Soldier Dogs

by Maria Goodavage

  “Fear the terriers!” cries a sailor, and everyone laughs some more. Dog handler Navy Master-at-Arms Third Class Cameron Frost hasn’t even had Lars for two weeks, but he’s used to his canine partner drawing this kind of jibe, and he has a ready answer. “I’ve already ordered my Coach bag to carry him in.”

  Lars was supposed to be a drug dog, but there was a mix-up at dog school, and he got trained as an explosive detector dog (EDD) instead. That suits him fine. He’s a self-confident, assertive dog with a detectable swagger.

  Frost joined the navy because more than anything else in the world he wanted to be a dog handler. From early on in his enlistment he cleaned kennels, fed dogs, did whatever work kennel masters needed done, in order to show how badly he wanted to work with dogs.

  Three years later his hard work paid off, and he got to attend the handler course at Lackland Air Force Base. He thrived on the rigors of combat training with German shepherds and Belgian Malinois. When he returned to his home base at the naval weapons station in Yorktown, he was assigned to Rokio L241, a patrol-narcotics German shepherd. They soon deployed to Afghanistan and stayed mostly inside the wire at Bagram Airfield during their deployment. Rokio’s accomplishments consisted mainly of finding drugs coming in with the Afghans working on the base. At the end of the tour, Frost and Rokio returned to the United States and Rokio was assigned to another handler.

  Frost was not left without a dog, however. About ten days before I met him at Naval Station Norfolk, he had been assigned Lars, who at age seven is something of a veteran in the world of explosives detection. He has a reputation for an excellent nose and a strong drive to do his job.

  But Lars will never deploy. He’s just too small. A wrong step with a boot could prove disastrous for him.

  The navy uses Jack Russells to sniff out drugs and explosives in ships and submarines. Originally bred to be ratters, these terriers thrive on squeezing into small places. A number of these energetic little dogs are sprinkled at naval bases throughout the U.S., including Pearl Harbor.

  Lars and his small comrades are never trained as patrol dogs. When your shoulders are about one foot off the ground, there’s a limit to how much protection you can offer. But don’t tell this to Lars. He may be small in stature, but he’s big in attitude.

  “Lars has ‘little-man syndrome.’ Sometimes he can be a real jerk,” Frost says as he hoists him out of his kennel in a navy police SUV and holds him in the crook of his arm. “Don’t try to take his food bowl unless you have a hose, because he will attack you. Even if you stick your boot toward the kennel, if the bowl is in there he will attack the boot. See all these bite marks on my boot? These are all from Lars.”

  Getting Lars’s food bowl out of his kennel requires having a hose handy. Like many of his fellow terriers, Lars does not care for getting wet. Just the sight of the hose is enough to make Lars run to the other side of the kennel while someone grabs the food bowl and closes the kennel door.

  But his distaste for water does not extend to water bottles. He is a dog obsessed. Empty bottles, full bottles, crushed-beyond-recognition bottles. If he finds one while searching for explosives, “he’s done until you take it away and he calms down,” explains Frost. He’ll chew it, throw it, drag it, make it make as much noise as possible. Clearly, this is not a good trait in a combat situation, where silence can mean the difference between life and death.

  Lars stands out wherever he goes when he’s on duty. He has been on several presidential missions, helping to ensure that no one planted explosives before the commander in chief arrives. He recently spent a week in New York City on duty for the UN General Assembly. He’s the short guy on these missions, Frost says. “There’s German shepherds. There’s Labs. There’s Belgian Malinois. And then there’s Lars.”

  It’s clear from the reaction dockside at the USS Norfolk that Jack Russells are not common vessel inspectors. In fact, Craycraft says that in his twenty-one years on subs this is the first time he’s come across a little terrier as a military working dog. The dogs who check for drugs or explosives are usually German shepherds. But shepherds weigh about eighty pounds; you can’t just pass one down the ladder, as you can with Lars. Bigger dogs must be securely harnessed (at Norfolk they use hardy harnesses from K9 Storm, a Canadian company that supplies highly specialized equipment to military and police dogs) and lowered down the twenty to thirty feet by rope. Sometimes, a makeshift pulley system is used. The dogs’ legs are nestled in a sack of sorts so they don’t flail around and hurt themselves.

  Perhaps Lars’s greatest achievement to date—he has yet to find a bomb—is that he is saving the backs of countless handlers and sub crews. He does wear a harness, but it’s just his standard-issue gear. During his twenty-foot descent, he appears more like a stuffed toy than a military working dog. Frost stands on top of the submarine and passes him down to a crew member, who is waiting for the dog with outstretched arms, balancing on a narrow rim several feet down. This sort of handoff goes on until Lars reaches the bottom.

  I wonder why someone didn’t just take Lars under his arm for the descent, but it quickly becomes evident when I try to go down the ladder.

  It is not your standard steep marine ladder. The main ladder of the USS Norfolk is straight up-and-down, shiny steel without even the slightest angle to it. This is my first descent into the belly of a nuclear sub, and I can’t help remembering a cross-country plane trip a few weeks earlier. I sat next to a retired navy submarine engineer who still does contract work for the navy. He told me that back in the day, a bunch of crew members had gone out and gotten snockered. As his pal started down the ladder afterward, he missed a step, or didn’t hang on tight enough, and plummeted thirty feet down to the bottom. His back never recovered.

  By the time I get to the bottom, Lars is trotting past officers in quiet meetings and crew members who point and laugh and follow. He is a scruffy pied piper, gathering submariners as he moves jauntily through the sub. Once in the berthing area, Frost and Lars get to work.

  Frost, seemingly unfazed by the amusement of his audience, lifts his partner from one stripped bunk to the next. Lars’s nose checks three levels of bunks, plus floor and ceiling. Sometimes Lars shows interest, and Frost releases him and lets him sniff around a bunk on a long leather leash. A few minutes into the exercise, Lars scrambles from Frost’s hands and onto a top bunk. He makes a beeline up the gray-and-white striped mattress to the pillow. After a quick sniff of the pillow, he sits and looks expectantly at Frost. He has found his quarry, an explosive (sans detonator) under a pillow. The onlookers cheer and applaud.

  Frost hurls out an enthusiastic and high-pitched, “Good boy, Lars!” and throws a yellow squeaky ball to the top berth. Lars catches it and the tiny quarters fill with squeak squeak as he wags and bites his prize. Down the passageway at their meeting, the officers have to wonder what is going on.

  We make our way back to the ladder, and when I next see Lars, he is on the dock, being laughed at by a whole new group of sailors. Frost takes it in stride. “Goes with the territory,” he says and shrugs. Lars jumps his front paws up on Frost’s leg, wags, and stares at him. Frost leans down and scratches Lars behind the ears. “You’re a good boyyyy,” he says in a hushed tone. Frost may not admit it in public, but it’s clear that Lars, small as he is, is growing on him.

  12

  ONLY THE BOLD WITH AN UNNATURAL DESIRE

  Even Lars had to pass a buy team’s muster once upon a time. In order to be considered for any MWD job, dogs undergo careful scrutiny.

  The dogs being screened must be between twelve and thirty-six months old (the older ones generally have more training) and need to be in excellent health, with no acute or chronic conditions that would be costly to treat. In addition, buyers evaluate behavior, temperament, and trainability. If anything’s amiss, it’s the equivalent of a human draftee’s flat feet or color blindness.

  The testing takes place outdoors and indoors. Indoors is not posh: Depending on the locat
ion, it can be a barn, garage, or even a large tent. There needs to be some furniture, like drawers and old couches, but otherwise it’s pretty bare bones.

  Since no matter how healthy a dog is or how good he is at basics like being interested in a ball or performing a good bite, if a military working dog is skittish and balky from the get-go, he won’t fare well in the dog program. Bombs and ammo and thin nerves don’t mix, so the first tests given are preliminary environmental stability tests.

  Here’s the official Department of Defense standard, from the Statement of Work: Potential Military Working Dogs, 341st Training Squadron:

  Testing of the potential detector dog begins with introducing the dog to a complex environment while walked on leash by a DOD handler. Ideally, this environment is unfamiliar to the dog and features a number of intense stimuli that can be used to test the animal’s environmental stability, or “boldness.” Stimuli of interest include tight spaces such as closets and cabinets, slick floors, elevated footing, obstacles, stairs, noisy and startling objects, and groups of people. Any and all such stimuli may be used at the Evaluators’ discretion to assess the stability and “boldness” of dogs presented to DOD for possible purchase. The dog will not be played with or stimulated with a reward object (e.g., Kong or ball) during this testing. To be eligible for DOD purchase, the dog shall behave boldly and fearlessly. If the animal is momentarily fearful, it may still be considered for purchase if it recovers quickly and if it displays sufficient willingness to confront stressful stimuli when coaxed. DOD will not accept dogs that are consistently or severely fearful or shy or retiring; that are noise-sensitive; that are strongly aggressive to handlers or bystanders and other neutral parties; or that refuse to negotiate obstacles such as stairs or slick floors.

  It doesn’t sound like it would be too hard to find dogs who fit the bill. Jake would pass this part of the test without a problem. This ninety-pound mellow yellow Lab has nerves of steel. He sleeps through earthquakes, will walk or run on any surface (especially if there’s something delectable to eat or to roll on as a goal), and has never flinched during the very loud fireworks people set off on our nearby beach for the Fourth of July and the Lunar New Year.

  The only thing he’s ever been scared of is the Golden Gate Bridge. The vibrations made him pull away once when we were in full tourist mode with some visiting friends. But as soon as I brought out some dog treats, he forgot all about the fact that he was vibrating more than two hundred feet above the cold, unforgiving ocean waters and marched on like the brave and always-hungry soldier he is.

  Jake—Passes the environmental stability test with ease.

  Medical evaluations come later on the test day, with vet techs drawing blood from candidates who are temperamentally suited to the job, and vets examining the dogs, and sometimes even anesthetizing an occasional dog in order to take X-rays of the hips, elbows, and lumbar spine. (X-rays happen only after a dog has passed all behavioral testing.) Dysplasia and other structural abnormalities have done in many a military working dog, so even though vendors have often already submitted radiographs, vets may want to do their own. Besides a thorough medical check, dogs who will be doing patrol work need to have good teeth and jaws, with all four canine teeth present and in excellent condition. The better to bite bad guys with …

  Jake may or may not have passed the physical evaluation. He has no major health issues at all, but he has always been the owner of a set of funky hips. Shortly after we adopted him at six months old, we noticed that he ran like a sack of potatoes whenever at the beach or Golden Gate Park. We eventually had him X-rayed and were told he might have hip issues down the road. We’re nine years down that road, and it’s been an adventure filled with running and jumping and living life to the fullest. So far, he’s OK. So for argument’s sake, we’ll say Jake would pass the medical portion of the test.

  Jake—Passes the physical, but will need his hips reexamined quickly if anything becomes a problem.

  Next up on test day, all dogs get evaluated for drive in retrieving and detection. For dual-purpose dogs, the team will also look for drive and competence and confidence in biting. It’s now time for dogs to have a ball—and an arm or leg, for dogs who will be patrolling. We’ll move inside the big, drafty barn for this portion.

  Most dogs have been taught by breeders to covet a ball or a Kong toy. The majority of dogs have come to love their Kong, even if they weren’t born with a natural drive to obsess over it. Breeders work to boost interest in dogs who would rather just sit outside and stare at butterflies. The reason this is important is because it’s the rubber Kong toy that most trainers and handlers will use as a reward, and in order for a dog to want to do various tasks, he’s going to want to know there’s pay at the end. Pay for a military working dog is a Kong or a ball, or anything the handler lets him bite. And of course, great praise from the handler.

  The dogs being tested generally have little to no training in detection work. Detection at this evaluation stage is much simpler than actually seeking out explosives or drugs. It really comes to a dog’s desire to play with a ball and to search for a ball he can’t see. Testers show the dog the ball and then hide it (usually in one of those drawers mentioned earlier) and watch to see how much the dog wants to find it. The evaluators are looking for a dog who wants the ball so much that he’s clearly thinking about it even if he can’t see it, and he’s excited and will search tirelessly and intensively until he locates the ball. You can imagine the energy a dog like this has.

  Once the dog has the ball, Doc and the team look at how jealously he guards the ball in order to keep it, and how enduring and vigorous his interest is in playing with the ball. In essence, the dog has to have a passionate desire to have a toy in his mouth and a very strong olfactory search drive in order to pass this part of the test.

  “It’s actually an unnatural desire to play with an object. It’s a specially bred mutated form of hunting behavior, selected for by dog breeders over hundreds of years,” according to Doc Hilliard. “Every dog we’re looking for needs to have it.”

  Jake—Barely passes the ball test. He loves the ball and will search for it tirelessly, but once he has the ball, he is happy to share it with whoever wants it. Doc says it’s not ideal, but that the possessiveness can be trained into him, at least to an extent. Our now-deceased springer spaniel, Nisha, was completely ball obsessed, and if you tried to take a ball from her, you had to be prepared to do battle.

  13

  THE WRONG STUFF

  But it’s hard to judge every dog’s passion for the ball. Sometimes a dog goes to the United States and passes through training, only to fail in advanced training school.

  I watched an army dog and his handler, who would be deploying to Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as they tried to work on exercises at the Inter-Service Advanced Skills K-9 (IASK) Course, at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The dog was listless and didn’t seem to want to do the exercises. The ball didn’t mean much to him when he got it. He’d take it for a few seconds and drop it. Part of it may have been the heat (114 degrees Fahrenheit), but some of the problem was simply that he didn’t care enough about the ball to go through the rigors of this level of training. The man in charge of the course, Gunnery Sergeant Kristopher Knight, said he could tell when he first saw the dog that the dog didn’t care enough about the reward.

  “If I made you run three klicks in this heat and told you ‘OK, now do what I tell you and I’ll give you this nice cold water,’ you’d do just about anything for that water at that point. That’s how a strong dog feels about his toy. That’s the passion this dog lacks.” The dog did not end up deploying and is working with his handler on trying to improve his love for his “paycheck.” If that doesn’t work, he will no longer be a soldier dog.

  The buy team also makes time to test an innate skill that’s vital to a good sniffer dog: how quickly a dog can learn to associate a ball with a weird odor. It’s the cornerstone of detection training, and once at
dog school in the United States, dogs have only sixty days to master detect eight explosives scents, so the team does not want slow learners. How does a dog come to associate a ball with an odor?

  Doc or someone on the team gets a dog searching for her ball inside the barn. Suddenly the dog hits this weird-smelling scent she’s probably never encountered before. Testers used to use substances like marijuana or potassium chlorate, but these days they don’t want to expose a dog to narcotics or drugs so early in the game. There’s a chance it could confuse a dog if, for example, she was exposed to marijuana during testing and went on to become an explosives detector. There’s a lot of weed in Afghanistan, and you don’t want an explosives dog alerting to it. This olfactory separation is even more important for narcotics dogs. If a drug dog alerts to that early memory of potassium chlorate, but handlers think she’s found a stash of drugs, it could be a very big problem.

  The scent that the team uses for testing could be something as simple as vanilla or licorice, which Doc refers to as “arbitrary odors.” When the dog, who is looking for her ball, hits this new odor, all sorts of things happen. The dog thinks, “I’ve never smelled this before!” and shows a tiny change of behavior, perhaps stopping or wagging or tilting her head. At that moment, someone throws the ball so it lands right on the source of the odor, and the dog is cheered on for her “feat.”

  This happens a few more times, placing the odor in various places in the room and having a ball “magically” land on it when the dog successfully sniffs the odor. Many dogs learn extremely rapidly to associate an odor and a ball. The odor becomes a totem for the ball. It’s a Pavlovian process that works wonders. Once they are at dog school, it becomes the way dogs once again begin associating scents with a reward—only the scents at school will be the real deal and not something you’d find in Granny’s pantry.