War Dogs (19 page)

It took four days for their ride to come and collect Knight and his dog teams, and they sat, stagnant and disconnected from everyone else on the FOB. They had become pariahs. When the bird landed, they had to pick up and carry all the gear they'd brought—a month's supply for the four handlers and their dogs—the 400 meters to where the helicopter was waiting in the dark. They were not permitted to put lights on, so they had to move everything in the pitch black. No one helped them. Knight bit his lip, did not complain, and they left.

The way Knight remembers it, after they left with their dogs, that same unit would suffer a lot of casualties during the war. But, he says, those guys were a bunch of cowboys, guys who didn't want to listen to reason, guys who didn't even try to work with his team or his dogs.

As far as Knight was concerned, shame on them.

“You ready for this?”
Knight asks me with his sly-dog grin.

I don't know what you would call it—a hill, a modest incline—but as the midway point of the ruck comes into view all I can see is a mountain, a big, insurmountable rise in the earth coated in slippery pebbles and loose sand. I watch a couple of handlers shoot up to the top, pushing themselves through the worst of the steep, their dogs panting but bullying their way up alongside them. No one falls down. I'm in no hurry to be the first. I just shake my head in Knight's direction as we take the first few steps and try to laugh as if I am having the time of my life, but I am breathing so hard the noise I let loose sounds more like a horse choking.

“Here,” Knight says, holding out Max's leash. The young buck of a puppy is making wheezing sounds similar to my own, but unlike me he's actually yanking hard to race to the top. I cannot keep pace with this dog. I shake my head again. I am starting to question Knight's motives, wondering if the instructors had taken bets on when I'll pass out and we'd just hit his payout mark.

But Knight won't let it go: he puts the leash in my hand and pushes my shoulder. “Lean back,” he tells me in a low voice. And suddenly my addled brain catches on—Max, beautiful, inexhaustible Max, so desperate to get to the other dogs, is going to pull me with the force of a tractor-trailer all the way to the top. I use my weight to counterbalance his tugging and all I have to do is hang on and lift my feet. We smoke past the other teams trudging their way up the hill on either side, hurdling with the grace of a tiny tornado through the middle of the road.

At the top of the hill the handlers have broken off into separate pairs, maintaining a few feet of modest but necessary distance while they rest. The group is quiet for once, and it feels symbolic to see them joined not en masse, but each handler with his or her dog, just as they would be on a mission, a team of two. Staff Sergeant Robert Wilson kneels in front of his dog Troll, taking his temperature while Bowe looks on. Peeler is sitting on the ground, his pack slumped up behind him still strapped onto his shoulders, and he leans back into it, his weapon flat across his bent knees. Lex is on
the ground by his ankles, the sides of his body moving as he takes in each deep, rapid breath. Lance Corporal Eddie Garcia is about two yards down the slope from Peeler, his dog Lubus curled on his side against him. Lance Corporal Joshua Ashley is one of the few still on his feet, standing to the left of the truck; he's holding his gun at the ready. His dog Sirius has taken position by Ashley's boots. Hardesty and McCoy make the rounds and check in on the dogs, watching the handlers as they take rectal temperatures of their dogs, water them down and bring them in turn to the orange coolers placed around them for a nice, long drink. Most everyone keeps on his gear.

And then the day is gone. The sunset's blushing oranges have burned down into the horizon and a dusky purple rises to color the sky. My eyes adjust to the dark as the chem sticks that each handler has put on his back, or has tied to the bottom of his helmet, begin their neon glow. The break is over, the ruck is back on.

Packs lift and the descent begins. Max's leash stays with Knight; our trick to get me to the top won't work the same on the way down. The dogs don't seem to have any trouble picking their way along the slant of the hill. I watch the camo-clad legs of the handlers and copy their side-to-side steps, trying to grip the hill with the bottoms of my feet.

From the base of the hill the dog teams start the walk back to the K-9 village. My bones and joints are already protesting the movement. I hope for numbness. While we walk one of the dogs defecates, and the smell smacks into us, overwhelming as it lingers on the air.

“That's one thing I'll never get used to,” Knight says, shaking his head hard as if he can forcibly toss the stink of it from his nose. His eyes are watering. There's little in life that bothers him, but that smell is one of them. That, he says, and seeing small children get hurt. Something he saw too much of in Iraq. While he had been on tour, an Iraqi man had brought his young son in for emergency treatment. They'd been riding on the man's motorcycle and the small boy had tumbled off as they were driving. When Knight had seen the boy, his body was lifeless, his face drained of color, and the blood gushed from his head. Knight said he could barely stand to look at him.

Behind the braying bravado, the crass jokes, and the don't-fuck-with-me eyes, Knight is a man who cares deeply about what he does. Almost a month after the night of the ruck march, Knight would find out that the Air Force intended to start its own advanced course and would be pulling not only its students from the ISAK program, but also its instructors from the course. That meant Knight would lose Staff Sergeant Philip Mendoza, Kitts, and Keilman all at once. On top of this news, other changes were weighing on his mind—pending budget cuts loomed over the whole of the Marine Corps, threatening the ISAK course's funding. That night in April he calls me from his car while he waits for the new class to finish up their ruck. Our conversation rounds a corner, and it is like a tight coil inside of Knight springs out of shape, launching, directionless.

He is sick of others in his field doing the bare minimum, the people who just put checks in boxes. The only ones who get hurt are the handlers, kids he says that, without the proper training, will be sent to fight a war, to offer a service they're not capable of delivering. To him it's like using a weapon that's missing parts, or a gun without any bullets. Knight's voice grows louder and louder, angrier and angrier. “We're just going to send them into the wind and pray it doesn't come back on us. That's not the right way to do it.”

The overflow of his frustration has something underneath it—not weakness exactly, but something more straining. It feels like helplessness.

“If the fucking mothers of America knew what their kids were over there trying to do, running at half speed at best, looking for 40-pound and 200-pound bombs,” he said, “they'd be disgusted. They'd break their own kids' leg so they couldn't go.”
5

At the end of the ruck march,
the instructors stand together behind the open doors of their trucks and the golf carts that everyone calls gators parked at the edge of the K-9 village. They are waiting for the dog teams to get ready for the night's “missions”—the drills that will extend well into the morning hours. The taillights and the glow from the car interiors cast a hazy, purplish pale over them, and I can make out the
approving grins that meet me as I limp my way over to them. Keilman asks me how I feel.

My bones ache. My knees, which have been reduced to unsteady knots, wobble, and my shoulders scream for mercy—it's like the places where my joints ought to meet no longer want to hold together. But my face stretches into a smile so big it is beyond my control. Keilman smiles back and tells me he's proud, raising his hand to give me a high five.

Knight and Max are waiting for me to walk the final yards—about the length of a football field—back to the hangar. But in a moment of adrenaline-fueled mania, I offer to take Hardesty's pack up to the office for him. As he helps hoist his 70-pound rucksack over my much smaller backpack, I teeter, my hips nearly giving out. But I smile the smile of delirious triumph and suck whatever air I am able to harness into my lungs. I can do this, too, I tell myself. By the time I make it over to Knight I know I've made a terrible mistake. After taking one look at me he knows it too, and pulls the pack off my shoulders and carries it the rest of the way.

There is one phrase
a handler must know forward and backward. It is as much a mantra as it is an instruction. “Where I go, my dog goes. Where my dog goes, I go.”

This is the line Staff Sergeant William Stone repeats as he delivers his Spotter's Brief to McCoy. Stone says this part fast, rushing the words that culminate in one of the most important things he will communicate to a commanding officer before a mission. (They teach the handy acronym
YMCA
—You, Me, and Course of Action.) It's a monologue the handlers have rehearsed endlessly these last few days at ISAK. The message is: See this dog here with me? We are not to be separated.

This is followed by instructions on how to handle the dog—if the dog is a biter, if he is protective of his handler—as well as the location of the Kong and the muzzle the handler carries on him at all times. Handlers also carry a card that they give to the medic before a mission. It lists basic emergency care for anyone who might be able to administer life-saving measures
if the dogs are injured downrange. Things that even a medic might not know, like, for example, that dogs require more morphine than humans.
6

Stone is about to patrol the market lane in the ISAK's K-9 village. The dog teams only have a few days left at Yuma, and the following evening they will begin the course's final exams, or FINEX. Earlier that evening I'd walked the dusty market lane with McCoy and he showed me where he'd set up the plants. “Tonight's the rude awakening,” McCoy says.

It is the last night for practice, the last night to make mistakes. The instructors have purposely set the teams up for failure, giving them more difficult exercises to jar the handlers out of bad habits and complacency.

At one of the huts, McCoy has set up a trip wire drawn loosely along the base of the wooden doorframe. It is so menacingly obscure it all but disappears in the darkness. And while the teams won't encounter a trip wire during FINEX, if they pay attention and use what the instructors will show them tonight, they should easily deal with the tests during FINEX. McCoy steps back and looks at the wire, crossing his arms. He knows this is still the crawl phase for the handlers, but tomorrow, he says, they'll be running.

In the Urzugan Province of Afghanistan there is a ten-mile-long thoroughfare known rather notoriously as IED Alley. During McCoy's deployment to Afghanistan with his Specialized Search Dog Spalding, a chocolate lab, they had regularly patrolled IED Alley.
7
One day, after they received reports that there were IEDs on the road ahead, McCoy and Spalding pushed out and started doing a search with the Afghan National Army guards working with them. After a while McCoy saw that the dog was tired and needed a rest. No sooner had he grabbed Spalding and turned away than a bomb blew up. The blast knocked McCoy clear off his feet and Spalding onto his side. They'd been only 20 feet from the explosion.

McCoy has a vague and throaty southern accent and a very deep tan. He's a little older than the other instructors, and when McCoy expends his advice to the handlers, he does it in a fatherly kind of way, stern and soft altogether. He's eager to show every intricate part, to make sure they understand exactly how it all works—the wires, the proper way to enter and exit
a building, how not to get lost in cordon search or in the maze of the K-9 village's alleyways.

For the night missions the handlers are using NVGs (night vision goggles). The handlers have theirs clipped to their helmets. Hardesty shows them how to balance them over their helmets, weighing them down with batteries to keep them from sliding out of place. The NVGs are small and black, essentially half a pair of binoculars. The flap around the eyehole is malleable, soft black rubber, and it closes out all the light. After a few blinks a fuzzy picture comes into view, in which everything is colored in varying greens: shades of neon lemon and lime.

It's one thing to see through NVGs, it's another to actually know how to use them. It's McCoy who takes the time to demonstrate how to adjust them and pick out the trip wire. At first it's barely visible; it lies flat in the dark. If you didn't know it was already there, the wire would be nearly impossible to see. But with a twist of one of the filters and a push of the infrared button, the wire pops into view, glowing white hot, like a thin thread of crackling electricity. There is no way anyone could miss it. It feels like magic, a secret defense like Superman's X-ray vision—the ability to unveil otherwise invisible dangers.

But that wire in McCoy's lane nails almost all the teams that come through that night, and they all have their NVGs. Lance Corporal Phil Beauchamp, a young Marine from Walnut Creek, California, later admits that it was in McCoy's lane where he had problems.

Loud music blasted from the intercom system throughout the village, and there was a bonfire raging in an oil drum, with its flames blazing more than ten feet into the air. The blast simulator, rocketing off the noise of erupting mortar shells, sounded constantly. This combined chaos was designed specifically for this night of training. It created an added layer of stress that threw Beauchamp off. He sighs and says he “died” twice within five minutes. He kind of laughs and when he does, his cheeks pull up and the thin wisp of a mustache bristles above his lip.

That night though, he and his dog lost their groove. “My dog was pissing me off, and I was getting pissed off. As soon as you lose your attitude
everything goes downhill. And the dog loses his attitude, too, when you lose yours. And I believe in that,” he says, his brown eyes serious. “You know, everything that you feel the dog feels.”