Navy SEAL Dogs (19 page)

About 40 yards from where Samson had first showed indications that he'd hit on an explosive odor, he sat on the spot. Dave called Samson back to him, and the men proceeded to use one of the machines to verify that Samson had indeed found something; it turned out to be a trigger switch. Another one was just a few yards away. The IED itself was wired and waiting on the opposite side of the road.

“That was a big find,” said Dave. “The EOD detail followed up and said that the IED was too large to transport and destroy. After we finished they came back and exploded it. I can't talk about the specifics of what we found, but an IED that large would have done some major damage to us or whoever else came across and detonated it.”

As soon as Samson returned to his side, Dave rewarded him. “I gave him his tennis ball and played with him for a few minutes, and then gave him a couple of dog treats I carry with me,” he said. “Samson seemed pretty happy to just have those.”

For a dog whose head-to-body ratio and slight build were the source of much teasing, Samson sure had turned into a battle-tested detection expert. Samson just does the job that SOF dogs do, but the dog also has a soft side that is perhaps best illustrated by another story Dave told.

“We were back on shore leave,” Dave recalled, “and were out and about. This woman in front of us was pushing her kid in a stroller. We were behind them and saw the kid drop a stuffed animal. When we got up to it, I could see that it was Elmo from
Sesame Street.
Samson picked it up, and he did that usual dog thing of kind of strutting proudly with his ‘look what I found' head-high thing going on. I hurried a bit to catch up to the woman, and she heard us coming and turned around. Her eyes got all big and she instinctively stepped in front of her baby to protect him.

“We put the brakes on. The lady was looking at Samson and the toy he had in his mouth, and I could tell she was not happy. I started to apologize, but then she kind of smiled a bit. I told Samson to release, and he did immediately. The woman's smile widened. She nodded her head. After that she said, ‘Let him keep it. That's the least I can do. That dog's out there saving lives.' I knew she was familiar with our program, living nearby and all. I thanked her. Well, Samson loves that toy. He never tore it up. I've still got it. When he comes back and I get to keep him when he retires, that toy will be right here waiting for him. I can't wait to see his reaction.”

 

14

REX AND DWAYNE: FOILING INSURGENTS

Afghanistan

It had a been another long, exhausting day in a string of eight- to twelve-hour days Rex and his handler, Dwayne, had spent on the move with the EOD guy and point man, searching fields, wells, and buildings for explosives, while most of the rest of the SEAL team took up security positions. As the sun angled lower in the sky, a call came over the radio that another suspicious area needed to be searched, yet one more walled compound. From the outside, this compound seemed no different from any of the hundreds they'd previously gone through. Once Dwayne and Rex entered the compound, however, they immediately saw not only a small roofed structure where livestock was being kept but, sitting along the far wall, a dozen or more Afghan civilians.

Gaunt, with concave cheeks behind their beards, their eyes large beneath their brimless, short, round kufi caps, the men sat there in the dust. Their stained and tattered shalwar kameez—pants and tunic—fluttered in the breeze. Dwayne asked his teammates to clear out the animals. There was a smelly assortment of goats and a few sheep, all of whom expressed indifference to their orders to disperse. They were all also reluctant to go near Rex, whose agitation and desire were evident in his barking and straining at his leash. Dwayne took Rex a relatively safe distance away, still within the walls, and waited.

“Even though the animals were finally led out, their stench was still there,” Dwayne recalled. “The sound of the buzzing flies was nearly loud enough to make any conversation difficult. Rex searched, and he made a solid find—blasting caps and a large quantity of other IED-making materials. It took him a few trips, but the EOD guy took them all out of there, while Rex and I stood by. At that point, it would have been easy to just be a spectator. Rex had done his job. I'd played tug with him to reward him, and a couple of other guys came by to pet him. I figured, though, that if there was that much explosive material here, then maybe there were other things around.”

Dwayne led Rex on a search around the perimeter. About a minute into it, Rex got a whiff of something, and he started tugging Dwayne. He went straight toward those seated men, who were now being detained under suspicion of being part of the Taliban. “I was thinking maybe he was interested in them,” Dwayne told me, “but he stopped just short of them. In front of where the prisoners were, there was a sea buckthorn bush. Those bushes have plenty of seriously sharp, sharp thorns. Rex indicated on that and sat down looking at it.”

Dwayne cautiously looked for himself, but the bush's heavy concentration of leaves and thorns made it nearly impenetrable. So he got the EOD guy to come over. Dwayne noted that the Afghanis being held were starting to get restless.

Two fully loaded AK-47s were found right under the bush, just outside arm's reach of the suspected Taliban members. All those men would have had to do was time a quick scramble and the operation could have turned into a very bad incident.

*   *   *

It was obvious that the guns had been placed there as part of some larger plan. How much Rex's presence, and the Afghanis' reluctance to mess with him, played into how that threat was neutralized wasn't clear. What was obvious was that Rex's ability to detect those weapons foiled the enemy's plans.

“That was my proudest moment working with Rex,” Dwayne told me as he recalled the incident. “In my mind, he saved a lot of our lives that day.”

When the operation was concluded and they returned to the FOB, Dwayne followed his usual routine. He went to the chow hall, which was really little more than a small room with a few tables, and had Rex lie down along a far wall. “Rex is like most dogs,” said Dwayne. “He loves to eat; I had to always be careful to keep his weight down. He got his meals, and a few treats. The one thing I was insistent on with the guys was that they not give him any junk food.

“At the FOB we had a ‘theater,' another small room with a TV, where we could watch movies. There were some chairs and a couch, and Rex always hung out with us in there. I never had to muzzle him because he was so friendly. After that great find that day, I knew I had to be even more vigilant than normal with the guys to make sure they didn't get lax and give him anything that would be bad for him in the long run. I knew they were grateful for what he'd done, but still.”

Dwayne rewarded Rex, as he always did after a meal, for staying at his “post.” He brought him a couple of bites of meat, in this case chicken. Later that night Rex did his usual thing. While the movie was on, he climbed onto the couch with a couple of the team members to get as comfortable as possible. He slept for a bit, woke up, and walked around the room looking for attention. Not that he needed to ask for it.

“If it weren't for the fact that we were in an FOB in Afghanistan, you could almost imagine yourself back at home in a rec room or basement or whatever, hanging out with your buddies watching a movie,” Dwayne said. “Your dog was doing his best to mooch a treat but settled for a few ear and belly scratches. He'd get blamed for a few odors that were worse than those in that livestock pen, but that's just boys being boys.”

*   *   *

Rex's success at his job and his easy camaraderie with the human members of the team were many miles away from where he had started as an MWD, and not just geographically speaking. Rex had, in a way, been a black sheep among the new trainee dogs. He had been sitting in a kennel, mostly untrained, for a year when he was paired with Dwayne. Rex was “green”; he was an inexperienced and unrefined dog that hadn't been trained in any of the dog sports and didn't have a firmly established foundation in obedience either. “Rex's big problem,” recounted Dwayne, “was his refusal to give up his toy. Getting a dog to release something is pretty essential. Rex thought it was kind of a game, and he was better at it than the rest of us. When we tried to trick him into giving the ball back, he always outsmarted us. It was like he had a perimeter-limit warning device—he'd let you in only so close before he'd dart away. Or he'd just sit there turning his head away so that you couldn't get the ball out of his mouth. Smart dog, but frustrating.

“The first thing I remember about Rex, though, was that he didn't look like any German shepherd dog I'd ever seen before,” Dwayne told me. “I did my research and found out that the breeding lines and what was considered proper conformation/makeup of the dog's body had changed since the 1950s. Rex looked like a classic German shepherd from the 1940s. He has a really big head and large paws and a very straight back. The dogs bred from the newer lines generally have smaller paws and heads, and they also have more of a swayed back. It's just my opinion, but that classic look—the lines of dogs like Rex are just much more beautiful.”

Like some of the other handlers in the then-new dog handling program, Dwayne didn't like some of the methods, but he had to do what he was being trained to do. “Choking a dog off a toy isn't a good idea,” he said. “It creates resentment in the dog, and distrust. After you do that a few times, every time you approach the dog, he's going to think that you want to choke him off that toy. All you're doing is reinforcing that drive to hang on to what I've got.” Dwayne noticed an instructor/trainer who was observing from the sidelines as they put the dogs through their routine in the basic handler course. “Every time we used the collar on the dogs, to choke him off the bite or anything else, I'd look over and see that man shaking his head,” he recalled. “I went over to him a few times to get his take on things. He was pretty highly regarded in Germany, and he just said that our use of compelling the dogs to do what we wanted, instead of encouraging or rewarding the dogs, was just making some things worse.”

Dwayne learned more and more about positive reinforcement and the importance of timing a correction or a reward as the program went along. “That reward has to be instantaneous. Bonding with a dog is all about the dog learning to trust you. If you get a dog to the point where he knows you have his best interests in mind, and you do that enough times in different situations, you earn some credit with that dog,” he explained. “It's just like with humans. You have to earn someone's trust. What we might call treating a dog with dignity and love translates in their minds to one thing—trust. Start with the small things and work your way up the scale.”

Similarly, Dwayne learned that as far as ability to detect odors is concerned, a dog can start big and break things down into very small parts. “When you're a SEAL, you learn about explosives from one perspective. I'm simplifying, of course, but basically we learn how to use them,” he explained. “We rely on the dogs for detection, and one of the things that surprised me was that the amount of an explosive being used can sometimes confuse a dog. A dog's nose is so sensitive that—let's say 50 grams of RDX or other explosive ordnance are being used in training. Well, a ton of RDX is going to smell different to a dog than that small sample will. So, in training, we have to work at exposing the dogs to varying concentrations so that they won't be confused. The thing is that RDX is the major ingredient in C-4, so if your dog can detect RDX, he is going to be able to pick up C-4, because that's essentially 94 percent RDX plus some plasticizers and fillers.

“What was made clear to me is that we as humans can walk into our kitchen and smell beef stew cooking. We may be able to pick up traces of the ingredients in that stew, but for a dog that stew's odor is immediately broken down into its component parts—beef, potato, carrots, onion, and whatever else is in there,” said Dwayne. “That's why efforts to disguise drugs or explosives or whatever with masking odors don't work. A dog can pick out all the individual components of any odor.”

*   *   *

Most of what Dwayne knows about dogs he learned from his exposure to them while in the service. His family had a Pekingese while he was growing up, and according to Dwayne, while he was a fine dog, he just wasn't the kind of dog with whom Dwayne personally bonded. He remembers his first exposure to working dogs took place when bomb-detection dogs from civilian contractors were assigned to his military unit. “I'd never seen a Dutch Shepherd or a Malinois before,” he recalled,” and I just thought they were the most incredible-looking dogs.”

It was years before Dave began working with the dog handler program. He was originally drawn to the navy because he loved the ocean and diving. At fifteen, he began an open-water PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) program when he was staying with his father for the summer in the mountains near Santa Cruz. Scheduling conflicts prevented him from making the last open-water dive, so he didn't get certified. “I was definitely disappointed at not being able to follow through to the end,” he told me, “but the really funny thing is that I was a terrible swimmer. My parents had the hardest time teaching me. I got to the point where I could just get by in the pool, but there was something about being under the water.”

He took up diving when he attended a private school, where for a six-week period, as part of an enrichment program, students were encouraged to pursue an interest. Dwayne chose diving and once again took a certification course, and once again he failed to complete it. He also didn't finish his education at that private school.