Soldier Dogs (18 page)

A
bout 10 percent of teams that start the course don’t graduate.

Skittish, fearful, gun-shy dogs or dogs who are very distractible or unfit do not make good soldier dogs. And sometimes handlers themselves are out of shape, they make too many excuses, or, Gunny points out, they cry too much. Gunny Knight and his team of instructors try to work with dogs and handlers who need extra help. He doesn’t like cutting handlers.

“My biggest fear in life is failure. So I imagine how they feel when they fail. Even if it’s one hundred percent the dog’s fault, it’s not a joyous time. But I can’t let them get out there and have others following them, thinking they’re safe because they’re behind the dog.

“See this guy?” he says, nodding his chin toward a navy handler who is working with his dog to clear a dirt road of IEDs. “I’m brutally honest. If he was terrible I would tell him, ‘You’re terrible,’ and we’d do something about it. I don’t really care to hear that this kid got killed three months after he went to our course.”

If you ask him (and you don’t have to, because he will be sure to tell you in the course of any conversation, even about the weather), some handlers play war fighter, but don’t fight the war. They do the minimum required explosives exercises and physical training at their home bases and don’t work their dogs more than twenty minutes at one time. When they get to Knight’s course, they have a hard time.

We walk up the road to the compound, where a dog is sniffing for IEDs in front of his handler as the blast simulators make it hard to hear anything unless it’s shouted. It’s an intense scene. You could imagine this is the real deal in Afghanistan, except the dog team would have a lot more troops following. Then the dog sees a rock and walks over to it with great interest. Has he found an explosive? He sniffs. Inspects. Sniffs some more. Then he lifts his leg and splashes the rock, and moves on.

Dogs have to do their business. But some are too distractible. It’s merely annoying when Jake is marking something every two feet on a walk, but in the theater of war, it can be deadly. “If his dog’s like, ‘Whatever!’ and goes and pees and poops everywhere and doesn’t find anything, they’re gonna be like, ‘Go sit in a corner and color. We’ll take this guy instead.’ Then the other handler has an extra burden, and the team may be worked too much, which takes a toll on their accuracy as well. So the goal is for all dog teams going over to be strong and reliable.”

On another visit to Yuma in August, we’re watching a new group of handlers, again in full combat gear, despite the 110-degree temperatures. It’s a little earlier in the course, and these handlers are getting their first taste of looking for pressure plates and other IEDs in this terrain. The devices have no explosive traces, so the
exercise is for the handlers only, not the dogs. They need to be able to see the telltale signs that someone has been there: A little pattern of gravel that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the terrain. A wire barely covered with dirt. A round piece of metal that looks like a large soda cap; is it different from the other bits of litter in the area?

Porras has instructed them to just look and not say anything about where faux IEDs might be until the end of the exercise. Oh, and don’t step on anything suspicious. The handlers all mill around a small gravelly lot, looking down, walking slowly, cautiously. A couple of minutes in, Gunny shouts out to a handler.

“How ya feeling?”

“Pretty good.”

“Are you feeling kind of light?”

“No.”

“Well you should be, because you just stepped on that pressure plate two times! If this were Afghanistan, you’d be missing a few limbs by now.” The handler laughs, slightly embarrassed. The gallows humor gets the point across. The handlers walk even more slowly and seriously, inspecting the ground for the most subtle signs.

After Porras briefs them on where the devices were hidden—a few were so stealth no one guessed—he has them walk their dogs in a big oval as ammo and mortar simulators blast noisily, and at unpredictable intervals, just ten feet away. They walk around a couple of times, and Gunny leans in and points to a German shepherd and a Belgian Malinois who are looking up at their handlers more than the others. “They’re going to have problems in a minute.” They look OK to me, but in a minute I see he has pegged them.

With every explosion, both dogs flinch low to the ground, as if
someone were about to hit them. Or they tuck their tails and try to run. It’s painful to watch. The other dogs, for the most part, don’t even seem to notice the blasts. They trot with tails high or focus with tails relaxed. But these two are distressed. The handler of the Malinois tries to quickly comfort his dog after each blast.

Blast.

He pats his dog’s flanks.

Blast.

“It’s OK!” he tells his dog.

Gunny beckons the handler over and takes the dog’s leash. He walks the dog a few more feet away from the blast simulators, and the dog sits and looks at him. He strokes the dog’s head gently, bending down and looking calmly into his eyes, rubbing under his chin, then back over his ears. The dog looks up, already seeming a little more relaxed. Gunny walks him away from the blasts and then turns toward the sounds. As he does, he faces the dog, who sits and then jumps up and puts his paws on Gunny’s chest. Gunny strokes him some more and then gently uses his knee to coerce the dog back to sitting.

They do this a few more times, getting closer to the simulators, only he doesn’t let the dog jump up anymore. He just pets the dog when he sits, leaning close and looking into his eyes. There is something about his demeanor that says, “You’re going to be fine. Don’t pay these noises any attention. Trust me on this.” He hands the leash back to the handler, who has been crouched, watching. As the handler walks away, his dog tries to pull back to Gunny, and then he turns two more times toward him until he’s once again swallowed back up in the oval.

“You have to show the dog real confidence. When you’re
confident, your dog sees and feels that, and he feels safe,” Gunny explains.

The dog still flinches, but maybe not quite so much. A work in progress.

Blast
.

The handler pats his dog’s head again.

“Don’t reinforce it! Ignore it!” Gunny shouts.

He explains that with his well-meaning comforting, the handler is actually conditioning the dog to think that these noises are frightening. “His feelings are dumping down the leash right onto his dog, and the dog goes, ‘Yeah, I thought I was right about being scared.’”

Of course, the dog’s instincts are right. Hell yes, those blasts could mean some nasty business. And letting a dog think otherwise is just fooling this creature who will try his hardest to do whatever you ask of him. But the reality is that these dogs are deploying. In war, what good does it do for the dog to know those sounds could mean tremendous pain, or death?

So with ammo exposure, the idea is this: The dog needs to believe the sounds are not associated with danger. When the dog hears the blasts and gunfire enough times, and if the sounds have never been associated with anything bad, even sensitive dogs will usually come to shrug off the blasts. In Gunnyspeak (he frequently talks from a dog’s POV), the MWD thinks, “I’ve heard these sounds a thousand times and I’ve never been shot, so why should I care about one thousand and one? Hey, when I find things when these sounds are going off, I get my reward. This is kind of fun!”

Next up is the other fearful dog. This time it’s going to be a game. Gunny gets the dog’s Kong rope toy from the handler, takes
over the leash, and runs away from the simulators with the dog. As a blast goes off, he gives the dog his reward. They go back and forth several times. He’s trying to distract the dog from the blasts, so he signals to someone on his crew whenever he wants an explosion. He gives the dog his rope toy and the blast goes off. At first the dog lets it go. But after several times, he’s hanging on to it more. He’s still not happy about the noise, but there has been some improvement by the time Gunny gives the dog back. He says it’s not an ideal way to train a dog. Working a dog a little farther from the noise and working him up to it slowly is better, as is not using a reward quite so frequently. But he couldn’t stand there and watch without trying a little first aid.

Back in June I met a navy team that did not end up passing the course. “I could tell right away the dog did not have the drive,” Gunny says. One morning, while the German shepherd (who shall remain nameless, because his handler understandably felt bad about not passing) was standing with his handler, Gunny went up to him in a semi-threatening manner, waving his hat at the dog as he quickly weaved toward him. The dog stood up slowly and gave a couple of noncommittal barks. Gunny tried to engage him again and got really close. If the dog wanted to, he could have lunged, and if Gunny had not been speedy, he could have ended up missing part of his face. He riled up the dog a little, and the dog made some effort to pull toward Gunny and barked with more attitude. But it wasn’t the kind of response Gunny was looking for.

During the raid and other war scenarios, the dog had put in the
effort, but in the end, he didn’t have the drive to want his reward badly enough to perform as he needed to.

“The dog’s like, ‘None of this crap is worth it and all I want to do is sit in front of a sixty-five-year-old lady’s fireplace and relax,’” says Gunny. The team will continue to work on building up drive and confidence back at home base.

     25     

O
ne thing Gunny can’t stand seeing is a team with a handler that’s not a strong leader. There are those who argue that the alpha dog/beta dog model is archaic and based on outdated information. But you won’t find many supporters of this argument in the military working dog world.

“Two betas don’t make a right,” says Gunny Knight. “Too often you’ve got a beta leader. Every successful team needs a strong alpha leader, and that has to be the handler, not the dog.

“You see all these people these days following everyone else. They don’t think. They don’t know how to lead. Even in the military. Too many people, they’re like sheep. People are becoming sheeple. It’s no way to be in life, and it’s no way to be a handler.

“I am not a sheeple.”

Gunny Knight does not need to tell me this. I realized he was not a sheeple from our first conversation. Arod had told me about the Yuma course, and I knew I had to see it in person. I went through the proper media channels. Two weeks later, I received a phone call from a public affairs officer telling me they were
processing my request, that it might take a little time, but that they’d do their best.

A couple of days later I got a call from a man with a booming voice. He introduced himself as Gunnery Sergeant Kris Knight, course chief of the Yuma predeployment course. I was impressed at the relative speed of the public affairs department. But this call had nothing to do with the PA. Gunny had seen the e-mails going through about my request, and he said he realized it would be “a long time, if ever” before I would get to visit the course. He checked in with Captain Bowe, the officer in charge of the school, to see if the rules could be bent a little to get me in. Bowe’s offices are at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. “It’s hard to be in charge of it from sixteen hundred miles away, that’s why I need Gunny Knight,” he would later tell me.