Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines

by Michael Ritland

  But there were also enough guys I met in my time who made you pause and ask, “You did what before joining up?” For example, in my first platoon, there was a guy that was an Ivy Leaguer—a Columbia grad—who was a Wall Street investor for several years, got bored, and decided to quit, joined the navy at thirty-one years old, and went through BUD/S. I’d also been on a team with a guy who’d been a rodeo clown previously. Another guy was a pothead, followed the Grateful Dead, and for a number of years was a professional skier—a ski-patrol member, ski guide, and instructor. And then in the summertime he was a white-water raft guide on the Colorado River. He did that for a number of years and then he got tired of it and decided he wanted to join the navy and become a frogman.

  Obviously, none of us were purposely bred to have an interest in any of those things; we either developed those interests ourselves or had family members or other exposures in our environment that led us to them. In my case, both my grandfathers served in World War II, one in the army and one in the navy. I was always fascinated by the stories they told me about their service during that war. They were a part of the “Greatest Generation,” and they had some of those traits—unquestioning loyalty, dedication, and humility among them. They didn’t talk much about their war experiences, but I was eager to hear anything about them, and they obliged me. It seemed like few others in my family really were as interested, but for some reason, I was. I became fascinated—“obsessed” might be a better word—with the idea of becoming a navy frogman after reading an article about them and the incredible challenge of SEAL training in Popular Mechanics magazine. Also, the movie Navy SEALs was an effective recruiting tool for me and a number of other guys in the teams.

  All of this to say that you never know who is going to make it as a SEAL, let alone who might be drawn to this life. Not all of it is random, but in my case, my level of interest and a somewhat random event combined to inspire me. Because of my grandfathers’ and my father’s influence (though he didn’t serve), I was raised to believe that you should be proud to be an American and that you can do a lot more than just express that pride verbally. Wanting to go out into the world and do something active for my country was my response to those stories I’d heard and the words and images I’d seen. Not everyone has that kind of response, and I can’t fully explain why I did. I also had a highly refined sense of right and wrong instilled in me.

  That sense came into play in particular in January of 1992. January 6, 1992, to be precise. It was a Friday afternoon, and I was a freshman in high school. I was a member of the swim team, a newbie, and as part of an initiation ritual I was required to wear my Speedo swimsuit over my jeans. Maybe that made me a target of a racially motivated attack at school. In March of 1991, the Rodney King beating had sparked a fair bit of racial tension nationwide, and my high school was no exception. King was the Los Angeles man who was severely beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department who were eventually acquitted of any wrongdoing a couple of months later. Our high school, Waterloo West, was racially mixed, and there were some tensions right before this about a Cultural Enrichment Club meeting being canceled because some white students promised to show up to it and cause problems.

  I was walking to class, just after having lunch with my older brother, Jake, when I ran into a gauntlet of black students. Wrong place at the wrong time, I guess. I was beaten up pretty badly, and I hated the feeling of powerlessness I experienced in those moments when I was punched, kicked, and slammed into the walls. No action was taken against the guys who beat the shit out of me. I took some action. I told myself that I would never again experience that kind of helplessness. I joined a local dojo, led by a sensei who had a very old-school mentality of what was what. It was everything a martial arts school should be, one that unfortunately rarely exists these days. My sensei’s mentor served in Vietnam as a Force Recon Marine, and I was naturally very interested in his experiences in combat. I became committed to defending myself in ways other than just some street-fighting moves that were learned the hard way. While I couldn’t have connected all these dots back then, that desire dovetailed with what I later saw as the role of the United States—to protect and defend against aggressors and other kinds of bullies.

  Add all of those influences up, as well as a best friend named Matt who shared a similar interest and work ethic, and I was fully committed to joining the military right out of high school and chose the navy and the SEAL Teams as my aspiration.

  I tell this story because it demonstrates some of the points I want to make about dogs and humans and breeding and training and the unpredictable nature of it. I was predisposed to becoming a SEAL; that beating incident could have led me another way altogether, but it didn’t. I wasn’t “bred” to be a SEAL, and at that point, I wasn’t exactly the model physical specimen you might imagine a SEAL Team member being. I was the typical late bloomer physically, but at the time I was the kind of Charles Atlas type, not exactly a ninety-pound weakling, but I was drawn to fitness and the discipline—mental and spiritual—of the martial arts.

  If I did possess one trait “out of the box,” so to speak, that made me a prime candidate for a SEAL Team member, it was this: I was ultra-competitive. I hated to lose, and as much as I felt helpless during that attack, by virtue of being so outnumbered, I also recoiled at the idea that, in my mind, I should have been able to overcome those odds. My fantasy was typically adolescent: I would have been jumped and then been able to fight my way out of it, breaking jaws and knocking out teeth along the way. I should have been able to overcome the numbers, and that is what separates successful SEAL Team candidates and is the one trait that I would say we all had in common despite our divergent upbringings. SEAL Team members don’t want to lose, and they won’t ever quit. Ever.

  In finding, breeding, selecting, and training dogs, I have to say that the same trait is necessary. The single most desirable trait in a dog that will do SOF work is this: they won’t quit. Combine that with some of the other required physical characteristics of a dog, and you’ve got yourself a prime candidate to do the necessary work of the SEAL Teams.

  Sometimes their willingness to go anywhere and do anything ends up being a kind of detriment. That’s especially true when they are “fresh out of the kennel” at the beginning of their training with us, and are being exposed to new activities and new environments. I’m painfully aware of this fact.

  Ask any West Coast SEAL what he thinks about the manzanita bush, and most of what they have to say isn’t something I could repeat here without blushing a bit. The San Diego County region of the United States is ripe with the stuff. Manzanita means “little apple” in Spanish, but most of us who’ve endured the agony of working our way through, around, under, and away from its thorny grasp think of it as more of a man-eater than an apple bearer. Because the dogs we train come from Europe, none of them have had experience dealing with the nuisance that manzanita brings. Belgium isn’t exactly a high-desert mountainous region, so one of the environments that we have to expose the dogs to, which is very much like Afghanistan, is in Southern California near the West Coast SEAL Teams.

  As a SEAL, you get exposed to manzanita during night patrols, and it is about the thickest, coarsest, sharpest vegetation that you’ll ever encounter. When we train the dogs to do mountain patrols at night, you wish that maybe these dogs didn’t have that all-speed-ahead spirit. One dog in particular, Barco, was one of our larger specimens, weighing in at eighty pounds. He is a freight train with a brain. Sometimes, however, that locomotive engine in him overpowers the driver.

  We were on a night training exercise, and Barco was on a thirty-foot retractable leash, a heavy-duty flexi-lead. Short leads are effective in some scenarios, but when training a dog to do detection work in the mountains, something that short just isn’t practical or realistic to use. If you’ve ever walked your dog and had the frustration of him or her going around a tree and wrapping the lead around it, you’ve experienced something like what we’ve
endured. Imagine if instead of your mild-mannered dog on a short leash winding around an oak tree with its relatively smooth bark, you’ve got an eighty-pound, high-energy beast intent on getting to an odor so that he can be rewarded by being able to play with his favorite thing in the whole world. And that tree isn’t a smooth oak but a torturous manzanita. And your outing isn’t along a sidewalk in a subdivision or city but is in the mountains. And your nighttime walk isn’t aided by streetlights, but you’re in pitch-blackness in the middle of the mountains. A classic recipe for disaster.

  Barco had a real talent for forging ahead, wrapping back around a manzanita bush, doubling back, coming around again, straining against his lead, and wrapping that bit of fabric tighter and tighter. I’ve been out on training exercises with a group of six to eight dog and handler teams and this is supposed to be done in stealth—and every few seconds you’d hear another handler muttering “son of a bitch,” and much worse, when one dog after another got tangled up in a man-eating bush.

  Of course, I don’t mean that literally, but almost. One night, I was out with Barco and a few others, and we came to a downhill section, and Barco was on point. He took off like a shot, and suddenly we were in the middle of an old Hollywood western, where a cowboy is being dragged by his horse or behind a wagon or whatever. His handler, who shall remain nameless, went down the hill like a rag doll, gravity and Barco determining his speed and direction, bumping along and kicking up a cloud of dust. I went down the hill after them as quickly as I could, but not soon enough to prevent the handler from getting hung up upside down in a prickly bush. Barco’s forward progress was only arrested because his handler’s limbs were entwined within that tangled manzanita. Each of Barco’s continued thrusts forward impaled his handler into the sharp points and further knotted the lead, producing tension in it that required many minutes of patient undoing to free man and beast.

  Sometimes it isn’t because of the dog’s over-the-top (but desirable when controlled) eagerness that gets handlers in trouble. Sometimes they are their own worst enemies. Ball rewards are what keep these dogs motivated. Once, Matt and his dog Arras were on a night patrol, and Arras indicated properly when he came to an odor by sitting still and staring at it. To reward him for properly detecting and indicating, Matt thought it was a good idea to toss Arras a ball. Of course, Matt forgot that it was nighttime. He had on his night-vision goggles, and while dogs can see well at night, Arras didn’t catch sight of the ball immediately, so he didn’t make the catch. Instead, he heard it hit off some rock and bounce down the slope. Keep in mind that we were at the top of a 4,800-foot mountain. Arras took off and Matt soon followed, swept off his feet and progressing down the rocky slope at a rate considerably faster than when he’d struggled up it moments before.

  I think incidents like these are teachable moments, and so when you get your lightly bloodied and battered handler back near you, you remind him that in certain situations, it’s best to get the dog right by your side where you can hand it its reward. With dogs and humans, it’s all a learning process. Few of our handlers have any experience with dogs that have the physical gifts and enormous drive that our future multi-purpose K9s do. They have to learn about this the hard way all too frequently.

  I mention this physical component only briefly, but it is obviously important. It’s a given that a dog has to be healthy and fit, but it is more their temperament that sorts them out in the final analysis. Their physicality is important in another way; for example, the weight difference between the German shepherd dog and the Belgian Malinois is a crucial factor in our decision to employ them as SEAL Team members. The ten pounds less that a typical Malinois weighs make a big difference for a handler in the field as he lifts the animal dozens of times a day.

  This is similar to what goes on in the military. The navy does a physical screening early on and will eliminate from consideration anyone who has an obvious physical disability or other potential health issue that would hinder that person’s ability to do the job required of them. A relatively small number of people are eliminated at that stage. What’s also true of humans is that sometimes their physical traits prevent them from being able to perform specific tasks. As a kid, I remember reading stories and watching movies and documentaries about World War II aviators. The ball turret gunner, the man who rode in a glass bubble slung from the belly of the bomber, had to by necessity be a small man. Therefore, someone’s height could disqualify him from performing that task. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t capable of being good servicemen; they just couldn’t do that specific job. That’s much like the situation with the Malinois. Many other breeds of dogs do valuable work for our government, but some just don’t qualify as SOF/SEAL Team members because of some physical trait.

  I want to take a moment to discuss my use of some terminology. In the mind of the military higher-ups, broadly speaking, a dog is not a SEAL Team member. In the strictest sense, dogs are accounted for in the same way that a piece of equipment is. There is a movement among the military and other canine advocates to eliminate that designation and to treat dogs not in the same manner as humans but in a manner that better fits with what they do for us and how they serve the country. A dog shouldn’t just be a line item on a budget sheet along with a weapon, a vehicle, or an office supply. What they do is far more important and far more complicated than that. I think it’s important to get into this, but I would like to say that back during Vietnam the brass thought of dogs as equipment, and now the military treats the dogs as counterparts to the operators—from medevacing wounded dogs, rehabbing injured dogs, to awarding medals and ribbons and holding memorials for fallen KIA dogs.

  Another analogy to consider when thinking about this canine-versus-human comparison is what happens after basic training is completed and the evaluation for suitable candidates for SEAL Teams begins. In my case, I knew going in that I wanted to be a SEAL, and I let the recruiters know that was the case. Not that my desire mattered much, but when it came time for me to take the preliminary screening test, I was well ahead of the game. Because I was so highly motivated, I’d been working out twice a day, six days a week, for a long time before reporting to Great Lakes Naval Training Center. In fact, I thought that basic training was a detriment rather than a benefit for someone like me. The physical training was so less intense than what I was used to doing that I felt like my fitness level was suffering.

  Two weeks into basic training, I did take that fitness test—a five-hundred-yard swim, the maximum number of sit-ups and push-ups in a two-minute span for each, six dead-hang pull-ups, and a mile-and-a-half run. I easily outdid the minimum numbers. Fortunately, that allowed me and others like me to do additional workouts and to have access to the fitness facilities after I passed that first assessment.

  Had I not passed that assessment—and I was the only one of the eight or nine in my division who attempted it—I wouldn’t have been bounced out of the navy, but I would have felt like I had been. The screening was a breeze, and I knew that I had a lot more to look forward to when the actual BUD/S training began. That was to be a ways off, but I was eager to get there.

  Similarly, when I travel to Europe to begin my screening process to select dogs to bring back to the United States to train for SEAL Teams, they’ve already gone through some initial training, have been bred to heighten certain traits, and have that crucial “drive” trait in spades. I put the word “drive” in quotation marks because it raises questions about dogs and their emotions. Absolutely, dogs do have emotions. Do they have the same spectrum of emotions that we do?

  No.

  Do they have “drive”?

  Absolutely.

  If you’ve ever been around a dog, you know that they want certain things. Besides the quality of not being likely to quit easily, the second trait that I look for in dogs is their drive. Call it enthusiasm, tenacity, or whatever, but, like a coach looking to recruit an athlete, you want to see that drive demonstrated. It is the combination of their unw
illingness to quit and their willingness to go after something unrelentingly that I look for when evaluating dogs. That may seem redundant or hairsplitting, but the examples that follow should shed some light on the differences between not quitting and really going after it.

  For most pet owners, the drive I’m talking about can best be observed when you have in your possession a favorite toy that your dog likes to play with. For a lot of dogs, the toy of choice is a tennis ball. When I go to look at dogs, physically mature dogs in most cases, what I want to see are behaviors that would drive most pet owners nuts. The dog should express its desire in leaping, barking, turning, and spinning. And I don’t just mean the dog does that for a little while, but persistently, for a long duration. Their desire must be over the top, and they almost literally exhibit that trait by jumping up to nearly my eye level to get to that ball. They are, as I said, relentless in that pursuit of the ball and would very definitely cross the line between what we consider acceptable and unacceptable pet behavior. I want to see a dog that is willing and able to use its only real weapon—its mouth—to get that ball. Simply put, they have so much desire and are so unwilling to give in and lose the battle for that ball that they will bite a human to get it.

  If you’ve ever seen a dog that just shivers with excitement and pent-up desire to get a toy, then you have some idea of what I’m talking about. It’s as if every fiber of its being is twitching with its genetic desire to get at prey. For the dogs at the top of my list, the object of their desire is nearly immaterial. I could be holding a piece of pipe, a length of rebar, a stick—it doesn’t matter. They want it and will do nearly anything to get it. They are so highly motivated that it is nearly impossible to describe their behaviors. In addition to wanting it while it’s in your possession, they will tear off after it at high speed as soon as the object leaves your hand when you throw it. Their aggressive pursuit of that object, the speed at which they go after it, is again at the very top of the charts. To say that they take off after it is an understatement; they launch themselves. After that, when they arrive at their destination, they crash the ball, planting their forelegs so forcefully that their hind legs rise up off the ground, kicking up dust and debris all over the place. They will then grab it, wrap it up with front legs and paws around it, and then go into a guarding position, not allowing anyone near it.