Soldier Dogs (14 page)

The detection portion of dog school takes about sixty days. In order to certify as a detection dog, drug dogs need to have 90 percent accuracy. Explosives dogs must have 95 percent, missing a maximum of one out of the twenty aids.

Then it’s on to the patrol section of schooling. This starts with basic obedience, then ramps up to an obstacle course, with tunnels, a jump, stairs, and other structures similar to what dogs might
encounter during a mission. Labradors and other dogs destined for a single-purpose career stop training here.

The shepherds and Malinois move on to the next phase of the dog school syllabus: the bite. Most dual-purpose dogs these days seldom need to use their bite skills in real life. But the deterrent factor may be part of the reason the dogs so rarely have to go into bite mode. Most people will back off when they see these dogs, or when the barking begins.

The dual-purpose dogs the Department of Defense purchases are already trained to bite, so the bite work is finessed and taken to the next level at Lackland. The dogs generally know how to run and attack a decoy’s arm that’s protected by a bite sleeve. It is deeply satisfying for a dog to chomp into it; in fact, the bite is the reward—no Kong needed.

But what about stopping someone who’s running away? The dogs here work on an exercise called a field interview, where the handler is questioning a “bad guy,” maybe frisking him. The decoy in this scenario is often clad in full-body protective gear, known affectionately as a marshmallow suit. It makes him look rather like the Michelin Man wearing a dark-colored coverall with thick fabric. The wearer’s head is usually the only part that’s not protected.

The dog stands guard. The person bolts. The handler shouts for him to stop, but he doesn’t. Meanwhile the dog is completely at attention, ears forward, body stiff, tail rigid, eyes focused. The decoy is like a giant rabbit, and to a dog with a strong prey, hunt, or play drive, it’s one of the most fun games there is.

(In case you ever get apprehended by a MWD or any law-enforcement canine, you might like to note that these dogs tend to
bite the part of you that’s moving the most. When you’re sprawled out on the ground after a dog knocks you down, consider waving a white flag. And don’t think about playing dead. The dog will liven you up very quickly.)

“Git him!” the trainer exhorts. Music to a dog’s ears. The dog gallops to his quarry and grabs whatever body part is convenient. The force often knocks down the decoy. Whether the decoy remains standing or gets sent to the ground, a well-trained dog will bite and hang on until the trainer calls him off. Most dogs don’t want to give up the bite. Some release immediately, others grab and shake until more firmly commanded—or even physically pried off. With more training, the release comes more quickly.

And what happens if, during the initial pursuit, the “bad guy” gives up and stops running? The dog needs to be able to stop in his tracks and resist every urge to finish the pursuit and bite the crap out of him until told to stop. This is called a standoff. The handler or trainer yells, “
Out
,” very loudly, and the dog is supposed to stop in his tracks and stand guard next to the suspect. The dog learns how to escort the suspect away, heeling close at his side. If the person makes a move to escape, the dog can grab him if the handler doesn’t get to him first.

I’ve watched this type of dramatic exercise at a few different military bases, with the big padded man or woman flouting the law and running away. It made me wonder if dogs think that all bad guys are obese. The message seems to be “Great big person runs away, I get to bite.” I’ve been assured that this isn’t the case. It’s the chase that kicks in a dog’s instincts, not the size of the person. In fact, as a dog gets more advanced, there’s special protective gear that’s a lot less bulky than the marshmallow suit. It doesn’t protect
as well, so it’s not used that much. But it helps make the scenario more realistic.

My question about bite-protection gear wasn’t entirely unfounded, as it turned out. Over lunch at Chili’s, Air Force Technical Sergeant Joe Null, the noncommissioned officer in charge of military working dog logistics, told me that there are some dogs who are so used to an obvious padded target—like a bite sleeve or full-body gear—that they’re flummoxed when these are absent.

He pointed me to a grainy video on YouTube that shows what appears to be a real-life situation, taken from a helicopter camera that doesn’t have the world’s best zoom, of a police dog chasing a suspect. But as the dog gets ready to take down the man, you can see by the dog’s body language that he’s a little confused. Null says the dog is wondering, “Where’s the bite sleeve? Where’s the padding?” He passes the man by, slows his pace, and for the remainder of the short video, man and dog weave around each other along the road, the dog now looking like he’s merrily cantering around—no longer an aggressor but more a happy cartoon character. When the music shifts from a dramatic chase riff to the Looney Tunes theme, it fits perfectly.

“The moral for handlers,” says Null. “Don’t let this happen to you.”

But it’s easy to see why some dogs are motivated by the sight and scent of a good bite sleeve—a big, thick, almost castlike arm protector. Everywhere I went at Lackland’s patrol area, dogs with heads held high and tails wagging hard paraded around with what looked like giant, stiff arms. After certain types of exercises—like finding a bad guy behind a closed door in a barren building with many doors—dogs would get the sleeve as a reward for about a
minute, and they’d beam as they toted around the biggest and most outlandish “bones” ever. It’s no wonder the dog in the video was holding out for his. (Another theory about that dog is that he didn’t want to hurt the man. He probably learned that handlers are not happy when you bite into a body part that’s not protected.)

What starts as a fun game propelled by a dog’s play, prey, and hunt drives develops over months and even years into a drive to defend and protect. “The goal is to develop the ultimate working dog that will defend itself and its pack members under any condition,” Arod says. If a handler is wounded and unable to speak, the dog won’t just stand there waiting for the command. He’ll go into full protection mode.

The trainers at Lackland plant the seeds of this drive. They teach a dog to attack when the “bad guy” starts fighting, or even when a suspect raises his arm while being questioned in a mock field interview.

Not all dogs will make it through this part of dog school. Patrol is not for everyone. Just as Ferdinand the fictional bull preferred to just sit and sniff the flowers, some tough-looking military working dogs really don’t want to attack people. There are softies in the dog world, and no matter what you do, they’re not going to be reliable aggressors. “They just want to be your friend,” says Null.

The military knows this, which is why dogs certify in detection work first. These dogs can be perfectly good sniffer dogs, and they have the bonus feature of looking like they could eat you for lunch, even if they’d rather just come over for a good ear rub.

     20     

I
’ve been watching bite-training work at Lackland for much of the morning when I meet up with Navy Master-at-Arms First Class Ekali Brooks. He’s training new students at the handler course on the basics of “catching” a dog.

When you catch a dog, the dog—generally a German shepherd or a Belgian Malinois—careens toward you at top speed, intent on biting into the part of your body that’s easiest to access and that’s moving the most. This can be rather dangerous, so you wear a bite sleeve. If you catch a dog right, you won’t be hurt. Mess up, and you might know what a few hundred psi of dog bite feels like.

Brooks explains that as the dog runs at you, the sleeve needs to be a few inches away from your body so there’s a cushion when the impact occurs. More experienced handlers and trainers can be running away from the dog and turn at the last second for the dog to bite into the sleeve. New students just stand there facing the dog, knees bent, ready to absorb the impact. In either case, as the dog runs toward you, you want to agitate the sleeve, shaking your arm
so the dog is attracted to the sleeve and not to any of the many unprotected parts of the body.

As I watch dogs fly by on the field of dry grass on this scorching Texas summer day, I realize a lot of things can go wrong if you don’t do this decoy business right. (Brooks tells me that “decoy” is a more appropriate term for what I’d been calling the “dog catcher” or once even, carelessly, the “victim.”) Besides the scars so many handlers and trainers bear, Brooks says these men and women are notorious for having shoulder problems.

Then he asks someone nearby a question: “You want to catch a dog?”

I look around for the decoy candidate he’s talking to, but there’s no one else close enough to hear that question.

“You want to try it?”

Oh God, the man is looking at
me
. And he’s smiling in that benevolent “here is a gift I know you will love” kind of way. How can I say no?

“Sure, that’d be great!” Suddenly the hot day feels much warmer.

Brooks calls over a husky student wearing army camouflage and asks for his sleeve. It looks like the arm of the Tin Man from
The Wizard of Oz
, only with a jute fiber cover over hard plastic. It’s a Gappay brand—one of the best, Arod would later tell me—and starts at the shoulder, bends ninety degrees at the elbow, and ends well past the hand, which is sealed off in case of overly enthusiastic dogs.

Brooks hands it to me, and I try not to notice that there’s blood on the outside. The jute should be a nice haylike color. And it
mostly is. But there’s one area that’s the color and demeanor of the piece of absorbent material that’s on the bottom of a package of hamburger meat. I didn’t want to ask what happened. Better not to know right now.

(I later learn that the blood is from the friction of a dog’s gums against the jute, not from a handler mishap. It’s uncommon that a dog bites in such a way that the gums scrape and bleed, but the sleeve I was wearing was pretty tattered and had clearly caught hundreds of dogs, and rubbed at least one dog’s gums the wrong way.)

I slip my arm into the thing. Inside there’s foam cushioning and a bar of protective steel running the length of it. The cushioning has a sticky, grungy, spongy wetness from the sweat of the handlers who’ve been practicing this morning. Outside, the jute is shredded and damp from the saliva of dogs with great big canine teeth and an even bigger prey drive. The dog I’m about to catch—a smaller, older Belgian Malinois named Laika H267—eyes me and my giant arm from afar. She looks like she wants a piece of me. I tuck away any thoughts of arms as hamburger meat and get my instructions from Brooks.

He is confident and calm in manner and has done this for years. He has an enthusiasm about working with dogs that’s conveniently contagious. “They actually pay us to work with dogs like this! There aren’t too many people who like what they do, and I love what I do. It doesn’t get any better than working with these dogs.”

My arm is in good hands.

I’m positioned, knees slightly bent, arm a few inches from torso. Bring on the Malinois!

Then I remember the missing ear.