Soldier Dogs (2 page)

I
t’s 7
A.M.
, just north of the town of Safar, Afghanistan, and Fenji M675 is already panting. Her thick, black German shepherd coat glistens in the hot August sun. Fenji is out in front of ten marines, leashed to a D-ring that’s attached to the body armor of her handler, Corporal Max Donahue. He’s six feet behind her and holds his rifle ready.

Fenji leads the marines down the flat dirt road, past the trees and lush vegetation in this oasis amid the deserts of southern Afghanistan. She ignores the usual temptations: a pile of dung, a wrapper from a candy bar. Her mission doesn’t include these perks. Her nose is what may keep them all alive today, and she can’t distract it with the trivial. Coalition forces have been sweeping Safar of insurgents and their bombs, allowing the Safar Bazaar marketplace to reopen and locals to start living normally again. The Taliban had to go somewhere else. So they headed north. And they planted improvised explosive devices (IEDs) like seedlings among the poppy fields and grape fields and off to the sides of roads, under thick weeds.

Around here, any step you take could be your last.

And that’s why Fenji is in the lead, walking point. IEDs are the top killer in Afghanistan—even with the highest technology, the best mine-sweeping devices, the most sophisticated bomb-jamming equipment, and the study of “pattern of life” activities being observed from remote piloted aircraft. But there is one response that the Taliban has no answer for: the soldier dog, with his most basic sense—smell—and his deepest desire—some praise, and a toy to chew.

“Seek!” Donahue tells Fenji, and they continue down the road, leading the men from the 3/1 (Third Battalion First Marines). She walks with a bounce to her step, tail up and bobbing gently as she half trots down the road. Every so often she stops and sniffs a spot of interest and, when she doesn’t find what she’s seeking, moves on. She almost looks like a dog out on a morning stroll in a park. Donahue, in full combat gear—some eighty pounds of it, including water for his dog—keeps up with her.

Fenji stops at a spot just a foot off the side of the road. She’s found something of great interest. Without taking her eyes off the spot, she sniffs around it swiftly and her tail starts to wag. Suddenly she goes from standing up to lying down, staring the entire time at the spot. The men have stopped walking and are watching her. Her wagging tail kicks up some dust. Everything is silent now. No more sniffing, no crunching of boots.

Suddenly a hushed, enthusiastic voice cuts through the dead quiet. “Fenjiii!
That’s
my girl!” In training exercises, Donahue is a lot more effusive, but out of respect for the bomb, he makes his initial praise short and quick, calls her back, and they “un-ass” from the area. It could be the kind of IED someone sets off from a
distance, not the type that goes off when you step on it. One of the marines marks it with a chartreuse glow stick, and they move on.

Within the next hour, Fenji alerts to three more roadside bombs. Donahue lavishes her with quiet praise every time. Twice after her finds, shortly after they get away from the bombs, he tosses a black Kong toy to his dog and she easily catches it. She stands there chewing it, reveling in the sound of Donahue’s praise, the feel of the hard rubber between her teeth, and the gloved hand of her best pal stroking her head. Life doesn’t get much better than this for a military working dog. These are the moments these dogs live for, when all the years of training, all the hard work, come together.

“I’m proud of you!” Donahue tells her, and he means it, and she wags hard. She knows she’s done well. She’s been with him for seven months now, and she has a great fondness for Donahue, her first handler, and he dotes on “my sweet girl.” She liked him from the moment they met at Camp Pendleton back in February. Nearly everyone who meets Donahue reacts the same way. There’s something about his big personality, his love of life, his dry humor, the way he looks after you. Fenji fell right in with him, and he immediately took to her. She was young, bright, eager to learn from him, and he swears she has a sense of humor. He once said that she gets his jokes before his friends do. That’s probably because she tends to wag in his presence regardless of jokes. She’s just happy to be near him. She’s three years old, he’s twenty-three, and together they’re a formidable bomb-finding force.

Their bond might contribute to their success on missions. She sleeps at the foot of Donahue’s cot every night out here; she joins him for card games with the other marines; she eats next to him at the patrol base where they’ve been stationed during this mission. He lets her have some of his food “because my girl deserves it.”

The explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians usually accompany the squad but had been called to another spot this morning. They’re on their way back to investigate the IEDs and defuse them. Donahue and the other marines go into action to protect the EOD techs in case of an ambush. They take positions to secure the area.

Donahue finds a great spot for his sector of fire, at a Y in the road. It’s wide open here, and he can see a few hundred meters around him. He fills Fenji’s portable bowl with water from his CamelBak. As she laps it up, he lies belly down, propped up on his elbows, and positions his rifle. He’s facing away from the field where some of the other marines are. He’s got a tiny village about two hundred meters away in his sights. If there’s trouble, that’s where it could start. A quenched Fenji lies down beside him a few feet away, and they wait.

The EOD techs arrive and get to work, carefully digging up the first IED, about one hundred meters from Donahue. One wrong move and they’re done for, and the Taliban adds another tally mark to its scorecard. One of the techs extracts the bomb from its hiding place and bends over it to take a look. Down the road, Donahue adjusts himself slightly to get more comfortable.

Three klicks south, in Safar, Corporal Andrei Idriceanu hears a terrible explosion as he and his dog sweep a building for explosives. “That could not be good,” he thinks, but he tries not to think about it too much.

     2     

C
airo, reportedly a Belgian Malinois, was part of the SEAL Team Six raid that led to the demise of Osama bin Laden. You don’t have to be a dog lover to be fascinated by the idea that a dog—the cousin of that furry guy begging for scraps under your table—could be one of the heroes who helped execute the most vital and high-tech military mission of the new millennium.

As the first details about the operation emerged, it sometimes seemed as though the dog was more the star of the story than the Al Qaeda leader: “Enough with the discussion of the photos of Osama’s corpse,” rallied a blog on the Web site Gothamist, “we want to see photos of the war dog who helped take him out!”

Though the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (known as DEVGRU, the more recent name for SEAL Team Six) and the Department of Defense were tight-lipped about the dog’s involvement in the raid, the stories poured forth. Most were conjecture presented as fact. According to some accounts, the dog sported night-vision goggles, bullet-resistant body armor, a live-action camera between his shoulders, earbuds to hear
whispered commands, and rappelling gear. Not to mention four deadly titanium teeth. Holy canine superhero! Cairo’s image made Batman look like a gadget-impoverished Spartan.

Night-vision goggles for an animal who already sees pretty well at night? Fake teeth? Titanium teeth are never preferable to healthy, unbroken dog teeth. They are sometimes used to replace teeth that get broken, as patrol dog teeth sometimes do. But no self-respecting veterinarian would ever yank a dog’s teeth to replace them with titanium for no reason, regardless of how durable the metal is.

Concerned that some of this gear might be at least slightly exaggerated, I tried to find out the truth about Cairo, or any of his elite Special Operations multipurpose canine (MPC) brethren working dramatic missions. How hard could that be? They’re just dogs, after all. We aren’t talking about the Manhattan Project.

While I was visiting Joint Expeditionary Base, Little Creek, near Norfolk, Virginia, my escort pointed at the obstacle course used by the SEALs and showed me the beach where they swim. “They don’t talk to
anyone
about this stuff,” he told me.

These Special Ops dogs are so secret that they aren’t there at all—at least some of the time. A former veterinary technician at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, discovered this a couple of years ago when an Army Special Forces dog came in for treatment of some ailment. The staff treated the dog without doing the usual paperwork, and when the tech asked about some forms that were supposed to be filled out, the dog’s handler told her, “This dog was never here.” “From his tone, it was pretty clear. I never questioned it,” she told me. “The dog didn’t exist.”

Oh well, never mind.

There are real canine heroes—the ones walking point, leading soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines safely through some of the most dangerous parts of the world every day—who definitely do exist, do their jobs in harm’s way without fanfare, and expect in return only a bit of praise, a chonk on a ball. They may not jump out of airplanes or fast-rope from helicopters or be rumored to have titanium teeth, but as I’ve come to find, the jobs they do save real lives and play an increasingly crucial role in real battlefield situations.

Throughout history, dogs have been used for attacking (disemboweling the opposition was once a favorite technique), protection, and sentry duty—alerting soldiers to danger well before they could sense it themselves. They’ve been trackers, messengers, sled pullers, and first-aid deliverers. As scouts, they’ve excelled at sniffing the air and alerting their handlers to snipers and other hidden enemies. But there may be no other time in history when their olfactory abilities have been so essential.

“My life is in my dog’s nose,” many handlers have told me.

In Afghanistan, where IEDs are the biggest killer, a dog’s most important sense is being used more than ever: The most common job of today’s military working dog (MWD) is sniffing out explosives. A trained dog can detect and alert to dozens of explosives scents. No mechanical sensor can even come close. CIA director David Petraeus praised their service when he was a four-star general: “The capability they bring to the fight cannot be replicated by man or machine.”

Air Force Master Sergeant Antonio “Arod” Rodriguez, who’s in charge of advising more than one hundred military working
dog teams assigned to twelve air force bases, puts it this way: “The working dog is a weapons system that is resilient, compact, easily deployable, and can move fast when needed. Nothing compares.”

That’s part of the reason dog teams are targets. Not only do these dogs help save lives, but the information that’s gathered from their finds can lead—via a very long and involved path—to locating the bigger operatives behind a device. It’s not something the Taliban relishes.

Most of the traditional soldier dogs serving in Afghanistan are patrol and explosives detection dogs like Fenji. The “patrol” part means they’re tough when they need to be and can put the bite on someone. I witnessed this rather personally during my research. Most patrol and explosives detection dogs in Afghanistan rarely if ever have to actively use their patrol skills, but their explosives-sniffing abilities are constantly in demand.

The lives they’re saving are not just those of the troops; IEDs are not choosy about their victims. Children, families, the elderly—no one is immune to their disfiguring, deadly effects. Locals in IED-infested areas are often prisoners in their own small, mud-walled homes. Venturing outside to meet with a neighbor or get some food is fraught with danger. Whole villages have stopped functioning because no one dares to go anywhere.

There’s a news video online that really brings the tragedy of the situation home for me. It shows a seven-year-old girl in Safar being rushed on a stretcher to a waiting military helicopter. She had been playing outside with her younger brother when someone stepped in the wrong place. The brother had not yet been found. His body was probably recovered later, far from the blast.