War Dogs (4 page)

When Ron Aiello was a little boy,
he would spend Friday nights riding in the front seat of his grandfather's taxicab. When they dropped off a fare, his grandfather, a heavy man who'd immigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager, would tell their passenger, “Give the tip to my grandson,” and Aiello would collect a dime or, if he was really lucky, a quarter. It was a lot of money for an eight-year-old kid in 1953.

Even then Aiello knew he would become a Marine. He grew up in his grandparents' home in the Italian section of
Trenton, New Jersey, in a house filled with love, food, dogs, and family. One of Aiello's favorite uncles was a Marine. So in the summer of 1964, when he was 18, Aiello threw some clothes into the back of his '57 Cadillac and drove down to Virginia Beach and enlisted. A few weeks later he was an infantry grunt stationed at Camp
Lejeune in North Carolina. One day coming back from maneuvers Aiello spotted a guy posting a three-by-five index card on a bulletin board. It was asking for volunteers for dog school. Aiello thought if he had to go to Vietnam, what better way to do it than to go with a dog?

By December 1965, he was assigned and training with the Army's dog program at Fort Benning in Georgia. It was there Aiello met the dog he would take to war with him, an 18-month-old German shepherd mix named Stormy. The first time he approached her kennel he did so cautiously, leash in hand. She was smaller than the male dogs and she stood in the back of the run, staring at him. She didn't bark or move. And so Aiello held still too, looking back at her. They both just stood there, staring. Ten minutes must've gone by before he got up the courage to open the kennel and walk in. Day after day they trained together—day patrols, then night patrols, learning how to follow airborne scent and alert on booby-traps, the scent of gun oil, and the sound of snipers high in the trees. The training drew them close, and pretty soon it felt to Aiello that Stormy could read his mind. In 1966, the 21-year-old Marine corporal and his scout dog were on their way to Vietnam.

As a scout dog team, their role was to lead night patrols through the jungle undetected and in one piece. Aiello always kept her leash wrapped tight around his left wrist. Stormy, confident in her job, would lead out in front. When the leash was taut and pulling, the tension held between them, she was moving and it was safe to follow. But as a soon as the leash went slack, it meant Stormy had stopped; it was her way of alerting him. Aiello would then halt the troops behind them. Whatever held her attention, whichever direction her head was turned, that was where the threat could be found.

Before each mission Aiello would sit with Stormy and talk through his orders with her. “Stormy,” he'd say, bending his dark head of Italian hair down to the dog, “We're going out on a patrol tonight. We're gonna go to an old cemetery.” As he would talk his way through the mission, mapping it out klick by klick, she would sit, listening intently, studying his face. And when Aiello heard his name called up, he'd look down at her and say,
“C'mon, Stormy. Let's go.” All the worry had gone out of him because she'd been there to listen.

Stormy was a loveable, friendly dog. In fact, she was so friendly that when a senior officer instructed Aiello to use Stormy to intimidate a Vietcong they were holding captive for questioning, Aiello panicked. Stormy was too gentle a dog to be violent without provocation, without some kind of imminent threat. As Aiello approached the man—who was on his knees, blindfolded, with hands tied behind his back—he tightened his grip on Stormy's leash, not because he was afraid she would bite the prisoner, but because he was afraid if she got too close, she would lick his face.

But that sweet disposition would change if warranted. One afternoon on base, Aiello was crossing a field with Stormy. Tired and deep in thought, he didn't notice a South Vietnamese Army soldier who was also crossing the field and heading right toward him. The soldier was similarly unaware of Aiello and his dog. Stormy however, had seen this man coming at them and, perhaps because she didn't know him or because she smelled his gun, had marked him as a threat. She stopped in front of Aiello, crouched to the ground and growled. The soldier, reacting, pointed his gun at the dog. Aiello reached for his .45-caliber pistol and pointed it at the man's head. He had no idea if the Vietnamese soldier would understand him but he told him anyway, “If you try to shoot my dog, I will blow your head off.” The soldier lowered his weapon and very slowly backed away. Aiello lowered his weapon and then, sensing that someone was close by, turned around. Behind him were three other Marines who'd watched this soldier point his gun at Stormy and had their M-14s raised, ready to shoot the man who would harm her.

After one handler was shot and wounded, Aiello and Stormy took over his assignment for a day patrol; their orders were to search a village suspected of harboring Vietcong. Before they began their search, an airstrike came through to clear the village. Artillery hailed down in front of them, and the sound of roaring jets filled the air above them. The ground shook as the 500-pound bombs hit the village, rattling the earth.

They stood on a hillside and watched as the village started to burn, blazing into a fiery inferno. While they waited for it to cool, a sick feeling
filled Aiello; he knew they weren't prepared for what lay ahead. Aiello was drenched with sweat from the intense heat, from all that burning, from sweating at the sight of it. The trees were still scorching, the lush green leaves smoldering and smoking, like coals in a fire, their ash lifting into the mess of black clouds above them even as they made their way to the bottom of the hill.

When they entered the village, Stormy made a sound Aiello had never heard before—a deep, strangled moan. As they pushed deeper into the wreckage, she kept moaning. The dog had been trained not just to alert on ammunition and gun oil but also on human scent, and she was overwhelmed by the smell of charred flesh—it was all around them. Aiello realized there was no way she could work like this. But in the end it didn't matter. As they walked from village to village, Aiello couldn't understand what the hell they were doing there, there was nothing but bodies left to find—in pieces and parts strewn everywhere. The village was like a hotbox, the temperature upward of 120 degrees. It was as if they'd entered the underside of hell.

The memory of that day would be one he would repress, hiding in the recesses of his mind until it reemerged on a steamy summer night nearly 40 years later.

On July 4, 2000, Aiello was sitting on the porch of his New Jersey home, a lit cigar between his fingertips. It was late in the evening; the day was fizzling to an end. Earlier, his teenaged sons had set off roman candles and firecrackers in the yard. Maybe it was the sound of the fireworks, or the starbursts pluming in the distant sky, or even the hazy heat of the night, but the vision hit him suddenly and clearly, as did the sensation of being completely soaked. He flashed back to his younger self, standing at the top of that hill in 1966, surveying the burning wreckage of that Vietnamese village.

Perhaps more traumatizing than the memory of that day is that Aiello never knew what became of Stormy. When his tour in Vietnam was over in 1967, Stormy stayed behind in Vietnam, as each dog did when his handler finished a tour. Back then, the dogs stayed where they were and partnered
up with new handlers. Aiello remembers the April afternoon when his captain announced that the replacement handlers were already en route and would be arriving the next day. It was, he told them, the last night they would have with their dogs. Almost all of the handlers, including Aiello, brought blankets out to the kennels to sleep on the ground next to their dogs, wanting to be with them until the very last moment.

For years Aiello wrote to the Marine Corps trying to find Stormy, putting in his bid to take her, mailing letters, making phone calls, but to no avail. He never received a response and was left only to wonder what had become of her. Like the majority of the some 10,000 handlers who served in Vietnam, Aiello never saw his dog again.

Of the nearly 5,000 dogs who served their tours in Vietnam from 1964 to 1975, only 204 dogs left the country, and none were out-processed to a
life beyond the military.
8
The dogs still in-country at the time the US forces evacuated were either euthanized or turned over the South Vietnamese Army, which likely meant death. Their handlers, who left Vietnam believing they would see their partners again, were in the dark about the fates of their dogs. Many wouldn't discover the truth until years later. And many, to this day, have not recovered from the pain of knowing their dogs were left behind.

In the early 1990s Aiello and some of his Vietnam handler buddies saw a notice circulating for a war dog reunion out in Ocean City, Maryland. They decided to go. They didn't realize their mistake until they got to the hotel—it was actually a reunion for World War II handlers, not for the guys who served in Vietnam. In the end, Aiello said it didn't matter—not the difference in wars or the generations between them. They were all handlers.

Aiello and the other Vietnam veterans spent those three days laughing, talking, and sharing memories of their dogs with the old timers. “They would close their eyes and listen,” he says. “Their stories were our stories.”

Two

The House of Misfit Dogs

Now the most important point . . . is this question of the keepers. It is more important than that of the dog.

—Lieutenant Colonel E. H. Richardson

In the late 1990s, at the Lackland Air Force Base kennels in Texas, there was one dog so aggressive, so vicious and unapproachable that Dr. Stewart Hilliard, chief of the Department of Defense's Military Working Dog Training Course and resident animal behaviorist, started to document the efforts to train him. Taint was an ornery, raging beast of a dog; a notorious biter who had grown to deserve his disparaging name.

Curious to see if even a problem dog like Taint could be used in the program, Hilliard asked handler Staff Sergeant Chris Jakubin to work alongside him in testing Taint's boundaries. Jakubin was eager to help. He had a great respect for Hilliard, whom he called “Doc,” and often trailed around after him, peppering Hilliard with questions about training techniques or a dog he was having trouble with. After they mounted a video camera on the top of the kennel so they could film these attempts, Jakubin donned the necessary protective layers and pulled on a pair of gloves to shield his hands. They were expecting the worst.

But when Jakubin opened the door and went in, nothing happened. Taint accepted the hot dog Jakubin offered and let him walk right into his kennel. Jakubin didn't have any issues with Taint that day or in the days that would follow. He would just walk up to the kennel, feed Taint a hot dog, and go on in. On the way out, the dog followed him willingly. And this was how Taint the problem dog became Jakubin's dog.

When Jakubin's assignment at Lackland came to an end, a Marine stepped up to take over handling Taint. Jakubin was very clear about how to work with the dog to keep his temperament in check, carefully outlining a long list of do's and don'ts. The Marine assured him he could manage Taint. But one day, not long after Jakubin departed, the Marine handler tried to get too close and Taint mauled him so badly that Lackland's behavioral veterinarians were ready to destroy the dog. When word got back to Jakubin that they were planning on putting Taint down, he pleaded with them not to do it. “I will take him,” he told them. “I will deal with him.”

His request was approved, and soon Taint was on a plane to Colorado, where Jakubin had taken a position at the United States Air Force Academy as kennel master. When he went to pick Taint up, Jakubin was nervous. It'd been months since he'd last seen his old partner, so he put on gloves before opening Taint's crate, just in case the dog had changed his attitude. But Taint came out of his crate happy. Together, Jakubin and Taint would go on to prove the naysayers wrong, winning multiple competitions and meeting the regular requirements for detection work without difficulty.

By 2009, time caught up with Taint. The ten-year-old dog's health had deteriorated: his bladder was shot and his cataracts were so bad he was nearly blind. But the tenacious Belgian Malinois continued running drills, his accuracy at detection spot-on perfect. Even as his body was riddled with illness and infirmity, he was outperforming dogs half his age with twice his strength. Those who knew and watched them together as a team—like Sergeant Timothy Bailey, Jakubin's head trainer—believe the dog's iron will to survive derived solely from his attachment to Jakubin.

One day Bailey was supposed to take Taint in for a routine veterinary visit, but when Jakubin saw them getting ready to leave, he decided he
wanted to be the one to go. After they got there, it only took the vet a little while to determine that the dog was dying. Taint's lungs were filling with fluid. It was unlikely, the vet told Jakubin, that he would survive the night. So Jakubin brought Taint back outside and they walked for nearly two miles before going back to the vet and saying good-bye.

When Jakubin returned to the kennels, he came back alone. He didn't hide his grief. It was the first time any of his handlers saw Jakubin so emotionally bare; the first time they ever saw Jakubin cry.

When Bailey spoke to the sizeable crowd at Taint's memorial service, he tried to impart to those gathered how rare Jakubin's relationship with Taint really was. Their relationship spanned the dog's life. “Jak and Taint could probably almost go in for records of being the longest team together,” he said. “Your average K-9 military dog team is together for maybe three to four years and that's the max.”

Jakubin and Taint were together for ten.

The muzzle on this dog
is already speckled with gray and white, even though he is barely five years old. This coloring is the reason why the other handlers at the United States Air Force Academy call Mack, a moderately sized Belgian Malinois, the “ghost-faced killer.”

It's a cold December morning in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Mack is riding in the back of one of the kennel's vehicles outfitted especially for their dogs. Kennel Master Chris Jakubin, or Jak, as most of his handlers call him, is driving. His six-foot-four frame fills the cab of the car so that he has to hunch over the steering wheel. Dog hair dusts his black fleece. Jakubin and Mack are on their way to meet the handlers stationed at Buckley, another Colorado Air Force base located nearby, for a day of intrabase kennel training.

Mack doesn't sit quietly, nor does he use the hour of downtime in the moving car to rest; he is constantly twisting and shifting or frenetically scratching at the metal interior of the made-for-canine backseat. He barks randomly at the cars he sees flying by his window on the highway, the sound throaty, hoarse, and loud. A smoker's bark, Jakubin calls it. He grins.
He has a special shine for Mack, the dog he fondly calls the reincarnation of Taint.

In the backseat, Mack seems more stir-crazy than like the vicious impressions conjured by stories of Taint. But Mack hasn't been an easy dog to work with, so in a way, Mack is continuing Taint's legacy because in Taint's legacy there is inherently a challenge. And Jakubin loves a good challenge—especially when it comes to training dogs. He calls it “polishing the turds.”

Chris Jakubin, kennel master of the US Air Force Academy, works with MWD Oli at a training facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado in December 2011.

There's been a long line of turds, or problem dogs, who have graced the kennels under Jakubin's command. In fact, he's actively sought out difficult dogs from other kennels; it's become something of a tradition. The very first dog to officially join the US Air Force Academy kennels after they opened in 2002 was Agbhar, a German shepherd. Agbhar was an asshole. Jakubin says this sheepishly but without hesitation because it's the truth. Agbhar did not like people. Agbhar was not friendly. Agbhar was a problem dog.
“Agbhar was in a way a misfit dog. Taint was a misfit dog,” Jakubin says. “Like the home for misfit toys, we're the home for misfit dogs.”

A kennel master is pretty much exactly what it sounds like—the officer responsible for maintaining the kennels and overseeing the handlers and dogs who work there. It's a high-ranking position in the dog-handling field. It's also a role that comes with a lot of managerial responsibilities—from ordering the dogs' food to assigning handlers to base patrol duty. Much of the work can have little to do with hands-on training. So how much a kennel master works with the dogs is entirely up to the kennel master. Will he be a desk man or a dog man?

Jakubin is decidedly a dog man. He operates under the philosophy that there is no single, cookie-cutter way to train a dog. Each dog is unique, and it's the handler's job to study that dog and learn
that
dog's behavior. As Jakubin sees it, dogs tell their handlers how they need to be trained, not the other way around. All the handlers have to do is listen. His technique—which he honed while working with dogs like Taint, Agbhar, and Mack—begins with simple observation: first, uncover each dog's weak points until they're fully explored and understood; next, work through those weak points; and finally, build the dog's confidence until that dog is performing at his highest potential. It is a long investigative process but one that comes with great reward—a dog who can contribute, a dog who can save lives.

Jakubin has been training dogs for nearly 30 years, almost his whole adult life. Getting on with dogs comes naturally to him. It all goes back to his first dog bite. One day in winter when he was just a kid, the family dog, a springer spaniel called Silly, went missing. They found the dog a couple of days later at a neighbor's house. When young Jakubin went to retrieve Silly, the neighbor's boxer bit him hard, the dog's incisors puncturing his leg. Rather than scaring him off dogs for good, the experience fortified his desire to work with them—he calls it his Peter Parker moment. That was a long time ago and now, in his mid-forties, Jakubin's arms and legs are pocked and colored with dog-bite scars.

Jakubin retired from the Air Force in 2005, so he's free to wear civilian clothes while he works. On his head is either a Cubs baseball hat or a black
wool skullcap that reveals the poke of a smooth ponytail just above his shirt collar. The long hair is a personal grooming choice that he takes shit for, constantly. An avid hiker, much of his spare time is spent tackling trails and peaks, knocking out the list of 14ers that he scales with three longtime hiking buddies. He walks with a slow, sometimes uneven gait. It's not hard to see how, on a military base with some 4,000 cadets, someone might mistake him for a wayward backpacker.

One afternoon, as we drive back into the Springs from a day of training, the mountains rise up ahead of us, cutting across the sky, impossibly large. He looks over at me, his face brightening as if he's just spotted old friends. “See that?” he says, nodding to the range as if there was any way I could miss it. “When I first saw those mountains I knew I was home.”

The Academy kennels are set back away from the road on the widespread campus, nestled against the outline of more Colorado mountains. Two mesh wire sculptures contoured in the shape of dogs guard the front door, flanking the walkway. A worn, black leather couch takes up room in the hallway, the walls of which are lined with framed photographs of each dog who has called this kennel home. Underneath each photo are rectangular pieces of wood, plaques listing the dog's individual achievements: Taint's drug find in May 2003 (five grams of marijuana); Ginger's 115 individual bomb searches in August 2003 alone; and Agbhar's second-place finish in bomb detection at the Tucson K-9 trials in 2003. This wall of colorful photos and the kennel's modest, fenced-in training yard out back, with its seesaw plank of wood and cement tunnel, are reminiscent of a nursery school playground.

Just to the left is the door leading to the kennels themselves, and before that a clean and organized kitchen area. On the counter is a hand-written reminder not to feed Benga because he has a vet appointment the following day. Plastic specimen containers are lined up above the kitchen cabinets; inside, ghostly white, cocoon-shaped orbs float in a yellowish liquid, some kind of preservative. They are dog testicles. An homage of sorts, however bizarre, to the kennel's dogs.

At the other end of the hall, Jakubin's office is comfortable but cluttered. His desk is a mess of papers; equipment and gear are lumped in
piles on the floor. Shelves and file cabinets are crowded with awards etched with achievements Jakubin has never mentioned. Across the hall, in what appears to be a little-used conference room, an old-fashioned mantelpiece hangs on the wall. The antique polished wood looks out of place, a relic in a room outfitted with more modern amenities—a large-screen television and plastic office chairs. It is the only thing Jakubin took from the original kennel, and on it sits a row of decorative tin boxes. Their sweetly curled pastel ribbons belie their contents: the ashes of the dogs the kennel has lost to illness and old age.

Jakubin is always affable, quick to make jokes and easy with his self-deprecating humor. “If there were no dogs,” he likes to say, “I don't know what I'd be doing. I'd be working in a video store.” Still, he somehow manages to remain at arm's length even when he's talking about his wife and their two sons or describing the day that Taint died. If you ask him how he won Taint over, he'll just kind of shrug and tell you he did it with a pocketful of hot dogs.

One afternoon as we walk through the campus, Jakubin runs into one of his handlers who has Benga, a German shepherd, in tow. The dog had banged his head, which caused a hematoma, the third on this ear. Now his left ear drooped, maybe from the weight of the stitches but more likely, said the vet, a lasting result of the repeated injury. That ear would probably never stand up straight again.

When the pair walks in, Benga lights up, immediately excited to see Jakubin, who is standing about three feet away, just out of his reach. The dog wants to get to him—his ears are snapped as high and tall as they will go, his eyes are wide and seeking, a high-pitched whine catches in his throat as he tap-dances his paws up and down, desperate to be closer.