War Dogs (3 page)

Their reputation spread further, beyond their fellow Marines and beyond their base. Whenever he worked with the Iraqi border police, Vierig showed them just how well his dog could find explosives. “Go ahead,” he'd say to them, “hide it. Anywhere you want. My dog will find it.” The Iraqi police officers would take a nonexplosive piece of material and tuck it away somewhere. Minutes later Duc would find it. Soon enough, while they were on patrol in the streets, the Iraqi civilians would point at the dog and say to Vierig, “Duc?” They knew his dog's name.

Vierig and Duc were stationed in Husaybah, an Iraqi border town known for its unwieldy lawlessness. A city of about 30,000 people, it was so treacherous even Saddam Hussein hadn't been able to keep control over it. It was a dangerous, violent, and volatile place located right on the Syrian border and along the western side of the Euphrates. The Marines there were constantly engaged in firefights with the insurgents. They practically had the routine down pat: after an exchange of gunfire, the Marines would give chase, down the streets running past shops and houses. Then the insurgents would rush into a mosque, knowing the Marines would not follow. It was a religious place, a sacred space and off limits. So the Marines had no choice but to wait. Sometimes the insurgents would emerge and the fight would begin again; other times they'd stay shut in and the Marines would disengage, knowing the firefight would just pick up again another day.

The insurgents would leave notes for them on the doors of the mosque. These were hateful messages, threats of violence and revenge. One day Vierig was in front of the mosque and a note caught his eye—some of it was in Arabic, some of it was in English. It had the standard threats promising the decapitation of American heads and cooking their brains, when he saw a word he recognized: “Duck.” It was spelled like the waterfowl, but the bounty it promised was for a hit on his dog. Next to it was a number: 10,000. Whether it was the guarantee of dollars or some other currency, Vierig wasn't sure, but he knew the enemy was gunning for his dog. And that was when the impact he and Duc were making became real.

When he first arrived in Iraq
in 2004, Sean Lulofs was a fairly religious man. Being someone who put a lot of stock in quiet humility, he just couldn't contend with Farnsworth's behavior—his foul mouth, his lewd jokes, or his cocky strut. They were the only two canine handlers stationed at Camp Baharia, and while the men didn't butt heads exactly, they spent those first weeks living together in an uncomfortable quiet. But eventually a grudging respect grew between them. Farnsworth, in his late 20s, had small, dark eyes below a substantial brow and a high rising forehead. Lulofs could see that behind the bullshit bravado, he was a competent handler. Lulofs liked the way the guy worked his dog, Eesau. And sharing such close living quarters, he would sometimes overhear Farnsworth making calls home to his wife, catching bits of their conversation. Somewhere along the way the distance between the men closed, and soon the handlers and their dogs became a tight-knit unit of four.

From day to day, their job was mostly running traffic control points, or TCPs, in different locations along the main routes in and out of Fallujah. Lulofs and Farnsworth eventually got their own Humvee from two other Marine handlers so they could travel with their dogs. It was a Frankenstein hybrid, a blend of ill-fitting pieces—part pickup truck, part jeep, part tractor. After a couple of months, it took on the look of a hardened scab—dinged, dented, scorched, and bruised.

When Lulofs and Farnsworth started taking the vehicle on missions, making the trip between Camp Baharia and Fallujah, the Humvee didn't have any armor—nothing, not even a bulletproof windshield. They were given a couple of Kevlar blankets, which couldn't have stopped a bullet or warded off shrapnel. Still, it was all they had, so they draped them along the carriage in the back where they kept the dog kennels. It was a paltry safeguard, especially as Lulofs and Farnsworth knew that without Aaslan and Eesau they had no real place in this war. Bit by bit they clamped on additions to their Humvee, stitching together mismatched patches of metal and canvas, adding the L-shaped armored doors for the driver and passenger side, and the homemade AC unit they jerry-rigged to a generator and
lobbed onto the roof. It was an eyesore of a combat vehicle, one that stood out in any convoy, and it became a prime and sought-after target.

It didn't take long before there was a bounty on their heads—Lulofs's and Aaslan's, Farnsworth's and Eesau's—handlers and dogs together. Shortly after those first teams arrived in 2004, the going rate for taking them out was $10,000. Lulofs was hell-bent on pissing off the enemy so much that by the time they left Iraq the bounty would be worth at least $25,000.
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Early one day in August they were riding in a convoy on their way to set up a TCP. There were very few cars on MSR (Main Supply Route) Mobile that morning. Lulofs could feel that something was off as soon as they rolled out onto the paved thoroughfare; it was too quiet. The main six-lane highway that traverses the outside edge of the city of Fallujah usually saw more traffic at this time of day.
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They guessed that word of some impending threat had spread among the people living in the city, and so the civilians were avoiding their normal route, using instead the makeshift dirt road that ran alongside MSR Mobile.

After some back and forth on their radios, Lulofs, Farnsworth, and the other Marines in their convoy determined that what they were looking at was likely a single IED attack. So they slowed down their normal speed of 45 miles per hour to about 25, taking the road nice and easy. Lulofs drove, keeping his eyes locked on the road, looking for disturbances—a suspicious bump, a rock pile—anything that could be a bomb.

They'd been creeping along for some time when the convoy pushed past a certain point and there was an explosion. But it wasn't just a single IED—that was just the trigger signal. The enemy, lying in wait, now had the target in its sights and started unloading its arsenal. The onslaught hit the convoy from the left side, so while Lulofs was driving, focused on steering around any IEDs, he was also aiming his weapon out the window, shooting as they pushed ahead. Farnsworth, who didn't have a clear shot from the passenger's seat, kept his eyes glued in front: watching for danger, calling out directions, and reloading Lulofs's weapon. The incoming fire pelted them as they pressed forward on the road, like ants in a line unable to scatter.

One of the rounds hit their Humvee—a bullet piercing its armor, passing right between Lulofs's knees, striking the steering wheel column and then ricocheting up, exploding the dashboard and spraying little blackened bits of shrapnel everywhere, breaking the skin along his hands, legs, chest, and arms.

Lulofs barely had time to react when Farnsworth shouted, “RPG!” Lulofs flinched and slammed the break, keeping the rocket-propelled grenade from hitting the driver's side door. The barrage continued; Farnsworth was so pissed that he climbed out his side of the vehicle while it was still moving to position himself so he could return fire over the back end of the truck. He wasn't there for very long—within a few minutes' time they'd almost made it out of the danger zone. The guys in the vehicle behind theirs watched as Lulofs's and Farnsworth's Humvee got slammed and counted at least six RPGs that sailed past or hit the vehicle. Each time, they missed or hit without detonating, clanking against the armor at an angle and flying back up into the air. It had been a relentless, nonstop hail of bullets and mortars that lasted the full stretch of a mile.

When they finally were able to pull over, the first thing they did was check on their dogs, who were still in their kennels in the back. While Aaslan had weathered the barrage, Eesau had not; he refused to get out of his kennel. Even after Farnsworth managed to coax him out, Eesau still wouldn't work. The stress was so great, the dog just shut down. The dogs had protection against bullets, yes, but it had been modest at best. And as each round hit the side of their vehicle close to where the dogs were riding, Lulofs couldn't help but think that they'd been killed or at least wounded. Amazingly, they weren't even scratched. But they had come close. On the outside of the vehicle, right by the dogs' kennels, was a compartment where they kept their MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, the prepackaged field rations. Later, when they opened up an MRE, they found a bullet lodged inside.

It was after that August ambush that Lulofs began to change. He'd been deployed for nearly six months, and the devout man he'd been when he arrived in Iraq was seeing things differently. Where before he'd have shaken his head in offense at the sound of swearing, profanity now spouted freely
from his mouth. Farnsworth noticed the difference in his friend and tried to talk to Lulofs about it; he reasoned that if a guy who wouldn't even utter a curse word put his Bible in a bag and never touched it again, it meant something wasn't right.

But it was more than that. Lulofs had grown complacent. It wasn't laziness but a kind of mania that gripped him. When they went out on missions, Lulofs stopped carrying his rifle, taking only his sidearm. He started to think himself invincible, believing that bullets and bombs couldn't touch him. He'd already faced them all and survived. God wasn't going to let him die, not here. Not in Fallujah.

The nearer he came to the end of his deployment, the more the thought of going home began to consume Lulofs. He began to approach each mission with a ravenous sense of purpose, working his handlers and their dogs to the breaking point. On one mission during those last weeks, he worked his team with such belligerent intent that he didn't even realize they had pushed their way past the front line—putting his dog teams between the Marines and the enemy. When he finally noticed they were in the kill zone, Lulofs simply told his handlers to keep moving even as they were getting shot at, telling them to ignore it. They were less than 100 yards from artillery shells. He knew how dangerous it was but he didn't care.

Lulofs rationalized away the risks he was taking. The sooner they were done with this mission, the sooner they could begin the next and then, only then, could they leave this godforsaken place and go home.

A single moment of clarity managed to prick its way through the fog of Lulofs's complacency. While he and Farnsworth were out together on a mission, Lulofs saw a master gunnery sergeant, with Special Ops standing a few feet away, watching the pair of them. The sergeant walked over and looked Lulofs straight in the eye. “You two have been here too long,” he told him.

The sense of fearlessness and invincibility he felt on missions was, he would realize later, purely selfish, and it put him recklessly close to the edge of death. Looking back now, Lulofs believes he survived the war because of two things. One of those things was luck; the other was Aaslan. The dog
had been his lone emotional crutch and the real reason why he'd been able to retain as much of himself as he could hold onto in Fallujah.

The other men relied on Aaslan too. During their deployment in Iraq, Lulofs had one rule about his dog. No one could pet Aaslan while they were working. The Marines on their patrols knew this rule and respected it. They would wait for each mission to be over because that's when Aaslan was free—free to be loved on, free to play.

There would be a lot of bad days in Iraq, “bad” meaning that they had severe casualties. After one very bad day, Lulofs and Aaslan were waiting with the Marines to remount so they could get back to their base. Lulofs watched while one Marine broke down, put his head on Aaslan's shoulder, and wept.

Any handler who has brought a dog
with him or her to war will say it made all the difference in the world. They will say that the dog by their side provided them with something more than just a living, breathing piece of home—the dog acted as a talisman, insulating them from whatever horrors unfolded, bringing them peace in turbulence, offering companionship in times of loneliness. The dog's presence made the path through war bearable, the unendurable somehow endurable, and many will say they came through the other side more stable.

During wartime or otherwise, no matter how far one strays from working dogs, whether to venture into different military jobs or once back in civilian life, K-9 is a lifelong state of mind. It's like a bloodline, deep and tangled, the mark of which lives on long past the dogs, long after the wars are over.

Sean Lulofs knew he wanted to be a handler when he was five years old. His mother brought him to a police demonstration. He watched as an officer placed a bag of cocaine in a woman's purse. Then a dog was brought in and, within minutes, found the cocaine. Awestruck, he turned to his mother and declared his life's goal—to become a K-9 police officer.

Dog handlers are their own breed. In Lulofs's estimation handlers have their own place in the military world; they are like drops of oil floating in water—distinct, separate. It's all part of the personality, he says. They see
themselves as outsiders within the larger world of the military. Shunned, misunderstood. “Leadership doesn't understand us,” he says, “because they don't understand our mindset. They don't quite grasp us because they don't understand dogs.”

Even though he didn't fully leave the MWD program, Lulofs stopped handling dogs in 2009 to take a managerial role. Advancing as a dog handler in the military often means giving up the work he loves—the higher the rank, the further into the world of administration one goes, and the further he is from working with the dogs. Still, the familiar ring of K-9 pride colors Lulofs's voice. It's the same sound that carries in Ron Aiello's voice, just as it does with most handlers whether they're retired or active, young or old.

A scout dog handler who served in Vietnam, Ron Aiello still beams with pride for Stormy, the dog who accompanied him to war. From the way Aiello talks about her—immediate, vivid, and joyful—it's as if Stormy is somehow still at his feet or dozing in the next room, instead of a memory from a lifetime nearly half a century old. She did more, Aiello believes, than merely save the lives of the men on the patrols he led through the jungles of Vietnam, alerting them to snipers, ambushes, and explosives. Had it not been for Stormy, he says, “I would've come back a different person.”