Navy SEAL Dogs (20 page)

“I got kicked out,” he admitted. “I was one of those classic ‘does not apply himself' types. Looking back on it now, failing to finish those first two dive programs was typical of how I approached a lot of things. I'd start something, get all fired up about it, lose interest, and then move on to something else. But those failures were more like delays. Those interests didn't just die out completely, they'd end up in the back of my mind, and eventually I'd get around to finishing what I'd started.”

Dwayne was one of the fortunate few whose navy recruiter seemed to recognize something in him. Dwayne had never heard of the SEALs, but his recruiter mentioned them to him because Dwayne had expressed an interest in getting certified as a diver, hoping that the third time would be the charm.

“I was so clueless about the SEALs,” Dwayne said with a laugh, “that I asked the guy, ‘Do they do any kind of diving?' He just looked at me and said, ‘Yes. They do.' Then I asked him if the training for the SEALs was hard. Again I got a kind of puzzled look, and the recruiter kind of stuck to his script. ‘No. Not really.' Then they showed me the video, and it looked like what the SEAL team members were doing was a lot of fun. I think I even said those exact words to the guys in the enlistment office.

“But the good thing was, I enlisted and was a part of the Dive Farer program,” he went on. “I did my basic training in Florida and then went on to Millington, Tennessee, for my A school. From A school, I went straight to BUD/S. That was an eye-opener.”

Dwayne was a good student of human nature. “I developed a game plan right away once I realized how tough this was going to be,” he told me. “I saw some of these guys; they looked like chiseled Greek god statues, and a whole bunch of the others gravitated toward them. They all projected this attitude—arrogance, I guess, is the best word to describe it—and I just didn't want to be a part of that. I wasn't a ‘Mister Popular' type guy; I wasn't a hero worshipper either. The thing is, when those studs fell by the wayside, so did their followers eventually. They saw their leader go down, and they must have thought that if this guy I admire so much couldn't handle it, then how can I possibly do it? In a way, my being a kind of loner type paid off for me.”

Despite Dwayne's early habit of not finishing what he started, he did graduate from BUD/S in class 180 in 1991. He was then assigned to a SEAL team. He felt he had a bit of bad timing. “There wasn't any real combat in the world at that time,” he recalled. “I just missed the Gulf War. The last platoon heading into that theater left a month or two before I graduated. Our first workups were in Southeast Asia to do Foreign Internal Defense assignments. That was okay, doing that kind of teaching and goodwill work. At least it wasn't all the same, since we'd lead dive courses, some segment pair operations, and some jumps. The best part was Cobra Gold (annual training exercises in Thailand). But I don't know anybody who graduated from BUD/S and didn't want to put all their training to use as an operator.”

Dwayne moved on to become a sniper and later a sniper instructor. He went to language school to learn Thai, then went on another deployment out of Guam doing more FID work. In 2000, he volunteered to become a free-fall instructor. A great need for those instructors existed, so Dwayne “jumped” at the chance. Once qualified as an instructor, he taught SOF and other Department of Defense candidates the fine skills needed to use nonstandard parachute equipment. He spent the next three years in Yuma, Arizona, doing that work. Next, he rejoined a SEAL team and started working up to go to Iraq. Once deployed in Iraq, he served as a member of a security detail protecting high-level Iraqi government officials. That was where he met those bomb-sniffing working dogs that made such a powerful impact on him.

However, because the need for free-fall instructors still existed, Dwayne returned to Yuma. Finally, in 2008, he changed assignments, working for Support Activity One, a unit that deals with high-security-clearance intelligence. That job proved to be more administrative than Dwayne would have liked.

“Being behind a desk and dealing with all kinds of written reports wasn't working out too well for me,” he recounted. “Intelligence work is important, but it's definitely not that active an assignment. Definitely not a James Bond experience. In fact, I felt like the relative inactivity was draining the life out of me. The command had just acquired the multipurpose canine unit from NSW Group One, and I was asked if I had any interest in going over there because they were shorthanded. I thought to myself that program was just about my speed. I think I have the attention span equal to a dog's, so why not? I loved being outdoors, and this desk wasn't a good fit.”

Dwayne sure got what he wished for when he opted to get out from sitting behind a desk. He and the other handler trainees and their dogs were taken all over the country to train in different environments. The theory was that the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in the war. So they traveled to deserts, places like the jungle, urban environments, and high elevations. Frequently they went to heavily populated skiing areas and traveled up to an elevation of 10,000 feet with 4 feet of snow on the ground. They practiced explosive-detection work under those conditions. Humidity, barometric pressure, wind, altitude, snow cover—all of these things affect how explosive odor travels, how much of it spreads. A dog may be able to find any odor you want in a regular and familiar environment, but when you take him to 10,000 feet and bury an odor under 4 feet of snow, that's a completely different ball game.

Dwayne and Rex did all that, but even those extremes and the incredible amount of training they had to do didn't fully prepare them for the rigors of their deployment to Afghanistan. However, the actual getting to Afghanistan was pretty easy. Rex couldn't fly in the cargo hold of the commercial flight taking them overseas. So he got to fly coach, sitting at Dwayne's feet the whole time, very content. This was a new experience for Rex, and when he stayed calm Dwayne rewarded him. A few passengers even came up to greet him, and Dwayne let them.

Once in Afghanistan's Zabul Province, however, even though the two weren't deployed to the mountainous regions—approximately 40 percent of the land—the landscape they were in and the work they were doing were still intense.

Their SEAL team engaged in a number of firefights against the Taliban on that deployment and covered a large operational sector within the province. Even though the men and Rex weren't actively engaged in clearing operations the entire time they were away from the FOB, those three- to four-hour rides on rutted tracks that wouldn't fit any definition of roads added to the fatiguing nature of the job they were doing. Like all other handlers, Dwayne had to be vigilant about his dog's condition.

“You start to wonder if your dog is going to break down, not in the mental sense necessarily, but physically also. This was his first tour of duty, this was my first time with him, all of this was new, and so you become hyperaware. You have to be. I would give him rests, and I'd also make sure that he stayed hydrated at all times,” Dwayne told me. “On the mental side, we'd go for long periods where he wouldn't make any hits, and that was hard on him. He wanted that reward; he wanted to succeed. To keep his spirits up, to keep him as motivated as could be, I'd frequently plant objects for him to find. That way I was keeping that reward in the front of his mind all the time.”

Functioning as part of the team and respecting roles and responsibilities is important on a deployment. Because of Rex's detection and apprehension work, he and Dwayne had to walk point, ahead of their unit. “Even though we walk point, that doesn't mean that we take on the full responsibilities of the point man,” Dwayne explained. “Point man's a prestigious job, and guys wouldn't like it if you came in there and just acted like you were taking over. I told them that my job with Rex was to make sure they didn't walk over any IEDs. They were still responsible for navigating the route and making all the decisions that go along with that. I often looked back at that point guy and keyed off what he was indicating to me. The only time I would divert them from a route was if Rex detected something or showed early indicators that he was on explosive odor.

“From the very beginning, we have it drummed into our heads that as much as we're out there fighting a war or trying to take out bad guys, we're really looking out for one another,” said Dwayne. “When you're in combat like we were, that becomes even more clear, if such a thing's possible. All the other stuff, the politics of the war and whatnot, how the Host Nation civilians feel about our being there, that goes away. I'm there to save my teammates and myself.”

Very early in their deployment, Rex did something that earned the trust of the other SEAL team members. The region they were assigned to was primarily made up of agricultural fields, where the main crop was pistachio nuts. The team was in a fairly broad and flat valley, and the region was dotted with grape arbors. “I don't know much about wine, but apparently extremes of temperatures are good for the grapes,” said Dwayne. “It was 110°F to 120°F during the day, and then at night, at that elevation, it dropped by 30°F to 40°F. We came on one fairly large vineyard, something I didn't expect to see in Afghanistan, and a call came over the comms that Rex and I needed to check something out. A drying hut, one of the larger structures in the area, that was maybe 65 feet high, a stone building with gaps at the top for ventilation, needed to be checked out.”

The interior of the drying hut was essentially one large room with a few pieces of framing-type lumber serving as partitions. Given the building's size, roughly 750 square feet, Rex had a fairly significant amount of ground to cover, especially after a day in which he'd already covered more than 6 miles (not all of which was spent, strictly speaking, in detection work). The search came up empty. As they were exiting the building and about to rejoin the rest of the members of the team, Rex, as Dwayne put it, “keyed up on something,” and he started pulling him. They came to a motorbike, a small single-cylinder thing that looked about the size of a moped. It was all beat up; the engine cases were crusted with oil and dirt, and the metal had a yellowish patina from gas leaking onto it and drying there. “I could only imagine what it smelled like to Rex, because the thing reeked of all those odors in
my
nose,” Dwayne remembered. “But he made a strong indication on that bike, and he sat next to it, letting me know he'd found something.”

Dwayne saw a small package under the frame's top tube that supported the gas tank and the seat. He called the EOD guy over, who normally walked right alongside him and the dog. “He wanded it, and then the point man came up behind us. We could all see something was there. The EOD man got the package out of there, and he discovered a dozen or so rounds of ammo,” Dwayne explained. “The package was wrapped up in feet and feet of something like duct tape. It was all wound into this very intricate pattern, almost like it was woven. Obviously, whoever had done that didn't want to have ready access to it, but they also really didn't want anybody else to know what was in there. In terms of its potential threat to our safety, that package posed minimal danger. Sure, those rounds could have been used against us, but nothing was rigged to explode.”

The important and somewhat impressive part of this is that at a distance of more than 100 yards, through a mixed-odor vapor of petroleum and gasoline, and shifting winds and swirling dust and packing that may or may not have been designed to contain that explosive odor, Rex had discovered it. In the early days of deployment of Navy SEAL dogs, this was very good work. As someone who's very experienced in working with the kinds of multipurpose dogs the SEALs use, I wouldn't get knocked off my chair by news like that if it happened today. Sure, I'd be pleased, but my more measured response would be due to the fact that I've seen and experienced much more. That's not to take anything away from the work Rex did that day. It was important, and sometimes timing is everything.

The other members of the SEAL team were impressed by Rex's find, and as Dwayne recalled, it helped him earn his credibility with the team.

*   *   *

Rex was only deployed that one time. A change in trainers and protocols meant that in the eyes of those newly in charge, he wasn't as well suited for the tasks in the field as they would like. Dwayne would have loved to adopt Rex as a pet, but the navy donated him to the San Diego County Sheriff's Office, where he is still at work. “It would have been easy to be bitter or selfish,” Dwayne said to me. “I still miss Rex, but knowing that he's still working, doing what he was bred to do and wants to do, I have to put his needs ahead of mine.”

That statement exemplifies anyone who does service for their country. The pride in Dwayne's voice was obvious when he told me one final story about Rex. “In one of his first patrols, he was with the sheriff on a call,” he recounted. “A perpetrator was holed up in an attic. From what I was told, he was a big guy, a former college football player or something. They sent Rex in there and he apprehended the guy. Rex got his bite, something all these dogs just love, and it was good to know that because of him, some officer didn't have to go crawling into what could potentially be a very dangerous situation.”

Dwayne is on the verge of retirement. He plans to work as a civilian in dog training. “One of the things I really like about dogs is that they are honest,” he said. “They don't ever try to deceive you, really. I laugh about this now, and I'm really very grateful those recruiters told me that I would have an easy time making the SEAL teams. One of the guys out of that office somehow remembered my name and tracked me down a while ago. He told me that of all the guys he showed that video to, of all the guys that he signed up, I was the only one to actually get through BUD/S. Imagine that. I always finish what I start eventually. It would be nice to finish up with Rex, but he's still got plenty of work left to do. And I want him to finish what he started, too.”