War Dogs (2 page)

Part I

One

When Dogs Become Soldiers

I actually got jealous when I saw some of the soldiers over there with dogs deeply attached to them. It was the nearest thing to civilization in this weird foreign life of ours.

—Ernie Pyle,
Brave Men

As the plane dropped it felt like falling, but the turns were too tight, too controlled. The C-17 twisted in a swift
plummet—down, down, down—without slowing. The dogs in their crates registered the strange sensation, a few hovering on the floor of their kennels, legs splayed, eyes darting and nervous. Neither they nor their 12 handlers who had left San Diego some 20 hours earlier were enjoying this motion. Some gripped their seats, others had their eyes closed, no doubt fighting a thick wave of nausea. The corkscrew landing pattern of the plane's descent was a combat zone necessity, as was the short approach to the flight line. They came down so hard and so fast that as the plane met the ground, the g-force slapped against their bodies.

When the men stepped off the plane and into the Iraq air, there was nothing but darkness, no way to discern where they were. The three Special Forces guys who had also been on their flight had already melted away into the night.

Only a couple of days before, Staff Sergeant Sean Lulofs and the 11 other Air Force handlers had been at Camp Pendleton in California for their in-processing: filling out the necessary paper work at the Marine Corps base before they could begin their deployment. A lieutenant colonel gave them their first briefing for the mission they would undertake, Operation Phantom Fury. She did not mince words. “The Marine Corps,” she told them, “anticipates that at least two to three of you will be killed in action.”

The response in the room had been utter silence. At first the handlers thought this woman had to be bullshitting them, that she was just saying this because the Marine Corps thought they were weak-ass Air Force guys. But it soon sunk in that this was not the lieutenant colonel's motivation. She was letting them know how deadly serious their deployment was going to be: they would be embedding deep within the Marines' infantry units, and it was crucial that they understand the risk implicit in this assignment. It would be so dangerous, in fact, that when the Marine Corps had conducted its objective assessment of their upcoming mission, it fully expected this group of handlers to come back at a loss.

Holy shit
, Lulofs had thought.
I'm not going home.

Truth be told, he hadn't wanted to deploy in the first place. The news of four American contractors who'd been killed that March had dominated the headlines; the images of a mob pulling charred corpses through the streets to then dangle them from a bridge over the Euphrates were fresh in his mind.
1
From the outside, the Iraqis appeared to be full of rage and they were directing their ire at Americans.

When Lulofs's commander had told him he and his dog Aaslan would be deploying, they'd given him less than eight hours' notice. Almost his whole life he'd dreamed of joining the Air Force to be a narcotics detection dog handler, and then, all of a sudden, he was frenzied, packing his bags to go to war. The thought of what it really meant scared the living crap out of him. Iraq was the last place in the world he wanted to be.

But there he was. The 12 handlers stood on the tarmac, in the dark with no idea where the hell they were. There was a mandatory military blackout so they couldn't use lights. They hadn't packed night vision goggles; they
didn't know they were going to need them. Lulofs wondered what else they might need that they would have to do without. After a few minutes the men began to load their weapons. Then a deep voice sounded nearby. “Are you the Air Force guys?”

Lulofs felt a twinge of relief; this voice was familiar. It was Gunnery Sergeant William Kartune, a rugged, no-bullshit Marine in charge of all the dog teams in Iraq from Baghdad to Al Anbar. He had come to collect the handlers.

It was March 2004. With their arrival, the call for approximately 30 Air Force and Marine Corps dog teams was complete. For the first time in nearly three decades the United States had dispatched a force of military dogs and their handlers to fight a war.

After that night,
the dozen air force handlers sectioned off into smaller groups. Lulofs ended up with another handler, a staff sergeant with a big chip on his compact shoulder named Joshua Farnsworth. Together they took their dogs to Camp Baharia, the post for which none of the others had volunteered. An assignment to Camp Baharia meant lots of time in Fallujah. At that time, Fallujah had become the epicenter of violence since US forces invaded in 2003. Nobody wanted Fallujah.

Located just two miles southeast, Camp Baharia was the closest base to Fallujah, known as the city of mosques, which had a population of 285,000.
2
It was so close that Lulofs could see the cars on the main highway heading in and out of the city. Once upon a time, the area that became Camp Baharia in 2003 had been known as Dreamland, formerly a Ba'ath Party retreat. Palm trees surrounded a man-made lake, where Saddam Hussein's sons had watched boats race back and forth across the water. In the last few months the area had been torn up by fighting. Many of the buildings on base had been gutted, including the handlers' living quarters, the glass in the windows blown out. Lulofs and another handler found plywood and sandbags and rebuilt walls where needed. They even managed to construct a couple of bunk beds. It was palatial compared to the floor of a Humvee, where some of the other handlers were sleeping.

That first morning on base, Lulofs woke early, just as the sun was rising, and took Aaslan outside. He unclipped his dog's leash to give him free range of the dirt and rock that made up the bank of the lake's shoreline. Lulofs's somber eyes lifted behind his wire-rimmed glasses as he smiled and watched Aaslan, with his shadowy dark coloring around his narrow face, sniff around the lake. Aaslan, a trim Belgian Malinois, had a civil temperament: he never growled at people, never barked at other dogs, and he would bite only when asked to, only when he knew it was okay. He was a tough dog, and when he ran at decoys during their bite work in training, Aaslan hit hard, once even breaking his own legs during a drill. That kind of fight was in his blood; his mother, Boyca, had been legendary for her hardiness. During one training session, she'd pounced with such force on a human decoy that even though the man had been wearing a full-padded bite suit, she'd cracked three of his ribs.

Lulofs watched Aaslan skirt the bank looking for the right spot to do his business. No sooner had he raised his leg when Lulofs saw the wrinkling of the dog's nose and watched Aaslan cock his head to the side. The dog paused, leg in the air, and stopped pissing midstream. Lulofs's blood went cold. Aaslan was on bomb.
But how can that be possible?
he wondered. They were
inside
the base.

As he watched Aaslan begin to search, nose to the ground, twisting and sniffing, Lulofs told himself the dog had to be picking up on some kind of residual odor, something left over from an unexploded ordnance. He stared in disbelief as Aaslan nuzzled around a coffee can and planted his hindquarters on the ground. “Oh shit,” he said to himself. “That's not good.” Lulofs called Aaslan back to him and away from whatever was in that coffee can.

The EOD team—the tactical specialists whose job it is to safely detonate any live explosives—came to investigate. The can, the harmless piece of trash filled with rocks and disarranged wires, also contained rocket propellant. According to the EOD guys, it had gotten waterlogged sitting idle for so long and thus had become even more volatile.

The night before, while Lulofs and Farnsworth were making introductions with the Marines on base, they'd hung out in this yard by the water, talking, smoking, shooting the shit. One of the Marines had been sent a fishing rod because of the lake, and the guys were casting it out onto the bank, seeing if they could hook up stray bits of garbage. The fucked-up thing was, they'd been messing around with that very same coffee can. Lulofs had even taken a picture of one Marine holding it up, a lit cigarette dangling from his lip. They'd been playing with an IED.

The next day the base was hit with roughly 18 rounds of indirect fire. They got their asses handed to them. Lulofs and Aaslan had been in Iraq a grand total of two days and they were in the thick of the war, as close to it as they could possibly be.

Just 12 months earlier,
bombs had rained down on Baghdad. In March 2003, President George W. Bush had stood before the nation and announced that, on his orders, coalition forces were going into Iraq to
disarm Saddam Hussein and save the world from grave danger. “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly—yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.”
3

By late 2003, the use of IEDs by insurgents to inflict terror increased tremendously—40 to 60 percent of all attacks started with an IED, attacks to which US and coalition forces were extremely vulnerable.
4
How to deal with the IED problem quickly became an utmost priority. A number of solutions were investigated, and different ideas were teased out and tested. In early 2004, General James Mattis issued an order down the chain of command inside the Marine Corps to investigate whether or not dogs might be brought in to help with the growing threat.
5
Was it possible for dogs to become a permanent part of a Marine battalion? Could dogs attach to a unit? Could they be paired easily with infantrymen? The idea evolved and morphed and eventually the task—and its funding—came under the jurisdiction of the Marine Corps MWD program. The Marine Corps determined that roughly 30 dogs were needed, and they combed their own units, as well as the ranks of dog handlers in other branches of the military, for the best dog teams available.

It would take almost a full year after the 2003 invasion before the Marines fulfilled that order to send dogs into Operation Iraqi Freedom, deploying six dog teams from their own service along with others from the Air Force. These were the first dog teams flown into a combat area since Vietnam. No US dogs had been used in a war as an on-the-ground force in over three decades.

However, these teams of Marine Corps and Air Force handlers were law enforcement teams, trained for patrol work—searching cars, detaining suspects, finding drugs and maybe bomb materials. They had not been trained for war. And they were categorically unprepared for what awaited them in Iraq. They hadn't been trained in conducting a roadway search, or
how to hunt for an IED. The dogs hadn't been conditioned to search for buried explosives for the simple reason that this specific hazard did not exist stateside or during wartime (not in recent decades) and therefore hadn't been anticipated, at least not until these first patrols started and units were going out onto roads and getting blown up by roadside IEDs. Since the US military's working dogs hadn't been trained to fight an asymmetric force of insurgents armed to the teeth with guerrilla tactics since the days of Vietnam, the dog handlers in Iraq were basically starting from scratch. They had to make it up as they went along.

When Marine handler Corporal Mark Vierig arrived in Iraq in 2004 with his dog Duc, he knew next to nothing about what was waiting for them. Born and raised in Utah, Vierig had, at the age of 17, made off for Texas with a friend to ride bulls professionally. At 25 years old, after breaking his leg twice as well as an arm, and shattering an ankle, he promised himself he wasn't going to end up a beat-up, broken-down cowboy. Instead he enlisted in the Marines. In some ways it wasn't much of a leap—the daredevil drive that pulsed behind the thrill he got from working the rodeo was perhaps the thing that drove him to volunteer for a combat tour. A combat mindset came to him naturally, and even though no one in-country seemed to know what to do with Vierig or his dog, he put himself to work.

In between missions, Vierig trained Duc on whatever they could find, hiding old mortars and RPGs so the dog could learn the scent. At first Vierig had to ask for missions in order to prove that he and Duc could be useful. He would approach company commanders and battalion commanders and say, “My dog finds bombs. Put us out in front.”

After a short time, the Special Forces teams started to request Vierig and Duc—they all wanted Duc out with them on their missions. Sometime in the spring, after he and Duc had been in-country for a few months, Vierig overheard one of the other Marines say that it'd be more demoralizing for them if Duc were to be killed than if they lost another Marine. He didn't really know until he heard that remark just how much the other guys were depending on the skill of his dog.