Maria Goodavage: Soldier Dogs

Ask almost any handler how he likes the work, and you’ll hear something like this: “It’s the best job in the world.” I’ve never heard this phrase so much as I did while exploring the world of military working dogs. These are people who go to hellish areas and get shot at and risk their lives every day, and they say things like “I wouldn’t trade working with my dog for anything,” or “Canine is a lot of hard work, a lot of extra hours, but, I mean, it’s a dog .”

These men and women (women make up only 10 percent of handlers) don’t all come from a dog background, but those who make it through the intensive training and end up with a canine partner are passionate about what they do. Handlers tend to be type A personalities who, by their own admission, often get along better with dogs than people. Not that they don’t like people. It’s just that they get to know dogs so well. Handlers in war zones must rely on the dogs for their very lives. Along the way they get to know the hearts and souls of their dogs. “It’s better than with people,” one handler told me. “It’s just simpler, and more pure.”

A big fear some handlers have is that their home kennel won’t get enough dogs, and they’ll become just regular MPs, which is where most started out. Once you’ve worked with these dogs, once you’ve experienced that bond, it seems the idea of becoming a regular “straight legs” is a lonely proposition.

Army Corporal Kory Wiens called his mine-detection dog, a Labrador retriever named Cooper, “my son.” He bought him all kinds of toys, and they sometimes shared a cot while on deployment in Iraq.

Wiens, twenty, planned to reenlist so he could stay with Cooper and adopt him when the dog was at the end of his career. He would never get that chance. Wiens and his dog were killed by an IED while on patrol in Muhammad Sath in July 2007.

His family knew how important Cooper was to Wiens. The pair’s cremated remains are buried together in a cemetery in Wiens’s hometown of Dallas, Oregon.

What was bad in Iraq is worse in Afghanistan.

The first handler I reached in Afghanistan was an army staff sergeant named Marcus Bates. In an e-mail, he introduced himself with characteristic military formality. “My name is SSG Bates, Marcus, serving in the U.S. Army,” he began. Bates wanted to talk about his partner, Davy N532, a three-year-old Belgian Malinois, whose name didn’t match her gender.

Bates recounted how he and Davy were supporting the Fourth Battalion Twenty-fifth Field Artillery Regiment, in Kandahar Province. During their months together they’d already found 140 pounds of explosives, two grenades, and two mortars.

“We get action about every time we go on a mission,” Bates said. He described Davy as a top-notch patrol and explosives detection dog. She’d been with Bates for nineteen months, at home base and in theater. “I trust her with my life. If I didn’t trust her, I wouldn’t be here.”

Bates had deployed with a dog once before, in Iraq. But Davy is new to war. In fact, Bates is her first handler. They hit it off immediately and she sleeps on his cot. She starts off with her head on his chest, but by the morning she is sleeping nestled up to his feet.

She’s slight for her breed, weighing only forty-five pounds, but her size turns out to be an asset in more than just sleeping arrangements. She’s agile enough to scramble up and over the four- to five-foot-high hardened mud walls that surround the area’s notorious grape fields. When Bates thinks of other handlers having to hoist eighty-pound German shepherds over those walls, he’s grateful for Davy. His combat load is already fifty to sixty pounds, including weapons, ammo, and enough water and food to last both of them for a two-day mission.

One November day Bates and Davy were on patrol in a grape field when they came under fire from eighty yards away. “I hate the grape fields here.”

Grape fields in Afghanistan are a far cry from your standard lush, manicured Western vineyards. Grapes grow in sprawling, tangled rows, between humid, muddy ditches obscured by weeds. The trenches are notoriously good places to hide explosives. When a blast goes off, the narrowness of the trench concealing it intensifies the explosion. These are the killing fields of a new generation of soldier.

As bullets from the AKs flew past, Bates and his squad took cover and returned fire. After a while it was time to get away from the dangerous trenches and up close with the enemy. The squad leader and Bates, Davy alongside, moved swiftly toward the enemy, firing as they approached.

The insurgents bolted and disappeared. But their secret ally—in the form of a long strand of copper wire in the dirt—remained. Bates and his little team followed the wire to a nearby grape hut. It was a small mud barn with thick walls pocked with holes for hanging fruit, as well as opium and marijuana, depending on the season. They entered, with Davy’s nose leading the way. Bates followed the wire to a battery. It was the makings of a command-wire IED. All someone had to do was touch the battery to the wire, and an IED on the other end would explode “on command.” When Bates looked up, Davy was sitting down staring at a pile of branches. She sat there, head tilted slightly down, riveted to the branches as if lost in a good book.

“My first thought was ‘Holy crap what is right next to me?’”

Bates approached the pile gingerly and found a vest with two grenades and some intel on local insurgents. A short time later, Davy discovered two IEDs near the hut.

It is clear that the bond between handlers and dogs on the battlefield is extraordinarily powerful. But wait. Before we go any further, there is a question we must address. Is it right to use dogs in war? Should we be putting them in harm’s way at all? Why should dogs die for the arguments of men? After all, dogs don’t have any say in the matter. They’re drafted and serve faithfully. They probably don’t understand the concept of death. This is all a big game to them, in a way. It’s about chasing a ball and bonding with a handler and having fun and getting praised.

I don’t have a complete, perfect answer to this question. I love dogs. The first time I met a military working dog, I wanted to abscond with him. He seemed happy at his home station of Travis Air Force Base, near Fairfield, California. But I found out he was going to war the next month. He had no worries about this, of course, but his innocence made his fate seem almost heartbreaking. “Hey, pal,” I wanted to tell him, “see that old station wagon over there? Make a break for it in one minute and I’ll meet you there. Do I ever have a nice dog bed for you, and there’s this dog named Jake I think you’d like.”

As the months went by, I met more dogs and handlers, and learned about the lives they saved, and saw the bonds they forged. I saw that, despite the less-than-ideal work conditions, these dogs have something a lot of pampered dogs don’t: a purpose, something meaningful in their lives.

It’s something we all aspire to.

I came to see just how incredible the best of these dogs are. If I had to cover a war, I’d want to be in a unit loaded with soldier dogs. Ditto if I had a kid who was in the military.