Top Dog

by Maria Goodavage

  What the hell is going on here?

  To an onlooker, her behavior wouldn’t seem like a big deal. Just a dog stopping and checking something out. But to Willingham, it was a red flag that she was onto something other than explosives.

  It was a different game now. He leashed Lucca and quietly talked to his team.

  “Hey, fellas, she’s seeing something out here. We gotta be careful.”

  They took two more steps and Lucca stopped and lowered her head again—her ears were slightly back, her tail stiff and raised. She let out a low, menacing growl. Willingham had never heard anything like this from her. She had growled a couple of times when Iraqis were taunting her, but nothing like this. She looked like she was ready to attack if she needed to.

  The fire team walked up to be in line with him and Lucca, rifles poised to protect the team from whatever lay ahead. Willingham walked forward with Lucca, who was still in an attack stance. The dry soil crumbled under the soldiers’ boots as they walked to where Lucca was staring. Suddenly the soldier to Willingham’s left screamed out one of the Arabic phrases they had all learned in predeployment training: “Er-fah EE-dee-yek! Get your hands up!”

  A second later, Willingham saw what the soldier had seen. There, crouched in the bottom of the muddy, nearly empty eight-foot-deep canal, was a clean-shaven man in his twenties. He was wearing a traditional long cotton garment, a thawb, in light blue, or maybe white—Willingham couldn’t tell exactly, because it looked glowing bright green through his NVGs. His arms were now raised above his head. A soldier jumped into the canal and cuffed him with zip ties. The canal was wide, with forty-five-degree banks, so it wasn’t hard for the soldier to escort the man out.

  The man eyed Lucca nervously. They brought him back to the compound, only about a hundred yards away, and turned him over to the intel experts for identification. Willingham had no idea if he was the one they were looking for. He just knew they’d found someone hiding in a canal, and people who bolt and hide in canals at night tend to have something to hide.

  After some data comparison, it looked like he was the HVT they had been seeking.

  “We never would have found him if it weren’t for her,” a squad leader told him as he patted Lucca’s head.

  Willingham could feel his heart quicken with this praise of his girl.

  Word of Lucca’s heroics quickly spread. For the rest of the night, Lucca was the recipient of many thanks and ear rubs.

  “How’d she do it?” asked one of the soldiers who was on his fire team. “I didn’t know she’s an attack dog.”

  “She’s not. Never even been trained on scouting, much less aggression,” Willingham answered, still stunned at the evening’s turn of events.

  “So what happened?”

  “I figure it this way. If she can find a minute amount of explosives buried in the ground, she can smell a hundred-and-fifty-pound man scared shitless a few yards in front of her.”

  “And she was gonna do something about it. She wasn’t just saying ‘Yoo-hoo! Looky at this guy here!’”

  “Well, there’s a reason for that,” Willingham said. “It’s ’cause Lucca is a real marine.”

  MISSIONS AT KALSU sometimes took them to strange places. One evening Willingham and Lucca found themselves in a large cemetery surrounded by single-occupant, aboveground concrete crypts. They were only about waist high, and mostly unadorned.

  Lucca took an interest in an old-looking tomb with a side seam that was wide enough to let her nose get a good whiff. She wagged happily, looking at Willingham, who could have thought of a thousand places he’d rather have her respond.

  “Really, Lucca?”

  He rewarded her with his usual enthusiasm but hoped she hadn’t just gotten happy over the smell of old corpse. His spotter notified the platoon leader, and a few soldiers came over and lifted the heavy lid off the tomb. They looked inside.

  “Whoa, check it out, Staff Sergeant!” one called to him.

  Willingham walked over, not knowing what to expect, and looked down into the crypt.

  There was no body, just a small cache of several bags containing RPK machine-gun rounds and some AKs.

  Willingham wondered what had become of the bodies and then decided not to go there. It was getting dark now.

  A FEW DAYS later, Willingham and Lucca were leading a squad through a chicken barn at night.

  “Never thought you’d be doing this when you signed up for the marines, did you, Mama Lucca?”

  He looked at her through his NVGs and could tell she was enjoying the atmosphere. Running birds, flying feathers, and the smell of chicken manure. “Doesn’t get much better than this for your kind, does it, Lucca?”

  The chickens were getting underfoot in an annoying way as the squad searched for weapons that were supposed to be somewhere on the property. Willingham flipped his rifle’s infrared laser to its normal red mode and took off his NVGs. To his surprise, the chickens ran away from the laser. Left and right, he aimed the laser, and left and right they scattered. He used this technique to clear a chicken-free path for everyone to walk in.

  “We’re like Moses parting a sea of chickens,” he told Lucca. But she was too busy sniffing for explosives and enjoying the crazy surroundings to acknowledge his joke.

  THE MONTH AT Kalsu passed quickly, filled with air assault missions to kill or capture high-value targets, and sometimes simply to search for caches or IED factories. The platoons Willingham and Lucca supported never had to kill HVTs, but a couple of HVTs may have been intent on destroying themselves—along with many others. During raids, suicide-bombing vests were found in two insurgent leaders’ homes. Willingham knew the kind of loss of life that could have led to if they hadn’t been discovered.

  When they arrived back at FOB Falcon, the operation tempo had slowed down considerably. There was talk of the successes of Marne Torch, and it looked like there was something to it. The areas he and Lucca were now clearing appeared less treacherous, with IED finds and insurgent encounters greatly diminished.

  Whether or not it would stay this calm would remain to be seen, but for now, Willingham continued to try to keep as busy as he could, even without back-to-back missions. Being at FOB Falcon resurrected the ghosts of time spent with Wiens—how the two of them sat up and talked for hours in this tent, how he laughed at Wiens gorging himself on chow-hall food at that table, how Cooper and Lucca played tug-of-war over in those open areas. Being fully engaged in working with Lucca or other dog handlers was a way of keeping the grief and guilt from overwhelming him.

  Roche heard the pain in Willingham’s voice when they spoke by phone after mission reports. One afternoon she made him an offer.

  “I can’t promise anything, but I want to do what I can to get you back home for the birth of your daughter,” she told him.

  He wanted to tell her what he was feeling: I sent Kory home in a body bag, loaded him up myself and sent him back to his family. Now I get a chance to go home early? I don’t deserve this, and I can’t do this.

  But he didn’t say that.

  “You know how much I want to be there for Jill and the baby, but I’ve still got a job to do here with Lucca. Thank you anyway, but don’t even try.”

  LUCCA SNIFFED THE trunk seam of the parked car, sat down, and looked at Willingham. He saw her through his NVGs and told his spotter, who radioed the find to the platoon leader.

  It was 0300, and they were wrapping up an air assault out of FOB Falcon, heading back to a landing area to meet the Chinook. The soldiers had come up empty on their search for the HVT they were seeking, and all that separated them from their cots was a half-a-klick walk and a short Chinook ride back to FOB Falcon.

  A couple of locals who were working with their platoon told them that the property belonged to some men involved with al-Qaeda. Between this, Lucca’s strong response, and the late hour, the plato
on leader decided not to wait for EOD. The car was history no matter what.

  He called in an Apache to dispatch it with a Hellfire missile.

  Willingham and most of the soldiers were sitting on the ground, waiting at the helicopter landing zone, when they heard the helo. Lucca, who had fallen asleep with her head on Willingham’s lap, didn’t stir. Willingham couldn’t see anything through the rows of palm trees blocking the view. The Apache flew slowly to its target and locked in on it with the laser guide, then paused in the air as the trigger on the air-to-surface missile was pulled.

  Whoosh! Boom! BOOM!

  One hundred pounds of missile slammed into the car, and the large explosion was followed immediately by a smaller secondary explosion, courtesy of the contents of the trunk.

  Lucca opened her eyes, stretched, looked around, and fell back to sleep.

  It wasn’t the first time ordnance was dropped because of Lucca’s nose, but Willingham never ceased to be amazed by the ways his dog could stick it to the enemy.

  As she lay there, the BADASS on her harness seemed to glow brighter than ever from Willingham’s view—no NVGs needed.

  ON SEPTEMBER 20, Willingham sat in a chair at the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation facility at FOB Falcon, phone clamped tightly to his ear. On the other end, at the hospital at Lackland Air Force Base, Jill was undergoing an emergency cesarean. Willingham had been on the phone with her every hour or two throughout the day and night, encouraging her the best he could from so far away as she went through labor. Eventually it was decided that the only way this baby was getting out was by C-section.

  Her sister held her cell phone out toward Jill’s belly as the doctor lifted their daughter, Claire, into the world. She came out screaming at 1:22 A.M. San Antonio time, 9:22 A.M. Iraq time, and Willingham whooped and high-fived everyone within reach.

  That evening, as he celebrated with some soldier pals, it struck him how much his life had just changed, and yet had also stayed the same.

  “I’m in a shit-hole country, I walked into the MWR like I always had, and I’m walking out a brand-new dad. But still in a shit-hole country,” he told them.

  He passed out cigars. Someone brought a plastic pink flamingo to the occasion. It wasn’t exactly a stork, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.

  ON THE C-5 home at the end of their deployment a month later, Knight and Willingham talked across the aisle, each sitting in their own row of seats again.

  “I didn’t tell you about Bram’s little issue on the roof of a compound yet, did I?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So there he is, strutting around all proud with his Kong. He’s running around and he drops it and it bounces off the roof. Without hesitation, before I could say or do anything, he jumps to retrieve it.”

  “Your crazy dog! What happened?!”

  “The roof was eighteen feet off the ground. I gotta show you pictures. That crazy bastard’s lucky to be alive. He was on light duty for three weeks.”

  Willingham laughed.

  But there were signs that all was not well with Willingham. Knight realized he was still carrying the burden from the death of Wiens and Cooper. Eventually he brought the conversation around to this, to try to reassure him, once again, that he did nothing wrong.

  “You know logically it’s not your fault. He went on that mission happily. No one forced him to. He loved working.”

  “I know. I’ll be OK.”

  “Yeah, you will. And you’ve got your little girl now.”

  “Claire. Claire Elizabeth.”

  “You’re going to be one great dad. You already are. Just look at Lucca!”

  Willingham knew he should be feeling over the moon. Soon he’d be with Jill again and meeting his baby. He was excited and couldn’t wait to see them. At the same time he could not let go of the feeling that he did not deserve this happiness, that he couldn’t celebrate life when Wiens’s dad was mourning his son’s death.

  “Want to go check the daooooggs?” Knight asked Willingham. “I think they could use a visit.”

  JILL GREETED WILLINGHAM at the airport with Claire. After Jill hugged Lucca and thanked her for bringing her husband home safely, Knight took Lucca to the side with Bram so Willingham could focus on his family without worrying about a leash. Claire, one month old, was wearing a marine cammy outfit.

  She was asleep, and her father held her carefully, not knowing quite what to do with her head. While he held her close, there was nothing else in the world. Her tiny body even crowded out his sadness.

  He felt his family would be complete if he could take Lucca home. But she had to go back to the kennels. It was the rule, and as much as he didn’t like it, he had been at this long enough to know there was no fighting it.

  Spending nearly 24/7 on deployment with dogs and then having to put them back in a concrete kennel when they got home was hard on handlers. He imagined it wasn’t a walk in the park for the dogs, but they seemed to adjust to almost anything. After their return, he saw Lucca as much as he could, taking her on walks, bringing her with him to specialized search dog classes. They did some detection problems, but he took it easy on her. She’d done enough detection in Iraq to last a lifetime. He liked to go hang out with her in her walk-in kennel. He brushed her, talked to her, just sat with her without having to say a word. They had been through so much together over there. He felt they could read each other just by being near each other.

  On one bad morning, as he was sitting and thinking about Wiens, he felt her eyes on him. He turned his head and saw her studying him, ears forward, her little black brows raised a little, pointing slightly toward each other. He thought she looked so wise and concerned.

  “Come here, Mama Lucca,” he said, patting the floor next to him.

  She lay down, put her head in his lap, and looked up at him. Then she sighed, closed her eyes, and within a minute, drifted off.

  WILLINGHAM AWOKE IN his bed with a start and looked for Lucca. Not on the floor, not in the bed.

  “Lucca! Lucca!” he called out.

  Then he realized where he was. Home, in bed with Jill. He was used to Lucca being at his side all the time. But she was back at the kennels. He had to start remembering that. It wasn’t the first time he woke up worried that Lucca wasn’t there. He wondered if she woke up looking for him sometimes.

  He had other disturbing dreams, nightmares. Wars, violence, people getting shot or exploded. Jill had to wake him up a few times in the early months home because he was screaming in his sleep. Once he woke himself up shouting, “No, Kory!”

  Jill never questioned him, never pushed him to talk about his experiences. Once she found him sitting on a box in the garage, crying with his head in his hands, surrounded by the military gear he stored there. Jill realized something had reminded him of Wiens, but she didn’t ask. She just sat with him a minute and held his hand, then let him grieve on his own.

  He was grateful.

  A part of him had not come home. In one year, he would be back in Iraq on his second deployment—and a part of him would remain with Jill. This could mess with anyone’s head.

  PART THREE

  Full Circle

  8

  Lessons Learned

  WELL, HERE WE are in Afghanistan!” Willingham said as he looked around the small room in the Mobile Expandable Container Configuration (MECC) shelter at Camp Leatherneck.

  He stowed his gear, including his M4 and two sleeping bags—one for hot and one for cold, since he’d be there from June through late December—in the wall locker underneath his rack. It was like all the other times he’d moved into new quarters during his Iraq deployments.

  Only not quite.

  The room was missing something vital, something he had never been without at war. Lucca.

  He grabbed his flak jacket off his duffel and sat on
his cot. He opened the flap inside the front panel and slowly withdrew the five-pound ceramic protection plate. His favorite photo of Jill, the one where she was beaming, with the bright red rose tucked into the V of her shirt, was still taped in the middle of it, as it had been from his first deployment three years earlier. Below her, a photo of his two children, Claire and Michael.

  On top of the two photos, staring back at him with those eyes he knew so well, a photo of Lucca.

  She was back at Pendleton, stuck in a kennel, while he was here, halfway around the globe, about to face the enemy without her. He looked at her photo for a few seconds and then pushed the insert back into the vest.

  He tried to shake a sense of foreboding that had been with him since he learned he was going to Afghanistan. With Lucca at his side, he and hundreds of others had survived two deployments to Iraq unharmed. But now he was kennel master at Camp Pendleton, and in charge of thirty U.S. Marine Corps dog teams—I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) K-9—and Lucca couldn’t be here.

  Willingham understood the reasons his command wouldn’t let her come with him: It hadn’t been done before, and it just wasn’t something kennel masters do, since there are so many other responsibilities. But he had tried.

  He had laid it out for the decision makers. She could do demos for all the units during his dog capabilities talks to unit leaders. She could go out on short missions to give other dogs a break. And she would be a great public relations dog for getting others used to military dogs—she wasn’t the type to eat you when you went to pet her.

  When he was told she couldn’t come, he accepted the decision. There really was no choice. But it was a blow. He wouldn’t leave his flak and Kevlar behind, and Lucca was so much more than that. Sure, officially military dogs were considered equipment, but he knew of no handlers who considered their dogs anything but fellow marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen—and more than anything, loyal friends.