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
SHEEPLE
One 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 There are those who argue that the alpha dog/beta dog model is archaic and based on outdated information.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.
“With Gunny Knight in charge, I have the most winning guy I can have in the marines for this job. To use a sports analogy, he’s my Tom Brady, Alex Rodriguez, and Michael Jordan all rolled into one. He’s what makes this course the winning game it is,” Bowe said.
He acknowledged that Knight doesn’t always follow every rule. “Sometimes there are black areas in life, sometimes white, sometimes gray. If Gunny ever needs to get into the gray area, he’ll dip in and get out as fast as possible. It’s always for a good reason.”
So Gunny dipped into the gray, and Bowe looked at my request and told Gunny to go ahead. I visited two separate times over the summer. During my August visit, a public affairs guy from YPG drove up to us, and Gunny quietly told me to take a little walk, that he would take care of things. The PA was not happy I was there, Gunny reported, but he didn’t have me escorted off the property.
Official approval remains in the works.
26
GUNNY
Kristopher Knight grew up in a small suburban unincorporated community called Camp Dennison, near Cincinnati, Ohio. The camp for which the place is named had been a major army center during the Civil War. Lincoln is purported to have stayed in the house around the corner from Knight’s house.
When he was eleven months old, Gunny’s black mother and white father divorced. She took the kids and moved in with her parents. Gunny describes his dad as a “redneck guy, and an alcoholic. He could only teach me three things: hunting, shooting, and fishing.” There was a falling-out seven years ago, and he hasn’t spoken to his father since.
His grandfather, who held down two jobs, became a father figure to him very early on. “I grew up on the black side of the family and have my grandfather’s hardworking values at my core,” he says. “He was my role model.” When his mother was able to move out on her own, the young Knight—age six—refused to go with her. His grandfather told her, “It’s not negotiable. He stays.” That was that.
His mother remarried when Knight was eleven, and she told him that he had to go with the new family to live in New Jersey. He said he wanted to stay with his grandparents. His grandfather once again went to bat for him, and Knight stayed put.
At age fourteen, Knight learned how to drive and would take care of car maintenance and drive the little family Honda Civic around the area with his grandfather’s blessing. His grandparents had two rules: Be careful and behave. These came in handy, because Knight loved guns, and his grandfather liked to see a well-behaved boy rewarded with meaningful presents.
There were the usual BB guns, a Crosman pellet gun, a derringer .25 handgun, a Ted Williams .20-gauge shotgun, a Marlin .22 magnum rifle, a Winchester break-barrel .20-gauge shotgun, and a few others. His favorite, though, was a Remington Model 700 .22-250 rifle. He chose it for his eleventh birthday because it had a very large scope. “I had no idea what it was used for until after my grandfather purchased it for me. When I called my father to tell him about it, he informed me that it was the second fastest varmint rifle in the world. I used it for several years to hunt groundhogs. Initially the gun was way too heavy for me, so I used fence posts and the corners of barns to stabilize my shots.”
He used his small arsenal for hunting or target shooting. Camp Dennison was surrounded by woods and farm fields, so there was plenty of space for shooting and camping.
If you saw this scene from the outside, you might have been worried, looking into the tent of this well-armed youth. But Knight knew his limits. He kept his firearms in check, didn’t get in trouble, and worked hard at side jobs. In a summer job he held at a factory when he was eighteen, he discovered a way to increase the productivity of making valves. It involved cutting down on lag time and using his strength, and not a crane, to hold seventy-five- pound parts. He thought he’d be lauded for it, but other workers were not happy. “Hey, youngblood, you gotta slow down. You’re making us look bad,” they told him. “No,
Even the boss wanted him to put on the brakes and use the approved methods. If nothing else, it was safer. But Knight said he wanted to do it his way because it was the most efficient method and better for the valves themselves, since they didn’t run the risk of getting scraped up by the cranes. In the end, the boss had him sign a waiver, and he proceeded.
It would become a common theme in the story of his life, this business of wanting to do what’s best and bucking the system if he had to. He went to college for awhile to become a forest ranger, dropped out the day his grandmother died in 1992, and became what he calls a wild child. He rode motorcycles like he was invincible, partied hard, and lived free. In October 1994, a lifelong friend told him he was thinking about joining the marines. They were at a party and very drunk. “He wouldn’t stop talking about it, so I said, ‘If you’ll shut up, and you’re serious about joining, I’ll join with you.’ He was serious and I kept my word.” His friend got out after four years, and Gunny’s been in since. Knight went the MP route right away. Eight months later, he was at Lackland, learning how to become a handler. Dogs have been his passion ever since.
