Soldier Dogs

by Maria Goodavage

  “I am not a sheeple.”

  Gunny Knight does not need to tell me this. I realized he was not a sheeple from our first conversation. Arod had told me about the Yuma course, and I knew I had to see it in person. I went through the proper media channels. Two weeks later, I received a phone call from a public affairs officer telling me they were processing my request, that it might take a little time, but that they’d do their best.

  A couple of days later I got a call from a man with a booming voice. He introduced himself as Gunnery Sergeant Kris Knight, course chief of the Yuma predeployment course. I was impressed at the relative speed of the public affairs department. But this call had nothing to do with the PA. Gunny had seen the e-mails going through about my request, and he said he realized it would be “a long time, if ever” before I would get to visit the course. He checked in with Captain Bowe, the officer in charge of the school, to see if the rules could be bent a little to get me in. Bowe’s offices are at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. “It’s hard to be in charge of it from sixteen hundred miles away, that’s why I need Gunny Knight,” he would later tell me.

  “With Gunny Knight in charge, I have the most winning guy I can have in the marines for this job. To use a sports analogy, he’s my Tom Brady, Alex Rodriguez, and Michael Jordan all rolled into one. He’s what makes this course the winning game it is,” Bowe said.

  He acknowledged that Knight doesn’t always follow every rule. “Sometimes there are black areas in life, sometimes white, sometimes gray. If Gunny ever needs to get into the gray area, he’ll dip in and get out as fast as possible. It’s always for a good reason.”

  So Gunny dipped into the gray, and Bowe looked at my request and told Gunny to go ahead. I visited two separate times over the summer. During my August visit, a public affairs guy from YPG drove up to us, and Gunny quietly told me to take a little walk, that he would take care of things. The PA was not happy I was there, Gunny reported, but he didn’t have me escorted off the property.

  Official approval remains in the works.

  26

  GUNNY

  Kristopher Knight grew up in a small suburban unincorporated community called Camp Dennison, near Cincinnati, Ohio. The camp for which the place is named had been a major army center during the Civil War. Lincoln is purported to have stayed in the house around the corner from Knight’s house.

  When he was eleven months old, Gunny’s black mother and white father divorced. She took the kids and moved in with her parents. Gunny describes his dad as a “redneck guy, and an alcoholic. He could only teach me three things: hunting, shooting, and fishing.” There was a falling-out seven years ago, and he hasn’t spoken to his father since.

  His grandfather, who held down two jobs, became a father figure to him very early on. “I grew up on the black side of the family and have my grandfather’s hardworking values at my core,” he says. “He was my role model.” When his mother was able to move out on her own, the young Knight—age six—refused to go with her. His grandfather told her, “It’s not negotiable. He stays.” That was that.

  His mother remarried when Knight was eleven, and she told him that he had to go with the new family to live in New Jersey. He said he wanted to stay with his grandparents. His grandfather once again went to bat for him, and Knight stayed put.

  At age fourteen, Knight learned how to drive and would take care of car maintenance and drive the little family Honda Civic around the area with his grandfather’s blessing. His grandparents had two rules: Be careful and behave. These came in handy, because Knight loved guns, and his grandfather liked to see a well-behaved boy rewarded with meaningful presents.

  There were the usual BB guns, a Crosman pellet gun, a derringer .25 handgun, a Ted Williams .20-gauge shotgun, a Marlin .22 magnum rifle, a Winchester break-barrel .20-gauge shotgun, and a few others. His favorite, though, was a Remington Model 700 .22-250 rifle. He chose it for his eleventh birthday because it had a very large scope. “I had no idea what it was used for until after my grandfather purchased it for me. When I called my father to tell him about it, he informed me that it was the second fastest varmint rifle in the world. I used it for several years to hunt groundhogs. Initially the gun was way too heavy for me, so I used fence posts and the corners of barns to stabilize my shots.”

  He used his small arsenal for hunting or target shooting. Camp Dennison was surrounded by woods and farm fields, so there was plenty of space for shooting and camping.

  If you saw this scene from the outside, you might have been worried, looking into the tent of this well-armed youth. But Knight knew his limits. He kept his firearms in check, didn’t get in trouble, and worked hard at side jobs. In a summer job he held at a factory when he was eighteen, he discovered a way to increase the productivity of making valves. It involved cutting down on lag time and using his strength, and not a crane, to hold seventy-five-pound parts. He thought he’d be lauded for it, but other workers were not happy. “Hey, youngblood, you gotta slow down. You’re making us look bad,” they told him. “No, you gotta speed up,” he replied.

  Even the boss wanted him to put on the brakes and use the approved methods. If nothing else, it was safer. But Knight said he wanted to do it his way because it was the most efficient method and better for the valves themselves, since they didn’t run the risk of getting scraped up by the cranes. In the end, the boss had him sign a waiver, and he proceeded.

  It would become a common theme in the story of his life, this business of wanting to do what’s best and bucking the system if he had to. He went to college for awhile to become a forest ranger, dropped out the day his grandmother died in 1992, and became what he calls a wild child. He rode motorcycles like he was invincible, partied hard, and lived free. In October 1994, a lifelong friend told him he was thinking about joining the marines. They were at a party and very drunk. “He wouldn’t stop talking about it, so I said, ‘If you’ll shut up, and you’re serious about joining, I’ll join with you.’ He was serious and I kept my word.” His friend got out after four years, and Gunny’s been in since. Knight went the MP route right away. Eight months later, he was at Lackland, learning how to become a handler. Dogs have been his passion ever since.

  In the years that followed his enlistment, he rose through the ranks, got a BS in education (he says he could be a captain now, but he would not be able to work with dogs, so he remained a noncommissioned officer; while most of his job these days involves paperwork to keep the program running, he tries to get out with classes whenever possible), had two combat deployments, became a trainer, and in March 2010, came to Yuma to be course chief.

  While training with the Israeli Defense Forces in 2006 (“the air force would count that as a combat deployment; I count it as a vacation”) he met his future wife, Rinat. I met them for sushi one night in Yuma’s nicest shopping center. Rinat Knight is a pretty, funny, smart woman with long, dark, wavy hair, eleven years his junior. He had told me on several occasions, including our first phone conversation, “I am the luckiest man on earth, and a lot of that is because of my wife.” She is on one of his two screen savers at work.

  Those closest to Gunny in the dog world say he could be in the private sector earning a lot more money than he does in the military. He says he’s not going to stay in forever, and in fact, he might retire within a few years. But he has no desire to leave just yet. “I just love what I do. Every day is a Friday. Why would I risk trading my Fridays for a Monday for more money? It’s not worth it to me. That’s why I do it, and that’s why my staff does it.

  “I want to make a difference before I leave. I want to make sure all these kids are getting the allotted time to properly prepare and come back home.”

  Gunny’s other screen saver is a photo of him with military working dog Patrick L722. Gunny is running and holding out his arm, which is covered with a bite sleeve, and Patrick is up in the air, biting at it and looking like although he means business, he’s having the best time in the world. They are collided
, suspended in time in this dynamic photo that greets Gunny every day.

  He helped train the handler who would help train Patrick. The dog was fresh out of dog school in Texas when he arrived at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to serve with the II Marine Expeditionary Force (II MEF). “He was a hyper mess when we received him, but he showed all the potential to be great,” Gunny says. Patrick’s handler and Gunny deployed to Afghanistan at the same time in May 2009. While there, Gunny continued to advance the team’s capabilities, including trying to make sure Patrick could work off leash.

  Patrick made it home and, because his handler needed multiple wrist surgeries, was assigned a new handler. They deployed to Afghanistan in December 2010.

  Patrick would not make it back alive this time. But everyone else on his final mission would, thanks to this dog and his ability to sniff out bombs without a leash.

  27

  A VERBAL LEASH

  Patrick was a bomb-detection dog designed to work on a six-foot leash. Gunny Knight, then chief dog trainer at II MEF, worked hard on Patrick’s off-leash skills. Patrick was one of the first PEDD dogs he trained this way. “The barrier had to be broken.”

  The dog was a typical Malinois. “He was all heart; he put everything into what he did, and he loved you to death,” says one marine corporal, who had hoped to deploy with Patrick.

  Nothing fazed this dog. During one firefight, Patrick lay beside his handler, Corporal Charles “Cody” Haliscak, in the tall grass as Haliscak and the rest of the squad engaged the Taliban. But Patrick wasn’t lying there cowering. He was lying there eating grass as the bullets screamed by.

  On May 9, 2011, Patrick and Haliscak were on a mission in the southern Helmand Province. With them were a minesweeper engineer and an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technician. The purpose was to check out a small IED—a toe-popper—that had gone off earlier that day. It didn’t harm anyone, but they needed a dog’s nose to clear the way back to the area. The dog went first, off leash, then the engineer with his metal-detecting device, followed closely by Haliscak and the EOD tech.

  It’s common knowledge among people who have dealt with IEDs in the last few years that where there’s one, there are two. Where there are two, there are four. Knight says the situation has been dramatically worse in recent months. Before, you might find a small field with one IED. Now there could be ten in that same area. (The Yuma course has adjusted training methods to take this lethal factor into account.)

  Haliscak had a feeling that something else was out there along their path, and he stopped his team. He told the two men he would let Patrick work this one. Patrick, tail high and wagging, walked up the path, searched one corner of the poppy field that lay ahead, crossed the path, and searched the other end of the poppy field. He shimmied around and made his way to where two paths met—exactly where the team was going to be walking. There, about fifteen feet away from the men, he responded to an explosive scent as Haliscak had never seen him respond before. Patrick’s usual style was to get excited, tail wagging hard, sniffing the area with great focus. Then he would sit or lie down in final response. This time, Patrick dispensed with the preliminaries and lay down immediately.

  Haliscak figures his dog’s last thought was “Oh, toy!!!” (“That toy was everything to him,” he says.)

  The explosion knocked Haliscak and the two other men off their feet. They had no idea what had happened. They thought they were going to get ambushed, so they prepared to fire. When there was no ambush, Haliscak looked for Patrick. He was nowhere to be seen. The handler started searching in a circle around where the blast had gone off. As a hunter, he is used to looking for downed animals. He peered through his rifle’s 4X scope. In the distance he saw that the grass in a field was bent over. Then he saw Patrick’s body, or what remained of it.

  “At that point I lost it.” Haliscak, who had a high-grade concussion from the explosion, tried to run over to his dog, but the EOD tech stopped him. It was enough death for one day. The EOD tech and the engineer got close enough to see there was nothing to be done. They did their post-blast work on the IED and the other one from the morning. It was nearly nighttime when the two men put Patrick on a piece of canvas, covered him up, and carried him back to the patrol base. Haliscak had known the dog for three years, been his handler for one and a half years. “I lost my best friend. He was my hero. Without him and his great ability to work off leash, I’d be toast.”

  Once they’d brought him back, Haliscak looked at his dog. All four of Patrick’s legs had been blown off. Only his head and rib cage were intact. “It’s truly terrible to see your best friend like this.”

  Dual-purpose dogs are officially considered on-leash dogs. It’s thought that the patrol part of them is too dangerous to let go off leash, so they don’t receive off-leash detection training during boot camp, and often are not even at their home bases. Some handlers work on it on their own—particularly handlers with kennel masters who are wise to its benefits. But it’s still far from standard procedure.

  Gunny Knight has been working these dual-purpose dogs off leash for a few years—since before it was even a remotely accepted technique. “I knew this was right. When I know I’m right, a thousand people can think I’m wrong, but I stand alone and know I’m right.

  “I believe in a verbal leash. Your leash may be six feet and leather, but mine comes out of my mouth.”

  Single-purpose bomb dogs, like EDDs, IDDs, TEDDs, and SSDs (see chapter 10 if you have not retained every letter of every acronym of every MWD job) are trained to work off leash. But these are usually sporting breeds, like Labrador retrievers, and they are not trained to attack. They can be trusted not to maul anyone in their path as they trot around sniffing out IEDs.

  It’s estimated that with our current situation in Afghanistan, about 95 percent of a dual-purpose bomb dog’s job is sniffing out explosives—not going after bad guys. Having a bomb-sniffing dog with off-leash capabilities makes sense. The farther from the handler and other troops a dog is when alerting to an IED, the safer for everyone. Except the dog, of course. It’s called stand-off distance. Some might argue that this isn’t very kind or humane, that these dogs don’t realize the dangers and we’re sending them out as canaries in a coal mine—almost as sacrifices.

  But with the dog out front, even on leash, he’s always the most endangered. The idea behind using soldier dogs is that they save lives by detecting explosives before someone can get killed by one. If a dog ends up dying while the men and women behind him live, he will be greatly mourned and remembered as a hero.

  Nobody wants to see a dog die. “It just sucks. It’s a shitty situation,” says Master Chief Thompson. “It hurts a lot. Just about as much as it does to lose a handler.”

  Gunny watches as Navy Master-at-Arms Second Class Joshua Raymond tries working his dog Rex P233 off leash for the first time while looking for roadside explosives. The dog doesn’t want to get more than ten feet away from Raymond. The handler explains that he’s not allowed to have his dog off leash at his home base.

  “We can get another Rex,” Gunny tells him, “but we can’t get another you. Parents who lose their son or daughter out there, it stays with them for the rest of their life. Children who lose a parent, it’s tragic. But tough as it sounds, if your dog dies, sad as that is, you get to come back and take out Flea Biscuit Two and start all over again.”

  Raymond and Rex walk down the hot dirt road, no shade in sight, just rocks and sand and dried dirt, with the occasional bit of plucky scrub poking through. Rex goes on in front about twelve feet, but then turns around and waits for his handler. The dog is accustomed to feeling the end of the leash well before now.

  “Put your toy away, show your dog your hands,” shouts out Gunny as Raymond keeps walking. “Tell him ‘I don’t have it, but there’s a way of earning it,’ and you gotta send him back down there. Good boy, keep going, good boy, keep going! Don’t let him think for himself! Find that command, maybe it’s ‘forward,’ mayb
e it’s ‘go,’ use your body and step into him. The dog doesn’t know he’s allowed to be that far away. There you go!

  “Now back up! Now the dog takes a picture and, hey! I can be away! He can go twenty-five feet and you can back up twenty-five feet, and now you have fifty feet between you.”

  About twenty minutes into it, the dog looks like he’s getting kind of used to the idea of being off leash. He’s walking down the road and off to the sides with more confidence, not stopping so often to wait for his handler. “They all want to be free, with a little guidance, of course,” says Gunny. “No one wants to have something tugging on their neck all the time.”

  Raymond is clearly impressed with what his dog has been able to do. But it goes so much against the navy protocol he has been trained to follow that he can’t imagine being able to “get away with” using it.

  Gunny explains that inside the wire (on an FOB), leashes are mandatory. “But I’m here to tell you for a fact that you are authorized to not only work your dog off leash here, but also when you go outside the wire in Afghanistan. If anything ever happens, call Master Chief Thompson. I guarantee he’ll offer his career to back you up. So will I.

  “If you find something out there, no one’s going to be like ‘Hey, leash up!’ I guarantee, in fact, that you will get an extra scoop of mashed potatoes and a tent with AC for you and Rex.”

  Because of the off-leash capabilities being taught here, Gunny and his staff go a step further than the usual deferred response training. When a dog responds to an IED, the people who teach this course don’t just want the dog to stay there staring at it until he gets paid. “In the real world, the handler’s not going to walk way over to where the dog is responding,” Porras says. “The dog has to be able to leave the odor and come back to you. It’s safer all the way around.”