We’ll also do things such as wrestling with the dog—putting a little bit of pinching or grabbing or twisting pressure on a dog’s legs to teach him to keep his legs out of the way. Eventually we’ll get to the point that, while he’s engaged, he’s got his legs tucked kind of back behind him, keeping them out of the way, something that the bad guy can’t grab and try to break. Or if the guy does grab hold of him and starts to injure him, maybe the dog regrips on whatever hand, weapon, or object is attacking or hurting him, and goes after that.
If the scenario presents itself in which the dog can basically circle around back and get the guy in the triceps area, we’ll teach a dog to do that as well, because it’s incredibly difficult to fight a dog when he’s got you by the back of the arm. You can’t really grab him.
And so we ratchet up all these different types of targeting and pressure on the dog so that he is engaged in increasing apprehension training over the course of his entire life. And as his mental maturity can afford it, we put a little bit of extra pressure on him so that if he has to go into a building and fight, say, a six-foot-four, 240-pound linebacker on heroin, he’s used to getting yelled at and punched and kicked and thrown against the wall. And that’s all part of the game to him, basically, and it’s not going to freak him out. He’s not going to pop off, let go, and run away. He’s been conditioned and trained to take that amount of pressure.
Similar to working through offensive and defensive drives, we have to be incredibly experienced, very patient, and very knowledgeable in reading the dog and knowing how much pressure to put on, when to raise the level and when to back off. Especially in the first year of that dog’s life, it is very, very easy to ruin a good dog by pushing him and going too fast, putting too much pressure on him too early.
And sometimes it’s difficult because you’ll get dogs that are just firecrackers. They’re really, really advanced. They’re mentally more mature than they should be for their age. Maybe they’re physically a little bigger than you would think or that you would expect, and you can get caught up in pushing them a little too far. But it’s imperative that you don’t, or you can have a detrimental effect on the dog and ruin him.
Again, the entire goal is a nonlethal neutralization of a threat. I want to see the dog push through, come with forward aggression, and continue, to see the fight through the end—to control but not to kill.
I have to admit that as serious as this work is for me, I take a lot of pleasure in creating and participating in these on-site exercises. A lot of our terrain-adaptability training takes place in the numerous mountain ranges of our beautiful country. Because so many of the dogs are deployed with teams in Afghanistan, this is a pretty decent mock-up of what they’ll encounter when there—both handler and dog. Just thinking about the feeling of driving along in an ATV at thirty-five to forty mph up a mountain pass with the goddamn dogs keeping up with us for eight hundred yards of elevation gain over the course of three-quarters of a mile gives you an appreciation for these dogs. They lope along in that classic herder stride, a combination of seemingly effortless athletic grace and fierce determination that gets my heart pumping in awe and pride.
I also have to say that I feel a bit of envy as well watching these dogs work at the peak of their powers. I spent years operating with SEAL Team 3 out of Coronado, California, completing multiple deployments to the Middle East, and loved every minute of it. It was an incredibly intense, fast-paced, and rewarding career that challenged me constantly but made me realize who I was. I left SEAL Team 3 and went to be an advanced training instructor at SQT (SEAL Qualification Training). I spent about eighteen months there, and during a training trip to a desert environment ended up contracting Valley Fever. Valley Fever is a fungal infection of the lungs that spreads like mold and scars your lung tissue permanently, to the point that you lose lung capacity. After recovering from that as much as my body was able to, I transferred over to BUD/S to be an instructor. I spent almost four years there selecting, teaching, and forging some of the finest warriors our nation has to offer. It was during that time that I learned as much as I could and have always admired what they brought to the table as a force-protection enhancement. While I can’t be part of those forces working overseas, I still do my best, but I have to admit my somewhat-diminished physical capacity hasn’t always been easy for me to live with.
Just because I’m no longer in the navy and not a member of SEAL Team, that doesn’t mean that I’ve lost some of my competitive spirit or that I lack the kind of camaraderie I enjoyed as a SEAL Team member. My good friend Wayne—who is the guy I mentioned earlier in regard to the decoy work and being able to stand a dog down with his posture—was formerly a navy Search and Rescue (S & R) corpsman and is one hell of a guy, a man who has taught me a lot about dogs and is one of the real friends I’ve got in this life. I’ve got plenty of buddies, but just a few friends, and Wayne is one of them. We frequently work together in training MWDs, and Wayne brings a wealth of experience and insight into the mix.
Wayne grew up mostly in Florida and spent a lot of his early years in the swamps tracking and hunting wild hogs using dogs. I don’t know of anyone else who can read a dog like Wayne can, and I also don’t know anyone else who can work as a decoy any better than him. He’s also a trainer, and one of the German shepherd dogs he had was titled in seven or eight different disciplines, which is an almost unheard-of accomplishment.
Wayne seems to have a preternatural sense of anticipation about what a dog is doing and thinking of doing. One night a few years ago, Wayne and I were on an apprehension training exercise with a group of about six dogs and handlers. We’d head up the mountains in advance of the dogs, be on comms with the handlers and another of our assistants. We’d be several miles out ahead of these men and dogs, and then we’d radio back when we’d selected a good hideout. The dogs would come into human odor and alert their handlers, get the reviere command, and dogs and handlers would come looking for us. We were suited up, of course, often in a middleweight suit with a neoprene underlayer—kind of like a wetsuit. That bottom layer offered additional padding but was also slick, making it harder for the dogs to grab hold when their teeth penetrated the outer part of the suit. After the first five dogs successfully got us, we were taking a break and shooting the shit.
It generally takes the dogs twenty to thirty minutes to cover the few miles between our find position and their release point. We did a debrief of the previous dog, taking notes so that we could do a full-blown evaluation of both dog and handler at the completion of the exercise. Wayne was next up as the decoy, and I looked at him and said, “You know who’s coming, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Yes, I do,” he said, sounding both a bit prideful and on edge.
Luke was notorious for being the most acrobatic dog of that training group. If dogs could be gymnasts, Luke would have been the equivalent of both the Hamm brothers. The things this dog could do with his body, how he could flex, twist, and contort himself to make sure that his mouth was pointed in the right direction, were becoming legendary. The other thing about Luke was that he was damn smart. So, as a decoy, one of the challenges in catching Luke is that he was always really, really good at feinting and faking. He’d come at you, looking for sure like he was going to come at you hard, low, and left, and then right at the last split second, he’d switch it up and catch us off guard. As a decoy, you take pride in not being knocked down, because you do it so often that you kind of get good and you get comfortable, and then you start to get a little cocky, like, This dog’s not going to take me down. Then Luke comes along, of course.
I said, “I bet you can’t esquive Luke.” Esquive is a French term that means to “dodge” or “sidestep” someone or something.
Wayne shook his head. “Bullshit. I’ll esquive him all fucking day long.”
So I said, “Okay, lets bet dinner on it. Winner’s choice.”
After a few minutes, I climbed to a little ridge where I could see better. It was
a fairly well-lit night, quite a full moon, bright and close. Over the comms, I’d heard, “Dog out,” about fifteen minutes before, so it was going to be just a few minutes until the action started. I sat there thinking, All right, I can’t wait to see this.
Keep in mind: Wayne is not just one hell of a decoy. He’s just the best decoy I’ve ever seen. He’s so quick on his feet that I thought that if anybody had a chance to esquive Luke, it was Wayne. And I thought he honestly had a pretty good chance of esquive-ing Luke. When I saw Luke coming, I was a little disappointed. He was charging at him from much the same direction that an earlier dog, Duke, had come at me. I knew Wayne had seen how that had gone down—one of those times when I thought my arm was going to be crushed—and he’d have the advantage of seeing my mistake.
Suddenly, still running at close to full tilt, Luke didn’t come uphill at Wayne; instead, he went around a few scrub bushes from the windward side and buttoned up back around. As a result, Wayne had to spin around real quick. As any good soldier knows, it’s important to take the high ground, and that’s exactly what Luke did. He took Wayne completely off guard, hit him right in the chest, and just pancaked my good friend’s ass. Wayne is six feet two and weighs between 220 and 225 pounds, and Luke blitzed him like he was a bag full of leaves.
Wayne managed to get up and finish out the scenario, but afterward he was reluctant to own up to his loss.
“I knocked that one on purpose. I didn’t want the dog to get hurt.”
Whatever.
“Dude,” I said to Wayne, “don’t give me that BS excuse. I want my dinner.”
Wayne made good on his promise, and I also had good ammunition to bust his balls with for the next two weeks. The combination of Luke’s cunning and strength was extremely impressive.
Sometimes the dogs and their ability to use their bite strength have unintended consequences for those of us who train them.
Along with the mountain-terrain exercises, we also have to simulate urban ones. Given the nature of contemporary warfare, building searches are a common part of an MWD’s duties. Fortunately, we have access to a number of compounds. One day, I set up a scenario that I thought would trip up the dogs with a combination of environmental factors. On this training day, we were on a compound that was spread out over two to three acres with approximately eight different buildings scattered across that space. It was in the foothills of some Southern California mountains, and the setting included heavy concentrations of vegetation, good-sized trees, and plenty of scrub. The environment was a close approximation of what they’d encounter in Afghanistan.
As usual, we took the dogs and handlers, six of each in this case, and we decided that our hiding spot was going to be in the largest of the buildings on site—an open-bay barracks, similar to what you might see at boot camp. There were three such buildings on the training ground, and each had a hundred or so two-tiered beds, a couple of common-area rooms, a large mess/kitchen area, some storage rooms, and, most critical to this exercise, two larger shower areas and bathrooms. In other words, these were sprawling buildings with multiple good hiding spots.
I explained the training exercise to the handlers by saying, “Okay, you guys are going to patrol in, cordon off security, and go into this building and try to find a high-value target in there.”
That target was me in a bite suit.
This was a daytime exercise, but I had blacked out all the windows, so it was dark in there. A dog’s vision isn’t quite as negatively affected as ours is by going from a bright room to a pitch-black room, but it absolutely is similar. I selected a hiding spot in that shower area, as far from the building’s entry point as possible. To add to the confusion caused by the dark, I also turned on all the showerheads with the water running full blast. In my mind this was going to be a major obstacle, the equivalent of the dogs working through a waterfall outdoors. Only in this case, it was pitch-black in there.
I squatted against a wall, breathing the moist air, confident that I’d have plenty of time to wait and likely have a dog or two fail to find me at all.
I was wrong.
Within a few minutes, the first dog came blasting out of the darkness to pile-drive me. My intention to make it tougher on the dog by having the water running turned into a serious disadvantage for me. I was in a bite suit, wrestling with a wet dog, trying to keep my footing on a slippery tile floor, waiting for the dog’s handler to find me to get the damn dog off me. Even though I trained these dogs myself at times, by this point in their training, some nineteen months in, they only obeyed their handlers—as they should.
I don’t know if words can adequately describe the feelings of anticipation and dread that you experience when you’re in a situation like that, knowing that at any second, a sixty-to-eighty-pound monster is going to steamroller you. It is time for more than sweaty palms, let me tell you, but the thrill of it never gets old. That’s especially true when the dogs and handlers do such a stellar job, like they did on this particular day. Wayne and I had switched on and off being the decoy, and we both agreed that we’d been foiled and the dogs had won the battle that day. My pride wasn’t wounded, but it was tough to walk off the field of battle with such sore and rapidly swelling forearms, hands, and legs.
As I mentioned earlier, the dogs can be seriously injured or killed if they are turned loose to apprehend someone who is near a window or on a roof or some other elevated structure. The dogs are kept on leash during some of the exercises and, depending on the situation, when in the field and actually working. The handlers have to make decisions about when to release them—and it generally varies when a dog indicates or shows a sign that they’ve gotten the scent trail of a human. During these training exercises for apprehension, I’m doing a lot of different things, including evaluating the handlers’ decisions. I want them to be able to make swift and appropriate choices, obviously, and the only way to do that is to make them work through multiple scenarios time and time again.
We’d traveled to another compound-type training area, this one in the American Southeast, among stands of loblolly pines. The buildings in this compound were constructed of cinder block, and small windows were formed from blocks that had been knocked out of the walls. The discarded blocks lay on the ground inside the structures. For this exercise, I told the handlers to keep the dogs on leash until the moment they thought best. What I was hoping would happen, a kind of teachable moment, was that a handler would release a dog prematurely. I’d been standing on a few of those blocks, with my body half inside the room and half hanging out the window. My plan was that as soon as a dog inserted itself into the room, I’d jump out the window and then turn around to catch the dog that had followed me out the window and onto the grassy area below.
The point, of course, would be to make it clear to that handler that he’d made a poor choice. Not only had the bad guy evaded capture, the MWD had been hurt in that fall from the window. In the exercise, of course, the window was only thirty or so inches off the ground, so no harm would come to the dog.
Even after all these years of working with these dogs, I can still underestimate just how fast they can get to you. On the first go-round, I barely scrambled out of the window fully intact before the dog was literally nipping at my heels. It came tearing after me from around the back, as he had caught wind of me and had scurried out the door on the side. I was just glad that I was able to illustrate for the handler what might have happened without putting a dog’s health at risk. I chose my profession and the risks that go along with it. Dogs don’t get the same choice, and as I’ve said repeatedly, the dogs are doing what they are bred to do and take a great deal of pleasure in doing it. They don’t get to exercise the same level of choice that we humans do, but, still, I take the responsibility to provide dogs that are sound in their training and in their health.
Just like humans, dogs occasionally develop nagging overuse injuries during the course of their training, and they sometimes either get left behind entirely from
their “classmates” or more often they just lag behind for a day or two to recuperate; sometimes they rest for an entire training cycle and join another class already in the pipeline.
I hadn’t really made the connection between the apprehension work we do and the feelings I experience when in the bite suit. I’m eager to make sure that the dogs are safe and in the best possible shape to help keep our soldiers, sailors, and marines safe. Even knowing what it feels like when those teeth penetrate the bite suit, I don’t have any sympathy for the bad guys who encounter these dogs in the flesh.
I love the work I do, and I know how important it is to take the time to get things done right. We work hard and have some fun as well, but I absolutely refuse to cut corners. At one point, I received word about how the dogs were doing. This story confirmed what I believed: we were on the right track and the dogs we provided were making a difference.
The moon sat just above the ridge of the mountain as we descended into a cutback that would lead us down into a valley. The boys adjusted their gear; the hike down into the valley was crisscrossed with barren loose rock and dense thorny brush along nothing more than what equated to a goat path. There had been a lot of activity in the area lately, the ground giving away constant sign of foot traffic, which had kicked loose the rock underfoot. The terrain glowed with a greenish tint as we looked through our NVGs, studying the lay of the land before us, everyone alert for the slightest hint of danger. Reno was out front, his muscled lean body moving with little effort, his eyes alert, ears perked at every sound; his breath, as he exhaled, created a small vortex of hot humid air as it interacted with the cold dry air that surrounded him. I had been Reno’s partner now for a little over a year, and the bond between my dog and me was something that ran deep and was hard to truly explain; quite simply put, I loved him and trusted my very life to him.
Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines Page 11
