War Dogs (18 page)

They pull up alongside me. Bowe, a Marine and executive officer of the Military Police Instruction Company and the ISAK course's school director, leans out the open window and calls over to ask me how I'm doing. “You know,” he says, his eyebrows crooked with concern, “I won't think any less
of you if you don't do it.” We are barely 20 minutes into the ruck. There's miles of tougher ground still to cover, including the incline leading to the tower, the site that marks the midway point. At the top of the hill the teams will break for a short rest and the handlers will water the dogs, take their temperatures, and collectively catch their breath.

I feel the sweat trickling down my back and chest. I look at the backseat; it's empty, inviting, air-conditioned. My fingers are cramping but I tighten them around the big red gun in my hands and shake my head, declining the captain's offer. He gives me a dubious look but assents and I push ahead of them on the road, willing my unwilling muscles to put some distance between us.

At least Staff Sergeant Christopher Keilman was rooting for me. “You tell them to go fuck off,” he'd said earlier, when a couple of the course instructors had joked that I wouldn't make it through the first mile. An Air Force handler and instructor for the ISAK course, Keilman has dark hair and a lean frame, serious and sincere. I felt grateful that his upbeat attitude was contagious.

This evening kicks off with the big ruck that would lead straight into the K-9 village, which is when the nighttime mission—meant to be as close to the soon-to-be-very-real assignments these dog teams would be assigned downrange—would begin. It was the second night of “nights,” the third and final week of the ISAK course when training begins every day just before sundown. Tonight would also be the last night of “hand-holding” before the students and dogs would run drills without the instructors walking alongside them—when they were to be tested and evaluated on all they have learned.

When, a week before, one of the instructors had asked me if I planned to go on the night march with them, I'd said yes. It was Keilman who took that opportunity to press me further to see if I'd “gear up” with them as well. I hesitated for the briefest of moments, knowing there was only one answer I could give. “That's fuckin' badass, man.” He whooped at this. “Hey, yo,” he called out to the other instructors, letting them know I was “gonna kit up and do the ruck.” There was an exchange of raised eyebrows.

Keilman helped get me into the gear, tightening the Velcro shoulder straps of the Kevlar vest while also cinching the ones that wrapped around my rib cage, trying to get the snuggest fit he could manage. He apologized when it still brushed so low it tapped against my hipbone. (The plate carrier, which belonged to a male instructor, weighs somewhere between 15 and 20 pounds.) I can still fit my backpack over the vest, which contains, among other things, my notebooks, warmer layers (layers I would have no need for), and four bottles of cold water (weighing around 12 pounds). Next Keilman handed me the red rubber training rifle (solid and heavy, it weighs roughly seven pounds); shaking his head, he quickly corrected my instinct to keep my fingers hovering over the trigger. Apparently, this was bad. When I relaxed my arms and let the rifle go slack, allowing it to point downward at my toes, he scolded me. “You can't let it hang down,” he warned. This was also bad, as it increased the likelihood that, were this a real gun with real bullets, I might quite literally shoot myself in the foot. “You have to keep your weapon at the ready,” he said pulling the gun's barrel upward. I adjusted my grip to keep it straight, my forearms instantly twitching.

After doubling up some of the magazine clips on my vest, Keilman took a step back to look me over and, seeing no other room for improvement, shrugged and hopped off to join the other instructors who were already outside. His pep talk and show of solidarity had been fortifying but brief.

Outside the dogs were fidgety while their handlers tugged on leashes to keep their line formation. The teams stood in two rows flanking the left and right of the road. Each dog team had to keep a distance from the team ahead of them—about six feet or so—as the dogs need their space from one another, mostly to keep the more aggressive dogs from fighting. Some had their muzzles on. There had been a couple of dogs struggling during the course and I pick them out—MWDs Jeny, Jessy, and Turbo—knowing watchful eyes would be swept in their direction all night. Everyone was in full gear, an expectant energy prickled in the air, boots shuffled, the dogs were twisting, ready to move. Finally, Tech Sergeant Justin Kitts shouted over the din of low chatter and the jostling gear: the ruck had begun.

And then I begin to feel the actual weight of what I am doing—it's as if the vest and backpack are straining to meet the ground, threatening to take me with them. All together I'm still only carrying about half the weight the handlers are—their packs and plate carriers average around 70 pounds, bearing extra water for their dogs, who are attached to their handlers' sides by the leashes they keep strapped to their waist. The troop is moving at a rigorous clip, a speed that, even without the gear, would have registered for me as a steady jog.

I stop to adjust the straps on my pack and look up. I'm alone and already trailing behind.

About an hour into the march,
modest relief comes on a teasing breeze, one that promises that a more temperate night is on the way. A good sign for everyone, including the dogs, as many of them, whose home stations are in cooler or more humid climates, are unaccustomed to steady exercise in such dry heat. Kitts is even hoping for rain. But after tonight, after Yuma, steady heat is what awaits these teams in Afghanistan or Iraq. Up ahead the sky is turning a buttery orange; the silhouettes of the handlers and their dogs blacken against the horizon, moving like upright shadows.

Keeping a brisk pace behind the last handler, Knight has brought along his dog Max, a Belgian Malinois puppy he's training privately. Max is tireless, tenacious, and a favorite playmate of all the instructors. He noses his way into the classroom during briefings to drop a slobbery tennis ball on unsuspecting laps, poised for the chase. While the other dogs are in work mode tonight, focused and marching in synch with their handlers, Max is off his leash and bounds ahead of Knight, dipping on and off the road, his big ears flopping out of rhythm with his wild, young-dog energy.

“Look at him,” Knight calls over, unabashedly proud of his rambunctious charge. “He could do this whole march at that pace and
still
not be tired.”

Knight's deep baritone rings in the space between us. At 40, he is barrel chested and gives off an air of impenetrability, projecting the very essence of the prototypical, badass Marine. It's a deadly kind of calm that smacks
of testosterone and is communicated more with the look of his dark eyes. Though he doesn't say so, I suspect Knight is walking the eight-mile ruck with Max tonight to keep an eye on me. A thought that comforts and slightly alarms me.

When I had first arrived in Yuma, I'd called Knight from my hotel room. It took a few minutes before I was convinced that he'd still been expecting me; after giving me a flat “Yeah, okay,” he went directly into fast and to-the-point directions. When I started to say my good-byes he cut me off to ask what kind of cell service I had. I named my provider and he made a snorting sound. “Yeah, you won't get shit for reception out here,” he told
me. I pointed out there wasn't much I could do about that. “Well,” he said. “Don't get lost.” And then he hung up.

Knight does not have a reputation for being a warm, fuzzy type. He's known instead for the lengths he'll take to enforce his high, uncompromising standards. Before arriving in Yuma, I'd heard a story about a handler from Buckley Air Force Base who'd had orders to fill an instructor position out at Yuma under Knight's command. But when he had found out that she had no outside-the-wire experience, he called her and told her not to bother coming. In his mind, without having done it herself, she couldn't offer anything worthwhile to handlers on their way to war and therefore was no use to him. Supposedly the movers had been there at her house, packing her stuff while this conversation took place, but it hadn't mattered. He didn't want her, so she wasn't coming.

He's not Jewish, but Knight wears a Star of David on a thick gold chain around his neck. He met his wife while he was training dogs with the Israel Defense Forces in Israel in 2006. He loved Israel and loved the handlers he worked with there, loved the way they handled their dogs.

Knight was raised on the outer cusp of a wealthy suburb of Cincinnati. His father was white, “a redneck” who drank too much, so Knight lived much of his childhood being raised by his black mother's parents. Knight adored his grandfather, a generous and patient man who taught his grandson the value of self-reliance, a quality that Knight has cultivated in himself to an almost obsessive end.

If there's one person I don't want to see me struggle through this march, it's Knight. Right after I put on the gear, he'd passed me in the hangar and watched me pop a stick of gum into my mouth. “Huh,” he smirked. “That gum's not gonna save you.”

But now that we're moving, Knight is my only company. He shouts again for Max, who, like a tiny gazelle, pops back into sight from behind a sloping mound of sand, his pink tongue flapping out of his mouth to the side, his eyes alight with adventure.

When Knight deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 with his dog Brahm, he was the senior officer in charge of three other Marine dog teams—another
Specialized Search Dog team, a combat tracker team, and a Patrol Explosive Detection Dog (PEDD) team. He and his fellow handlers had been called out on a mission to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Castle in Khan Neshin, Afghanistan, located about 150 kilometers south of Camp Leatherneck, in Helmand Province.

After they'd been on-site for days and had yet to be assigned any missions, Knight had begun to wonder what the hell they were doing out there. He remembers that during the day, the temperature was so high, holding out his hand into the sun was like sticking it directly into a hot oven.

Frustrations had been building, and not just because of the baking temperature. Knight had already had trouble getting enough water for their dogs from Command, and there was no air-conditioning or special shelter for their use. Instead the handlers had to get creative about how to keep their dogs from overheating. There had been so little shade that the men had dug holes in the ground under their own cots so the dogs could try to keep as cool as possible.

On one afternoon, around midday, a young lieutenant runner jogged over to where the canine unit had been setting up their gear. He told Knight that he and another handler would need to pack up everything and be ready to leave with a convoy in 30 minutes.

“Well,” Knight told him, looking around at all the stuff they came with, “we've got quite a bit of gear here. Where are we going?”

But the younger officer had no answer. Knight suggested that he find out. The lieutenant made a call. “You'll find out when you get there. It's need to know,” he told Knight. No mission had been discussed at their early morning meeting and the request had come with almost no detail, not where they were going or for how long. Given the hour, it was already too hot to work the dogs. It wasn't quite noon and the temperature was already approaching 130 degrees. The dogs were panting, salivating around their mouths. The heat in the air was deadly.

So without more information Knight refused to budge. And, after another series of back-and-forth that included speaking to the lieutenant
himself and a strong attempt to convey that his need to know was a matter of safety for his dogs, the reply had been the same: no further information.

That wasn't good enough for Knight. He told them he wouldn't be going and that none of his men or their dogs would be moving either.

His rebuff had not gone over well and it prompted the major, whose orders Knight had just refused, to come out to confront the dog teams himself. A heated confrontation ensued and escalated until, finally, the major was shouting at Knight through an open window of a vehicle.

As he stood there and listened, Knight had prayed that this man would actually come out of the vehicle, that he would put his hands on him and initiate physical contact, because at that point all Knight wanted to do was snap his neck.

In the end the confrontation was venomous but contained, and afterward the major sent over two officers who read Knight his rights for refusing a mission in a combat zone and for disrespecting an officer. Knight signed the statement, though nothing ever officially came of it. After that he called for a flight off the FOB. Before the whole episode was over, a lieutenant colonel finally got involved and tried to diffuse the situation. He had asked Knight to stay with his dog teams, but Knight declined.