deployed to remote areas with no kennels—and even on FOBs that have large kennel operations, if the handler chooses. More often than not, these dogs sleep in or near the handler’s cot. Some dogs crawl right into their handler’s sleeping bag; others curl up on the foot of the bed. Where there are no chow halls, they’ll eat with the handler. Many even end up following their handlers into the shower.
Some will say that the best time in a soldier dog’s life is during war. Instead of being with a handler only a few hours a day back home, and often not at all on weekends, in war they’re almost inseparable.
“You know this dog so well, and he knows you,” says Marine Sergeant Mark Vierig, whose story opened this part of the book. “Deployment seals it.”
41
FOXHOLES
For more than a month in early 2011, Vierig slept in foxholes every night in the Upper Gereshk Valley of Afghanistan. Vierig and his combat tracker dog Lex were supporting the Third Battalion Eighth Marines Second Platoon, which was safeguarding the construction of the first paved road in the Helmand Province from Taliban attacks. As road construction moved on, so did they, and the marine found himself digging a new foxhole every few days.
It was a cold, wet time of year and rained heavily, daily, almost all day and all night long. Gore-Tex rain gear protected Vierig somewhat by day, and at night he’d take refuge in a sleeping bag in his muddy foxhole. The hole was like a shallow grave—about three feet deep, six feet long, and two feet wide. He also dug a connecting circular hole next to the part of his foxhole near his head. This was for Lex and his backpack. From the air, the whole setup would look like the letter P.
Every sopping night Vierig would sink into the foxhole to sleep and would get Lex in to bunk next to him to keep relatively dry. He’d prop up his rifle under a camouflage tarp so the rain would run off and not flood their refuge. Rocks kept the outside of the tarp in place. Every night Vierig would wake up at least a couple of times to scoop water from a deep hole he’d dug at the foot to collect water so his foxhole wouldn’t flood.
But when Vierig awoke in the middle of the night, Lex was rarely in the foxhole. It was baffling the first time it happened, but the marine raised the tarp and looked outside and found his dog. This would go on every night during those wet weeks. “He’d just be standing there, in the rain, just standing guard over me.” The dog did not sit, but stood, head erect, large triangular ears at attention and focused for sounds, eyes peering into the darkness for any sign of intrusion. His coat was soaked with rain, but he stood riveted, noble.
“I’d tell him, ‘Hey you, come on in here!’” and the dog would leave his post and go to his subterranean room—at least until Vierig fell asleep again. When Vierig would wake up a couple of hours later ready to scoop more rain with his empty half-plastic water bottle, Lex would be back up on volunteer duty.
Did Lex sleep during this time? “I wondered that a lot. I asked him ‘When do you sleep, dog?’ He spent a lot of sleepless nights watching over me.”
As Lex protected Vierig, so Vierig protected Lex. “Would I sacrifice another human life to save him? I would not. But I’d do everything in my power to save him.” It’s a common refrain among military working dogs handlers. The Department of Defense may officially consider military working dogs to be equipment, but most handlers—while they know that’s the bottom line—see things quite differently. “My rifle is a piece of equipment,” says Vierig. “But I don’t feel the same about my rifle as I do about my dog.”
One day during their month of foxholes, Vierig and Lex joined another platoon for a short mission. Everyone else had already dug in, but Vierig was a newcomer, so he got to work digging his foxhole into a barren, rocky hill. It was the full six feet long but barely over a foot deep when insurgents fired an 82mm heavy recoilless rifle in his direction. The explosive round hit thirty feet from Vierig, although it was likely aimed at a nearby tank.
Without thinking, Vierig grabbed Lex by the scruff of his neck and threw him into the foxhole. Then he jumped down and covered Lex’s body so the dog wouldn’t get hit. Most of Vierig’s body protruded from the semi- dug foxhole, but he had his flak and Kevlar and figured he was a lot less vulnerable out in the open than Lex would have been.
Suddenly another explosion rocked the earth just fifteen feet away. Lex remained calm under Vierig. “When stuff goes down in a situation like that, dogs know what’s going on. They’re like, ‘OK, this is serious.’”
Then out of nowhere, man and dog started laughing. It’s incongruous, Vierig knows, but it’s the only way he can describe it. There they were, face-to-face, nose-to-nose almost, in this vastly dangerous situation, and Lex gave Vierig a look that seemed to say, “This is a most ridiculous position we’re in, don’t you think?” If you had been an insurgent and you saw this up close, you would have thought they were going a bit mad. As a former professional bull rider, Vierig has laughed in the face of danger before. “But it’s a lot better when you’re with your dog.”
42
REX… AND CINTE
In civilian life, the idea is that you stay with your dog until death do you part. Unfortunately, too many people don’t, which is why shelters are so overcrowded, but that’s another story.
By contrast, in military life, handlers play a game of musical canines. They get assigned a dog for a set period—a deployment, a year, a few years, depending on their specialty and the luck of the draw—but it’s generally not a pairing that lasts a dog’s career. Handlers switch dogs, dogs switch handlers, all depending on the jobs that must be done.
Kennel masters often try to match dog to handler, but sometimes a handler gets stuck with whatever dog happens to be around and available, and the match can be downright dreadful. Some pairings stay that way for the duration. But as any dog lover can attest to, dogs have their ways of working themselves into people’s hearts. Military dogs are no exception.
When Army Sergeant Amanda Ingraham learned she had been assigned to work with Rex L274 in 2008, she was aghast. “Of all the dogs, why him?” she wondered.
The army had tried to pair the four-year-old German shepherd with other handlers, but no one could work with him. You had to yell to get him to do anything. He chased everything that moved, from wild mules in Arizona to rabbits in Texas to squirrels in Virginia. Being a specialized search dog (SSD), he worked off leash, and chasing critters while looking for IEDs was not an option.
But Ingraham seemed to be the only person the dog would listen to even remotely while training. For instance, once during night training, Rex was doing nothing she asked, and in frustration she yelled, “Good God, you can’t even
The man in charge said the dog was hers.
Specialized search dogs stay with a handler longer than most other dogs stay with their handlers. Stints of four or five years together are not uncommon. After spending a couple of months with Rex, Ingraham was counting the days until her contract with the army was up, especially after the dog led her dangerously close to faux explosives. And more than once. “I’d be right on top of it by the time I saw it. He showed no change of behavior like he’s supposed to. I’d have been dead if it were the real deal.” She was almost certain she would not reenlist in eighteen months. She couldn’t bear the thought of spending more time with this wretched dog.
The two eventually headed to Yuma Proving Ground for predeployment training. They were to go to Iraq together. The thought made Ingraham queasy.
One day Rex once again led her right on top of an IED, and she was yelling at him, pushing him on to sniff out more and do it right. He refused to do anything. He just sat there, as if on strike. “I was yelling as much as I could yell. I said, ‘What’s the matter with you? You want me to ask you
