War Dogs (28 page)

The Rusk family home
has always been populated with dogs. From every Christmas going back to when the first of their three sons was born, all the photos of their boys during the holidays have a dog or two crowded into the frame somewhere. Colton was the middle child, a dark-haired little boy with a determined sense of independence. He never needed to be told to do his homework; he always took care of himself. He wanted to be a veterinarian when he grew up. That is, until he decided he wanted to be a Marine. And Colton always did what he set out to do.

Colton Rusk was born on September 23, 1990, and 20 years later, exactly to the day, he left for Afghanistan with Eli, his bomb-sniffing dog.

When Rusk would call home, he had a way of talking to his mother, Kathy—he knew just what to say to set her at ease. He was more forthcoming with details when he spoke to his father, Darrell, but he was protective of his mother. After all, he had a big, red-hearted tattoo with the word
Mom
scrawled across the top of his right arm. From the way he sounded, Kathy could almost imagine that her son was somewhere else entirely, somewhere safe and happy, as if he were only away at summer camp instead of in a combat outpost in Afghanistan. And he always talked about Eli.

The last time he called home, the phone rang early Sunday morning in Texas. Rusk told his mom that the Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment were moving to a safer location and that she shouldn't worry. He'd written a letter, he told her, and it was already on its way. He told her to keep an eye out for it. After not hearing from her son for months, to have the sound of his voice come through so buoyant, so happy, talking about
how Eli was sleeping in his sleeping bag or taking up all the space on his cot, it all but pushed away her worry. And that night Kathy went to sleep and actually got some rest.

That following Monday, December 6, 2010, Kathy and Darrell got the notification that Rusk had been killed. Kathy's memory of that day is hazy, but she remembers hearing Darrell ask about Eli—had Eli made it? Where was the dog now?

And Kathy thought of that letter Rusk sent and realized it was still on its way. It arrived the day before they buried him. At the top of the paper was a discernable smudge. Next to it Rusk had written: “Eli kisses.”

Rusk's story and the news that Eli had shielded his body after he was shot, had garnered a lot of attention. It does not happen often, but the Marine Corps offered the dog to the family.

Kathy never dreamed that they'd get Eli. And when the Marine Corps first contacted them about adopting the dog, Kathy and Darrell balked. They wanted him, yes, but how could they take him away from the other young men in Rusk's unit? But they were assured that the dog couldn't stay with Rusk's unit, he would have to come back to the States, and start all over again with a new handler before he could redeploy to Afghanistan. If he redeployed at all.

On February 3, 2011, the Rusks drove to Lackland Air Force Base to pick Eli up. Kathy was worried. It'd been months since they'd seen him, and she doubted that he would remember them. While they signed the adoption papers, questions ran through her mind: What if Eli was traumatized or didn't want to go with them? The small room they were waiting in felt even smaller in spite of the fact there were only a few people in there with them. When a Marine finally came in with Eli, from the moment he entered the room she was filled with a contented kind of certainty—the dog was meant to be with them, he was back with his family. She watched the way he strained at the leash to get closer to them, like he knew exactly who they were and he'd been waiting all this time to see them again.

After they drove the two hours back from Lackland, they brought Eli into the house and let him off the leash so he could explore his new home.
He made a beeline straight for Rusk's room and went right on his bed as if he knew exactly where he was going.

Every night Eli sleeps with Brady, the Rusks' youngest son. Brady was only 12 when Colton died, but even though he's a teenager, Eli still sleeps in his bed—not curled at the end of the bed, but under the covers, wrapped in Brady's arms. He may shift around at night if he gets too hot, but he never moves until Brady falls asleep.

The Rusk family home in Orange Grove, Texas, has become something of a sanctuary for the Marines in Colton's unit. Every one of the young men in Rusk and Eli's unit has an open invitation to come and stay. A handful of Marines have already made this pilgrimage to call on the family of their fallen brother—to pay their respects, to visit and to see Eli.

Kathy intuits that they wish to be alone with the dog, to visit with Eli in private. She senses they worry about her, her husband, and their other sons, as if they think somehow the family stopped living too when Colton died. “We tell them we want what is best for them, we want them to live their life to the fullest,” she says. “We know Colton's life is over, but he would want them to live their life.”

The Marines take solace in these visits and in the Rusk house. Some have stayed days; one even lived with them for a couple of months after he got out of the service. They act as big brothers to Brady. A few of them have taken to calling Kathy “mom.” That was hard for her.

Three years later there are still days when Kathy can't bring herself to get out of bed, and it's Eli who comes and finds her, who licks the tears off her face. The dog that lives in her house needs taking care of and it's that need that pulls her up. Eli has his bad days too, when the ghosts of his past come to haunt him—to this day he doesn't like the sound of gunfire, and when there are fireworks going off she sees the change in him. She sees in his face that he's afraid. And then it's her turn to comfort him.

Every now and again Kathy comes across something that belonged to Colton, something that still carries his smell—an old shirt or his watch, the one he was wearing in Afghanistan that she keeps safely tucked away in a small pouch in a small cabinet. The Marines in Rusk's unit brought back all
the toys and gear that Colton used with Eli, like his Kong, and gave it to the family. But those things are special and the Rusks only bring them out on rare occasions. One day she caught Eli sniffing the cabinet, just sniffing and sniffing, and she couldn't think what he was after—until she remembered the watch was in this cabinet. He was sniffing out Rusk's scent. Now when she finds Colton's things she shares them with Eli; she drops down her hand to offer whatever she's holding to the dog. They inhale and remember the young man they loved together.

While ruminating on the loss
of one of his longest-living pets—a crew that included a variety of well-loved animals—writer James Fallows remarked that “we take animals into our lives knowing that, in the normal course of events, we will see them leave. . . . Nothing lasts forever, and small animals are here for only a brief while.”
1
And yet, despite knowing that we engage in this short-lived sojourn destined to mourn, we invite these creatures into our lives, again and again, knowing that however long their lives span, it will have been worth it in the end.

In the spring of 2014 Eli will be seven years old. His joints ache a little. He's slowed down some. Kathy is more careful now not to let him wear himself out chasing tennis balls in the sun.

Before they went to pick Eli up and bring him home, Kathy wrote to the Marine Corps and asked that they please not neuter him because she wanted to breed him. They didn't want to make money off the puppies, she explained in her letter, they wanted to give Eli's puppies to the Marines in Rusk's unit. And so when they brought Eli home, they did so with his fatherhood abilities still intact. The first litter of puppies has already been born—Eli mated with a chocolate Lab, but all 11 of the puppies are black like him. Kathy had intended that they would go to anyone from Colton's Marine battalion who wanted one, but so many of them were still in service. One puppy went to Colton's older brother Cody, who named the little dog Tough; another went to Colton's cousins, who named the puppy Fern, after
Where the Red Fern Grows
, Colton's favorite movie. Still another puppy went to the casualty officer who helped the Rusk family through the
worst of their grief following the notification of their son's death. The next of Eli's offspring will be going to the boys of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.

Kathy Rusk knows that Eli isn't going to live forever. She knows the dog will die, but she won't dwell on the thought, choosing instead to think of other things.

When his dog Aaslan retired,
Sean Lulofs hadn't been able to adopt him. His wife had just had a baby and Aaslan didn't have the right temperament for children. He kept tabs on the dog for a while; he knew about the family that had taken him in and where the dog was living. But around the time Aaslan would've been 14 years old, Lulofs stopped reaching out to hear news of his dog. It wasn't because he stopped caring, but he couldn't face the possibility that the dog might've died. So he just left it alone, preferring to keep the fantasy that he was alive and well.

Ron Aiello never found out what happened to Stormy, but when he went to that reunion for the World War II handlers, he met another Vietnam handler who'd worked with Stormy after he left. He showed Aiello a photo of them together, taken in 1970. As far as Aiello knew, this was the last time there was any real record of her. Of all the fates that could have befallen his dog, Aiello prefers to believe that Stormy was killed in action rather than being handed over to the South Vietnamese Army where she would've likely been euthanized. To think of that (or worse, to think she might've been killed and then eaten) fills him with anger.

After his tour ended, Aiello was certain he would never be able to have another dog again. It wouldn't be possible, he thought, that he could love another dog as much as Stormy, and it wouldn't be fair to another dog to always be comparing the next animal to her. But when his younger son pleaded for a dog, he made him a deal. He told his son that if he could keep a hamster alive for one full year, they would get a dog. Aiello thought it was a bet he couldn't lose. His son's first hamster hadn't lasted more than a few weeks. But the next hamster made it one year. A promise was a promise. So Aiello took his son to the pound and they adopted a shepherd-Lab mix
called Sampson. Aiello grew to love this dog. It wasn't as hard as he thought it would be.

That hamster died exactly one week later, perhaps knowing he had served his purpose—or, Aiello reasoned, the new big dog in the house had frightened the little thing to death. Either way, a dog had found its way into Aiello's home and into his heart again. Somehow, there had been room. There is always room.

Epilogue

What We Talk about When We Talk about War Dogs

The only thing of which I am sure is that the dogs will be around if we are. They are too valuable in all regards to give up. They are too much a part of who we are.

—Mark Derr,
A Dog's History of America
1

After one especially fierce battle, Napoleon
Bonaparte had a singular, soul-enlightening encounter with a dog. Surveying the aftermath of the bloody fight he had waged with Italy, Napoleon walked among the fallen men, their bodies still scattered on the ground. A dog appeared before him, and it soon became clear that he had been keeping watch over his master's corpse. The animal was distressed and ran back and forth between the dead soldier and Napoleon, licking the man's lifeless hand in an attempt to signal the general, and, in a sense, implore him for aid, which of course Napoleon had no earthly ability to offer. Many years later, while in exile, Napoleon would write of the deep impact this dog had made on him:

Perhaps it was the spirit of the time and the place that affected me. But I assure you no occurrence of any of my other battlefields impressed me so
keenly. I halted on my tour to gaze on the spectacle, and to reflect on its meaning.

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. . . . I had looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands.

Yet, here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. I am certain that at that instant I felt more ready than at any other time to show mercy toward a suppliant foe-man. I could understand just then the tinge of mercy which led Achilles to yield the corpse of his enemy, Hector, to the weeping Priam.
2

When we talk about war dogs, we are not simply talking about war, and we are not merely talking about dogs. These dogs are a connective thread, a great conveyer bringing events of consequence and people, who would otherwise exist at a great distance from one another, much closer together. By proxy, these dogs can become the thread of war's experience, a link between us or a mirror by which we are more easily able to see things as they really are.

One dog trainer I spoke with while writing this book was employed by a private canine contractor; he'd been hired to prepare Marine dog handlers for their deployments in Afghanistan. This man had already had a long career working dogs for sporting competitions; it's a kind of training that demands very precise execution from the dogs at each particular task. He enjoyed the work, yes, but for a long time, he'd been caught up not with the dogs as much as with winning ribbons. He had never thought of his dogs as just a means to an end, exactly, but when he started training dogs to find explosives, he was startled by what he saw. He began to see the animals he'd worked with his whole life with a newfound appreciation. He'd always known that dogs could save lives, he told me. But, he said, his voice quiet, “until I actually put my hands on them, I really never understood it.”

Author Mark Derr doesn't write about dogs to understand them, he told me; he writes about dogs to explore the many ways they help us
understand ourselves. He believes dogs are a great gift. He perceives them to be our connection to the natural world, bringing about a more significant sense of meaningfulness to our existence than perhaps we deserve.

And when it comes to understanding and talking about war, Derr muses that dogs offer us a way to discuss the more complicated aspects of war that we otherwise might not—the ugly, darker parts of war—in a way that I believe is quite profound. “It's just that using the dogs to discuss these things is somehow cleaner, as it were, somehow simpler,” he reasoned. But, he added, “there's nothing wrong with that, because the only way they get discussed is by distilling them down to their raw essence.”
3

To know war dogs is not to know war, but they can help us understand it better. Knowing the bond between a handler and his dog, we are able to see the people at the other end of the leash more clearly. To know a military handler and his dog's lot in war is to better understand our military and our country's lot in war. And just as war dogs save lives, they enrich them.

Because I've known war dogs, I will never look at dogs the same way again. Because I've known their keepers, I will never look at the military, or the people in its community, the same way, either. And because I knew Lance Corporal Joshua Ashley—despite the fact that I only knew him a little, and gleaned much of what I know about him from those who taught him, loved him, and mourned him—I will never think of war the same way. It's not that I now think of these things—conceptually or otherwise—as necessarily better or worse than I did before I started writing this book; they are just far more layered, complex, and complicated, and infinitely more interesting.

When we talk about war by talking about war dogs, I believe Derr is right—dogs make war more palatable, but also more tender, and more human. Dogs have a way of bringing us back to our senses. They cut a path to our emotions, and more often than not that emotion is love, whatever form it takes.