So would a dog named Blek.
37
THE SOUND OF BLEK SCREAMING
Military working dog Blek H199 didn’t have much time between his fourth and fifth deployments. The black German shepherd returned to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama from Afghanistan in December 2009 with a handler who had bonded deeply with him. The two had found numerous explosives and grown to be best friends.
The handler would like to have stayed with six-year-old Blek for the rest of the dog’s career. That was not to be.
In what’s known as a “hot swap”—he had to give up Blek upon return from war, and Blek got a new handler, Air Force Staff Sergeant Brent Olson. He liked Blek immediately but felt a little guilty. “His other handler wouldn’t even talk to me, he was so upset that I had his dog. They had really bonded. I was like, ‘Dude, it’s not my fault.’”
Less than three months later, Olson and Blek deployed to FOB Salerno/RC East and Kandahar/RC South, Afghanistan, where they were attached to the 101st Airborne, 502nd Bravo Company, Third Platoon. During their months there, they bonded over “all that war stuff. We experienced firefights and we found IEDs and pretty much had a good time.”
Like most military working dogs, Blek loved finding IEDs. He’d sniff and wag his tail hard and fast. “He’d be like, ‘OK, Dad, I did good! Now give me my ball!’” Olson credits the predeployment training he and Blek got at Yuma a few months earlier with helping keep them safe, perhaps alive, during some tenuous moments. “We’d been through the dress rehearsal, so we were ready to perform.”
They fought Taliban insurgents together for six months and spent almost every hour at each other’s side. Life was about as good as it gets for a dog and handler at war, as far as Olson was concerned.
But on the night of September 16, 2010, through the odd green glow of night-vision goggles, Olson’s war would take a dark turn.
It was the third night of a mission to clear a known hostile village in southern Afghanistan. Each day, as American and Afghan army troops swept buildings for insurgents, weapons, and caches, someone would open fire on them. It was a grueling mission. Troops were tired. But it was almost over. Just a few more buildings to go.
That night, after clearing three buildings, the platoon arrived at the fourth. It was near a huge marijuana field—a mud hut residence on the bottom, with stairs on the side leading up to a grape hut. Olson sent Blek up to check out the door frame to make sure it was not booby-trapped, and to sniff for IEDs on the mud stairs along the way. “Go up, boy!” Blek ran up, sniffed the twelve stairs, inspected around the bottom of the door frame with his nose, ran back down the stairs, and stood about ten feet away from Olson, awaiting his next command. Then an Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier ran up the stairs, followed within seconds by another Afghan soldier. They were going to open the hut and take a look at what lay inside. But when the second soldier got to the fourth step, there was a tremendous explosion.
What followed was a hellish scene.
A platoon sergeant got on the radio calling, “IED! IED!” The Afghan soldier who was on his way up the stairs was thrown twenty feet, onto an old dirt road. His left leg had been blown off, and he lay screaming, begging in Arabic for someone to shoot him. He quickly bled to death in the middle of the road.
The force of the explosion had blown Olson back a few feet into the wall behind him. He stood stunned. “What brought me back to reality was the sound of Blek screaming. It was a horrible sound.”
He couldn’t see his dog because it was nighttime, so he reeled Blek in on the retractable leash, pulling and pulling until Blek was next to him. Blek had run when the IED exploded, so the leash was out a good twenty-five feet. When he finally got him close, Olson was relieved that Blek was even alive. He felt his dog for any injuries. As he was running his hands up and down Blek’s legs, Olson’s right arm went completely numb. He put his left hand under his right armpit, and then drew it out—his hand was drenched with blood.
“I’m hit!” he yelled.
“Who’s hit?”
“The dog handler!” Olson shouted back.
An army medic came over and started cutting off Olson’s gear and clothing. Blek growled at the medic. “All he sees is someone touching me and me in pain, and he’s like ‘That’s my dad. Leave him alone.’”
Olson couldn’t take chances, and he handed off Blek to someone who was also hurt, but not completely out of the fight.
As the medic worked on Olson, the Afghan soldiers were running around in a panic. More IEDs went off as they ran into other buildings to seek shelter. The damaged platoon called in First Platoon for support because of all the casualties. As the troops ran in, they set off more IEDs. Two American soldiers died, and several others were wounded.
Olson had taken shrapnel to his right armpit, and his upper arm was broken and still devoid of feeling. His left arm was burned, shrapnel peppered his face, and he had a three-inch piece of metal in his leg.
He saw Blek again as they were waiting for a Black Hawk medevac. He knew right away that Blek had gone deaf. He was talking to his dog, but it was clear Blek could not hear him. The dog just stared straight ahead, panting. Blek’s eardrums had been blown by the concussion. He also had a piece of shrapnel embedded in the left side of his muzzle.
Twenty minutes after the initial blast, the helicopter arrived.
“The dog can’t go!” yelled a crewmember above the noise of the chopper.
“He has to go. If he doesn’t go, I’m not going! There’s no way I’m leaving my dog!”
Blek went with Olson on the Black Hawk to Kandahar. There, an ambulance sped Olson to the base hospital. Veterinary staffers took Blek to the vet hospital. “You’re a good boy,” Olson told him as they parted.
Two days later, Olson had a visitor at the hospital. Blek had come to see him, brought by another handler who was taking care of Blek. The dog jumped onto Olson’s bed and just stared at him. “I almost cried.” The dog’s face was already better, but he was still deaf. Blek stayed with Olson for about a half hour and then went off on the first leg of his journey back to the States. They would meet up again briefly at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
Olson spent the next month going from one medical facility to the next. He had three surgeries, and one year later is back in fighting shape. He will be deploying to Afghanistan again in March 2012. This time he will not go with Blek. He is working Wiel R139, a young, high-strung Malinois fresh out of dog school. “I wish it were Blek, but he’s a good dog. He’s coming along pretty well.”
As for Blek, he is now eight years old. He was deaf for two months and still has troubles with equilibrium from time to time because of his ear damage.
Olson has not forgotten his old comrade. In fact, he sees him every day. Blek is now officially Olson’s dog. Blek couldn’t work anymore because of his injury, and Olson jumped at the chance to adopt him. As a handler, he got first dibs.
Blek spends his days hanging out on the couch, sleeping in the comfort of a real bed, and eating dog treats shaped like prime rib bones. When he’s not busy sleeping or eating, he follows Olson or his girlfriend around the house to see what they’re up to. “He’s my shadow,” says Olson. “I’m going to miss him.”
38
THE BUDDY SYSTEM
A true bond between soldiers is unparalleled, particularly a bond born in deployment. In part, because like a mother’s bond with her child, you can’t possibly explain it; it’s too intense, it’s unique—that closeness and camaraderie, the complete interdependence, and then of course the shared adrenaline rush during moments of life or death.
Every handler who has done it says that if you’ve never been a handler in a war situation, you’ll never grasp it. You’ll just never understand the razor-sharp dread and thrill of facing what’s at stake together. You are absolutely dependent on that dog doing his thing. And the dog relies on you for everything else.
The dog is a check for what you might
miss: the scent of an IED buried so cleverly there’s no way to tell by looking, the sight of someone doing something that doesn’t look quite right, the sound of an insurgent releasing a safety ever so quietly. And you’re there to keep him out of the trouble he could wander into out of naïveté or enthusiasm.
How could you possibly explain the sensation of being dependent upon such ability and, more so, surviving because of it? Who else would understand what that means and what it’s like to owe your life to another creature—a creature that you could swear is humanly conscious in some way?
“The bond will pull you through the toughest situations,” says Master Chief Scott Thompson, who was in charge of all dog-team operations for a year in Afghanistan. “I don’t think there’s anything else in the world that can compare to the bond between a handler and dog.”
But as any dog lover knows, a bond can’t be created overnight. It takes an investment of time, nurturing, and shared experiences. Sure, Jake will be enraptured with anyone who pays him the slightest attention. Once he even followed a jogger a mile down the beach before I could catch up with him and remind him of my existence. (The jogger had stopped to pet him, saying he was missing his own yellow Lab, who was back home in Connecticut; maybe Jake could sense the guy needed a pal.) But in the larger scheme of things, Jake and I have spent nine years together, and if he ever had to come to the defense of the jogger or me, I have no doubt he’d have my back.
It’s the same with military working dogs. Initially, when a dog and handler are matched up, the goal is to establish a rapport. Blek had been with his previous handler for at least a year, and there were others before him, too. So Olson went out of his way to have long grooming sessions with the dog, to visit him more frequently than called for by protocol, to let him off leash in the fenced area to play catch. Blek was adaptable, outgoing, and willing to work, as long as he got his praise and his ball. It made for an easy transition.
But what about dogs who haven’t had a handler before? What’s it like to go from a breeder to a vendor to dog school to a kennel and finally get assigned a real handler?
39
THAT DOG WHO WAS WALKING POINT
Fenji was young and green and needed a lot of fine-tuning when she was assigned to Corporal Max Donahue in February 2010 at Camp Pendleton. So it was up to Donahue to move her along to where she’d be ready for deployment.
He liked her enormously from the first time he met her. There was something about her happy demeanor, her eagerness to please. And he brought out the best in her, says his kennel master, Gunnery Sergeant Justin Green, “because he wasn’t afraid to make a jackass of himself in front of his buddies. You have to be willing to put yourself out there and look like an idiot to look like gold to a dog.” When Fenji performed a task successfully, there is no imitating the sound of the thrilled, goofy, crazy praise her handler lavished on his dog.
Like many other marines, Donahue had never been one to follow convention. He did things his way from the start. On July 14, 1987, his mom drove herself to the hospital between contractions because she’d gone into labor at 3 A.M., two weeks before she was due. Her husband was out of town, and “I didn’t want to bother any friends just because my baby decided to make a grand appearance at a time of his choosing.” Growing up, Donahue was always making grand appearances, it seems. He couldn’t walk into a room without all eyes falling upon him. Something about his smile, his confident, congenial gait.
He got in plenty of trouble in his early years, fighting to defend his younger brother, disrupting class to tell a joke. As he got older, he drank, smoked, flirted, and got into more fights. But even as a rowdy teen, he’d always help someone who needed a hand. Broken down on the side of the road? He’d change your tire. ATM card not working at the gas station and you’re out of gas? He’d fill your tank. Someone picking on a weaker kid? You’d be unwise to do that in front of Donahue.
As with many now serving in the military, September 11, 2001, was the day Donahue decided that he would join the armed forces when he was old enough. He told his mother, “I’ve decided: I’m going to become a marine and fight to protect this country.”
He stayed true to his mission, and a month after he graduated from high school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps with the knowledge that he wanted to work with dogs. “To have a dog at your side while you fight for the good guys? A best friend right there to have your back and maybe save everyone around you?” he said. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”
40
SPECIAL EFFECTS
The effect these dogs have on their handlers can be profound. As army veterinarian Captain Emily Pieracci says, “You get these big burly guys and they melt with these dogs. They love them more than anything.”
Everywhere you turn in the world of military working dogs, you will hear handlers trying to summarize how much their dogs mean to them: “My boss may be mad at me, my wife may be mad at me, but my dog is always happy to see me.” “My biggest fear is of not getting assigned a dog and having to be a regular cop. It’s like half of you is gone.” “War would have been hell without my dog.”
Air Force Staff Sergeant Chris Keilman was only eight months into being a handler when he got picked—he thinks totally at random—for a deployment with a Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force unit in Afghanistan. It took a while for this elite group to trust the new guy and his German shepherd, Kira L471. But after enough missions with the dog team out front—and 95 percent of the time, Kira led the way, with Keilman not far behind, and the others covering for him—they came to appreciate these two. They grew especially fond of the dog.
Keep in mind that these are tough warriors. They go on long missions in dangerous places and don’t see a shower or outhouse for up to seventeen days at a time. There are no days off on these missions. They target insurgent leaders with great success. They go on missions about which I could not be told.
Kira’s handler loves her and calls her “my girl,” “my baby,” “my sweetheart.” (He is married, and his wife loves the dog, too.) “She was out there making sure we were safe every day. I would try to make her comfortable, massaging her belly, her pads. It wasn’t much in return for what she did,” he says.
But the effect this dog had on the rest of the troops is what’s surprising. She would sit around the campfire with them as they ate, and they’d talk to her and pet her and reminisce about their own dogs. Kira was their number one morale booster on most days. And so, as Keilman puts it, “they babied the crap out of her.”
“She got steak a lot when she was downrange. Anytime we’d get real meat, they were always giving her some. We’d be riding the RG (a mine-resistant light-armored vehicle), and Kira would stand in the front by the gunner, looking out the window. He’d feed her beef jerky the whole way.
“One of my guys, holy shit, he didn’t like that she only had a duckboard to sleep on when she was in her crate. He was pissed that it was too hard. He went to the main FOB and bought her a memory foam pad. Someone else gave her a nice soft blanket.”
Part of a dog’s charm during deployment rests in the simple fact that the dog is friendly. Who better to tell your problems to than a dog? She won’t tell anyone else, and she won’t judge. Even just touching a dog, being around one, has been shown to have myriad health benefits, including lowering blood pressure and reducing stress levels.
“These dogs are there for you and will listen to you and will keep you company in what may be one of the worst places in the world. These dogs make your days over there a lot less lonely,” says Thompson.
That accounts in part for why so many stray dogs in Afghanistan become an intimate part of the everyday lives of troops. “She’d just sit there with us the entire time, and if anyone wasn’t doing well, she’d put her head on them and just close her eyes,” Marine Corporal Ward Van Alstine told the San Francisco Chronicle, of Chloe, the stray he ended up adopting after his deployment. “She was the one thing that, no matter how bad t
he day was, she was our best friend.”
A dog makes the most foreign situation seem a little more normal. Think about a time when you were in a new city or country, and you felt a little lost, a little upended. Then you saw a dog, and if you like dogs, you probably felt a bit more at home. If you got to make the dog’s acquaintance, all the better.
Not all military working dogs can be good companions for the troops they’re supporting. Some dual-purpose dogs are too unpredictable. What may seem like a friendly gesture to you—like reaching out your hand to pat a dog’s head—could be interpreted as a threat. After all, these dogs have been trained to attack in certain situations when someone raises a hand. Some dogs can’t tell the difference between those scenarios and what’s intended as a friendly fireside ear rub.
But many dual-purpose dogs, and the vast majority of single-purpose dogs, provide a vital form of companionship on deployment. “Even if they’re terrible at explosives, afraid of gunfire, and just have to sit around and color all day, a dog may do funny things that make time pass for everyone. It’s comforting,” says Gunny Knight.
The army even uses specially trained stress-therapy dogs, notably Labrador retrievers, to help deployed soldiers relax and cope better with the stresses they endure. Just by virtue of being their affable canine selves, these members of army combat stress teams can make a difference in how the rest of a soldier’s deployment may go.
But the deepest levels of friendship are between dog and handler. They can be together almost 24/7 while deployed to remote areas with no kennels—and even on FOBs that have large kennel operations, if the handler chooses. More often than not, these dogs sleep in or near the handler’s cot. Some dogs crawl right into their handler’s sleeping bag; others curl up on the foot of the bed. Where there are no chow halls, they’ll eat with the handler. Many even end up following their handlers into the shower.
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