Soldier Dogs

by Maria Goodavage

  It’s not that hard to teach, as it turns out. The dog gets his million-dollar reward only when he comes back to the handler—and not when he responds to the explosive. Getting strong on the recall command (“Come!”) can serve these dogs well for other reasons as well in Afghanistan. Feral and stray dogs are commonplace, and dogs have gone MIA chasing after them. As well, dirt roads can appear seemingly out of nowhere, with surprising traffic.

  “You don’t want to let your dog be done in by these dangers,” Gunny Knight says. “There are enough of those as it is. A whole lotta shit can go wrong out there.”

  28

  HEAT

  Air Force Technical Sergeant Adam Miller walks with his German shepherd, Tina M111, down a dirt road toward a small village, rifle poised. On the right, a white mosque topped with blue and gold. A billboard asking for help for Afghan schoolchildren. To the left, a service station with one nonworking gas pump. A crashed, abandoned pickup truck. Up ahead, several mud-walled buildings, some small, a few two-story. A heap of concrete walls from what looks like a bombed-out building. Several stalls making up a tiny marketplace. In the background, intermittent gunfire.

  Miller and his dog walk on—Miller wearing full kit, Tina in harness and leash, which attaches somewhere on Miller’s beltline so his hands can be free to use his rifle. It’s 11 A.M., 114 degrees. Suddenly more gunfire. “The dog’s down!” shouts someone on his team, and without hesitating, Miller reaches down to Tina, hoists her over his left shoulder, and with rifle still ready to take out anyone intent on harming him or his dog, moves a little faster now, toward shelter, anything that will protect them while he tries to save her.

  Within two minutes, they make it to a cube-shaped mud-and-concrete building—more of a hut, really. They disappear inside.

  This was not in the script. What just happened? I jog over to look in through a window opening, and there’s Miller crouched over his dog, working furiously to fix her. This was supposed to be a simulation. We’re at the Canine Village just a couple hundred meters away from the dog kennels where we started the day at YPG. But there on the ground, incongruously—sickeningly—is Tina’s severed leg. It seems to have been blown completely off her body, and there’s an IV flowing into it. How in God’s name did this happen?

  And why would you put an IV in a severed leg, anyway? I try to look at Tina. She is lying down, and the earth beneath her is wet. Miller is wrapping bandages around her and talking to her. I can only see her front end, but her face does not look like the face of a dog whose leg is two feet away from her. Miller moves, and I see that all four limbs are firmly attached to Tina. Then in the corner of the room, I see someone looking on. She offers Miller advice about the wrap. In a moment, she suggests he do something with the IV on what’s called a Jerry leg around here.

  (A Jerry leg is a realistic, large, furry, fake dog leg that handlers can use for practicing placing IVs, bandaging, splinting, and giving injections. Complete Jerry dogs are also used for training. They have an artificial pulse and expandable lungs for mouth-to-snout resuscitation. There are also dogs that can be intubated, but the program doesn’t currently have any of those.)

  Predeployment training does not get much more realistic than this. Miller would later tell me that he was exhausted when he got Tina to the building, and his adrenaline was pumping almost as it would have in a real-life war emergency with Tina. “It’s the best canine training I’ve ever had. The hardest, too,” he says. “If this doesn’t prepare you for Afghanistan, nothing will.”

  The woman who is helping Miller patch up his dog is Army Captain Emily Pieracci. She is a veterinarian, and one of her main jobs is to prepare handlers here in every aspect of emergency care possible, as well as in the prevention of problems to begin with. She also makes sure all dogs who come through here are ready for deployment—medically fit and not suffering from heat casualties.

  Pieracci grew up with dogs. Her mother was a police dog handler for the Washington State Patrol. Pieracci graduated Washington State University’s veterinary school in 2009 and spent several months working in the private sector in the field of emergency medicine in order to pay back her student loans.

  She joined the army in 2010. She has found her calling. “The army offered something different from regular civilian practice. I got to jump out of airplanes, shoot weapons, and get lost doing land navigation. I could be a vet and also do a lot of active stuff that didn’t involve veterinary medicine.” (The army also repaid her vet school loans, which in this economy was a huge blessing.)

  Within her first month at Yuma, she knew this was the place for her. She loves working with the handlers and their dogs. “I could not imagine being anywhere else other than the military. To me, this job carries so much meaning. I have such a strong sense of purpose when I care for these dogs. Keeping them healthy saves our troops’ lives. It’s both powerful and humbling all at the same time.”

  Pieracci enjoys the heat here, too. But it’s this very heat that can also do in the best dogs. Heat injuries among working dogs are not uncommon here or at Lackland or in Afghanistan. On warm days, handlers take their dogs’ temperatures (rectally, with digital thermometers; a dog’s normal body temperature is between about 101 and 102.5) every two hours, sometimes more. But temperature tolerance can vary greatly. It’s not necessarily how hot the dogs get, but how well they can compensate. One MWD went down out here at only 104. Some dogs hit 109 and do fine after they get cooled off quickly. It all depends on the individual dog. Just as important an indicator as temperature, or more so, is how a dog acts.

  As Pieracci explains it, heat injury has three categories: heat stress, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke. The signs progress very rapidly, and heat stress and heat exhaustion can be missed by handlers if they are not looking for these. Heat stroke is the most severe form. Signs include rectal temps above 108, unwillingness to work, lethargy, vomiting, diarrhea, uncontrolled panting, and seizures.

  Reaching a level defined as heat stroke is different for every dog. But most military working dogs have very high drive, which works against those looking out for them; these dogs would rather work than not. That means handlers have to be extremely vigilant for early warning signs.

  Dogs here always have patches shaved on their front legs. That’s for easier access to the cephalic vein if a dog goes down during training. It’s a precautionary measure Pieracci takes to save time in the field during an emergency, and she encourages handlers to shave this area every two weeks while deployed. She uses the vein to administer IV fluids, which help cool the dog quickly, support stable blood pressure, and help avoid shock. On deployment, if no medics or vets are around, the handler will have to do this. That’s why they insert all IVs during veterinary procedures. It helps keep them ready just in case they need to act quickly on their own.

  Pieracci says that dogs who go through Yuma tend to fare better with heat injuries downrange than other MWDs. That’s mostly due to handler knowledge. Part of the reason the dogs train out here is to show handlers what their dogs look like when they’re getting hot: Does the dog seek shade? Does she quit working, or will she keep working no matter how hot it gets? Having the handlers see how their dogs react in Yuma helps them identify when their dog might be overheating in Afghanistan.

  Coming to Yuma also makes handlers hyperaware of the need to check dog trailers every ten minutes to ensure the air-conditioning is working when dogs are inside. (It’s not very cold air, but just enough to make it somewhat comfortable—or at least tolerable.) “There’s a side of me no one wants to see if you kill your dog in one of these,” Gunny says as he knocks on an empty trailer.

  In late September 2011, two marine IDDs were being transported to Yuma from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The contractors (the dogs were not with their handlers) responsible for the dogs’ care during transport stopped overnight in Phoenix and allegedly left the dogs in the travel trailer unattended. They found IDD Ace dead the next morning, and IDD Max was in critical
condition.

  According to Pieracci, Max was taken to a Phoenix emergency veterinary hospital, where he received three blood transfusions and massive amounts of fluid and medication. He was in kidney failure and bleeding internally from the heat stroke. He was severely dehydrated, and the vets were worried about his brain swelling from the high levels of sodium in his blood. He remained in critical condition for ten days, but he pulled through.

  “He was a real fighter. He was discharged just three days ago and is on his way to Lackland, where he will most likely be adopted out. I don’t think he’ll ever be able to deploy to a hot environment again after the severity of his case. He may have some long-term kidney and brain damage, and quite frankly, he’s been through enough,” says Pieracci. “He deployed in 2009 and 2010, and I know he served his country honorably. He deserves a nice comfy couch for as long as he’s got left, if you ask me.” She has never met Max, but she was on the phone with the Phoenix vets every two to four hours while he fought back from the brink of death. “I feel quite attached to him even though I’ve never met him. I would love to meet him before he retires, but I’m not sure that will happen.”

  Those contractors may want to stay out of Gunny Knight’s way.

  29

  THE END OF THE ROAD?

  More parachutists drop in front of us as we round a bend later toward the kennels. “Hollywood, that’s what they are,” Gunny spits.

  “I don’t know how many frickin’ millions of dollars they spend every year to let these guys jump out of planes. Dogs save so many lives out there, this course has saved untold numbers, and as of now, we have no funding after October 2012.”

  Finally, perhaps, we’ve come to the reason he feels disdain for the jumpers.

  It costs the DOD about $750,000 a year to run the IASK Course. Some 225 handlers go through the course annually. Despite the tremendous (if unquantifiable) success of the course, it’s on the chopping block because of the same major budget cuts causing pain everywhere in the military. The program is currently considered a Tier III course, which means it’s looked at as “extra” in times of budget crises.

  But what is $750,000 when it comes to saving lives? If you have to put a life in terms of dollars, it costs the government $400,000 to $500,000 in death benefits for every soldier, sailor, airman, or marine killed in action. The Defense Department would have been shelling out more money for the lives Patrick saved that day than it costs to run the IASK Course for an entire year.

  “It’s astronomical the number of lives that are being saved because of this Yuma program,” says Bowe. “And I will panhandle to get this if I have to.”

  The idea is for the course—which began in late 2005 as an “urgent need” program—to become a formal, required course. This would guarantee funding for awhile. Bowe had exhausted two of three options by the time this book went to press. “The program absolutely must not, cannot go away,” Bowe says. “Too many people and dogs will die.”

  I would not be surprised if dogs around here smell a little extra fear these days.

  30

  THE SCIENTISTS WEIGH IN ON NOSE POWER

  The mind of a soldier, the nose of a trained dog: a perfect partnership,” dog behaviorist and anthrozoologist John Bradshaw wrote me one day during a round of e-mails about a dog’s sense of smell. It was a refreshing change from the mound of complex scientific journal articles that had accumulated on my desk about the subject of a dog’s sense of smell, including one I was trying to get through at the moment: “The Fluid Dynamics of Canine Olfaction: Unique Nasal Airflow Patterns as an Explanation of Macrosmia.”

  If dogs had noses like yours or mine, they would have an utterly different and diminished role in today’s military. The Department of Defense would still likely use some dogs for patrol purposes (although there are currently no “patrol only” dogs), but as it is now, those skills are rarely called upon. And say what you will about companionship or the value of a unit having another set of eyes, we are involved in a war where IEDs are the number one killer. If soldier dogs didn’t have such excellent noses, they would be a rare breed.

  Dog owners are all too aware that there’s something different about the way dogs sense the world. For instance, there’s the old “Nice to meet you! Now I’ll sniff your crotch and learn more about you!” business that embarrasses many of us when we have company over. And it’s a dog’s sense of smell that’s at least partly responsible for why walks that would take ten minutes without a dog take at least twice as long (especially with a male dog) if you let the dog set the tempo. On walks, I find myself asking Jake things like “How could you possibly smell that tuft of grass for an entire minute? Can’t you see it’s just grass?”

  In a way, dogs are wonderful travel companions because they do force you to slow down from the madcap pace many of us maintain on vacation. We try to fit in too many activities, too many sites, and then we return feeling more exhausted than when we left.

  With a dog, though, you have to stop the car more frequently than you might normally, so the dog can have a bathroom break and stay comfortable. And you can’t just race around from one attraction to another when you’re hoofing it with a dog. A dog will, by his very nature, force you to slow down a bit. In other words, to use a cliché I have used too many times in my talks: Dogs help you stop and smell the roses.

  I never really thought too much about the literal meaning of a dog smelling a rose until I came across this description by Alexandra Horowitz in her wonderful book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs, See, Smell, and Know:

  Imagine if each detail of our visual world were matched by a corresponding smell. Each petal on a rose may be distinct, having been visited by insects leaving pollen footprints from faraway flowers. What is to us just a single stem actually holds a record of who held it, and when. A burst of chemicals marks where a leaf was torn. The flesh of the petals, plump with moisture compared to that of the leaf, holds a different odor besides. The fold of a leaf has a smell; so does a dew drop on a thorn. And time is in those details: while we can see one of the petals drying and browning, the dog can smell this process of decay and aging.

  Since reading that passage, and learning a great deal about dogs’ sense of smell, I have been more understanding when Jake stops and spends a full minute inspecting a neighbor’s hedge. I am so awed by what a dog’s nose is capable of, in fact, that I try to add a little time to our walks so I don’t have to rush him from his rich world of fascinating odors. That hedge is imbued with odors representing many things, including all the dogs who have preceded Jake. “Dogs read about the world through their noses, and they write their messages, at least to other dogs, in their urine,” psychologist and prolific dog-book author Stanley Coren told me. Who am I to tear Jake away from his favorite news and gossip blog?

  I’m now also slightly less discomfited when Jake and another dog greet each other by heading right for each other’s nether regions. Chances are the dogs are learning far more about each other than the other dog’s owner and I are learning about each other; we make idle chitchat and try very hard not to notice our dogs’ utter fascination with each other’s anal area and sexual organs; exactly what the dogs are learning about each other, and what they do with that information, has yet to be figured out by science. But it’s very likely far beyond “Nice weather we’re having, eh?” “Yup, how ’bout them Giants?” It’s probably more along the lines of “How old are you, and what’s your personality like, and what did you have for dinner, and are you gonna be nice or a jerk?”

  The canine proclivity for sniffing out what we might consider the more intimate olfactory signals may have helped the Allies in World War II: Nazis stationed along the Maginot Line were using dogs as messengers. French soldiers attempted to shoot the dogs, but the dogs were quick and stealthy.

  Enter a French femme fatale. She was a little thing, a messenger dog who had just gone into heat. She went on her mission, and when she returned to her post that evening, about a dozen Ge
rman military dogs were close behind. It was a small victory played out in the battlefields. Toujours l’amour.

  Figures abound about how much better a dog’s sense of smell is than ours. There are so many variables that it’s almost impossible to quantify. I’ve seen figures indicating that it’s from 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 1,000,000 times better. Bradshaw explains that dogs can detect some, if not most, odors at concentrations of parts per trillion. The human nose, by contrast, is lucky to get into the parts-per-billion range and is often relegated to parts per million. That makes a dog’s nose between 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than ours. The range is obviously very wide, and the sensitivity depends on variables like the dog and the odor. Research continues.

  Coren gives an example of what this extra sensitivity looks like. Let’s say you have a gram of a component of human sweat known as butyric acid. Humans are quite adept at smelling this, and if you let it evaporate in the space of a ten-story building, many of us would still be able to detect a faint scent upon entering the building. Not bad, for a human nose. But consider this: If you put the 135-square-mile city of Philadelphia under a three-hundred-foot-high enclosure, evaporated the gram of butyric acid, and let a dog in, the average dog would still be able to detect the odor.

  If a dog can detect BO in such tiny amounts, imagine what it’s like for a dog to be immersed in a world of sweaty humans in a far smaller space. Coren was recently able to observe one of his dogs in just such a situation, when he was out picking up a friend at the gym. He brought along Ripley, his young Cavalier King Charles spaniel, whom he held in his arms. When they entered the gym, Ripley’s nose flew up in the air and he went stiff—a clear-cut case of olfactory overload.