War Dogs

by Shane Bryant

  Not every aspect of the army, I was learning, had to be as full-on as Kapooka. The parachute course was intense, and everyone was focused on learning the flight and emergency drills, but there was still time for some humour. One day, everyone on the course was sitting in the big timber-panelled lecture room, paying attention to the instructor. As he was talking, the door behind him opened softly and another instructor, totally naked except for a paper bag over his head with eye holes cut out of it, snuck in, padded silently along the stage behind the lecturer, then slipped out another door. As hard as we tried, some of us couldn’t help laughing. The instructor wanted to know what was so funny, but no-one said a thing. He looked behind him and saw nothing. As soon as he returned to his lecture notes and continued speaking, the naked phantom reappeared, and darted behind him and out the first door.

  While the parachute course was fun, I wasn’t getting any closer to my dream of working with dogs. There was only one military dog handler’s course per year and I always seemed to miss it. However, in the airborne troop we also learned how to do hand searches for bombs and would often work with the dog teams, both in training and in real-life searches for bombs and explosives with the police and other civil authorities.

  I really enjoyed watching dogs and their handlers working together as a team, especially when the handler would let the dog off its lead to do its job. The dogs always seemed so eager to please their partners, and responded to every command as though they were perfectly attuned to them. I was fascinated by how a handler would position himself to channel a dog into searching different areas, and the way he would anticipate the dog’s every move and read its body language. There was understanding, respect and friendship there. I knew that I always felt better with a dog by my side, so how much better could life get if I were paid to work with dogs like these guys did? The longer I had to wait to get on the dog handler’s course, the keener I became.

  The work of searching, in training and for real, continued. When the former President of the United States, George Bush Snr, came to Australia on a state visit, the airborne troop was part of the team tasked with searching his hotel room and other venues he’d be in. We prided ourselves on our professionalism, although when one of our guys, Wrighty, was searching with a small hand mirror inside a fusebox at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, he did manage to black out a whole section of the building by short-circuiting something. The president’s Secret Service detail was also checking places, but they weren’t keeping too close an eye on their own vehicles, because one of my mates, Wainy, managed to nick one of their numberplates, which we proudly displayed in the unit boozer.

  The dog teams searched the president’s hotel room first, and then we went in to do a second, detailed, check, following the dogs so that our scents didn’t confuse them. We used mirrors to check in hard to see places, methodically searching from left to right, and from the lowest to the highest parts of the room.

  ‘So, this is George’s room?’ Wainy said as we searched the hotel suite.

  ‘That’s what the intel said.’ Wainy looked at me, and I smiled and nodded. We knew this was a once-in-a lifetime opportunity that we couldn’t pass up. At the time, Jane and I had a favourite practical joke that we liked playing when friends stayed at our place, or when we went visiting. I told the other guys about it and they thought it would make for a fitting welcome for the US President. One of them ducked outside and kept watch for Secret Service dudes while the rest of us quickly went to work.

  I’d like to think that George and Barbara Bush saw the brighter side, after a long day of public engagements, of trying to climb into a king size bed that had been short-sheeted by some Aussie soldiers.

  TWO

  Ziggy

  1994

  Finally, in February 1994, after more than four years’ wait, I was able to get into an Explosive Detection Dog Handler’s course at the School of Military Engineering.

  I’d come a fair way since joining the army as a seventeen-year-old. Jane and I had married in 1992, and while I’d been waiting to go on the handler’s course, I’d already done my two promotion courses to become a corporal and had been promoted to lance corporal. The other five students on the dog handler’s course were all sappers.

  If I had wanted to pursue higher rank in the army, I wouldn’t have gone on the dog handler’s course. At the time there was only one sergeant dog handler’s position in the Australian Army, so, until he retired or died, there was no prospect of me even going higher than being a corporal, which was the next rung on the promotion ladder. All up, there were probably less than 20 military dog handlers in Australia at the time. However, rather than lessening, my determination to work with explosive sniffer dogs had grown stronger over the years I’d been around them as a field engineer and in the hand-search role.

  The corporal instructor on the dog handler’s course was Mark Wilczynski, who had been a lance corporal dog handler when I was in the airborne troop. When I was working on hand searches, I’d always be asking Mark questions about his job, and whether he’d let me work as the number-two on his team, so I knew him well by the time the course started. I’d also got to know another dog handler, Sean Reason, who had let me work with him and his dog. As it turned out, Mark was the one who would recruit me to work in Afghanistan many years later.

  Because there were only a few of us on the course, and it was a tight-knit unit once you qualified, the instructors wanted to make sure they would get the most out of their dogs and the soldiers who would work with them. I didn’t know it at the time, but even though he already knew me, Mark had called my troop commander to ask what sort of bloke I was. He did this with all the students on the course so that he could make sure he assigned the right dog to the right man. Dogs, like humans, have very different personalities, and Mark had a good feel for what type of dogs would fit best with different types of humans.

  I was assigned a German shepherd cross named Ziggy, who was so laid-back and friendly he was like Scooby-Doo. Some dogs work at a hundred miles an hour and need little encouragement, but Ziggy was the opposite, as I soon learned. He needed a handler who would give him 100 per cent attention to make sure he worked well and to keep him motivated. Ziggy wasn’t a dog that, where work was involved, could be turned on and off. His need to be worked intensively all the time pushed me to develop my dog handling skills to the limit, right from the start. We really had to work as a team. I hope that Mark gave me Ziggy to ensure that I’d get the most out of the course, having been busting a gut for so many years to get on it, and because he knew I liked to be active. Either that, or he was screwing with me.

  The course lasted three months. Every morning, the students had to walk all the dogs in the kennels, rather than just the ones assigned to us. We also had to clean the kennels, which, like most things in the army, were subject to regular inspections. If the kennels weren’t clean enough, we’d be told to do them all over again. We’d take it in turns either to walk the dogs or clean the kennels.

  Ziggy taught me a lot. In the Australian Army at that time, we were trained to work our dogs off-lead. That is, once we were in an area that needed to be searched, we would unclip our dog’s leash and let them roam free, so that they get on with the job. The advantage for the handler, of course, is that if anything goes wrong and the dog trips a booby trap or a mine, there is less risk of injury or death for the handler. In my experience, the dogs also enjoy working this way, as opposed to working at the end of a long lead. They can get into tight places a lot more easily, and show more expression through their actions when they find something than they can if they’re working on a lead. For the handler, working a dog off-lead requires a lot of training and practice. You’re controlling the dog in many different ways, through your voice, body language (including hand signals), and through where and how you position yourself.

  The dogs in the kennels were a mix of breeds. Many of them, like Ziggy, were shepherds, as this had once been the breed of choice. Howeve
r, the army had started going for mongrels and crossbreeds with a high retrieval drive, rather than for pure breeds. Explosive detection dogs aren’t cross-trained as attack or guard dogs, so the aggressive qualities that shepherds are known for really aren’t necessary. Some of the older shepherds were being retired – sent to people’s homes to be pets – and the army was looking for the right qualities in its dogs, more than at bloodlines.

  The army didn’t breed dogs or buy them from breeders. The K9 supervisors would instead keep an eye out in the local newspapers for people advertising that they were looking for a home for a dog, or sometimes people would contact us and offer to donate a dog. The supervisors would go around to the person’s house, assess the dog there, and if it looked like it would be suitable, the dog would be brought to the School of Military Engineering for further assessment.

  The first thing the supervisors looked for was whether the dog was a fanatical retriever – an animal with a high search-and-hunt drive. It didn’t matter how big or small the dog was, as long as it showed it was crazy about running after a ball or a stick, or some other toy, and bringing it back. If you’ve ever had a dog like that, you know what I mean. It’s the one with the wet, slobbery tennis ball in its mouth all the time – the one that you hope your house guests won’t start playing with, because you know that he will never stop once he starts searching and retrieving.

  Generally, the army would look for dogs that were about twelve-months-old, so that they weren’t wasting time rearing puppies but the animals were still young enough to be trained properly. We also wanted dogs that weren’t too highly strung. Again, the army was finding that cross-bred mongrels tended to have this quality. As the dogs would be working off-lead, they also needed to be reasonably obedient, so that they would respond to a handler’s commands, and not go chasing or biting any bystanders who happened to be in the search area. The other good thing about mongrels was that they tended to get on better with each other in the kennels. Having too many cranky old alpha-male shepherds living side by side, testing each other out, led to aggression between the dogs.

  Once I was assigned Ziggy, I was given time to get to know him. I took him for long walks around the School of Military Engineering, past the classrooms and training areas, and along the banks of the Georges River, which backs on to the base. I learned how to groom him properly, and to care for him in barracks and in the field. I’d give him a fingertip massage, running my hands through his coat to check for ticks and fleas, sores and external parasites such as ringworm. Unless he got filthy doing something during training, I’d only wash Ziggy once a month, which was standard procedure in the army. If you wash a dog too often, its coat loses the nutrients and natural oils that keep it in top condition.

  All the other dogs assigned to us on the course were already trained and experienced in detecting explosives. It was us humans who were learning the ropes. Our training covered how to search different areas, from open spaces to buildings. We were taught how to search in teams, and how to work to established patterns, so that we didn’t miss anything. We’d train in public venues, such as the 12,000-seat Sydney Entertainment Centre, which is a huge building; we’d have to learn how to break it up into zones that we could cover one at a time.

  In the Australian Army, the dogs had been trained to respond to praise, rather than to food rewards. The New South Wales Police, where I would work later, fed their dogs when they did the right thing, but a soldier in the field can’t carry unlimited amounts of snacks for his dogs. Our police had learned their food-reward training from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the United States. Training methods can also depend on the dogs themselves, as some breeds respond better than others to food. The police tend to use labradors, and they love food.

  Another point of difference in the Australian Army compared with other organisations using dogs was that our dogs were trained to give an active response when they detected the explosives. They were encouraged to show a change in behaviour – to, for example, bark, or wag their tail when they found what they were looking for – and the handler had to learn to recognise his dog’s change in behaviour. This was a signal to their handler that they had found something. In the case of the police, and the companies I’ve served with in Afghanistan, the dogs are trained to give a passive response – that is, when they first find something, they sit and stare at the source of the explosive odour. Ziggy, my dog, would change his behaviour by standing and staring. Sometimes you’ve just got to accept that your dog has its special way of doing things, and work with it.

  As well as indoor venues, such as the Entertainment Centre, we trained in open spaces, such as Warwick Farm Racecourse; on long stretches of road; and on the ferries on Sydney Harbour. Man and dog – but particularly man – were being tested all the time during the course. In open areas, especially along roads, we had to keep our dogs motivated all the time, as there were few obvious places for them to look and fewer objects to get their attention. They needed to keep searching and we needed to stay focused as well.

  After graduating from the dog handler’s course, I was posted back to my old unit at Holsworthy, which was now called 1 Combat Engineer Regiment (1 CER).

  There was an odd situation for a while, as the senior dog handler in the unit was a sapper – the engineers’ equivalent of a private – and I was a lance corporal, even though I was a junior dog handler. Eventually, the sapper in charge left and I became the commander of the dog element. Although I had a superior rank, it was a lot of responsibility for me to be given, because there were other handlers with more experience than me.

  Still, we all got on well together and I really enjoyed getting stuck into being an explosive detection dog handler. I’d waited long enough to do it. At the time, the New South Wales Police didn’t have a bomb dog capability, so the army dog handlers, based at Holsworthy, were the only ones qualified to use dogs to search for explosives. We would get called out whenever there was a bomb threat, and the police would sometimes call on us to help them in proactive operations.

  On one occasion, we took part in simultaneous searches of three outlaw bikie gangs’ premises around Sydney. We went into one of the clubhouses, which had a fully stocked bar inside. I let my dog off its leash and off it went, sniffing around the clubhouse. When it got behind the bar, it started indicating, by changing its behaviour and staying focused on one area, that it had found something.

  ‘We’ve already searched behind there. There’s nothing of interest,’ one of the cops said.

  ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘the dog’s interested, so maybe you’d better have another look, mate.’

  The police went behind the bar, got down on their knees, and started scratching around and lifting up the floor covering. Underneath, they found a hidden safe, buried in the floor. There was nothing in it, but I suspected there must have been some ammunition, or maybe even explosives of some kind, stored in there at one point. The dog wouldn’t have indicated it for nothing.

  We searched venues both when the Pope and former US President Bill Clinton visited Australia. For big jobs, the army sometimes brought in the Brisbane-based army dog team to work with us. For some reason, the Queensland handlers thought their shit didn’t stink and would brag about how they were the best in the country. Whatever, I thought.

  Pope John Paul II was going to visit the Maritime Museum in Sydney, so we were searching it prior to his arrival. I was on one of the lower levels of the underground car park, working my dog off-lead. Two levels above me was one of the teams from Queensland.

  ‘Milo!’ I heard someone call. ‘Milo? MILO!’

  I looked around and saw a border collie, Milo, one of the Queensland dogs, bounding down the car park ramp. It ran past me and stopped to greet my dog, disturbing its search pattern in the process. Running down the ramp, out of breath, was one of the army’s ‘ace’ dog handlers from Brisbane, who had completely lost the plot, and his dog.

  ‘Real’ searches, however, were the
exception rather than the rule. For the most part, my day followed a set routine of letting Ziggy out of his kennel; exercising him; cleaning his kennel; doing some training with him; accounting for, and packing away, the explosive training aids we’d been using; and taking Ziggy back to his home for the night.

  As much as I loved my job, and working with Ziggy, the army was starting to get me down. Life in the army in peacetime involves a high degree of bullshit.

  In the absence of a real threat, you go on exercise after exercise, and nothing ever seems to change. Things that are exciting to you as a young soldier, such as living out in the bush, shooting, and playing at war, lose their attraction as you get older. You start asking yourself, when you’re sitting in a hole in the ground and it’s pissing down rain, what the fuck am I doing here, wasting my life away?

  To a certain extent, I don’t think the Australian Army really knew how to use dogs, except as support to the civil authorities in searches prior to the arrival of some dignitary. Our dogs weren’t trained in attacking, or as trackers, so there wasn’t very much for the dogs or their handlers to do when the combat engineer regiment packed up and went out into the bush on an exercise. Our dogs were more at home working in the city, searching buildings or roads, than in the rainforests and scrub of northern Australia. Usually what would happen was one of the handlers would stay and look after all the dogs, and the rest of us would go and help the other field engineers build a bridge or do whatever else had to be done. It was a bit of waste even having the dogs there. It was different once the army started to become operational again, in East Timor and, later, in Afghanistan. There, the dogs and handlers had a real job to do, looking for explosives and improvised explosive devices (IEDs).