before I was involved with training.

“I knew that Cairo was a bit gun-shy, and he also saw me, because of how I was taught to correct him, as someone who caused him discomfort a lot of the time,” Lloyd said, thinking back to that time. “Dogs are thinkers, but not on the most sophisticated level. He saw and heard me doing something he didn't like. He also saw me not so much as someone he didn't really like but someone he couldn't completely trust, and who, at times, he even feared. I was the source of most of his discomfort, so when the opportunity came along, and he was really uncomfortable and wanted to make the noise stop, he did what his breeding and his instincts told him to do—he came after me and tried to shut me down. I don't know exactly if rewarding him more during training would have helped us avoid that situation, but I think it would have.”

Ironically, it was after that battle Lloyd and Cairo waged that their relationship changed significantly for the better. Perhaps they each sensed and respected the power of the other and decided it was best to work together as a team. It had been clear to Lloyd from their very first meeting that Cairo was a supreme alpha dog, but right from the start he knew, too, that the dog could be a calm presence.

“We weren't given a choice of which dog we were going to be paired off with,” Lloyd recalled. “I was given a number and then told to go to the kennels and find the corresponding number. That was going to be my dog. I was also handed an ear-protection headphone-type device. Even with that on, the noise level in the kennel was incredible. My first response was to wonder what I had gotten myself into. I walked in there and these dogs were barking like mad. Some were chewing at the mesh in their kennel; a few were spinning around. It was pandemonium. When I got to my number, there was this dog just sitting there. He was high and tight, squared away like a good sailor, sitting there with his back straight, his head high, and his ears up. That's how he carried himself later, too, especially around the other dogs. He was very dominant, and I liked that about him.”

*   *   *

In those early days of the program, the training facilities were not a part of any base. Training took place on the property of the breeder or trainer. The trainers believed that bonding with the dogs was important, so on that first day, the handler trainees took their dogs home. Actually, since they were far from their home bases, they took their dogs to nearby hotels. While the places allowed dogs, it's unlikely they were prepared for all these dogs and their handlers.

“We were all kind of surprised,” recalled Lloyd, “that after just meeting these dogs for the first time and only going through some basic introductory information, filling out paperwork mostly, we were sent home with these clearly aggressive, high-energy dogs. We looked at each other and said, ‘What are we supposed to do now?'”

The trainers had incorrectly assumed that Lloyd and the other members of this SEAL canine group had prior experience in handling working dogs. Lloyd vividly remembers those first few minutes in the hotel room. Cairo trotted in, using that high-stepping gait that the breed is known for. He sniffed around the room, checking out every corner of it. After a few minutes, he settled down on the floor, watchful but quiet.

“I got off easy,” Lloyd said. “That night, in the room next to mine, I could hear this dog going crazy. It sounded like he was just chewing the place to pieces. I could hear things crashing to the floor. The next morning I asked the guy what was going on, and he told me that it wasn't as bad as what one of the other guys had gone through. After the dog tore up the room, that handler had put him in the car, figuring he could do less damage there. The dog ended up tearing up a headrest. He just chewed through the thing until all that was left of it was a metal frame and a pile of stuffing.”

As time went on, Lloyd came to have a great deal of respect for Cairo's independent and fierce spirit. “He was tough. He wouldn't back down. A few simple corrections with the stick often weren't enough, he was that strong-willed. He knew what was right and wrong, but I think he sensed that I was new at this whole deal and he really tested me. As a result, I think in the end, he ended up teaching me much more than I taught him,” Lloyd recalled.

Like most of the other handlers, Lloyd had had a successful naval career prior to joining the dog program. After graduating from BUD/S, his first assignment was with SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team (SDVT) One on the West Coast. The SDVT platoons are a subset of the SEAL teams and also fall under the Naval Special Warfare Command. They trace their origins back to World War II, when they worked with Italian and British combat swimmers, and their job is to deliver SEALs via submersibles to where they need to be to accomplish their mission, along with their equipment.

Lloyd also did a tour on the East Coast with SEAL Team Four, doing jungle work as well as participating in the effort to stop the flow of illegal drugs in South America. After two other assignments, and an opportunity he passed on to work with the navy's mammal program, he wound up exactly where he wanted to be—with Cairo.

During that first deployment in Iraq, every time Cairo assisted in a successful detection, the men in the platoon grew more and more comfortable with him. The detections might have been relatively small victories, but they emphasized that despite the large number of searches they had to do, every single one of them was important. As Cairo's find total increased, so did the men's belief in him and in the operation.

“Cairo was inspirational in a lot of ways,” Lloyd recalled. “To see how tirelessly he went after it, running and searching night after night and day after day, you felt like you had to keep up with him. SEAL team members are a competitive bunch, and nobody wanted a dog to outdo them. Plus, just having him there, let alone when he made finds, was a huge morale boost. Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration, but for me, even if Cairo hadn't had any finds or apprehensions, he would have been a valuable asset for us. Just having him there as a companion, one bit of home out there, was huge. And I don't mean just for me. Cairo was great with all the other team members. You're out there. You're hungry. You're tired. A dog comes up to you, and you feel better.”

Lloyd and Cairo did a second rotation together, this one in Afghanistan, and the results were the same. As Lloyd said to me, “It's hard to prove a negative. By that I mean, how can you know how many lives those weapons and explosives might have taken if they'd been used? Since that didn't happen, we'll never really know. In my mind, that doesn't matter, the exact numbers.”

Lloyd and Cairo are still together. Now that Cairo is retired, he enjoys his time off but needs to be worked fairly regularly. When he isn't doing some variation of his formal training, he still wants to be a working dog. “Cairo helps put the groceries away,” Lloyd told me. “I hand him something, and for as powerful as those jaws are, when he carries a carton of milk or whatever, he never busts through the package. I was doing some work around the house, and I had a bunch of lumber delivered, and Cairo was helping out by dragging two-by-fours from the pile to where I was working. He wasn't about to just sit there and watch me. He also gets along well with my other two dogs, especially my little beagle. Cairo lets that little guy roll him. Cairo probably wouldn't like me telling people this, but he's got a thing for pillows—he just tears them up. He also has this little blanket that he carries around all the time. He's had it for years now, and I guess having it makes him feel secure.”

Lloyd laughs at the irony of that statement. “He can still tear after things,” he pointed out, “but I've never tried to see how he'd do in any drills with that blanket in his mouth.”