Navy SEAL Dogs

by Mike Ritland

  “That was my proudest moment working with Rex,” Dwayne told me as he recalled the incident. “In my mind, he saved a lot of our lives that day.”

  When the operation was concluded and they returned to the FOB, Dwayne followed his usual routine. He went to the chow hall, which was really little more than a small room with a few tables, and had Rex lie down along a far wall. “Rex is like most dogs,” said Dwayne. “He loves to eat; I had to always be careful to keep his weight down. He got his meals, and a few treats. The one thing I was insistent on with the guys was that they not give him any junk food.

  “At the FOB we had a ‘theater,’ another small room with a TV, where we could watch movies. There were some chairs and a couch, and Rex always hung out with us in there. I never had to muzzle him because he was so friendly. After that great find that day, I knew I had to be even more vigilant than normal with the guys to make sure they didn’t get lax and give him anything that would be bad for him in the long run. I knew they were grateful for what he’d done, but still.”

  Dwayne rewarded Rex, as he always did after a meal, for staying at his “post.” He brought him a couple of bites of meat, in this case chicken. Later that night Rex did his usual thing. While the movie was on, he climbed onto the couch with a couple of the team members to get as comfortable as possible. He slept for a bit, woke up, and walked around the room looking for attention. Not that he needed to ask for it.

  “If it weren’t for the fact that we were in an FOB in Afghanistan, you could almost imagine yourself back at home in a rec room or basement or whatever, hanging out with your buddies watching a movie,” Dwayne said. “Your dog was doing his best to mooch a treat but settled for a few ear and belly scratches. He’d get blamed for a few odors that were worse than those in that livestock pen, but that’s just boys being boys.”

  * * *

  Rex’s success at his job and his easy camaraderie with the human members of the team were many miles away from where he had started as an MWD, and not just geographically speaking. Rex had, in a way, been a black sheep among the new trainee dogs. He had been sitting in a kennel, mostly untrained, for a year when he was paired with Dwayne. Rex was “green”; he was an inexperienced and unrefined dog that hadn’t been trained in any of the dog sports and didn’t have a firmly established foundation in obedience either. “Rex’s big problem,” recounted Dwayne, “was his refusal to give up his toy. Getting a dog to release something is pretty essential. Rex thought it was kind of a game, and he was better at it than the rest of us. When we tried to trick him into giving the ball back, he always outsmarted us. It was like he had a perimeter-limit warning device—he’d let you in only so close before he’d dart away. Or he’d just sit there turning his head away so that you couldn’t get the ball out of his mouth. Smart dog, but frustrating.

  “The first thing I remember about Rex, though, was that he didn’t look like any German shepherd dog I’d ever seen before,” Dwayne told me. “I did my research and found out that the breeding lines and what was considered proper conformation/makeup of the dog’s body had changed since the 1950s. Rex looked like a classic German shepherd from the 1940s. He has a really big head and large paws and a very straight back. The dogs bred from the newer lines generally have smaller paws and heads, and they also have more of a swayed back. It’s just my opinion, but that classic look—the lines of dogs like Rex are just much more beautiful.”

  Like some of the other handlers in the then-new dog handling program, Dwayne didn’t like some of the methods, but he had to do what he was being trained to do. “Choking a dog off a toy isn’t a good idea,” he said. “It creates resentment in the dog, and distrust. After you do that a few times, every time you approach the dog, he’s going to think that you want to choke him off that toy. All you’re doing is reinforcing that drive to hang on to what I’ve got.” Dwayne noticed an instructor/trainer who was observing from the sidelines as they put the dogs through their routine in the basic handler course. “Every time we used the collar on the dogs, to choke him off the bite or anything else, I’d look over and see that man shaking his head,” he recalled. “I went over to him a few times to get his take on things. He was pretty highly regarded in Germany, and he just said that our use of compelling the dogs to do what we wanted, instead of encouraging or rewarding the dogs, was just making some things worse.”

  Dwayne learned more and more about positive reinforcement and the importance of timing a correction or a reward as the program went along. “That reward has to be instantaneous. Bonding with a dog is all about the dog learning to trust you. If you get a dog to the point where he knows you have his best interests in mind, and you do that enough times in different situations, you earn some credit with that dog,” he explained. “It’s just like with humans. You have to earn someone’s trust. What we might call treating a dog with dignity and love translates in their minds to one thing—trust. Start with the small things and work your way up the scale.”

  Similarly, Dwayne learned that as far as ability to detect odors is concerned, a dog can start big and break things down into very small parts. “When you’re a SEAL, you learn about explosives from one perspective. I’m simplifying, of course, but basically we learn how to use them,” he explained. “We rely on the dogs for detection, and one of the things that surprised me was that the amount of an explosive being used can sometimes confuse a dog. A dog’s nose is so sensitive that—let’s say 50 grams of RDX or other explosive ordnance are being used in training. Well, a ton of RDX is going to smell different to a dog than that small sample will. So, in training, we have to work at exposing the dogs to varying concentrations so that they won’t be confused. The thing is that RDX is the major ingredient in C-4, so if your dog can detect RDX, he is going to be able to pick up C-4, because that’s essentially 94 percent RDX plus some plasticizers and fillers.

  “What was made clear to me is that we as humans can walk into our kitchen and smell beef stew cooking. We may be able to pick up traces of the ingredients in that stew, but for a dog that stew’s odor is immediately broken down into its component parts—beef, potato, carrots, onion, and whatever else is in there,” said Dwayne. “That’s why efforts to disguise drugs or explosives or whatever with masking odors don’t work. A dog can pick out all the individual components of any odor.”

  * * *

  Most of what Dwayne knows about dogs he learned from his exposure to them while in the service. His family had a Pekingese while he was growing up, and according to Dwayne, while he was a fine dog, he just wasn’t the kind of dog with whom Dwayne personally bonded. He remembers his first exposure to working dogs took place when bomb-detection dogs from civilian contractors were assigned to his military unit. “I’d never seen a Dutch Shepherd or a Malinois before,” he recalled,” and I just thought they were the most incredible-looking dogs.”

  It was years before Dave began working with the dog handler program. He was originally drawn to the navy because he loved the ocean and diving. At fifteen, he began an open-water PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) program when he was staying with his father for the summer in the mountains near Santa Cruz. Scheduling conflicts prevented him from making the last open-water dive, so he didn’t get certified. “I was definitely disappointed at not being able to follow through to the end,” he told me, “but the really funny thing is that I was a terrible swimmer. My parents had the hardest time teaching me. I got to the point where I could just get by in the pool, but there was something about being under the water.”

  He took up diving when he attended a private school, where for a six-week period, as part of an enrichment program, students were encouraged to pursue an interest. Dwayne chose diving and once again took a certification course, and once again he failed to complete it. He also didn’t finish his education at that private school.

  “I got kicked out,” he admitted. “I was one of those classic ‘does not apply himself’ types. Looking back on it now, failing to finish
those first two dive programs was typical of how I approached a lot of things. I’d start something, get all fired up about it, lose interest, and then move on to something else. But those failures were more like delays. Those interests didn’t just die out completely, they’d end up in the back of my mind, and eventually I’d get around to finishing what I’d started.”

  Dwayne was one of the fortunate few whose navy recruiter seemed to recognize something in him. Dwayne had never heard of the SEALs, but his recruiter mentioned them to him because Dwayne had expressed an interest in getting certified as a diver, hoping that the third time would be the charm.

  “I was so clueless about the SEALs,” Dwayne said with a laugh, “that I asked the guy, ‘Do they do any kind of diving?’ He just looked at me and said, ‘Yes. They do.’ Then I asked him if the training for the SEALs was hard. Again I got a kind of puzzled look, and the recruiter kind of stuck to his script. ‘No. Not really.’ Then they showed me the video, and it looked like what the SEAL team members were doing was a lot of fun. I think I even said those exact words to the guys in the enlistment office.

  “But the good thing was, I enlisted and was a part of the Dive Farer program,” he went on. “I did my basic training in Florida and then went on to Millington, Tennessee, for my A school. From A school, I went straight to BUD/S. That was an eye-opener.”

  Dwayne was a good student of human nature. “I developed a game plan right away once I realized how tough this was going to be,” he told me. “I saw some of these guys; they looked like chiseled Greek god statues, and a whole bunch of the others gravitated toward them. They all projected this attitude—arrogance, I guess, is the best word to describe it—and I just didn’t want to be a part of that. I wasn’t a ‘Mister Popular’ type guy; I wasn’t a hero worshipper either. The thing is, when those studs fell by the wayside, so did their followers eventually. They saw their leader go down, and they must have thought that if this guy I admire so much couldn’t handle it, then how can I possibly do it? In a way, my being a kind of loner type paid off for me.”

  Despite Dwayne’s early habit of not finishing what he started, he did graduate from BUD/S in class 180 in 1991. He was then assigned to a SEAL team. He felt he had a bit of bad timing. “There wasn’t any real combat in the world at that time,” he recalled. “I just missed the Gulf War. The last platoon heading into that theater left a month or two before I graduated. Our first workups were in Southeast Asia to do Foreign Internal Defense assignments. That was okay, doing that kind of teaching and goodwill work. At least it wasn’t all the same, since we’d lead dive courses, some segment pair operations, and some jumps. The best part was Cobra Gold (annual training exercises in Thailand). But I don’t know anybody who graduated from BUD/S and didn’t want to put all their training to use as an operator.”

  Dwayne moved on to become a sniper and later a sniper instructor. He went to language school to learn Thai, then went on another deployment out of Guam doing more FID work. In 2000, he volunteered to become a free-fall instructor. A great need for those instructors existed, so Dwayne “jumped” at the chance. Once qualified as an instructor, he taught SOF and other Department of Defense candidates the fine skills needed to use nonstandard parachute equipment. He spent the next three years in Yuma, Arizona, doing that work. Next, he rejoined a SEAL team and started working up to go to Iraq. Once deployed in Iraq, he served as a member of a security detail protecting high-level Iraqi government officials. That was where he met those bomb-sniffing working dogs that made such a powerful impact on him.

  However, because the need for free-fall instructors still existed, Dwayne returned to Yuma. Finally, in 2008, he changed assignments, working for Support Activity One, a unit that deals with high-security-clearance intelligence. That job proved to be more administrative than Dwayne would have liked.

  “Being behind a desk and dealing with all kinds of written reports wasn’t working out too well for me,” he recounted. “Intelligence work is important, but it’s definitely not that active an assignment. Definitely not a James Bond experience. In fact, I felt like the relative inactivity was draining the life out of me. The command had just acquired the multipurpose canine unit from NSW Group One, and I was asked if I had any interest in going over there because they were shorthanded. I thought to myself that program was just about my speed. I think I have the attention span equal to a dog’s, so why not? I loved being outdoors, and this desk wasn’t a good fit.”

  Dwayne sure got what he wished for when he opted to get out from sitting behind a desk. He and the other handler trainees and their dogs were taken all over the country to train in different environments. The theory was that the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in the war. So they traveled to deserts, places like the jungle, urban environments, and high elevations. Frequently they went to heavily populated skiing areas and traveled up to an elevation of 10,000 feet with 4 feet of snow on the ground. They practiced explosive-detection work under those conditions. Humidity, barometric pressure, wind, altitude, snow cover—all of these things affect how explosive odor travels, how much of it spreads. A dog may be able to find any odor you want in a regular and familiar environment, but when you take him to 10,000 feet and bury an odor under 4 feet of snow, that’s a completely different ball game.

  Dwayne and Rex did all that, but even those extremes and the incredible amount of training they had to do didn’t fully prepare them for the rigors of their deployment to Afghanistan. However, the actual getting to Afghanistan was pretty easy. Rex couldn’t fly in the cargo hold of the commercial flight taking them overseas. So he got to fly coach, sitting at Dwayne’s feet the whole time, very content. This was a new experience for Rex, and when he stayed calm Dwayne rewarded him. A few passengers even came up to greet him, and Dwayne let them.

  Once in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, however, even though the two weren’t deployed to the mountainous regions—approximately 40 percent of the land—the landscape they were in and the work they were doing were still intense.

  Their SEAL team engaged in a number of firefights against the Taliban on that deployment and covered a large operational sector within the province. Even though the men and Rex weren’t actively engaged in clearing operations the entire time they were away from the FOB, those three- to four-hour rides on rutted tracks that wouldn’t fit any definition of roads added to the fatiguing nature of the job they were doing. Like all other handlers, Dwayne had to be vigilant about his dog’s condition.

  “You start to wonder if your dog is going to break down, not in the mental sense necessarily, but physically also. This was his first tour of duty, this was my first time with him, all of this was new, and so you become hyperaware. You have to be. I would give him rests, and I’d also make sure that he stayed hydrated at all times,” Dwayne told me. “On the mental side, we’d go for long periods where he wouldn’t make any hits, and that was hard on him. He wanted that reward; he wanted to succeed. To keep his spirits up, to keep him as motivated as could be, I’d frequently plant objects for him to find. That way I was keeping that reward in the front of his mind all the time.”

  Functioning as part of the team and respecting roles and responsibilities is important on a deployment. Because of Rex’s detection and apprehension work, he and Dwayne had to walk point, ahead of their unit. “Even though we walk point, that doesn’t mean that we take on the full responsibilities of the point man,” Dwayne explained. “Point man’s a prestigious job, and guys wouldn’t like it if you came in there and just acted like you were taking over. I told them that my job with Rex was to make sure they didn’t walk over any IEDs. They were still responsible for navigating the route and making all the decisions that go along with that. I often looked back at that point guy and keyed off what he was indicating to me. The only time I would divert them from a route was if Rex detected something or showed early indicators that he was on explosive odor.

  “From the very beginning, we have it drummed into our he
ads that as much as we’re out there fighting a war or trying to take out bad guys, we’re really looking out for one another,” said Dwayne. “When you’re in combat like we were, that becomes even more clear, if such a thing’s possible. All the other stuff, the politics of the war and whatnot, how the Host Nation civilians feel about our being there, that goes away. I’m there to save my teammates and myself.”

  Very early in their deployment, Rex did something that earned the trust of the other SEAL team members. The region they were assigned to was primarily made up of agricultural fields, where the main crop was pistachio nuts. The team was in a fairly broad and flat valley, and the region was dotted with grape arbors. “I don’t know much about wine, but apparently extremes of temperatures are good for the grapes,” said Dwayne. “It was 110°F to 120°F during the day, and then at night, at that elevation, it dropped by 30°F to 40°F. We came on one fairly large vineyard, something I didn’t expect to see in Afghanistan, and a call came over the comms that Rex and I needed to check something out. A drying hut, one of the larger structures in the area, that was maybe 65 feet high, a stone building with gaps at the top for ventilation, needed to be checked out.”

  The interior of the drying hut was essentially one large room with a few pieces of framing-type lumber serving as partitions. Given the building’s size, roughly 750 square feet, Rex had a fairly significant amount of ground to cover, especially after a day in which he’d already covered more than 6 miles (not all of which was spent, strictly speaking, in detection work). The search came up empty. As they were exiting the building and about to rejoin the rest of the members of the team, Rex, as Dwayne put it, “keyed up on something,” and he started pulling him. They came to a motorbike, a small single-cylinder thing that looked about the size of a moped. It was all beat up; the engine cases were crusted with oil and dirt, and the metal had a yellowish patina from gas leaking onto it and drying there. “I could only imagine what it smelled like to Rex, because the thing reeked of all those odors in my nose,” Dwayne remembered. “But he made a strong indication on that bike, and he sat next to it, letting me know he’d found something.”