War Dogs (22 page)

“I got to get my dog to the vet!” Poelaert shouted. Shrapnel had hit Flapoor, piercing the dog's stomach and puncturing a lung. The impact of
the blast had been so powerful and had hit with such force that ball bearings had lodged inside Poelaert's weapon.

Eventually Poelaert and his dog were carried out of the chaos and to surgery. They would recover, as would Cann's dog Bruno, who was also wounded in the blast. Cann did not survive.

Sometime later Flapoor came through the ISAK course at Yuma with another handler. The instructors remembered him because the dog was so petrified of explosions. One day while the dog teams were in the training field, a sonic boom sounded and Flapoor took off, streaking away in fear. They chased after the dog and found him curled up in a van, shaking. Three months later the dog died of heart failure. But Flapoor wasn't an old dog; his heart just gave out on him. Later, when they cremated him, they found shrapnel in the ashes leftover from that day in Ramadi.
12

Cann was one of 58 people killed in that 2006 bombing,
13
just three weeks shy of his twenty-fourth birthday. He wasn't even supposed to be on patrol. He had just finished a mission but when he returned to base he saw his friends, handlers Poelaert and Sergeant Jesse Maldonaldo, with their dogs and he decided he wanted to go along with them. The others told him he didn't have to do the extra work, but Cann had insisted.
14

After he died, the men on his base in Iraq set up a memorial, an upright slab of pocked alabaster concrete that reads “
camp cann
” in large, rust-colored, stenciled letters. It bears his name and the date he died; someone has sketched a likeness of Cann and his dog Bruno onto the rough surface. It has the look and feel of a tattoo, the shading and shadows of ink on hard skin. Scrawled off to the side, in quotation marks, is “This bites for you.” When the United States pulled its troops out of Iraq, the Marine Corps shipped the memorial back to Camp Pendleton, Cann's home station in California. It is now the first thing people see when they drive up to the K-9 office.

This tradition of military handlers memorializing their fallen is both old and well kept—as is commemorating the fallen dogs among their ranks.

Marine Scout dog Kaiser, an 85-pound German shepherd, was the first dog killed in action in Vietnam. Kaiser and his handler, Lance Corporal
Alfredo Salazar, were leading a patrol when they were hit with artillery fire and grenades. The dog was hit, his handler was not; it's said Kaiser returned to his handler's side, tried to lick his hand, and then died. The Marines carried his body back to camp, buried him under the shade of a tree near their tents, and renamed their base after the dog. A red sign mounted on a wooden frame was painted with large, yellow block letters:

camp kaiser: this camp is named in honor of kaiser a scout dog who gave his life for his country on 6 July 1966 while leading a night combat patrol in Viet Nam.
15

In Afghanistan at Camp Leatherneck, near the dog kennels, there's a placard with the dark outline of a handler kneeling beside his dog. In black are the words, “From a Few of the Finest.”
16
Next to it is a painted wooden cross; “K-9 MWD” is marked in black against the wood's pale yellow. Small rectangular panels bearing the names of the dead dogs hang from the arms of the cross. When the wind blows they move, almost like wings. In front of the cross is a small wooden podium, the top of which is made of three framed photos of fallen handlers.

If a dog is killed in action, he is memorialized and eulogized by his handlers and kennel masters at their forward operating bases in-country or at their home stations, often times both. These ceremonies are executed with the utmost dignity and respect. The loss is the loss of a fallen comrade, nothing more and nothing less. Open displays of mourning are appropriate, accepted.

Journalist Ernie Pyle made a note of this culture that embraced mourning canines after spending time with one dog in particular who was on the front lines of World War II. Pyle described him as a “beautiful police dog” that belonged to “the headquarters of a regiment I knew well.” Sergeant, as the dog was fondly called by the men around him, was not only much beloved but highly intelligent; the dog had learned to run for cover when a raid flew overhead, and the men in this regiment had even dug a special foxhole just for him.

Sergeant was in his foxhole when “shrapnel from an airburst got him.” The dog's injuries were beyond treatment, so the soldiers had to put him down. Six other men died in that same attack, and while Pyle's account of this day is short, it is revelatory. “The outfit lost two officers, four men and a dog in that raid. It is not belittling the men who died to say that Sergeant's death shares a big place in the grief of those who were left.”

Even outside the intensity of combat theater, kennels hold formal memorial services for their dogs when they die; handlers eulogize their partners, making full mention of their service with gratitude and respect. If you walk into a military working dog kennel on any base in the United States, you're sure to come across at least one wall commemorating all the dogs who at one time or another called the site home. Like the one on the walls of the US Air Force Academy kennels in Colorado, like the one that Barry, Doughty, and Vidal had up in their clinic in Bagram.

On one of the first days
that I was out at the ISAK course in Yuma, I noticed that Tech Sergeant Justin Kitts was wearing a black metal bracelet on his right arm. When I'd gotten close enough to take a better look, I saw that it was a memorial bracelet, with the name Sergeant Zainah Creamer, the first female handler killed in action. She died on January 12, 2011, in Kandahar Province. Kitts had been in Afghanistan with Creamer, and they had trained together at the beginning of their deployment. The day she was hit, he and Dyngo were being helicoptered back to FOB Wilson following a mission. The pilots gave him the news. Creamer had stepped on a pressure plate. “The waist down was gone,” Kitts remembered. A medevac had come, but she had lost too much blood, and by the time they had gotten her to Kandahar, it had been too late. Her dog, Jofa, had not been hurt. Kitts wore the bracelet always, he said, removing it only when he showered.

In recent years, the advent of social networks has opened up a new vein for a more accessible and immediate way to memorialize fallen handlers and their military working dogs. On one hand, these accounts—on Facebook, MySpace, and other networks—held by handlers killed in action, leave behind a ghostly legacy. Their last post or final update feels more like
a placeholder than an end marker; like a dog-eared page of a book in mid-read, it suggests the promise to return. But often these pages morph into memorial sites where friends and family of the deceased can leave messages, lamenting the shared loss with notes and photos. Or new pages are created for an always-open forum for remembrance for friends, family, and even the public. There are pages for Colton Rusk, for Sean Brazas, for Zainah Creamer, and for Joshua Ashley.

Back at Yuma, Ashley had never seemed what you might call breakable. Standing well over six feet he was, in a word, enormous—his back and shoulders were impossibly wide, earning him nicknames like Lou Ferrigno from the other Marines from II-MEF. The other guys in class had all gravitated to him, laughing at his jokes. He possessed the sure-headedness of a young man accustomed to excelling because he was big and strong. One afternoon, Ashley coaxed Sirius up into the driver's seat of one of ISAK's ubiquitous golf carts and placed the dog's paws on the steering wheel, joking with the other handlers as he'd made it look like Sirius was driving. If at other times Ashley had seemed aloof, even arrogant, in that moment with his dog he'd been gentle, working his large hands and holding Sirius with real delicacy.

On Ashley's page there are photographs of Sirius, of his brothers and his parents; snapshots from proms, where his jet black hair is slick and spiked high with gel, his face rounder, softer, still that of a growing boy. Some of these photos are posted with captions, others come with notes. As one friend wrote, months after he died: “Hey bro, its weird thinking that your [
sic
] really gone. Its crazy actually. I think about all the good times we had together. . . . My fiance got me this awesome bracelet with your name on it and on the back it has your KIA date and it just gets to me every time I look at it. I miss you man.” Elsewhere on Ashley's page someone has posted a photo of a Marine. It doesn't say who the young man is, but that doesn't really matter. On the camouflaged fabric of his helmet the Marine has inscribed a slight alteration of verse 1:9 from the Book of Joshua. In large, black-inked letters it reads: “I will be strong and courageous, I will not be terrified or discouraged, for the Lord my God is with me wherever I go.”

But these pages are more than message boards; they are chronicles of loss in wartime. Indeed, these social networking sites play a surprisingly significant role in recording the MWD efforts in these wars.

From time to time as I scroll through my Facebook News Feed, a haunting little box pops up high on the right-hand sidebar. Under the words “People You May Know” I see Ashley's profile picture. He's wearing his helmet sitting on a staircase of bleached earth, Sirius standing on the steps below him, his hand resting on Sirius's big, furry head. “Do you know Joshua?” it asks.

Determining the number
of military working dog losses—
precisely how many handlers and how many dogs have been killed during combat operations since the first dog teams were sent into Iraq in 2004—proved to be an unexpectedly difficult task. More difficult still is trying to calculate the number of wounded.

A few factors conspire to muddle what, from the outside, should seem easy numbers to tally. The first: there is no
centralized
official record of handlers killed in action. In fact, there never has been.
17
There also is no official record devoted specifically to tracking combat-related injuries or deaths for dogs.

Through a variety of contacts, nonmilitary sanctioned websites, and news articles, I managed to pull together a number I believe is close to what an official number might look like.
18
I started in 2004, the year that dogs first went into combat theater.

Handlers KIA (killed in action) from 2004 to 2013: 30

MWDs KIA from 2004 to present: 20 (2 Missing in Action)

That's not to say that there are not records of military handlers or their dogs, or that these teams are not kept track of while they are on
deployment—or that their deaths are not noted. They certainly are.

Across all the different branches there are many different kinds of
required
records kept, and each branch follows its own system. Of the more standard and significant are the dogs' training and medical records, which
span their military careers, but this information has many filters and there is no point through which they intersect, save one.

There is a centrally located, official, and, now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, publicly accessible record pertaining to military working dogs. This database is maintained by the 341st Training Squadron at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. (The Air Force, being the executive agent of the Department of Defense's working dog program, tracks all military working dogs from all branches, not just Air Force dogs.) As Master Sergeant (Ret.) Joel Burton, who was formerly responsible for maintaining this annually updated document, puts it, this is the single document that keeps track of all DOD military working dogs “from cradle to grave.”

These efforts were initiated on September 27, 2000, as part of a new piece of legislation: the Robby Law. This amendment was designed with a single, specific purpose: “to facilitate the adoption of retired military working dogs by law enforcement agencies, former handlers of these dogs, and other persons capable of caring for these dogs.”
19
The law also mandated that the 341st Training Squadron at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, the head of the Department of Defense's Military Working Dog Program, must provide Congress a full and complete record of every dog whose military service has ended that calendar year, whether by retirement and adoption, euthanasia, or death.

But this mandate wasn't conceived in a time of war and had—and continues to have—nothing to do with the dog teams' experiences in combat. That data is almost exclusively maintained with information pulled from veterinarians' records for each dog. Unfortunately, not all veterinarians follow the same standards or requirements. And there is no
requirement
for the notation of death to include details on how the dog was killed—whether by bullet, IED, heat exhaustion—nor even a requirement to list a dog's death as KIA.
20

Given that this document and its maintenance was enacted before the United States was engaged in Iraq or Afghanistan, it was not designed to track dogs in combat zones or what happens to them once they're there.
However, in examining each document from year to year, it did not evolve much beyond its original form, instead capturing more pertinent and somewhat detailed information though records were overall inconsistent and incomplete.

Further complicating the collection of these finer details, each military branch—Marine Corps, Air Force, Army, Navy—has different records and different requirements when it comes to keeping track of its dogs. It's a “we take care of our own” mentality. Which means that while each service keeps records of its dog teams—if they've been wounded, if they were killed in action, if they were retired or pulled from service for PTSD or some other reason—this information is not being gathered or reviewed.