War Dogs

by Shane Bryant

  After visiting the kennels, the Aussies came back to my room, along with a couple of other civilian handlers, so it was getting crowded. I got up to go for a piss and, just as I closed the door of the bathroom, I heard one of my handler mates yell, ‘Benny, no!’

  I burst back into the room and saw a female Australian soldier on her knees with her hand over her face and blood streaming out between her fingers. Benny had bitten a nice big chunk out of her lip.

  ‘Fuck!’

  We tried to clean her up as best as we could, but it was obvious to all of us that the party was over and the girl needed medical attention. One of the Aussie soldiers raced back to their lines and woke up their doctor.

  ‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ I said to her. ‘No,’ she insisted through her swollen, bleeding lip, ‘It was my fault, I’m to blame. I put my face down near his and I knew I shouldn’t have.’

  We were all on edge for a couple of days, as at first the word was that she’d have to be flown home to Australia for a skin graft. If that had happened, everyone there that night would have been in the shit, but luckily the task force’s medical officer was able to get her patched up in-country.

  Benny and I, however, were temporarily grounded. The doctor wanted Benny to be tested for rabies and other diseases, and that meant we had to stay in Kandahar for another ten days before leaving for Cobra. Nat was pleased when I told her the news, as she thought I’d be safer at Kandahar than I would be at a FOB, but I was pissed off. I told her that I was sick of Kandahar already and hated the place. If I were going to be in Afghanistan, I wanted to be out at a FOB where I’d at least be doing my job and where the time would go quicker.

  ‘Did you get a warning from Benny that he was going to bite that girl?’ Nat asked on MSN.

  ‘No, he was really good with everyone and he’s been coming along in leaps and bounds.’

  ‘Well, being with you, he’s with a good person for a change. He’ll be fine,’ Nat said. And she was right. We were soon back in business and on our way to Cobra.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of this one, man,’ Lee, the US Army special search dog handler said to me while we were waiting to saddle up for a mission at Cobra. ‘It just doesn’t feel right.’

  I nodded. The convoy’s route would pass along a stretch of road and through a long wadi at Yakhdan we called IED alley. The Afghani minesweepers would be searching the track at choke points along the way, and Chief Chin Nuts and I were pretty sure we’d be called out with our dogs to search.

  Benny had tested negative for rabies and any other nasties, and I’d finally made it back out to where I belonged, at Cobra. While it was good to be getting back out on missions, Lee’s sudden attack of wariness was infectious.

  Lee was my best buddy at Cobra. Nothing was ever a hassle for him and he’d do anything to help a friend. He was a happy-go-lucky guy in his late thirties and, like me, had heaps of kids and had been married more than once. We’d talk for hours about our kids and our homes, and our dogs.

  ‘What do you reckon about the US Army using civilian dog handlers?’ I asked Lee. As he was an army dog handler, I wondered if he saw us civvies as a threat to his trade.

  ‘I’ve got no complaints,’ he said. ‘Hell, yes, there are some that don’t belong out here where we are, like at Cobra, but overall I think it comes down to how people are trained, and how the handler thinks. You and me both know the job’s important and we save lives. We train every day – even when we’re out on patrols – so, I guess, if a man takes the job seriously, knows his stuff and keeps on training, I’ve got no problem whether he’s army or civilian.’

  After I returned from vacation and had been re-teamed with Benny, Lee told me he was pleased to see me back at the FOB. Guy went to Cobra to replace me when I went on my extended vacation, and I’d told Lee the other Aussie was a good bloke. Lee had said he would look after Guy.

  Not long after arriving at Cobra, Guy went out on a mission and was sitting in my regular spot behind the 240 on the back of a GMV. The convoy was ambushed and while Guy was getting some rounds down range, a Taliban bullet came in from the rear of the vehicle, went straight between Guy’s legs and hit poor Apis in the foot.

  To their credit, the SF team called in a medevac for Apis, and Guy was flown out with his injured dog – there was no point in the team carrying a handler without a dog on the mission. Apis was treated by the US Army vet at Kandahar and later made a full recovery. Even though he could have gone back to work, he was retired as he’d been wounded. He ended up being shipped home to the US, where he found a home with the family of one of the American K9 project managers.

  Guy never returned to Cobra after that incident.

  Spaulding, Lee’s dog, took after his master, and was a warm and sociable individual. Spaulding got on fine with Ricky and Benny. While we were training, we could let both dogs off their leads, which was something I could never do with Guy and Apis, as Apis and Ricky would have torn strips off each other if they’d been running free. Spaulding was friendly, though. Too friendly, in fact, as, although they were both males, Spaulding loved sniffing Benny’s arse and, when we weren’t looking, would often try to mount him.

  Benny was funny around people. He hated some individuals at first sight and could be unpredictable, like when he’d bitten the Australian Army woman. With others, he was more relaxed, though still a little guarded. He loved Lee, though. When Lee came in the room, Benny would be all over him, rubbing up against him and looking for a pat. It was just the way things were with Lee – he was friends with everyone.

  Lee had introduced me to his wife, April, via MSN, and once she contacted me while he was out on a mission.

  ‘I’m worried about, him, Shane. Something doesn’t feel right,’ April tapped into her computer, half a world away.

  ‘Nah,’ I replied; ‘Lee’s a good man. He knows his stuff. He’ll be fine, April.’

  The team had stayed out for longer than originally planned and I guess April’s imagination had got the better of her. Lee came back from that mission safe and sound, but now he had the bad feeling, right before we were due to leave. I felt a bit of a shiver down my spine as I loaded Benny on to the back of the GMV and climbed up behind my 240. I tried to shake off Lee’s concerns. He loaded Spaulding and gave me a wave.

  As we drove out of the base, I told myself there was nothing to worry about. It was a MEDCAP, so it wasn’t as though we were going out to pick a fight with the Taliban. However, we were passing through an area where other vehicles had been hit by IEDs, which was why there were Afghani minesweepers and us two dog handlers along for the ride.

  The convoy drove off road, as usual, but after we crossed the Sakhar River we had to go on to the road for a while, down the long Yakhdan wadi that had been christened, for good reason, IED alley.

  We came to a halt, and the Afghanis dismounted with their minesweepers and began sweeping the road ahead. The word came down the line that the Afghanis had found something and also needed a dog handler to search and, as Lee had lost the toss, he and Spaulding got out and started to work. At the time, head office had told the civilian dog handlers working for American K9 that we were not to do roadside searches. As handlers and dogs had been injured by IEDs and pressure plates along roads, we’d been instructed to confine our searches to compounds, buildings, open fields, choke points and wadis. The greatest danger to the team, as far as I could see, was roadside IEDs, so I ignored the company rule and always searched a road when it needed to be done or, as was the case today, when it was my turn to do so. There was no point, I thought, trying hard to win a team’s acceptance and then saying, ‘No, I can’t do that job to protect you because my company says it’s too dangerous.’

  I stood in the back of the GMV, stretching my legs, and grabbed a pair of binoculars. I focused and could see the ASG guys with their minesweepers, moving very slowly up the road.

  ‘They’re taking their time,’ I said to the staff sergeant in the gun turret.


  The two Afghanis stopped in the middle of the road and appeared to be having a discussion. Behind them, I could see Lee and Spaulding. Spaulding was straining against his lead, and Lee had obviously kept him attached because of the close proximity of the Afghanis, and to stop the dog from roaming ahead of the sweepers. Surprisingly, the team captain had also dismounted, and was walking along next to Lee and Spaulding. I could see one of the Afghanis gesticulating with his hands to his comrade, as though they were arguing.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing, Lee?’ I whispered to myself.

  Lee, Spaulding and the team captain were moving past the two arguing Afghanis, apparently impatient with their lack of progress. This was a really unsafe practice, and there was no reason for the team captain to be out walking around while the road was being cleared.

  I shook my head. ‘Shit, man.’

  Behind me, Benny was stirring and whimpering. I put the binoculars down and turned to my dog. ‘What’s wrong, boy? You’re not spooked too, are you?’

  Boom!

  I scrambled back to the turret and snatched up the binoculars, which had vibrated off the ledge where I’d left them. Dirt was raining down on the wadi, and a cloud of black smoke was twisting and turning up into the clear blue sky.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ the gunner in the turret said. The intercom radio was squawking with urgent conversation, but I couldn’t focus on what people were saying. Benny was barking, as if asking me the same question the staff sergeant was.

  ‘I think Lee’s just been killed,’ I said.

  FIFTEEN

  You know something can happen to you . . .

  ‘Man, that scared the shit out of me,’ Lee said, as we sat outside our hooch back at Cobra, sipping coffee. He was still shaken by what had gone down in IED alley.

  ‘I thought I was going to find you and Spaulding dead,’ I said.

  Lee nodded. ‘Me and the team captain got tired of waiting for those Afghanis, and when we got about 20 or 25 metres past them, Spaulding started showing a change in his behaviour. We’d already cleared about a mile of road by then, and Spaulding was tired, so I thought that was what was up with him, so we pushed on a bit further.’

  I drew hard on my cigarette. I had thought I’d lost my best friend, and if I was shaken by the experience, it was no wonder Lee was jittery.

  ‘Then the explosion went off. All I could see was smoke and I could smell the fucking dirt . . . you know?’

  I knew the smell. It was like the earth was wounded when a mine or an IED went off, or was blown, as though the ground were bleeding or having the life ripped out of it, and the smell was like that of a human or animal body being ripped open. Mixed in with the burning chemical odour of explosives was the raw flesh of Mother Earth, and there was nothing nice about it.

  Miraculously, the two Afghani minesweepers had lived, but they’d had their eardrums blown; there was blood coming out of their noses, and they’d been injured by flying rocks and dirt and shrapnel from the IED. They were loaded into a vehicle and raced back to Cobra, while the rest of us set up a perimeter so that a search for more devices could be made.

  Benny and I were called forward to help out with the search and I was pleased to see that Lee was OK, if a little shaken. We searched the roadsides, working in tandem with Lee and Spaulding.

  Spaulding sniffed out a spider device, which was an electronic receiver with an aerial made of a coil of very thin wire. The insurgent who had set the IED would detonate it by sending a signal to the spider with a remote-controlled transmitter. There was a further delay while the explosive ordnance disposal men from the team set a charge to blow up whatever the spider was attached to.

  We continued clearing for five hours as the rest of the convoy inched along behind us. By that time the team captain, who had also narrowly escaped being blown up, called off the mission. We’d been going out to treat sick and injured villagers and two of our Afghani guys had been wounded, so the mood towards the village on the convoy was ‘fuck you’.

  From the size of the crater and fragments around the explosion site, it appeared that the IED had been a buried 107- millimetre rocket that had been detonated by remote control in a bid by the Taliban to wipe out the trained minesweepers, as well as Lee, Spaulding and the captain. Lee set his coffee cup down and looked down at his hands. ‘Scariest day of my life, man.’

  *

  I’ve been lucky in Afghanistan and, apart from the death of Scott, the ETT, in the Baluchi Valley, no coalition soldiers or civilian contractors were killed or seriously wounded on any of the missions I took part in. However, Lee’s near miss with the IED reminded us both that dog handlers and dogs have been among the many casualties in Afghanistan.

  There was a dog handler from American K9 who was walking along the side of a road when his dog stood on a pressure plate that set off an IED on the road’s edge. The IED was pointing in towards the centre of the road, but the dog was killed instantly and the handler badly injured by the back blast of the explosion. He nearly died, and he’s still carrying shrapnel from that day. A female handler at Kandahar was given the task of going through his gear, and found bits and pieces of the dog’s hair and flesh in it. She had to pick them out before his gear could be sent home.

  What made a lot of us feel sour about that incident was that there was a delay getting him flown back to the US military hospital at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany for advanced medical treatment, because he didn’t have his passport with him and it took a while to find it. As he was a civilian, the Americans wouldn’t let him into Germany without the document. As it turned out, he’d been evacuated by chopper direct to the military hospital at Kandahar but his passport was back at the outlying FOB where he’d been based. This situation highlighted the fact that while the Americans were happy to have contractors fighting and, potentially, dying alongside their troops in the field, they would never bring them into the fold completely.

  An American K9 handler was killed when an IED hit the SF truck he was travelling in, while another one of our colleagues had a miraculous escape while travelling in a turtleback humvee. The dog handler was sitting next to an Afghani who had his hand up, holding on to the door frame through an open window. The Taliban opened fire on the vehicle as it was driving, and a bullet passed through the Afghani’s hand, taking off a finger or two, and hit the handler in the head. Because the bullet’s momentum had been slowed by it having hit the other guy first, it lodged in the handler’s skull. If it had penetrated into his brain, the handler would probably have died. As it was, he made a full recovery.

  My mate Guy had nearly taken a bullet on the TIC out of Cobra, when Apis was shot in the foot. Guy played it down, but something like that happening had to have disturbed him. A while later, he resigned from American K9 and took a job as a security contractor with Canadian firm Tundra. The fact was, in Afghanistan there was probably more chance of a dog handler than a security guy doing personal protection getting involved in TICs and coming under fire. Because we were working with SF, out in the remote mountains and deserts, we were often at the forefront of the war against the Taliban.

  You know that something can happen to you, but you rarely think about it or worry about it. It’s not like you can’t afford to dwell on it, it’s more that you just get used to the environment around you – and death is something that always happens to someone else. Still, every time a military or civilian handler or dog is killed or injured, I do have a reality check. It’s the same when I hear about something happening to one of the SF guys I’ve served with. Like I said, I was lucky, or perhaps I have a guardian angel looking out for me. I do know that after Nat and I got together, I carried an angel with me. Nat bought me a tiny silver one, and had it blessed by the priest at the hospital where she was working in Perth. I’ve never been anywhere without it since.

  When you’re living in Afghanistan, it’s actually hard to judge whether things are getting worse over there or not. There is always more fighting and
dying going on as soon as summer – the fighting season – comes around, and then you’re lulled into a false sense of security as the weather gets colder.

  When an Australian soldier is killed or wounded in Afghanistan, it’s front-page news back home, but the rest of the time the general public has no idea that there are guys going out on missions every day, sometimes killing Taliban and often getting shot at.

  When I was about to leave Cobra, Deh Rawood and Spin Boldak, the team captains made certificates of appreciation for me, in recognition of the work my dog and I had done. There is no official acknowledgment of the services that contractors provide to the coalition, but those certificates probably mean more to me than any medal could.

  Contractors in Afghanistan are paid well, yes, but few of us are there solely for the money. We’re also there for job satisfaction, and we provide a service to the coalition that is, at least in the case of dog handlers, exactly the same as the work done by the US Army special search dog handlers. We live, fight and face the risk of death alongside our uniformed comrades. Our dogs and handlers are helping to keep coalition soldiers safe.

  There are unlikely ever to be Australian military contractors marching on Anzac Day, but I’ve held on to the certificates I received from the Americans, and to other bits and pieces from my time in Afghanistan, mostly for my kids’ sake. They’re going to grow up knowing their father served in a war, but they’ll never be able to march with my medals when I’m dead.

  SIXTEEN

  Afghanis

  ‘Shane, look!’ Bari, the team’s Afghani terp, walked into my room carrying a small brown Afghan puppy.