Gunny watches as Navy Master-at-Arms Second Class Joshua Raymond tries working his dog Rex P233 off leash for the first time while looking for roadside explosives. The dog doesn’t want to get more than ten feet away from Raymond. The handler explains that he’s not allowed to have his dog off leash at his home base.
“We can get another Rex,” Gunny tells him, “but we can’t get another you. Parents who lose their son or daughter out there, it stays with them for the rest of their life. Children who lose a parent, it’s tragic. But tough as it sounds, if your dog dies, sad as that is, you get to come back and take out Flea Biscuit Two and start all over again.”
Raymond and Rex walk down the hot dirt road, no shade in sight, just rocks and sand and dried dirt, with the occasional bit of plucky scrub poking through. Rex goes on in front about twelve feet, but then turns around and waits for his handler. The dog is accustomed to feeling the end of the leash well before now.
“Put your toy away, show your dog your hands,” shouts out Gunny as Raymond keeps walking. “Tell him ‘I don’t have it, but there’s a way of earning it,’ and you gotta send him back down there. Good boy, keep going, good boy, keep going! Don’t let him think for himself! Find that command, maybe it’s ‘forward,’ maybe it’s ‘go,’ use your body and step into him. The dog doesn’t know he’s allowed to be that far away. There you go!
“Now back up! Now the dog takes a picture and, hey! I can be away! He can go twenty-five feet and you can back up twenty-five feet, and now you have fifty feet between you.”
About twenty minutes into it, the dog looks like he’s getting kind of used to the idea of being off leash. He’s walking down the road and off to the sides with more confidence, not stopping so often to wait for his handler. “They all want to be free, with a little guidance, of course,” says Gunny. “No one wants to have something tugging on their neck all the time.”
Raymond is clearly impressed with what his dog has been able to do. But it goes so much against the navy protocol he has been trained to follow that he can’t imagine being able to “get away with” using it.
Gunny explains that inside the wire (on an FOB), leashes are mandatory. “But I’m here to tell you for a fact that you are authorized to not only work your dog off leash here, but also when you go outside the wire in Afghanistan. If anything ever happens, call Master Chief Thompson. I guarantee he’ll offer his career to back you up. So will I.
“If you find something out there, no one’s going to be like ‘Hey, leash up!’ I guarantee, in fact, that you will get an extra scoop of mashed potatoes and a tent with AC for you and Rex.”
Because of the off-leash capabilities being taught here, Gunny and his staff go a step further than the usual deferred response training. When a dog responds to an IED, the people who teach this course don’t just want the dog to stay there staring at it until he gets paid. “In the real world, the handler’s not going to walk way over to where the dog is responding,” Porras says. “The dog has to be able to leave the odor and come back to you. It’s safer all the way around.”
It’s not that hard to teach, as it turns out. The dog gets his million-dollar reward only when he comes back to the handler—and not when he responds to the explosive. Getting strong on the recall command (“Come!”) can serve these dogs well for other reasons as well in Afghanistan. Feral and stray dogs are commonplace, and dogs have gone MIA chasing after them. As well, dirt roads can appear seemingly out of nowhere, with surprising traffic.
“You don’t want to let your dog be done in by these dangers,” Gunny Knight says. “There are enough of those as it is. A whole lotta shit can go wrong out there.”
28
HEAT
Air Force Technical Sergeant Adam Miller walks with his German shepherd, Tina M111, down a dirt road toward a small village, rifle poised. On the right, a white mosque topped with blue and gold. A billboard asking for help for Afghan schoolchildren. To the left, a service station with one nonworking gas pump. A crashed, abandoned pickup truck. Up ahead, several mud-walled buildings, some small, a few two-story. A heap of concrete walls from what looks like a bombed-out building. Several stalls making up a tiny marketplace. In the background, intermittent gunfire.
Miller and his dog walk on—Miller wearing full kit, Tina in harness and leash, which attaches somewhere on Miller’s beltline so his hands can be free to use his rifle. It’s 11 A.M., 114 degrees. Suddenly more gunfire. “The dog’s down!” shouts someone on his team, and without hesitating, Miller reaches down to Tina, hoists her over his left shoulder, and with rifle still ready to take out anyone intent on harming him or his dog, moves a little faster now, toward shelter, anything that will protect them while he tries to save her.
Within two minutes, they make it to a cube-shaped mud-and-concrete building—more of a hut, really. They disappear inside.
This was not in the script. What just happened? I jog over to look in through a window opening, and there’s Miller crouched over his dog, working furiously to fix her. This was supposed to be a simulation. We’re at the Canine Village just a couple hundred meters away from the dog kennels where we started the day at YPG. But there on the ground, incongruously—sickeningly—is Tina’s severed leg. It seems to have been blown completely off her body, and there’s an IV flowing into it. How in God’s name did this happen?
And why would you put an IV in a severed leg, anyway? I try to look at Tina. She is lying down, and the earth beneath her is wet. Miller is wrapping bandages around her and talking to her. I can only see her front end, but her face does not look like the face of a dog whose leg is two feet away from her. Miller moves, and I see that all four limbs are firmly attached to Tina. Then in the corner of the room, I see someone looking on. She offers Miller advice about the wrap. In a moment, she suggests he do something with the IV on what’s called a Jerry leg around here.
(A Jerry leg is a realistic, large, furry, fake dog leg that handlers can use for practicing placing IVs, bandaging, splinting, and giving injections. Complete Jerry dogs are also used for training. They have an artificial pulse and expandable lungs for mouth-to-snout resuscitation. There are also dogs that can be intubated, but the program doesn’t currently have any of those.)
Predeployment training does not get much more realistic than this. Miller would later tell me that he was exhausted when he got Tina to the building, and his adrenaline was pumping almost as it would have in a real-life war emergency with Tina. “It’s the best canine training I’ve ever had. The hardest, too,” he says. “If this doesn’t prepare you for Afghanistan, nothing will.”
The woman who is helping Miller patch up his dog is Army Captain Emily Pieracci. She is a veterinarian, and one of her main jobs is to prepare handlers here in every aspect of emergency care possible, as well as in the prevention of problems to begin with. She also makes sure all dogs who come through here are ready for deployment—medically fit and not suffering from heat casualties.
Pieracci grew up with dogs. Her mother was a police dog handler for the Washington State Patrol. Pieracci graduated Washington State University’s veterinary school in 2009 and spent several months working in the private sector in the field of emergency medicine in order to pay back her student loans.
She joined the army in 2010. She has found her calling. “The army offered something different from regular civilian practice. I got to jump out of airplanes, shoot weapons, and get lost doing land navigation. I could be a vet and also do a lot of active stuff that didn’t involve veterinary medicine.” (The army also repaid her vet school loans, which in this economy was a huge blessing.)
Within her first month at Yuma, she knew this was the place for her. She loves working with the handlers and their dogs. “I could not imagine being anywhere else other than the military. To me, this job carries so much meaning. I have such a strong sense of purpose when I care for these dogs. Keeping them healthy saves our troops’ lives. It’s both powerful and humbling all at the same time.”
Pieracci enjoys the heat here, too. But it’s this very heat that can also do in the best dogs. Heat injuries among working dogs are not uncommon here or at Lackland or in Afghanistan. On warm days, handlers take their dogs’ temperatures (rectally, with digital thermometers; a dog’s normal body temperature is between about 101 and 102.5) every two hours, sometimes more. But temperature tolerance can vary greatly. It’s not necessarily how hot the dogs get, but how well they can compensate. One MWD went down out here at only 104. Some dogs hit
