Soldier Dogs (31 page)

At an auditorium at Lackland Air Force Base—the same auditorium where new handlers graduate from the dog program—memorial plaques for Rusk and Crouse hang side by side, in order of their deaths, in a row of plaques honoring fallen handlers. They are no longer at the end of the row.

You look at the row and find yourself trying not to wonder who will fill the next space. Will any of the men and women who are picking up their diplomas right now on the stage end up on this wall? You can’t think about that. It’s not right. They look so thrilled to be starting their careers as soldier dog handlers. You don’t go there.

So you switch to a better track. Who will their dogs be? What kinds of bonds will they form? Will their dogs nestle into their sleeping bags on frigid nights at their patrol bases and keep them safe against those who would do them harm? Will the handlers survive, physically and mentally? How about their dogs?

     45     

I
’m walking down the aisle between two long rows of kennels at Lackland Air Force Base’s adoption kennels. The dogs, as always seems to be the case at large kennels, are going nuts. The cacophony of excited barks makes me wish I’d taken up someone’s offer of earplugs before we entered. Several dogs are spinning in fast circles like whirling dervishes. Others run back and forth. And then I come to Buck P027.

Buck is a chocolate Lab. Labs are normally rambunctious, happy dogs, and I would have expected him to be woofing with the rest. But he is curled up in a tight ball toward the back of his kennel. He seems like the only normal, calm one among these super-energetic dogs. But there is something about his eyes, his demeanor, that seems almost sad. He doesn’t lift his head; he just looks at me unblinkingly, and then stares out again, eyes not seeming to focus on anything much.

Buck, it turns out, was in Afghanistan as a marine IED detector dog (IDD). The man taking me through the kennels tells me, “He heard one too many explosions.” Buck has been diagnosed
with canine post-traumatic stress disorder. He did not respond well enough to treatment, so tomorrow he will be picked up by thrilled new owners and given a new life as a civilian dog.

Months after I met poor Buck, his new people, Larry Sargent and his wife, Lynette, updated me on how he’s doing. “We love him to death, and we’re seeing his inner puppy a lot the way he plays,” says Larry, a San Antonio pastor. “But we still have a lot we’re trying to figure out about him.” Buck is pretty clingy with him and needs to be attached to him by a leash when people come by, or the dog gets too nervous. And once, on a visit to the veterinary hospital at Lackland, Buck “completely froze” when he saw some soldiers in uniform. “He just lay down. He wouldn’t even take treats from them,” he says. Only after they walked past did Buck move again.

The Sargents wonder if it brought back memories of war—or perhaps worse yet, if Buck thought maybe his days of happiness on his quiet acre of land with this doting couple were over, and that he was going back to war. “It’s a heartbreaking thought,” says Lynette.

Until early 2011, PTSD was not officially recognized in dogs. A few years earlier, veterinarian Walter Burghardt, chief of behavioral medicine and military working dog studies at Lackland’s Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital, had seen a number of dogs come back from deployment with what looked like clear signs of PTSD. He and colleague Kelly Mann, a veterinary radiologist and director of the veterinary hospital, developed a survey for handlers to track possible signs of PTSD. For the next two years they collected data and weeded out dogs with preexisting issues, like fear of thunderstorms, or post-event problems, like short-term anxiety.
The result: About 5 percent of dogs were coming back with signs of what they could diagnose as PTSD.

Burghardt held a blue-ribbon panel meeting in January 2011 to see if nearly three dozen top experts and researchers could come to a conclusion about whether or not canine PTSD exists. The result was a consensus statement that some dogs do, indeed, qualify for the diagnosis.

Panel members weighed in on whether to use the term
PTSD
, because it might be considered an affront to people who have served their country and been diagnosed with the syndrome themselves. It was decided to officially call it canine PTSD to at least partially mitigate the issue.

Signs of canine PTSD include hypervigilance, increased startle response, attempts to run away or escape, withdrawal, changes in rapport with a handler, and problems performing trained tasks—like a bomb dog who just can’t focus on sniffing out bombs anymore. These are variations of PTSD’s symptoms in humans.

Burghardt points out a misnomer in one piece of the name PTSD: the word
stress
. “It’s more
di
stress; stress that can’t be mediated.” And as with PTSD, the causes of the canine version are highly variable. What may result in problems in one individual may not affect another at all. Just as different people react to events in different ways, some dogs shrug off what could shut others down.

Sporting breeds, like Labs, appear to be more prone to PTSD than traditional dual-purpose dogs, like German shepherds and Malinois. Burghardt is not sure of the reasons, but he and Mann and a small team at Lackland are starting to investigate this and dozens of other questions about the disorder, including how to prevent it and how to best treat it. Right now, affected dogs are given
time off and get a combination of drugs and different therapies. A dog who is shaking and hiding may be given antianxiety medication; one who is withdrawn could get antidepressants.

The success rate is not great so far. About one-fourth of soldier dogs being treated go back to their jobs. One-fourth are assigned to less stressful jobs, in which deployment is likely out of the question. Another fourth need long-term therapy, from three to six months.

About 25 percent will not be able to work again and end up being retired from service. Depending on their condition, they could go to a police force or be adopted by a family or an individual, as Buck has been.

Burghardt and Mann are studying dogs like Buck to investigate what can go wrong inside a dog. They’re also looking at dogs who face unthinkably violent and terrifying conditions and are able to return to service with a bounce in their step.

Dogs in horrendous situations … As Burghardt describes the hell some dogs have been through, I think about Fenji….

     46     

M
arine Sergeant Rosendo Mesa immediately looks up toward his EOD partner when he hears the explosion. He’s afraid of what he will see. Only last week an IED detonated on another EOD partner as he was defusing it.

But when Mesa looks toward the other tech, who is working on the first of four IEDs Fenji has alerted to this morning, he’s fine. Then they both see it; a rising billow of dark smoke a hundred meters away. It’s coming from where they had last seen Corporal Max Donahue. He had been lying down, rifle poised, ready to engage against an ambush if needed. Fenji had been lying just a few feet away, attached to him by her leash.

One of the roles of an EOD tech is to run to an explosion where there may be an injury, give emergency care to any victims, and investigate the IED. The other marines stay put, ready to fire, to protect the mission and the EOD techs. Mesa and his partner sprint toward the smoke. There’s a hole where Donahue had been keeping watch. Fenji is lying near it, bleeding from her ears, unable to get up.

They find Donahue ten meters from the blast hole. He’s on his back, in a pool of blood, left leg gone at the thigh, right leg missing below the knee. He’s blinking, but Mesa doesn’t think he knows what hit him. Mesa has seen years of blast injuries, and it’s not just the fireball that tears people up, it’s the earthquake in the skull. The air itself becomes like shrapnel. And sure the vest takes the brunt, but you’re talking about ten pounds of ammonium nitrate and aluminum, encased in a metal container planted a foot deep in the ground.

Donahue had been lying right on top of the bomb. It had been the perfect lookout spot. And it wasn’t by chance that this bomb went off. While the other EOD tech works on Donahue, Mesa finds a cord leading from the IED to about two hundred meters south, to a small village. The cord is roughly hidden under dirt. He doesn’t follow it all the way. He knows enough. This is what’s called a command wire IED. All the enemy on the other end had to do was wait for a good opportunity and put a battery to the cord.

Even the best marine, the best dog, can’t always catch these things. Instinct fails. Or there just aren’t enough atoms floating above the dirt to detect. Or maybe somebody was tired, or assumed something. It happens. It’s nobody’s fault.

Just as the EOD techs get the tourniquets on Donahue and the major bleeding stops, the marines start taking fire. The two men quickly lift Donahue between them, like you would if a friend had twisted his ankle. They just grip him for life and run. They run down the dirt road in the 117-degree heat with bullets flying at them, as the other marines fire on their assailants. The corpsman (a medic everyone calls “Doc”) follows them, and in about three hundred meters they come to a place on a tributary of the Helmand River where they can cross. They set Donahue down, and the
corpsman tends to severe wounds on his abdomen, where even his body armor couldn’t completely protect him.

The techs run across the river, which is about thirty feet across at this point and only knee deep. On the other side, they pull out their metal detectors and start sweeping the area as they continue to a place where the Black Hawk can land. Once they’ve checked the area for bombs, they run back, grab Donahue, and carry him across the river—not an easy feat, with the slippery rocks. They run to a wide-open spot and throw a red smoke marker down so the helo pilot can see them. They’re still taking fire. The Black Hawk comes down in smoke and dust. And a minute later Corporal Max Donahue is lifted out of his hell and gone.