In the years that followed his enlistment, he rose through the ranks, got a BS in education (he says he could be a captain now, but he would not be able to work with dogs, so he remained a noncommissioned officer; while most of his job these days involves paperwork to keep the program running, he tries to get out with classes whenever possible), had two combat deployments, became a trainer, and in March 2010, came to Yuma to be course chief.
While training with the Israeli Defense Forces in 2006 (“the air force would count that as a combat deployment; I count it as a vacation”) he met his future wife, Rinat. I met them for sushi one night in Yuma’s nicest shopping center. Rinat Knight is a pretty, funny, smart woman with long, dark, wavy hair, eleven years his junior. He had told me on several occasions, including our first phone conversation, “I am the luckiest man on earth, and a lot of that is because of my wife.” She is on one of his two screen savers at work.
Those closest to Gunny in the dog world say he could be in the private sector earning a lot more money than he does in the military. He says he’s not going to stay in forever, and in fact, he might retire within a few years. But he has no desire to leave just yet. “I just love what I do. Every day is a Friday. Why would I risk trading my Fridays for a Monday for more money? It’s not worth it to me. That’s why I do it, and that’s why my staff does it.
“I want to make a difference before I leave. I want to make sure all these kids are getting the allotted time to properly prepare and come back home.”
Gunny’s other screen saver is a photo of him with military working dog Patrick L722. Gunny is running and holding out his arm, which is covered with a bite sleeve, and Patrick is up in the air, biting at it and looking like although he means business, he’s having the best time in the world. They are collided, suspended in time in this dynamic photo that greets Gunny every day.
He helped train the handler who would help train Patrick. The dog was fresh out of dog school in Texas when he arrived at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to serve with the II Marine Expeditionary Force (II MEF). “He was a hyper mess when we received him, but he showed all the potential to be great,” Gunny says. Patrick’s handler and Gunny deployed to Afghanistan at the same time in May 2009. While there, Gunny continued to advance the team’s capabilities, including trying to make sure Patrick could work off leash.
Patrick made it home and, because his handler needed multiple wrist surgeries, was assigned a new handler. They deployed to Afghanistan in December 2010.
Patrick would not make it back alive this time. But everyone else on his final mission would, thanks to this dog and his ability to sniff out bombs without a leash.
27
A VERBAL LEASH
Patrick was a bomb-detection dog designed to work on a six-foot leash. Gunny Knight, then chief dog trainer at II MEF, worked hard on Patrick’s off-leash skills. Patrick was one of the first PEDD dogs he trained this way. “The barrier had to be broken.”
The dog was a typical Malinois. “He was all heart; he put everything into what he did, and he loved you to death,” says one marine corporal, who had hoped to deploy with Patrick.
Nothing fazed this dog. During one firefight, Patrick lay beside his handler, Corporal Charles “Cody” Haliscak, in the tall grass as Haliscak and the rest of the squad engaged the Taliban. But Patrick wasn’t lying there cowering. He was lying there eating grass as the bullets screamed by.
On May 9, 2011, Patrick and Haliscak were on a mission in the southern Helmand Province. With them were a minesweeper engineer and an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technician. The purpose was to check out a small IED—a toe-popper—that had gone off earlier that day. It didn’t harm anyone, but they needed a dog’s nose to clear the way back to the area. The dog went first, off leash, then the engineer with his metal-detecting device, followed closely by Haliscak and the EOD tech.
It’s common knowledge among people who have dealt with IEDs in the last few years that where there’s one, there are two. Where there are two, there are four. Knight says the situation has been dramatically worse in recent months. Before, you might find a small field with one IED. Now there could be ten in that same area. (The Yuma course has adjusted training methods to take this lethal factor into account.)
Haliscak had a feeling that something else was out there along their path, and he stopped his team. He told the two men he would let Patrick work this one. Patrick, tail high and wagging, walked up the path, searched one corner of the poppy field that lay ahead, crossed the path, and searched the other end of the poppy field. He shimmied around and made his way to where two paths met—exactly where the team was going to be walking. There, about fifteen feet away from the men, he responded to an explosive scent as Haliscak had never seen him respond before. Patrick’s usual style was to get excited, tail wagging hard, sniffing the area with great focus. Then he would sit or lie down in final response. This time, Patrick dispensed with the preliminaries and lay down immediately.
Haliscak figures his dog’s last thought was “Oh, toy!!!” (“That toy was everything to him,” he says.)
The explosion knocked Haliscak and the two other men off their feet. They had no idea what had happened. They thought they were going to get ambushed, so they prepared to fire. When there was no ambush, Haliscak looked for Patrick. He was nowhere to be seen. The handler started searching in a circle around where the blast had gone off. As a hunter, he is used to looking for downed animals. He peered through his rifle’s 4X scope. In the distance he saw that the grass in a field was bent over. Then he saw Patrick’s body, or what remained of it.
“At that point I lost it.” Haliscak, who had a high-grade concussion from the explosion, tried to run over to his dog, but the EOD tech stopped him. It was enough death for one day. The EOD tech and the engineer got close enough to see there was nothing to be done. They did their post-blast work on the IED and the other one from the morning. It was nearly nighttime when the two men put Patrick on a piece of canvas, covered him up, and carried him back to the patrol base. Haliscak had known the dog for three years, been his handler for one and a half years. “I lost my best friend. He was my hero. Without him and his great ability to work off leash, I’d be toast.”
Once they’d brought him back, Haliscak looked at his dog. All four of Patrick’s legs had been blown off. Only his head and rib cage were intact. “It’s truly terrible to see your best friend like this.”
Dual-purpose dogs are officially considered on-leash dogs. It’s thought that the patrol part of them is too dangerous to let go off leash, so they don’t receive off-leash detection training during boot camp, and often are not even at their home bases. Some handlers work on it on their own—particularly handlers with kennel masters who are wise to its benefits. But it’s still far from standard procedure.
Gunny Knight has been working these dual-purpose dogs off leash for a few years—since before it was even a remotely accepted technique. “I knew this was right. When I know I’m right, a thousand people can think I’m wrong, but I stand alone and know I’m right.
“I believe in a verbal leash. Your leash may be six feet and leather, but mine comes out of my mouth.”
Single-purpose bomb dogs, like EDDs, IDDs, TEDDs, and SSDs (see chapter 10 if you have not retained every letter of every acronym of every MWD job) are trained to work off leash. But these are usually sporting breeds, like Labrador retrievers, and they are not trained to attack. They can be trusted not to maul anyone in their path as they trot around sniffing out IEDs.
It’s estimated that with our current situation in Afghanistan, about 95 percent of a dual-purpose bomb dog’s job is sniffing out explosives—not going after bad guys. Having a bomb-sniffing dog with off-leash capabilities makes sense. The farther from the handler and other troops a dog is when alerting to an IED, the safer for everyone. Except the dog, of course. It’s called stand-off distance. Some might argue that this isn’t very kind or humane, that these dogs don’t realize the dangers and we’re sending them out as canaries in a coal mine—almost as sacrifices.
But with the dog out front, even on leash, he’s always the most endangered. The idea behind using soldier dogs is that they save lives by detecting explosives before someone can get killed by one. If a dog ends up dying while the men and women behind him live, he will be greatly mourned and remembered as a hero.
Nobody wants to see a dog die. “It just sucks. It’s a shitty situation,” says Master Chief Thompson. “It hurts a lot. Just about as much as it does to lose a handler.”
