Soldier Dogs

by Maria Goodavage

  Dogs go through detection training first. They’ll learn eight explosives scents here (or a variety of narcotic scents), starting out in much the same fashion they did when they were chosen for this work from the vendors. Only this time instead of vanilla or licorice, trainers use real commercial explosives.

  A dog may have a slight change of behavior when he smells a new scent like potassium chlorate—kind of like a “Whoa, that was weird! Let me give that an extra sniff” reaction. It can be very subtle. Sometimes it’s just a little extra time spent on a scent. When the dog has clearly detected the odor, a trainer “pays on sniff” by throwing a Kong over the dog’s head so it lands on the scent. It seems to the dog like it’s not the trainer who pays him, but the scent.

  That dogs can believe the scent of potassium chlorate magically creates a bouncing Kong is just one of those things that makes them lovable. The trainer doing the high-pitched happy cheerleading for the dog’s deed might seem a little odd to the dog at first. One wonders if the dog thinks the handler is just as happy to see the Kong appear from the explosive as the dog himself is.

  The reason for the ball coming from the odor and not from a trainer at this early stage is that the dog shouldn’t always be looking to the trainer to see if he’s on the right track. A dog can’t have this kind of dependence in theater, since handlers have no idea where IEDs may be. Looking for approval or reward in a wartime situation can lead to a dog stepping onto an IED instead of detecting it first.

  After a while, when a dog detects the scent, he’ll stare at it, which of course leads to the reward. Trainers then introduce the “sit” command when a dog sniffs an odor, because it’s important that dogs don’t keep wandering around once they’ve detected something, and because sitting makes it clear that the dog isn’t just staring at a passing beetle. The technique where a dog sits and stares at an odor is known as deferred final response. Some dogs may lie down instead if the odor source is low or it’s under something like a car.

  Once a dog learns the technique for one scent, other scents can be fairly quick to follow. It’s as if a lightbulb goes off: “Ah, here’s a new, weird, unnatural, potent scent. Let’s see if a Kong comes out of it!” After a while, the Kong doesn’t even have to be used in this manner anymore, but it’s inevitably part of the reward. The scents that dogs learn to detect at the 341st are just the start of a bouquet of narcotic or explosives scents they’ll be able to uncover. Many more will be added as they continue their training at their home bases and beyond.

  The detection portion of dog school takes about sixty days. In order to certify as a detection dog, drug dogs need to have 90 percent accuracy. Explosives dogs must have 95 percent, missing a maximum of one out of the twenty aids.

  Then it’s on to the patrol section of schooling. This starts with basic obedience, then ramps up to an obstacle course, with tunnels, a jump, stairs, and other structures similar to what dogs might encounter during a mission. Labradors and other dogs destined for a single-purpose career stop training here.

  The shepherds and Malinois move on to the next phase of the dog school syllabus: the bite. Most dual-purpose dogs these days seldom need to use their bite skills in real life. But the deterrent factor may be part of the reason the dogs so rarely have to go into bite mode. Most people will back off when they see these dogs, or when the barking begins.

  The dual-purpose dogs the Department of Defense purchases are already trained to bite, so the bite work is finessed and taken to the next level at Lackland. The dogs generally know how to run and attack a decoy’s arm that’s protected by a bite sleeve. It is deeply satisfying for a dog to chomp into it; in fact, the bite is the reward—no Kong needed.

  But what about stopping someone who’s running away? The dogs here work on an exercise called a field interview, where the handler is questioning a “bad guy,” maybe frisking him. The decoy in this scenario is often clad in full-body protective gear, known affectionately as a marshmallow suit. It makes him look rather like the Michelin Man wearing a dark-colored coverall with thick fabric. The wearer’s head is usually the only part that’s not protected.

  The dog stands guard. The person bolts. The handler shouts for him to stop, but he doesn’t. Meanwhile the dog is completely at attention, ears forward, body stiff, tail rigid, eyes focused. The decoy is like a giant rabbit, and to a dog with a strong prey, hunt, or play drive, it’s one of the most fun games there is.

  (In case you ever get apprehended by a MWD or any law-enforcement canine, you might like to note that these dogs tend to bite the part of you that’s moving the most. When you’re sprawled out on the ground after a dog knocks you down, consider waving a white flag. And don’t think about playing dead. The dog will liven you up very quickly.)

  “Git him!” the trainer exhorts. Music to a dog’s ears. The dog gallops to his quarry and grabs whatever body part is convenient. The force often knocks down the decoy. Whether the decoy remains standing or gets sent to the ground, a well-trained dog will bite and hang on until the trainer calls him off. Most dogs don’t want to give up the bite. Some release immediately, others grab and shake until more firmly commanded—or even physically pried off. With more training, the release comes more quickly.

  And what happens if, during the initial pursuit, the “bad guy” gives up and stops running? The dog needs to be able to stop in his tracks and resist every urge to finish the pursuit and bite the crap out of him until told to stop. This is called a standoff. The handler or trainer yells, “Out,” very loudly, and the dog is supposed to stop in his tracks and stand guard next to the suspect. The dog learns how to escort the suspect away, heeling close at his side. If the person makes a move to escape, the dog can grab him if the handler doesn’t get to him first.

  I’ve watched this type of dramatic exercise at a few different military bases, with the big padded man or woman flouting the law and running away. It made me wonder if dogs think that all bad guys are obese. The message seems to be “Great big person runs away, I get to bite.” I’ve been assured that this isn’t the case. It’s the chase that kicks in a dog’s instincts, not the size of the person. In fact, as a dog gets more advanced, there’s special protective gear that’s a lot less bulky than the marshmallow suit. It doesn’t protect as well, so it’s not used that much. But it helps make the scenario more realistic.

  My question about bite-protection gear wasn’t entirely unfounded, as it turned out. Over lunch at Chili’s, Air Force Technical Sergeant Joe Null, the noncommissioned officer in charge of military working dog logistics, told me that there are some dogs who are so used to an obvious padded target—like a bite sleeve or full-body gear—that they’re flummoxed when these are absent.

  He pointed me to a grainy video on YouTube that shows what appears to be a real-life situation, taken from a helicopter camera that doesn’t have the world’s best zoom, of a police dog chasing a suspect. But as the dog gets ready to take down the man, you can see by the dog’s body language that he’s a little confused. Null says the dog is wondering, “Where’s the bite sleeve? Where’s the padding?” He passes the man by, slows his pace, and for the remainder of the short video, man and dog weave around each other along the road, the dog now looking like he’s merrily cantering around—no longer an aggressor but more a happy cartoon character. When the music shifts from a dramatic chase riff to the Looney Tunes theme, it fits perfectly.

  “The moral for handlers,” says Null. “Don’t let this happen to you.”

  But it’s easy to see why some dogs are motivated by the sight and scent of a good bite sleeve—a big, thick, almost castlike arm protector. Everywhere I went at Lackland’s patrol area, dogs with heads held high and tails wagging hard paraded around with what looked like giant, stiff arms. After certain types of exercises—like finding a bad guy behind a closed door in a barren building with many doors—dogs would get the sleeve as a reward for about a minute, and they’d beam as they toted around the biggest and most outlandish “bones�
� ever. It’s no wonder the dog in the video was holding out for his. (Another theory about that dog is that he didn’t want to hurt the man. He probably learned that handlers are not happy when you bite into a body part that’s not protected.)

  What starts as a fun game propelled by a dog’s play, prey, and hunt drives develops over months and even years into a drive to defend and protect. “The goal is to develop the ultimate working dog that will defend itself and its pack members under any condition,” Arod says. If a handler is wounded and unable to speak, the dog won’t just stand there waiting for the command. He’ll go into full protection mode.

  The trainers at Lackland plant the seeds of this drive. They teach a dog to attack when the “bad guy” starts fighting, or even when a suspect raises his arm while being questioned in a mock field interview.

  Not all dogs will make it through this part of dog school. Patrol is not for everyone. Just as Ferdinand the fictional bull preferred to just sit and sniff the flowers, some tough-looking military working dogs really don’t want to attack people. There are softies in the dog world, and no matter what you do, they’re not going to be reliable aggressors. “They just want to be your friend,” says Null.

  The military knows this, which is why dogs certify in detection work first. These dogs can be perfectly good sniffer dogs, and they have the bonus feature of looking like they could eat you for lunch, even if they’d rather just come over for a good ear rub.

  20

  I TRY NOT TO NOTICE THE BLOOD

  I’ve been watching bite-training work at Lackland for much of the morning when I meet up with Navy Master-at-Arms First Class Ekali Brooks. He’s training new students at the handler course on the basics of “catching” a dog.

  When you catch a dog, the dog—generally a German shepherd or a Belgian Malinois—careens toward you at top speed, intent on biting into the part of your body that’s easiest to access and that’s moving the most. This can be rather dangerous, so you wear a bite sleeve. If you catch a dog right, you won’t be hurt. Mess up, and you might know what a few hundred psi of dog bite feels like.

  Brooks explains that as the dog runs at you, the sleeve needs to be a few inches away from your body so there’s a cushion when the impact occurs. More experienced handlers and trainers can be running away from the dog and turn at the last second for the dog to bite into the sleeve. New students just stand there facing the dog, knees bent, ready to absorb the impact. In either case, as the dog runs toward you, you want to agitate the sleeve, shaking your arm so the dog is attracted to the sleeve and not to any of the many unprotected parts of the body.

  As I watch dogs fly by on the field of dry grass on this scorching Texas summer day, I realize a lot of things can go wrong if you don’t do this decoy business right. (Brooks tells me that “decoy” is a more appropriate term for what I’d been calling the “dog catcher” or once even, carelessly, the “victim.”) Besides the scars so many handlers and trainers bear, Brooks says these men and women are notorious for having shoulder problems.

  Then he asks someone nearby a question: “You want to catch a dog?”

  I look around for the decoy candidate he’s talking to, but there’s no one else close enough to hear that question.

  “You want to try it?”

  Oh God, the man is looking at me. And he’s smiling in that benevolent “here is a gift I know you will love” kind of way. How can I say no?

  “Sure, that’d be great!” Suddenly the hot day feels much warmer.

  Brooks calls over a husky student wearing army camouflage and asks for his sleeve. It looks like the arm of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, only with a jute fiber cover over hard plastic. It’s a Gappay brand—one of the best, Arod would later tell me—and starts at the shoulder, bends ninety degrees at the elbow, and ends well past the hand, which is sealed off in case of overly enthusiastic dogs.

  Brooks hands it to me, and I try not to notice that there’s blood on the outside. The jute should be a nice haylike color. And it mostly is. But there’s one area that’s the color and demeanor of the piece of absorbent material that’s on the bottom of a package of hamburger meat. I didn’t want to ask what happened. Better not to know right now.

  (I later learn that the blood is from the friction of a dog’s gums against the jute, not from a handler mishap. It’s uncommon that a dog bites in such a way that the gums scrape and bleed, but the sleeve I was wearing was pretty tattered and had clearly caught hundreds of dogs, and rubbed at least one dog’s gums the wrong way.)

  I slip my arm into the thing. Inside there’s foam cushioning and a bar of protective steel running the length of it. The cushioning has a sticky, grungy, spongy wetness from the sweat of the handlers who’ve been practicing this morning. Outside, the jute is shredded and damp from the saliva of dogs with great big canine teeth and an even bigger prey drive. The dog I’m about to catch—a smaller, older Belgian Malinois named Laika H267—eyes me and my giant arm from afar. She looks like she wants a piece of me. I tuck away any thoughts of arms as hamburger meat and get my instructions from Brooks.

  He is confident and calm in manner and has done this for years. He has an enthusiasm about working with dogs that’s conveniently contagious. “They actually pay us to work with dogs like this! There aren’t too many people who like what they do, and I love what I do. It doesn’t get any better than working with these dogs.”

  My arm is in good hands.

  I’m positioned, knees slightly bent, arm a few inches from torso. Bring on the Malinois!

  Then I remember the missing ear.

  It’s earlier that same morning, around 6:30 A.M., not too warm just yet for the birds in a pleasant grove of trees to pack up their songs for the day. Shade is a precious commodity at Lackland, and about ten new handler course students are starting their day under the trees, bonding with the dogs. They’ve been assigned these dogs for a few weeks now, and some are really getting attached.

  The students smooth their hands down their dogs’ coats repeatedly, and they talk to them. It’s a practice called rapport work. The touch and closeness helps establish the students as people the dogs should care about. And it helps the students get to know their dogs as well. Some dogs don’t even seem to notice all the attention and spend the time barking at another dog or running back and forth as far as their leash will allow. But most dogs revel in it.

  I approach a navy student handler whose dog is standing still, eyes slightly shut, as he enjoys the military’s version of a dog massage. The dog is a large shepherd with bushy fur around his ears. His real name is Hugo P128, but Navy Master-at-Arms Seaman Glenn Patton calls him Chewbacca because of the dog’s similarity to the hirsute Star Wars character. Patton beams as he strokes his dog.

  “Oh, I love him. I’d take him home if I could,” he tells me when I ask how they’re getting on. As we talk about his lifelong love for dogs, and how he has dreamed of being a military dog handler for years, he turns his head slightly to the left, and I notice that the upper third of his right ear is missing.

  The top edge of what’s left of the ear is jagged and red, almost like someone or something recently bit it off. This turns out to be an accurate assessment. He explains, after some coaxing, that another dog had bolted away from his handler the previous week and tried to attack Hugo. Patton came between, and the aggressor bit into his ear and ripped it off.

  I found out later that a group of handlers and instructors searched for the ear in the vicinity of the attack for a long time and couldn’t find it. In an effort to leave no stone unturned, the perpetrator dog was brought to the vet and given an emetic to induce vomiting. But when he threw up, there was no ear.

  Patton says the mishap hasn’t discouraged him from his calling. “In a weird way, it’s made me love it even more. It shows me that my love for the program is as deep as I thought it would be. It doesn’t bother me what happened. I just keep loving working with dogs and can’t believe my good luck that I’m here.”


  “Get her!”

  Laika lunges toward me. I start shaking my giant, sleeved arm at the Malinois as instructed, so she’ll be attracted to that part of my body and not (oh, just for instance) my ear. As she runs toward me, Brooks tells me to freeze. I stop moving so she’ll get a good bite on the targeted body part.

  Laika is on a long leash just in case, but the impact is strong. She sends me reeling back a step, and the sleeve crashes into my body. She starts tearing at the sleeve, and as I agitate it again she digs in, front paws pushing against my stomach and then my thigh for more leverage. Her bite is steady and strong. The power of this dog’s mouth is awesome. Without the sleeve, I’d be a bloody mess.

  Having Laika on my arm starts to be almost fun. Brooks tells me I can growl at her, so I do and she digs in harder. Then he tells me they always praise a dog, so I tell her what a good girl she is before I realize that as the bad guy I’m probably not the one who is supposed to praise her. But she continues biting just as hard, unfazed by my complimentary words, and perhaps a little concerned about my apparent mood swings. Then Brooks comes over and gives Laika a friendly “atta girl” pat.

  “Decoy, stop resisting!” he shouts to me, and I stop moving my arm. “Out!” he calls to the dog. Laika stops biting, but on the way down, quickly butts my torso with her nose. “Sit!” She sits. “Stay.” I back away several steps when Brooks tells me to. Laika trots off with her handler, and as she does, she turns around and looks at me with what could only be described as a “Wait till next time” expression.

  21

  REWARD-BASED TRAINING, MOSTLY

  Laika’s reward—aka “pay”—was twofold: biting my arm, and the praise from Brooks. If she wanted a piece of me again, maybe it was only because dogs love the rewards of the job.