K-9 Korea

by J. Rachel Reed

  As the ship rolled on to Japan, the men, now certain of their final destination, looked at their dogs in a different light. If they hadn’t been completely grateful before, now they saw their dogs as the lifelines they truly were. The situation was terrible, any way you looked at it. “The enemy” they were about to face would be someone who wanted to survive, someone who needed desperately to eat. They would not be facing hardened warriors who had been trained to kill, but overwrought parents who needed to feed famished mouths and quiet empty bellies. Many of the men had experienced poverty and believed they could wrap their heads around the situation. But for many of the men, the mission conflicted painfully with the charitable ideals that had been instilled in them by hardworking, Christian, small-town parents. Their fears of going to Korea were now realized in a more profound way.

  The dogs had demonstrated their ability to kill a man. In the bite suit the men had experienced for themselves the power of those iron jaws and sharp teeth. They also understood that the struggle in Korea could very easily come down to nothing more than kill or be killed. The men had been told in the briefing that they must try to call the dogs off once a suspect was subdued, but they also understood that if a perpetrator continued to struggle, the situation might go beyond the handler’s control. They had learned the commands in English, but now they also learned how to say “Stop resisting” in Korean. Lieutenant Word told the men he would buy a case of beer or a fifth of liquor for any suspect apprehended, “dead or alive.” The men took this to mean they would be asked to set their personal values aside for the Army mission. Each man would wrestle with that from then on.

  The dogs were a lifeline, and the men understood that well. They had always taken great care of the dogs but now, more than ever, their diligence in caring for them was amplified. Through typhoons and treacherous seas, the men made sure the dogs were properly exercised and fed aboard ship. The dogs would sometimes be staked out on the ship’s deck so they could use muscles that might atrophy sitting in the kennels all day. The dogs’ daily rations were fortified, but only enough to encourage lean, powerful muscle mass. Regularly the men checked for any sign of illness or injury that might prevent the dogs from performing at their optimum capability.

  The 8125th was aboard ship for twenty-two days before landing at Incheon. The smell was overpowering from two miles out. To the men it was a rancid stench of rot and sewage. For the dogs it must have been overpowering. They became anxious when the kennels were brought above deck. Many of the dogs shivered and whined inside their kennels, while others raised hackles and growled.

  Hatch and Stewart thought the dogs might just have a built-in loathing for Koreans, their enemy in this game. Chan told them if it was Asians the dogs hated, he would have been eaten long ago. Hatch had heard a story from someone who had gone to Korea before: “If you let the dogs lick up what’s left of a blown-up Korean, you’ll have the meanest dog you’ve ever seen!” The consensus among the men, however, was that the dogs could certainly smell, even two miles out, the rot in the Korean gut of dogs the people had eaten before.

  Landing barges came out to meet the men and dogs, anchored a half-mile off shore and bring them in across twenty-foot swells. The dogs would stay in their shipping crates, to keep them safe from being jostled out of the boats into the treacherous water, until finally being unloaded in their permanent location. They were divided among four locations: Siheung with the Fifty-Eighth Ordnance Co., Yong Dong Po, Musan-ni, and Uijongbu with the 696th Ordinance Co.

  The men were divided among these four locations too, meaning they would be separated from each other for the first time since training began. Over time they found out that they would rotate between posts, but close friendships were divided nonetheless. The men were grateful, however, knowing they would always have their dogs by their sides.

  Many were still fearful of the assignment. Hatch was one of them. On land in Incheon, the men were briefed by a colonel who told them their mission had been planned a year before their arrival. He showed them on the map where the action had been in relation to where they were going. Seeing the fear in his eyes, the colonel asked Hatch if he was afraid.

  “Hell yes!” Hatch was being honest.

  “Good,” the colonel retorted. “You’ll stay awake then.”

  Chan was one of the soldiers whose job it was to unload the dog crates from the barge onto the awaiting convoy of deuce-and-half trucks. When Prinz was unloaded he caught Chan’s eyes and happily wagged his tail at his old friend. Yet Chan’s face looked somehow unfamiliar to Prinz.

  “Damn, Prinz, you’re a little too happy.” It was disappointment that Prinz had registered in his handler’s face.

  Chan pulled King’s crate off next and placed him next to Prinz. An unwitting Korean civilian walked by, and King flew into a barking, frothing rage at the sight of him. Prinz looked around, trying to process the mood of the pack, taking into consideration Chan’s lack of reaction and King’s excessive one. After assessing the scene, Prinz decided Chan was his leader, and his instinct was the right one. He laid down and didn’t pay the passerby any further mind. Then, something odd happened. Chan went to King and called him a “good boy.”

  “Awww Prinz, don’t get your feelings hurt,” Chan joked. He turned to Broadway, who was standing close by, and asked about King. It turns out King was one of the dogs who hadn’t been paired with just one handler. He could be rotated in on the off-time of other dedicated dogs.

  The one thing Chan had dreaded most about assignment in Korea was the thought of having to kill someone. He had prepared himself for the possibility of letting a dog loose that might, in turn, kill someone if it couldn’t be called off. But he hoped that just the threat of a vicious dog would be enough to thwart the enemy. The Korean civilian who had just walked by was in a puddle of terror from King’s reaction, and the men knew that this, in general, was the way most Koreans would react. They were terrified of the dogs.

  “I’ll be taking King on patrol,” Chan told Broadway. King’s bark was all he would need to get through the next sixteen months.

  The men headed out to their respective areas, in their respective vehicles loaded with dogs and supplies. Stewart, Hatch, Falge, Paulus, Rath, Stahlke, Jellison, and Poole went initially to Uijongbu. Broadway, Chan, Fickes, and Benevenga went directly to Siheung. Slaughter and Falge went to Musan-ni where Slaughter’s dog, Jet, the first out of his kennel, went ballistic. His vicious barking unnerved his handler. Slaughter shouted at him, “Shut up, Jet! Ain’t nobody out there!”

  Later the men would move around among the four locations, but their dogs always went with them. All the areas the men and dogs would patrol were within fifty miles of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, and all had huge ammunition storage facilities to be protected. It was getting cold in Korea by the time the men moved in, and it would only get colder. In the winter of 1954–1955, the weather was comparable to the frigid days at Chosin Reservoir in 1950. The men saw signs of the pending freeze as they drove to their posts. Koreans along the road were already picking up any scrap they could find to burn, and many tagged along behind the trucks as they went, hoping for coal or fuel to fall along the wayside. The poverty was striking, but the men were most concerned about what it would mean to care for the dogs in these conditions.

  7

  THE MISSION

  The dogs were set up immediately in the kennels on the perimeter of the posts. The men found very little had been done to prepare for the dogs and the pending threat of winter worried them. The dogs’ needs came first, always, and basic shelter had to be established. They also had concerns about the cans of horse meat freezing, so they set up potbelly stoves and burn barrels to keep the meat thawed.

  At Yong Dong Po, where Harlan had left Greta only a few months before, there were still kennels from the group of 8125th who had gone before them, but the mission there was diminished and not the priority. The men never met Greta. No one even knew that she had been there. Perhaps she wa
s moved to a different location along with the other dogs, but all the new group found were the vestiges of the former dog inhabitants.

  In the other camps the men had to start from scratch. There had been no dogs in those places before them. It wasn’t easy to scrape together spare lumber in Korea, because much of it had already been pilfered. They put in a request for supplies, but that would take months to receive—if the request was honored at all. So they set to work building the kennel areas using the same shipping crates that had carried the dogs from Carson. Those crates were very small, however, and the dogs wouldn’t survive a Korean winter without some fortification. Some of the ammo storage units they had been sent to protect had remnants of wooden floors, and the men decided to use what they could of those. They set about building homes for the dogs and were willing to sacrifice their own supplies—and their own down time—to do it.

  Other measures also had to be taken to keep the dogs warm. Some of the men put their own gloves on their dogs’ paws to keep delicate pads from freezing. Occasionally, a dog might even be brought into the men’s tent to keep it warm. Dogs’ water would often be melted in helmets over the open fire pits.

  Warming horse meat on potbelly stoves was necessary in the frozen Korean wasteland.

  The makeshift kennels were lovingly built to meet the dogs’ every need.

  Peterson and three of the other handlers in his section improvised on their bare bones conditions that winter by bringing the dogs into their tent. The already small space was consumed by four additional furry occupants who were almost as large as the men. The shared body heat was a bonus for both handlers and dogs. The situation was a definite detriment for anyone else who might try to enter the space, however. Once the Charge of Quarters (CQ) found this out when he entered the tent to wake them for their 11:00 p.m. shift. The dogs, though muzzled and chained, were startled by the intruder and tried to attack. The tent and its contents were destroyed, and the rattled CQ never went to their tent again. Instead, the next day a phone was installed in the tent.1

  The Army wasted no time, regardless of the dogs’ sleeping situation, in putting the dogs into rotation. The duty was a twelve-hour overnight shift, roughly from sunset to sunrise. They worked two days on and two days off in order to give the dogs necessary down time, which the Army realized was crucial to the dogs’ well-being. Every morning on duty, the men would retrieve their dogs, check them thoroughly for any signs of injury or illness, slip on the choke chain, and grab their side arms. They patrolled the post perimeter and ammo areas throughout the night, looking for any signs of Koreans slipping past the boundaries. They had been taught to issue certain commands in Korean: “Halt,” “Hands up,” “Get on the ground,” “Don’t resist,” and “stop struggling.” The dog’s primary job was to alert. Only as a last ditch effort, if the suspect did not respond to the litany of commands in Korean, were the soldiers to let a dog loose.

  The dogs were so keenly aware of any sight, smell, or sound, that often they alerted to nothing. This made it difficult for the men, at first, to decipher what was really a threat. They were hyper-vigilant in the beginning. Once Stewart, already frightened from patrolling through a Korean cemetery, heard shooting in the distance. His instinct to “get down” kicked in, and he fell hard to the ground, closing his eyes to the imagined impact of a bullet on his body. When he opened his eyes, he looked to his side and found Duchess had also hit the deck. Slaughter’s dog, Jet, had a reputation for being especially alert to any and all threats, perceived or real. After a while Slaughter caught on and could be heard patrolling through the night, saying, “Shut up, Jet! There’s nobody out there!”

  The men found over time that any suspects they encountered were generally completely submissive in the face of a dog. Because of this, the handlers could convince them to leave and never return. This was a huge relief for the men, who felt a deep compassion for what these civilians were enduring at home. Sometimes it was necessary to take civilians into custody, usually repeat offenders, but even Lieutenant Word’s early promise of alcohol was not enough to override the compassion many felt for these Korean men trying to feed their starving families.

  STARVATION

  It was probably the scent of food coming from the active military posts that was most responsible for bringing hungry people to them. In the dead of winter, the men had to warm the dogs’ food over the fire. Horse meat cooking over an open fire had a smell Fickes would later describe as “marvelous.” Despite his American sensibilities, which could never quite accept the notion of horse as food for humans, he understood the draw—though he never sampled it.

  Just as people were drawn to the smell, stray dogs who had managed to survive the Korean famine also could not resist the smell of the meat cooking. This brought the dogs to the posts, where some would make homes for as long as they were welcome. Only the true survivors lasted. The military working dogs were nasty about protecting their food. Schulz’s dog had to be double-chained at feeding time, and Falge had developed a system of pulling his dog’s empty pan away with a stick. Strays had to make buddies, either with one of the K-9s or with one of the soldiers.

  There were set amounts of rations for dogs and people at the posts. Meat for the dogs and food for the soldiers were shipped through the quartermaster either from Japan or from the states. The men understood all too well that what was a single ration for them was more than the average Korean would eat in a week. The dogs often received more than they could eat, and leftover meat was to be discarded if it went past the expiration date, or if the dogs didn’t eat their whole portion. Expiration dates and dog slobber were never a deterrent to the starving, however, and it was tough for the men to follow Army policy in the face of so much hunger. Often the Koreans would dig through the trash for the rotting meat. This was heartbreaking and difficult to watch, but it was also problematic to the mission. The men had tried taking the trash a greater distance from the posts, and they were always heartsick at having to pry the determined Koreans from the truck’s bumper. Finally, the Army set forth a policy that the Korean civilians were to stay out of the trash dump areas altogether because it only seemed to encourage them farther and farther inside the gates. Of course it was left to the dogs and handlers to enforce this policy that most did not condone.

  At first the men tried to discourage the Koreans by putting Ex Lax on discarded horse meat. This was a last-ditch effort, and a horrific option: diarrhea could likely turn malnourishment into a death sentence. Still, they hoped one case of diarrhea would serve as sufficient warning for everyone else. They were wrong. So the men tried another tactic: knowing the fear and loathing the Koreans had for the dogs, the men put the dogs’ feces, scooped up on a daily basis, on top of the discarded meat as the ultimate deterrent. This worked for a time, but it wasn’t a huge leap for people already accustomed to knocking maggots off rotting food to look past dog feces for a meal.

  The moral conflict the men felt was soul-crushing. They were bound by duty to make the dogs their first priority. They knew the dogs were well fed, usually with plenty left over at the end of the day to share. Yet military policy would not allow them to feed starving people. If one of them were to get caught allowing the Koreans to eat, he would be punished—some form of non-judicial punishment or even time in the brig. It was the latter option that most worried the men. To be sentenced to time in confinement would disrupt the handler-dog bond for an undetermined amount of time, and that defied the credo the dog handlers lived by. Dogs needed their handlers, and the handlers needed the dogs. A soldier would never abandon a fellow soldier on a mission.

  Starving stray dogs, however, were another matter. The survivors managed to find a way into the tents of the men of the 8125th. There was no Army policy against feeding strays. This may have been because the Army had witnessed, throughout its illustrious history in war, that soldiers derived comfort from battle buddies. Perhaps it had more to do with keeping Korean combatants hungry by controlling a food source, t
he dogs. Whatever the reason, strays were left alone by military brass. The handlers, on the other hand, were drawn to any dog that wandered inside the perimeter. Maybe the dogs reminded them of the dogs they had known in their youth, or maybe it was the bond that they had formed with their K-9s. Once they endeared themselves, strays received full spoiling privileges. The men would never have taken scraps from their plates to their K-9 partners, but they happily gave food to the strays. Two of those strays, Katie and Posack, were even given the right to sleep at the foot of the bunk.

  KATIE

  When Benevenga first got to Siheung, he noticed a pair of hungry dogs hanging around the kennels. His initial thought was that they would certainly be attacked and killed by the K-9s if they ever got too close. From a distance, however, he could see that dog language flowed easily between the strays and the military working dogs, and there was never a problem. The two strays seemed to know which dogs they could befriend and which were off-limits. Chan’s Prinz would stretch out to the end of his chain to meet the two dogs. Fickes’s Duke was the same, and it was through him that any human was ever able to have contact with the pair.

  Benevenga wanted desperately to get food to the stray dogs, but they were so mistrusting of humans that it made it difficult even to extend a bowl of food, much less a stroking hand. He left food for the pair when he could, and always found that the two had eaten in his absence. He hoped over time the dogs would allow for more. Once while out in the dog yard, Benevenga was surprised to find the stray dogs hadn’t touched the bowl of food. His first terrible thought was that the Koreans had gotten to them. He had such an abiding love for dogs that this idea was beyond horrific. He tried to put it out of his mind as he completed his chores, tending to his dog’s needs. Suddenly a noise caught his attention near Duke. The two dogs were playing with Duke. Benevenga walked up to them, hand extended, and to his surprise they paid him little mind. He got close enough to touch them and crouched down, cupping his hand as he extended it to their faces. The male stray recoiled a bit but didn’t seem too fearful in Duke’s presence. The female surprised Benevenga by fully surrendering to his touch.