Soldier Dogs

by Maria Goodavage

  I’m thinking about how much it looks like images I’ve seen of parts of Afghanistan, when I spot people falling out of the sky. They’re dangling from parachutes, twenty of them, getting almost alarmingly close to us. I’m fascinated. They’re clearly Special Ops guys of some form—who knows, maybe even related to Cairo’s people. My excitement is lost on Gunny. He scoffs. “Clowns. When’s the last time anyone ever parachuted into combat?”

  We drive around for awhile so I can get the lay of the land, and by the time we arrive at our destination, eight handlers are finishing a long run. It’s already eighty-three degrees. Some are sweating and red, others (marines, mostly) look like they just stepped out of a cool cafe. Then it’s military push-up time. As they wrap up PT, the moon disappears, and the dogs who have been barking in their trailers come out and chug water from gallon jugs. It’s now 6 A.M. and time to start the day.

  Military working dog handlers deploying to work outside the wire are supposed to go through rigorous predeployment training, generally at a course designed to prepare them and their dogs for the grueling demands of war. There’s a canine team predeployment course at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and one at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

  But the course that every handler and instructor I talked with across all four services says is the course to attend is the Inter-Service Advanced Skills K-9 (IASK) Course, here at the Yuma Proving Ground. It is the only advanced course among the three, and it focuses entirely on matters essential to dog teams. In addition, it’s the only course that accepts dog handlers from all four services. Those who have gone through this Marine Corps–run program rave about the training, despite its rigors: “No other course compares.” “It’ll save your life, and maybe a lot of other lives.” “A killer, but the best training in the entire military.” “Should be mandatory for every handler deploying.” “Gunny Knight knows his shit like no one else.”

  The course takes advantage of its location, and at thirteen hundred square miles, it is one of the largest military installations in the world. YPG is known for testing munitions systems and weapons, military vehicles, and manned and unmanned aviation systems. In addition, some thirty-six thousand parachute drops take place annually here—apparently much to Gunny Knight’s annoyance. As the day goes on, and the sky divers drop from planes like tiny bursts of rain, there is always a new name. This time it’s “Damned glory children!” You get the impression that these parachutists are in the same category as mosquitoes to this man. Or maybe it goes deeper than that.

  The terrain and the climate make the Yuma Proving Ground a popular training area for all kinds of units that will be deploying. The IASK course adds some authentic man-made touches, with a mock “Middle East” village; it’s home to a mosque, mud and concrete buildings, and a small marketplace. At Site 2 there’s a two-story compound surrounded by walls—a small and simpler version of Bin Laden’s final manse. And because this is a test facility, the course gets munitions and ordnance no other military working dog courses can.

  During the course, which runs for nineteen days, dogs and handlers take part in realistic raids, night operations, and route-clearance exercises. The machines that simulate ammo, IED, and mortar blasts are deafening, the humps are long and arduous, and the heat is stultifying. “A lot of dogs who are good at their home station in a cooler area come here and shit the bed. Like ‘Sweet Jesus, I can’t feel my balls and I can’t breathe by 11 A.M.!’

  “But if you have not subjected your dog to this terrain, to this temperature, you really don’t know how he’s going to perform. You don’t know how you’re going to do, either,” Gunny says as he watches a navy handler struggle to put on his pack.

  One of the most valuable parts of the course is the exposure to homemade explosives (HMEs). It’s estimated that HMEs account for 90 percent of the explosives being used in Afghanistan right now. It’s so important that dogs get imprinted with these scents that Gunny Knight even offers a special mini-course that handlers can come here for.

  Before Corporal Max Donahue and his dog, Fenji, deployed to Afghanistan, they took the HME course. They did very well here, and Donahue spread the word to other marine handlers that the HME course was not to be missed. “It’s going to save you, your dog, and all those guys following you,” he would tell them.

  He got it straight from Gunny Knight. “If your dog has never been subject to HMEs, what’s the point of even going to Afghanistan? It’s like going to combat with a rifle and no ammo.” You can’t expect a dog to find something he was never trained to find. Ammonium nitrate? It might as well be a bowl of grapes to your dog, because if he’s never been rewarded for locating it and responding to it, why would he place any value on it?

  When Master Chief Scott Thompson headed dog operations in Afghanistan from 2010 to mid-2011, he was in frequent communication with Gunny Knight, letting him know the most recent Taliban trends in explosives and IED placement methods. Now it’s pretty much the handlers doing it. They hear what to watch out for pretty fast from other handlers over there. They tell Gunny and his staff, and they’re on it. Handlers who have been through this course say they were very well prepared for the Taliban’s latest tricks.

  Seven A.M. and Air Force Technical Sergeant Gwendolyn Dodd is giving the first handler of the day his final instructions. As she talks to him, the mortar and ammo simulators are already going off around the compound. Dodd and the handler and his dog are at the back end and have to enter the compound area by crawling through a long, dusty tunnel. “Ready?” she asks, and then sees the handler’s canine partner. The dog is busy doing a leg lift on a solo scrap of plant life. It’s a moment that makes you see the dog for what he is: Not a warrior. Just a dog like yours or mine. “Go ahead, boy!” he tells his dog enthusiastically when his dog has finished. The dog charges through. Dodd and the dog’s handler follow.

  Gunny and I meet them at the edge of the compound. During the next two hours, we will see two more handlers go through the same raid exercise. Wearing full combat gear, rifles poised, they walk next to an outer compound wall, carefully watching around them for snipers and other dangers, and observing their dogs. They negotiate corners, sometimes well, sometimes badly. One handler walks around a corner in front of his dog, and if this were the real deal, he’d have set off several IEDs. But the course’s chief instructor, Marine Staff Sergeant Kenny Porras, stops him and reminds him that the dog has to go first. So the handler lets the dog go first, and the German shepherd immediately lies down, tail wagging, looking earnestly at what seems to be plain gravel and dirt, just like everything around it. It isn’t until Knight brushes away some dust and gravel that I see the IEDs (which don’t have fuses or detonators, so are safe) that lay underneath.

  Once inside the compound, there are rooms to clear, stairs to negotiate. The mortar and ammo simulators go off nonstop nearby, and the heat in the plywood bowels of the compound gets more suffocating as the morning wears on. The dogs, though, are enthusiastic and don’t seem to mind any of it. They find explosives in ceilings, behind boxes; they locate caches, and with every find, tails wag and they know they’ve done well and here comes the Kong and the whoop and the praise, and a minute later the party is over and it’s off to search for more.

  “There’s a lot of dogs I wouldn’t follow,” says Gunny. “But if they make it through this course, I’d be right behind them downrange.”

  24

  GUN-SHY

  About 10 percent of teams that start the course don’t graduate.

  Skittish, fearful, gun-shy dogs or dogs who are very distractible or unfit do not make good soldier dogs. And sometimes handlers themselves are out of shape, they make too many excuses, or, Gunny points out, they cry too much. Gunny Knight and his team of instructors try to work with dogs and handlers who need extra help. He doesn’t like cutting handlers.

  “My biggest fear in life is failure. So I imagine how they feel when they fail. Even if it’s one hundred percent the dog’s fault, it’s not a jo
yous time. But I can’t let them get out there and have others following them, thinking they’re safe because they’re behind the dog.

  “See this guy?” he says, nodding his chin toward a navy handler who is working with his dog to clear a dirt road of IEDs. “I’m brutally honest. If he was terrible I would tell him, ‘You’re terrible,’ and we’d do something about it. I don’t really care to hear that this kid got killed three months after he went to our course.”

  If you ask him (and you don’t have to, because he will be sure to tell you in the course of any conversation, even about the weather), some handlers play war fighter, but don’t fight the war. They do the minimum required explosives exercises and physical training at their home bases and don’t work their dogs more than twenty minutes at one time. When they get to Knight’s course, they have a hard time.

  We walk up the road to the compound, where a dog is sniffing for IEDs in front of his handler as the blast simulators make it hard to hear anything unless it’s shouted. It’s an intense scene. You could imagine this is the real deal in Afghanistan, except the dog team would have a lot more troops following. Then the dog sees a rock and walks over to it with great interest. Has he found an explosive? He sniffs. Inspects. Sniffs some more. Then he lifts his leg and splashes the rock, and moves on.

  Dogs have to do their business. But some are too distractible. It’s merely annoying when Jake is marking something every two feet on a walk, but in the theater of war, it can be deadly. “If his dog’s like, ‘Whatever!’ and goes and pees and poops everywhere and doesn’t find anything, they’re gonna be like, ‘Go sit in a corner and color. We’ll take this guy instead.’ Then the other handler has an extra burden, and the team may be worked too much, which takes a toll on their accuracy as well. So the goal is for all dog teams going over to be strong and reliable.”

  On another visit to Yuma in August, we’re watching a new group of handlers, again in full combat gear, despite the 110-degree temperatures. It’s a little earlier in the course, and these handlers are getting their first taste of looking for pressure plates and other IEDs in this terrain. The devices have no explosive traces, so the exercise is for the handlers only, not the dogs. They need to be able to see the telltale signs that someone has been there: A little pattern of gravel that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the terrain. A wire barely covered with dirt. A round piece of metal that looks like a large soda cap; is it different from the other bits of litter in the area?

  Porras has instructed them to just look and not say anything about where faux IEDs might be until the end of the exercise. Oh, and don’t step on anything suspicious. The handlers all mill around a small gravelly lot, looking down, walking slowly, cautiously. A couple of minutes in, Gunny shouts out to a handler.

  “How ya feeling?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Are you feeling kind of light?”

  “No.”

  “Well you should be, because you just stepped on that pressure plate two times! If this were Afghanistan, you’d be missing a few limbs by now.” The handler laughs, slightly embarrassed. The gallows humor gets the point across. The handlers walk even more slowly and seriously, inspecting the ground for the most subtle signs.

  After Porras briefs them on where the devices were hidden—a few were so stealth no one guessed—he has them walk their dogs in a big oval as ammo and mortar simulators blast noisily, and at unpredictable intervals, just ten feet away. They walk around a couple of times, and Gunny leans in and points to a German shepherd and a Belgian Malinois who are looking up at their handlers more than the others. “They’re going to have problems in a minute.” They look OK to me, but in a minute I see he has pegged them.

  With every explosion, both dogs flinch low to the ground, as if someone were about to hit them. Or they tuck their tails and try to run. It’s painful to watch. The other dogs, for the most part, don’t even seem to notice the blasts. They trot with tails high or focus with tails relaxed. But these two are distressed. The handler of the Malinois tries to quickly comfort his dog after each blast.

  Blast.

  He pats his dog’s flanks.

  Blast.

  “It’s OK!” he tells his dog.

  Gunny beckons the handler over and takes the dog’s leash. He walks the dog a few more feet away from the blast simulators, and the dog sits and looks at him. He strokes the dog’s head gently, bending down and looking calmly into his eyes, rubbing under his chin, then back over his ears. The dog looks up, already seeming a little more relaxed. Gunny walks him away from the blasts and then turns toward the sounds. As he does, he faces the dog, who sits and then jumps up and puts his paws on Gunny’s chest. Gunny strokes him some more and then gently uses his knee to coerce the dog back to sitting.

  They do this a few more times, getting closer to the simulators, only he doesn’t let the dog jump up anymore. He just pets the dog when he sits, leaning close and looking into his eyes. There is something about his demeanor that says, “You’re going to be fine. Don’t pay these noises any attention. Trust me on this.” He hands the leash back to the handler, who has been crouched, watching. As the handler walks away, his dog tries to pull back to Gunny, and then he turns two more times toward him until he’s once again swallowed back up in the oval.

  “You have to show the dog real confidence. When you’re confident, your dog sees and feels that, and he feels safe,” Gunny explains.

  The dog still flinches, but maybe not quite so much. A work in progress.

  Blast.

  The handler pats his dog’s head again.

  “Don’t reinforce it! Ignore it!” Gunny shouts.

  He explains that with his well-meaning comforting, the handler is actually conditioning the dog to think that these noises are frightening. “His feelings are dumping down the leash right onto his dog, and the dog goes, ‘Yeah, I thought I was right about being scared.’”

  Of course, the dog’s instincts are right. Hell yes, those blasts could mean some nasty business. And letting a dog think otherwise is just fooling this creature who will try his hardest to do whatever you ask of him. But the reality is that these dogs are deploying. In war, what good does it do for the dog to know those sounds could mean tremendous pain, or death?

  So with ammo exposure, the idea is this: The dog needs to believe the sounds are not associated with danger. When the dog hears the blasts and gunfire enough times, and if the sounds have never been associated with anything bad, even sensitive dogs will usually come to shrug off the blasts. In Gunnyspeak (he frequently talks from a dog’s POV), the MWD thinks, “I’ve heard these sounds a thousand times and I’ve never been shot, so why should I care about one thousand and one? Hey, when I find things when these sounds are going off, I get my reward. This is kind of fun!”

  Next up is the other fearful dog. This time it’s going to be a game. Gunny gets the dog’s Kong rope toy from the handler, takes over the leash, and runs away from the simulators with the dog. As a blast goes off, he gives the dog his reward. They go back and forth several times. He’s trying to distract the dog from the blasts, so he signals to someone on his crew whenever he wants an explosion. He gives the dog his rope toy and the blast goes off. At first the dog lets it go. But after several times, he’s hanging on to it more. He’s still not happy about the noise, but there has been some improvement by the time Gunny gives the dog back. He says it’s not an ideal way to train a dog. Working a dog a little farther from the noise and working him up to it slowly is better, as is not using a reward quite so frequently. But he couldn’t stand there and watch without trying a little first aid.

  Back in June I met a navy team that did not end up passing the course. “I could tell right away the dog did not have the drive,” Gunny says. One morning, while the German shepherd (who shall remain nameless, because his handler understandably felt bad about not passing) was standing with his handler, Gunny went up to him in a semi-threatening manner, waving his hat at the dog as he quickly weav
ed toward him. The dog stood up slowly and gave a couple of noncommittal barks. Gunny tried to engage him again and got really close. If the dog wanted to, he could have lunged, and if Gunny had not been speedy, he could have ended up missing part of his face. He riled up the dog a little, and the dog made some effort to pull toward Gunny and barked with more attitude. But it wasn’t the kind of response Gunny was looking for.

  During the raid and other war scenarios, the dog had put in the effort, but in the end, he didn’t have the drive to want his reward badly enough to perform as he needed to.

  “The dog’s like, ‘None of this crap is worth it and all I want to do is sit in front of a sixty-five-year-old lady’s fireplace and relax,’” says Gunny. The team will continue to work on building up drive and confidence back at home base.

  25

  SHEEPLE

  One thing Gunny can’t stand seeing is a team with a handler that’s not a strong leader. There are those who argue that the alpha dog/beta dog model is archaic and based on outdated information. But you won’t find many supporters of this argument in the military working dog world.

  “Two betas don’t make a right,” says Gunny Knight. “Too often you’ve got a beta leader. Every successful team needs a strong alpha leader, and that has to be the handler, not the dog.

  “You see all these people these days following everyone else. They don’t think. They don’t know how to lead. Even in the military. Too many people, they’re like sheep. People are becoming sheeple. It’s no way to be in life, and it’s no way to be a handler.