War Dogs (6 page)

What he says reminds me of something Richardson wrote. It was his recommendation, in fact, that each officer appointed to the post of keeper be done so on a temporary basis, first having to prove himself during a probationary period and not fully integrated or assigned to canine-related duties until the “result of the man's work”—his aptitude for working with dogs—was proven.
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That same afternoon Colonel Alan Metzler visits the clinic, dropping by the Langley training field to speak to the handlers assembled. As he walks across the yard, the air shifts; all the handlers pop up from their seats on the picnic bench. If they were leaning into the chain-link fence, they stand up away from it.

Metzler is upbeat but intense, his moves with a tight decisiveness as he addresses the group. He is quick to tell the group to speak freely, to tell him directly what they need, what they would change if they could. There is a pause but then a few hands are raised. Some ask about funding, another handler suggests more training time and more special seminars like Jakubin's. The colonel nods, his head bobbing efficiently; he is a serious listener. And then Staff Sergeant Kaluza, the handler from the picnic bench, starts to speak. He wants to know if they could do more to weed out the handlers who are in the job for the quick rope-climb up the totem pole, the ones who are in it for the high pay, the ones who lack the passion and intensity of the diehard handlers. He is frank and deadly serious. He wants them gone.

Canine training can be
a rough-and-tumble business. It takes a toll on the body. The resulting scratches, knuckle nicks, and bite marks—like scorecards or bedpost notches—are brands of the job and worn with
pride. The badder the dog, the bigger the bite; the deeper the scar, the better the story.

On a training field one young handler pulls off his shirt and upends his bandages to reveal the bite he received the day before. In this case, the dog hadn't taken a temperamental turn; rather, it was the handler who'd made a move in the wrong direction during their bite-work training so that the dog, aiming for the protective layers, missed, and ended up raking off a good bit of skin right under the handler's rib cage. Because the dog's teeth only grazed the handler's side, the marks look more like scratches—angry red and all the deeper where the canines had pierced the flesh.

In the PowerPoint presentation Jakubin uses during the class portion of his seminar, one of the slides shows a particularly heinous dog bite. The label over the photo reads: “Super Epic Failure!!”

The skin in the photo is ripped so completely, it looks as though a crude blade had sliced a square patch of skin from the sweetest, fleshiest section of this handler's forearm. The blood pools in the wound, threatening to spill over edge; the rest of her arm is spotted with drops of red. Jakubin was with Staff Sergeant Ciara Gavin before she was rushed to the hospital. It's the worst dog bite he's ever seen.

Gavin worked in Jakubin's kennel at the Air Force Academy. She'd been partnered with a long-haired German shepherd who had a sweet temper. While this sweet dog had been competent in detection work, he never took to bite work, so Jakubin traded him to another base that was having trouble with a dog named Kelly, notorious for her volatile temperament and erratic moods. Not so fondly referred to as a “nasty little bitch,” Kelly had bitten at least three handlers and sent them each to the hospital. When she came to the Air Force Academy kennels, Gavin became her handler. It was Kelly who tore that piece out of Gavin's arm.

Kelly's K-9 portrait hangs in the hallway of the Academy's kennel with the others. Her forehead is stout and square, her ears lean at a somewhat sharper bend, turning out at their own stubborn angle. The lids of her eyes have a reddish hue and actually seem to glow. There is no other way to describe it—the dog looks demonic. Gavin, on the other hand, appears
almost angelic in a cherry red fleece; the softness of it seems to warm the space around her. Her brown eyes radiate kindness.

At best Kelly was merely unpredictable. Her moods changed suddenly and without warning or provocation; one minute Kelly was vicious and the next compliant, lying on her back offering her belly up for a scratch. Gavin would see the devil flash and then it would disappear again. And when Kelly went to that instant and ferocious place, snarling and bucking, it was like a rodeo, and wrangling her back down into submission was no easy feat.

There was nothing especially foreboding about the day Kelly bit Gavin. She and Jakubin were just trying to work the dog through the fierce possessiveness she showed for her toys, attempting to establish trust and consistency by showing the dog that if she released the toy she would get it back again.

Gavin was only standing behind Kelly, raising her arms and lifting the dog by the collar when Kelly whipped her head around, sinking in her teeth. It was the day Kelly beat Gavin at the rodeo.

It was six weeks before Gavin was able to use her hand again. When she returned to work, Jakubin put Kelly's leash back in Gavin's hand, and she took it without thinking twice. Gavin could have refused, but in her mind, picking up Kelly's leash wasn't a choice. Pure pride and ego kept her going. In the end, it was the good kind of ego that prevented her from letting her fear override her confidence. It's this side of ego in a canine handler that inspires persistence and the kind of commitment that separates a good handler from a great one. It was essential in the end that she get right back to work, to push through her fears of working with Kelly. It made Gavin a better handler.

Kelly eventually went to a different kennel. Gavin completed her career as an Air Force handler in 2008. And though Gavin is no longer an MWD handler, she will never forget that bite. Even from a distance the twisted lines of the scar shine a pearly white on her wrist. She saw Kelly recently. The dog seemed calm and under control. But for a few seconds, the old devil in Kelly showed through. When the dog growled and snapped at her
new handler, adrenaline coursed through Gavin and her heart thundered as if it would never settle back down.

But as they say in K-9, it's not a matter of
if
you'll get bitten, only when.

I can feel the soggy Virginia heat
on my face, but it's actually cool inside the enormous black bite suit I'm wearing. This luxurious damp is, I'm fully aware, lingering sweat from the bodies that had worn it during drills the day before, but I don't care. This suit is my big, bulky armor of protection.

The horses that had been grazing serenely just outside the fence the previous afternoon are now galloping in wide loops, stopping abruptly to shake out their manes and stamp the ground, their hooves setting off clouds of golden dust. Hurricane Irene is careening her way up the eastern coastline, and though it's hours away from hitting the area around Langley Air Force Base, the horses have caught wind of the approaching storm. Their restlessness and unease is palpable and does little to quiet the loud thumping of my heart. Still, they are more calming than the ribbing calls coming from the crowd gathered inside the smaller training yard to watch me catch my first bite.

“Catching a Bite” is exactly what it sounds like. It is essentially the act of becoming the animated human equivalent of a chew toy. And it's a crucial part of a handler's role in preparing his dog for patrol work. Bite-work training is learned in stages. This is for everyone's safety—the dog's, the handler's, and the decoy's. (The decoy—a handler—plays the role of “perpetrator” so the dog can learn how to detain a fleeing suspect during patrol work.) If a decoy catches a dog incorrectly—turns the wrong way or keeps his body too rigid—he can really hurt the dog, or himself. The decoy will wear a bite sleeve or a full bite suit. Bite suits vary in size and bulk, but ultimately their weight is gradually reduced until the decoy is wearing something thin enough to hide under street clothes. This way the dog learns to associate the bite with a perpetrator, rather than with the suit.

The first suit I try on is huge. Two women handlers—the only other women besides myself in this group—do me a kindness, whether out of
pity or female solidarity, and help me get into the gear. They hold out their arms so I have something to hang on to and work the zippers running down the side of the pant legs to squash them low to the ground, so that I can climb into them. Jakubin, who so far has been keeping a polite distance, looks relieved that I'm managing without his interference. The jacket is easier to get on but not easy to wear. It is very heavy and very large. This is when Jakubin steps in, shaking his head, and hands me a tack suit jacket, which is just as big but not as bulky and thick. It doesn't fit exactly but it's close enough. Under the weight of the jacket and the pants, I feel like I'm walking neck-deep through a pool, pushing against a wall of water. In a few minutes, I'm supposed to act the part of a fleeing suspect, and “run” away from a dog. I can hardly manage a respectable walk.

Handler Staff Sergeant Ted Carlson brings out the dog who's going to bite me, a slender Dutch shepherd named Rambo. From across the yard, I can hear Rambo's ragged panting, the high-pitched whining and the sound of his teeth smacking together as he snaps at the air in anticipation. The sight of me in the suit has ignited the dog's prey drive—the instinct that motivates him to chase and bite something into submission. It would seem that Rambo's prey drive is quite high. My brain knows that I'm safe, but my body doesn't—my muscles stiffen. It's a physical primordial response. It's fear.

Jakubin stands with me in the middle of the yard, adjusting my stance. Before leaving me there on my own, he offers one final directive. “If you get knocked down, don't move,” he says. “I'll come and pick you up.”

I hold my breath, shut my eyes, and wait for the blow. It takes Rambo under three seconds to clear the 25 feet separating us. I feel a spike of adrenaline as the dog makes contact, the force of his weight shoving me back as his open mouth locks around my arm. The sensation registers from dull to crisp, the trickle before the deluge as I feel teeth sink into me—and that sensation is pain.

To put the feel of a dog bite into perspective, it might be helpful to start with what's familiar—our own mouths. Per square inch, the human bite
exerts 120 pounds of pressure. That's enough to do some damage—think Mike Tyson, who managed to tear away a piece of Evander Holyfield's ear with his teeth. Dogs have more teeth than humans, 42 of them,
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but the big fangs, the canines, are the real damage doers. A dog's straight, muscular jaw is designed for meat eating, unlike the construct of a human's mouth and jaw, where the teeth move from side to side to better grind down on things that don't try to run when you eat them, like vegetables.

Different studies and tests have been conducted to try to measure the discrepancies in bite impact from the mouths of a variety of species. In an attempt to determine those animals who possess the most deadly powerful bites, the host of a National Geographic Channel series called
Dangerous Encounters
, Dr. Brady Barr, used a force-measuring device to scale an approximate bite impact among a range of different animals.
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He found that lions and sharks use roughly the same force of bite pressure at 600 pounds per square inch. But were you to get an appendage caught in an alligator's jaws, you could expect something like 2,500 pounds of pressure to clamp down on your muscles, tendons, and joints, making it highly unlikely that you'd get your limb back in working order, let alone get it back at all.

Depending on the breed, dog bites boast considerable force, ranging from that of an American pit bull terrier at 238 pounds of pressure per square inch
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to a bullmastiff, the breed with strongest bite, coming in at a recorded 552 pounds per square inch.
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In training a dog to attack and detain a suspect, the objective is to get a full-mouth bite with a solid grip. The strength of the bite comes from the clamp of the dog's jaws. A weak bite happens when, for example, only a dog's front teeth catch the material, and that's not a bite that will hold for long. But the power of a dog bite depends on many things, from the obvious (how large the dog is) to the difficult to measure or predict with regularity (the dog's desire to bite). The military most often employs two breeds—the Belgian Malinois and the German shepherd. According to the Air Force, the average military working dog's bite exerts somewhere between 400 and 700 pounds of pressure.

I can't say for sure exactly how many pounds of pressure are coming down on my arm—Rambo isn't a very big dog, and I'm fully aware that what I'm experiencing is hardly pushing the limits of dog-bite pain. And because I know this implicitly, I grit my own teeth and force a smile, taking a few steps around the yard. But Rambo has got a good, full-mouth bite, and for that reason he remains fastened to me. Whenever I move, I drag him along with me. Jakubin encourages me to try to pull my arm away from the dog; the resistance excites Rambo, activates his prey drive, which in turn further ignites in him a desire to bite. I tug my arm for all I'm worth, but Rambo's grip seems only to get stronger.

We repeat this move of run, jump, and bite a few more times. When I take off the suit, a marking the shape of a dog's open mouth has already puffed pink and purple on my upper right arm, a swollen pinch where the dog's jaw clamped down on my flesh. Within an hour, that marking will billow into a righteous bruise of deep blues and greens. Compared to some of the batterings I've seen on arms far more muscular and experienced than my own, this mark is like holding up a paper cut next to a machete wound. That doesn't, however, keep me from regarding the bruise fondly over the next couple of weeks, proud as its coloring molts into withering shades of yellow and brown. When Rambo's imprint finally fades and disappears completely, I am sorry to see it go.