War Dogs (26 page)

Miller tried to calm Ody, offering first a Kong and then the tug toy he always carried with him on missions for Ody. But the dog refused them, and he wouldn't focus on anything, milling aimlessly. He showed no interest in sniffing or investigating anything around him. Ody was in a state of fear and shock.

Miller kept an eye on Ody through his NVGs as they continued with the mission. But even just moving from one point to the next, Ody kept trying to walk underneath his handler, moving against his handler's legs. When Miller took a knee, Ody would push at Miller with his paws, trying to dig underneath him, to get to the only place it seemed he felt safe.

When they got back to Leatherneck, Miller took Ody to the vet right away. He was told to keep him content for the next few days, to just let the dog relax. The dog was locked up the whole night and all the next day—he wouldn't eat, he wouldn't sleep, or even relieve himself. He finally started to relax the following day, spending most of his time in Miller's bed.

But Ody didn't show much sign of improvement beyond that; the trauma from that night hadn't left him. He was jumpy around anyone other than his handler. Miller worried that Ody might bite someone, which, for a dog as easygoing as Ody, meant he was still very afraid.

Despite their poor performance during the mission, the MARSOC team wanted to keep the dog team around. Miller and his team leader decided that Ody should get a three-week retraining session. Their goal was to slowly and gently rebuild the dog's confidence. Each week they introduced a new kind of weaponry at the range—from pistols to rifles, from machine
guns to RPGs and mortars—getting louder and louder. On base Ody still proved to be a solid detection dog, doing well on every search drill. So they decided to try a low-intensity mission, a basic foot patrol during the daylight. But as soon as they stepped off the base and outside the wire, Ody tensed up, all his skittishness returning. He knew he was leaving the place where he felt safe.

Miller could have tried another night mission with Ody, but MARSOC uses a lot of mortars and rockets. When he asked himself if it was worth the risk, Miller knew the chance of doing more harm than good loomed too large in the end. Ody's lack of confidence was too big a risk factor, both for him and for the Marines on their missions.

When the pair returned to Fort Rucker, Miller could see the difference in his dog as soon as they drove up to the kennels. He was like a kid on Christmas: Ody knew he was home. Miller is confident, however, that Ody will be a superb garrison dog. He just wasn't meant for war.

Nine

The Never Again Wars

Many an American boy will survive this war and be restored to his family because some dog gave him warning of an enemy in time to seek cover, or sought him out as he lay helplessly wounded in some jungle thicket. Time and again these dogs have proved their worth in saving human life.

—Clayton C. Going,
Dogs at War
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It was Iraq, 2005. Sergeant Justin Harding and four other Marines sat in a Humvee, blocking a bridge that connected southern Ramadi to the Tameen District and stood over the Tameen Canal, a man-made tributary that ran into the Euphrates. The bridge had once been a railroad thoroughfare, but trains had long since stopped running across these tracks. Instead, pedestrians used it as a walking bridge.

After noticing a suspicious looking speedboat down along the canal, their platoon commander ordered the five Marines to take the Humvee across the train tracks to the other side of the bridge. They rolled along slowly, singing “this shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s,” a line from a Gwen Stefani song, joking because there was barely any room on either side of their large vehicle and no protective rails, if anything went wrong, to keep their Humvee from dropping 20 feet off the side into the fast-moving waters below.

The Marines had watched civilians walk over the bridge safely all day, so they hadn't even thought to sweep it for explosives. Yet it turned out that there were two IEDs hidden under that bridge. The first blew up right in front of them, the Humvee's grill and hood absorbing the blast. Another second later and it would have exploded right under the vehicle's belly, probably killing everyone inside. The Humvee continued on for another 500 meters before the vehicle overheated. Harding suffered a severe back injury, the pressure from the explosion compressing several discs in his spine. The driver's knees were bruised, and their gunner suffered a bad concussion and had to be medevaced out. As they were waiting for the Quick Reaction Force to come get them, the Medical Humvee was making its way back across the bridge and the other bomb, the one that failed to detonate on their first trip, exploded. The vehicle, nearly destroyed, limped across and everyone inside was put on other trucks.

Harding deployed to Iraq four times; he was there for the initial push of US forces in 2003, deployed two more times in 2004, and returned for a final tour in the US troop surge of 2007. During these four deployments he was hit by more IEDs than he can keep track of. During his second deployment, from 2004 to 2005, he suffered no fewer than three direct hits, a handful in which he was within 50 meters of the blast and another dozen that exploded between 50 and 100 meters away. During one of his Iraq tours in 2004, the Humvee he was in got hit with an RPG. It went through the armor and through their driver, killing him instantly. It took off the leg of their gunner, set another Marine on fire, and knocked out the man sitting behind him. The blast sent shrapnel everywhere, hitting Harding in the face. And then, he says, “we crashed.”
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Hanging on the wall of Harding's office now is a photograph of ten Marines who were with him in Iraq. Nine of them were killed by IEDs.

These men are the reason why Harding volunteered to be a supervising officer with the Marine Corps Improvised Explosive Detector Dog (IEDD) program, one that pairs single-purpose detection dogs with infantrymen, introduced in 2007 in response to an “urgent-needs request” for bomb-sniffing canines.
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In 2010, three years after Harding returned from Iraq, he
was on his way to Afghanistan, this time as a gunnery sergeant and as the supervisor for a team of 17 IEDD handlers and their 13 detection dogs. Having survived his combat tours, Harding wanted to do something that would help keep young Marines from getting killed by IEDs.

During their seven months in Afghanistan, Harding calculated that his dog teams were responsible for finding approximately 500 IEDs. And while he is infinitely proud of that number, Harding believes that even if only one dog had only found one bomb in the entire seven months that would have been enough. At the very least, he figures, one bomb found would have equaled one Marine's life saved.

At the end of wars,
sometimes it's the numbers that make the difference.

In World War II, it is said that war dogs saved 15,000 men. In Vietnam, the dogs were credited with saving the lives of 10,000 men, but many handlers who served there feel that this number is grossly underestimated. Of approximately 87,000 missions, the dogs uncovered 2,000 tunnels and bunkers and enabled 1,000 enemy captures and 4,000 enemy kills.
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How big that number will be many years from now, when we are in a position to tally the lives saved by dogs in Iraq and Afghanistan, one cannot say. But Technical Sergeant Justin Kitts was awarded his Bronze Star in 2011 for his detection work with Dyngo during their Afghanistan deployment, and for having secured the lives of 30,000 US, host nation, and coalition forces. And that was just for one dog team on one tour of duty.
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Equally impossible to tally are the lives that have been recovered, even in some small way, by a dog's cathartic presence, on a battlefield or in a wounded warrior treatment center.

From war to war, these numbers are often forgotten.

It is an unfortunate scenario that's already played out twice in the United States: post–World War II and post-Vietnam. The value of war dogs has been lost as often as it has been found.

These events usually go a little something like this: the United States engages in a conflict. Someone, a person or group, with great resilience and
spirit, petitions the military to adopt a canine fighting force, touting their many lifesaving skills. Someone in a position of power gives an order, and a small contingent of dogs is procured, trained, and deployed. Once in-country, the dogs prove to be of great value on the battlefield and save many lives. Next comes an “urgent need” request from the combat arena: “Send more dogs!” And so efforts are pooled, handlers and dogs are trained with fervor and speed. Sometimes concessions are made, sometimes shortcuts are taken, but more dogs are sent to war. The military parades the dogs' successes, the media seizes upon their stories, and headlines capture the hearts of civilians at home.

The wars slow down and eventually end. The tremendous canine force is scaled back, as are the combat-ready aspects of the dog programs, until they are virtually nonexistent.

If the war was unpopular, the lessons are lost all the more quickly. This tendency of the US military to strategize with a selective memory is one with which John Nagl, coauthor of the
Counterinsurgency Field Manual
along with Generals David H. Petraeus and James F. Amos, is well familiar.

The Pentagon is traditionally accused of preparing for the last war. But according to Nagl, who was an operations officer of a tank battalion task force during the Iraq War,
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that's not exactly what happens. We prepare to refight the last war only if it was the kind of war we had wanted to fight. The wars the US military is interested in fighting again are wars where they've had success, such as the American Civil War and World War II.

The irony of this, Nagl explains to me, is that in recent decades, the American military hasn't spent its time fighting big and successful wars like these. Instead, we have fought small wars, irregular wars—the kind of wars waged with IEDs. Despite this reality, the military still builds the capabilities it needs for those “big” wars, not the capabilities it needs for what Nagl calls the “small nasty wars of peace.”
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And when the military tries to do that, it makes mistakes, which is when the lessons learned become especially important. In fact, Nagl says, “we have rediscovered many, many lessons that we actually learned and
paid for in great cost in Vietnam.” One of those lessons, Nagl says, “is the utility of working dogs, who were invaluable in Vietnam. [We] couldn't get enough of them; didn't ever have enough of them.” But after Vietnam, he says, the skills of those dogs, as with almost everything about Vietnam, was purged from our memory. “And that's a lesson we had to relearn. We are in danger of forgetting a number of those lessons,” Nagl tells me. And that includes the dogs.

In the years following the Vietnam War, the US military began to disassemble its war dog programs little by little, dismantling ten years of combat readiness. In a shroud of shame, the dog programs slipped away—first the tracker dogs, then the scout dog school at Fort Benning. There was no outside organization watching over the military efforts for the dogs deployed to Vietnam as there was in World War II.

The Vietnam chapter, which will remain a perpetual blemish in the United States' war dog history, is perhaps the most troubled and difficult to reconcile. But each war has its own dogs—from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam—and each war has its own saga. How the dogs came in, and how they came out again, is as important, in some ways, as what they did while they were there. Their entry and exit unearths a relevant truth. This discernable pattern of US war dog history is one of building to a great success that is later shelved and forgotten, only to be rebuilt again when the need arises. It's a precedent that creates the kind of disadvantage no one would be able to fully realize until 2004, when it was time to send the dogs back to war, so many years after Vietnam.

Ron Aiello, the Marine handler who served in Vietnam with his scout dog Stormy, remembers how the canine program was dismantled after the war. First they got rid of the Marine Corps scout dogs, the mine dogs, and the booby trap dogs. Then the Army got rid of its tracker dogs. All their combat readiness disappeared. He knew then it was a mistake.

After 9/11 happened and the Iraq war began, Aiello watched the news reports on television, and saw military dogs working checkpoints or sniffing cars as they crossed gates. It infuriated him. He found himself shouting at
the television set: “Have them out on patrol! Use them for IEDs!” But he knew the dogs weren't trained for that kind of work because building up those kinds of programs again from scratch would have taken years.

There are many parallels to draw between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and that in Vietnam: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been popular ones, and there is a rush to push our military's attention elsewhere. As the United States closes shop on two wars, the urgent need for dogs is already depleting and will likely continue to lessen over time.

In response, the military working dog program is already downsizing its combat-ready dogs accordingly. All branches of the military are seeing budgetary cuts. The programs that produced the “Dog Surge” of the mid-2000s—the Marine Corps' Improvised Explosive Detector Dogs and the Army's Tactical Explosive Detection Dogs—have already reduced their numbers and will certainly be disbanded. The need for dogs has not been extinguished, but it is no longer urgent now that the United States has withdrawn from Iraq and is preparing to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. As one of his final acts as program manager at Lackland before retiring, Sean Lulofs was ordered to investigate cutting the program by one-third. In fact, he found a way to cut it in half.

There's no way that what happened in 1975 would happen now. The United States military will never again leave its dogs behind as they did in Vietnam. This is in part because of the government's interest in monitoring the dogs' exit from the military, manifested in the Robby Law, which mandated diligent record-keeping and turned a watchful eye on how the dogs leave service, but also because there is simply too much public visibility for such gross neglect to exist on such a grand scale. But just how far the programs will diminish, and whether or not war dog lessons of the past, which is to say our present, will be remembered, remains to be seen.

Aiello sees the changes happening today—the troop drawdown, the program cuts, and the thinning of dog teams—and he sees the heavy curtain of past mistakes dropping again.

But what is far more likely to make an impact than a tally of numbers at the end of the war are the efforts and living memories of handlers—like
Aiello—who, after their tours of duty ended, became the watchmen of the next generation of dogs, handlers, and war. They are the ones now building memorials and keeping track of the handlers and dogs killed in action. Their memory is institutional and it is long. And just like Aiello and his handler buddies from Vietnam followed in the footsteps of the World War II handlers, so too will the war dog handlers of Iraq and Afghanistan.

When, in 2010, Gunnery Sergeant Justin Harding was with his team of IEDD handlers and dogs in Afghanistan, they made a stop at Camp Dwyer, one of the Marine Corps' largest military bases in the country, so the handlers could bring their dogs to the veterinarians there.
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While they were waiting on base, their dogs with them, a lance corporal they didn't know approached the handlers. This Marine had been with a unit in Marjah where the fighting had been especially fierce. This young man had returned to Dwyer looking battle shocked and worn, and Harding could tell that he'd seen hell. The grief-stricken Marine had just lost some of his friends, but he wanted to thank the handlers and their dogs. “You guys are the shit,” he told them. “You know, you saved our lives and I'm sure not all of you will come back.”

Harding's infantry handlers, who hadn't yet been out on patrol, didn't know how to respond. But for Harding, that singular interaction summed up his entire wartime experience: from getting hit with IEDs, to losing so many of his friends, to trying to help protect the younger generation of Marines, to fighting against higher-ups who denied the dogs the legitimacy he believes they deserved.

Harding will never forget watching that young Marine, who was battered and damaged and already showing signs of the scars he'd likely carry for a lifetime, walk up to the handlers with tears in his eyes and reach out to shake their hands. In that moment he was overcome with the certainty that being in Afghanistan with the dogs was the right thing—the best thing he could have done to save lives in this war.