Soldier Dogs (26 page)

M
ilitary working dog Blek H199 didn’t have much time between his fourth and fifth deployments. The black German shepherd returned to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama from Afghanistan in December 2009 with a handler who had bonded deeply with him. The two had found numerous explosives and grown to be best friends.

The handler would like to have stayed with six-year-old Blek for the rest of the dog’s career. That was not to be.

In what’s known as a “hot swap”—he had to give up Blek upon return from war, and Blek got a new handler, Air Force Staff Sergeant Brent Olson. He liked Blek immediately but felt a little guilty. “His other handler wouldn’t even talk to me, he was so upset that I had his dog. They had really bonded. I was like, ‘Dude, it’s not my fault.’”

Less than three months later, Olson and Blek deployed to FOB Salerno/RC East and Kandahar/RC South, Afghanistan, where they were attached to the 101st Airborne, 502nd Bravo Company, Third Platoon. During their months there, they bonded over “all
that war stuff. We experienced firefights and we found IEDs and pretty much had a good time.”

Like most military working dogs, Blek loved finding IEDs. He’d sniff and wag his tail hard and fast. “He’d be like, ‘OK, Dad, I did good! Now give me my ball!’” Olson credits the predeployment training he and Blek got at Yuma a few months earlier with helping keep them safe, perhaps alive, during some tenuous moments. “We’d been through the dress rehearsal, so we were ready to perform.”

They fought Taliban insurgents together for six months and spent almost every hour at each other’s side. Life was about as good as it gets for a dog and handler at war, as far as Olson was concerned.

But on the night of September 16, 2010, through the odd green glow of night-vision goggles, Olson’s war would take a dark turn.

It was the third night of a mission to clear a known hostile village in southern Afghanistan. Each day, as American and Afghan army troops swept buildings for insurgents, weapons, and caches, someone would open fire on them. It was a grueling mission. Troops were tired. But it was almost over. Just a few more buildings to go.

That night, after clearing three buildings, the platoon arrived at the fourth. It was near a huge marijuana field—a mud hut residence on the bottom, with stairs on the side leading up to a grape hut. Olson sent Blek up to check out the door frame to make sure it was not booby-trapped, and to sniff for IEDs on the mud stairs along the way. “Go up, boy!” Blek ran up, sniffed the twelve stairs, inspected around the bottom of the door frame with his nose, ran back down the stairs, and stood about ten feet away from Olson,
awaiting his next command. Then an Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier ran up the stairs, followed within seconds by another Afghan soldier. They were going to open the hut and take a look at what lay inside. But when the second soldier got to the fourth step, there was a tremendous explosion.

What followed was a hellish scene.

A platoon sergeant got on the radio calling, “IED! IED!” The Afghan soldier who was on his way up the stairs was thrown twenty feet, onto an old dirt road. His left leg had been blown off, and he lay screaming, begging in Arabic for someone to shoot him. He quickly bled to death in the middle of the road.

The force of the explosion had blown Olson back a few feet into the wall behind him. He stood stunned. “What brought me back to reality was the sound of Blek screaming. It was a horrible sound.”

He couldn’t see his dog because it was nighttime, so he reeled Blek in on the retractable leash, pulling and pulling until Blek was next to him. Blek had run when the IED exploded, so the leash was out a good twenty-five feet. When he finally got him close, Olson was relieved that Blek was even alive. He felt his dog for any injuries. As he was running his hands up and down Blek’s legs, Olson’s right arm went completely numb. He put his left hand under his right armpit, and then drew it out—his hand was drenched with blood.

“I’m hit!” he yelled.

“Who’s hit?”

“The dog handler!” Olson shouted back.

An army medic came over and started cutting off Olson’s gear and clothing. Blek growled at the medic. “All he sees is someone
touching me and me in pain, and he’s like ‘That’s my dad. Leave him alone.’”

Olson couldn’t take chances, and he handed off Blek to someone who was also hurt, but not completely out of the fight.

As the medic worked on Olson, the Afghan soldiers were running around in a panic. More IEDs went off as they ran into other buildings to seek shelter. The damaged platoon called in First Platoon for support because of all the casualties. As the troops ran in, they set off more IEDs. Two American soldiers died, and several others were wounded.

Olson had taken shrapnel to his right armpit, and his upper arm was broken and still devoid of feeling. His left arm was burned, shrapnel peppered his face, and he had a three-inch piece of metal in his leg.

He saw Blek again as they were waiting for a Black Hawk medevac. He knew right away that Blek had gone deaf. He was talking to his dog, but it was clear Blek could not hear him. The dog just stared straight ahead, panting. Blek’s eardrums had been blown by the concussion. He also had a piece of shrapnel embedded in the left side of his muzzle.

Twenty minutes after the initial blast, the helicopter arrived.

“The dog can’t go!” yelled a crewmember above the noise of the chopper.

“He has to go. If he doesn’t go, I’m not going! There’s no way I’m leaving my dog!”

Blek went with Olson on the Black Hawk to Kandahar. There, an ambulance sped Olson to the base hospital. Veterinary staffers took Blek to the vet hospital. “You’re a good boy,” Olson told him as they parted.

Two days later, Olson had a visitor at the hospital. Blek had come to see him, brought by another handler who was taking care of Blek. The dog jumped onto Olson’s bed and just stared at him. “I almost cried.” The dog’s face was already better, but he was still deaf. Blek stayed with Olson for about a half hour and then went off on the first leg of his journey back to the States. They would meet up again briefly at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

Olson spent the next month going from one medical facility to the next. He had three surgeries, and one year later is back in fighting shape. He will be deploying to Afghanistan again in March 2012. This time he will not go with Blek. He is working Wiel R139, a young, high-strung Malinois fresh out of dog school. “I wish it were Blek, but he’s a good dog. He’s coming along pretty well.”

As for Blek, he is now eight years old. He was deaf for two months and still has troubles with equilibrium from time to time because of his ear damage.

Olson has not forgotten his old comrade. In fact, he sees him every day. Blek is now officially Olson’s dog. Blek couldn’t work anymore because of his injury, and Olson jumped at the chance to adopt him. As a handler, he got first dibs.

Blek spends his days hanging out on the couch, sleeping in the comfort of a real bed, and eating dog treats shaped like prime rib bones. When he’s not busy sleeping or eating, he follows Olson or his girlfriend around the house to see what they’re up to. “He’s my shadow,” says Olson. “I’m going to miss him.”

     38     

A
true bond between soldiers is unparalleled, particularly a bond born in deployment. In part, because like a mother’s bond with her child, you can’t possibly explain it; it’s too intense, it’s unique—that closeness and camaraderie, the complete interdependence, and then of course the shared adrenaline rush during moments of life or death.

Every handler who has done it says that if you’ve never been a handler in a war situation, you’ll never grasp it. You’ll just never understand the razor-sharp dread and thrill of facing what’s at stake together. You are absolutely dependent on that dog doing his thing. And the dog relies on you for everything else.

The dog is a check for what you might miss: the scent of an IED buried so cleverly there’s no way to tell by looking, the sight of someone doing something that doesn’t look quite right, the sound of an insurgent releasing a safety ever so quietly. And you’re there to keep him out of the trouble he could wander into out of naïveté or enthusiasm.

How could you possibly explain the sensation of being
dependent upon such ability and, more so, surviving because of it? Who else would understand what that means and what it’s like to owe your life to another creature—a creature that you could swear is humanly conscious in some way?

“The bond will pull you through the toughest situations,” says Master Chief Scott Thompson, who was in charge of all dog-team operations for a year in Afghanistan. “I don’t think there’s anything else in the world that can compare to the bond between a handler and dog.”

But as any dog lover knows, a bond can’t be created overnight. It takes an investment of time, nurturing, and shared experiences. Sure, Jake will be enraptured with anyone who pays him the slightest attention. Once he even followed a jogger a mile down the beach before I could catch up with him and remind him of my existence. (The jogger had stopped to pet him, saying he was missing his own yellow Lab, who was back home in Connecticut; maybe Jake could sense the guy needed a pal.) But in the larger scheme of things, Jake and I have spent nine years together, and if he ever had to come to the defense of the jogger or me, I have no doubt he’d have my back.

It’s the same with military working dogs. Initially, when a dog and handler are matched up, the goal is to establish a rapport. Blek had been with his previous handler for at least a year, and there were others before him, too. So Olson went out of his way to have long grooming sessions with the dog, to visit him more frequently than called for by protocol, to let him off leash in the fenced area to
play catch. Blek was adaptable, outgoing, and willing to work, as long as he got his praise and his ball. It made for an easy transition.

But what about dogs who haven’t had a handler before? What’s it like to go from a breeder to a vendor to dog school to a kennel and finally get assigned a real handler?

     39