“Okay, Rebecca, it’s your turn to find the bomb.” That’s what Tech Sergeant Edward Canell at Buckley Air Force Base said to Rebecca Frankel, a journalist who was there in Aurora, Colorado doing research for her new book, War Dogs: Tales of Heroism, History, and Love. A few minutes later, she and Haus, a German shorthaired pointer, were a tangle of woman, leash, and dog-in-training as both struggled to find the fake bomb hidden in one of the stalls of a bathroom.
They didn’t find the bomb, but this scenario illustrates where War Dogs hits the bulls-eye: the sheer intimacy of its detailed storytelling. Frankel offers her readers the same hard-won, front-row access into the unknown world of military dog training and handling that she earned over years of research. The handlers of war dogs are a small and closed community within the military, said Frankel at a recent event at New America. In the process of writing the book, she worked hard to break through their defensive insularity, which has solidified over time around training programs that mandate rough tactics for the dogs and foster a macho environment (along with a wariness against charges of abuse) in which survival of the toughest is the rule. “The badder the dog, the bigger the bite,” as Frankel describes the handlers’ mentality, “and the deeper the scar, the better the story.” Frankel has first-hand understanding of this mentality after suiting up in protective gear at Langley Air Force Base to run a drill essential for training MWDs for patrol work that’s called “catch a bite.” The Washington Post published her personal account along with a video and she doesn’t mince words about the experience. “It _really _hurts,” she recalls with a smile and a grimace.
Frankel offers her readers the same hard-won, front-row access into the unknown world of military dog training and handling that she earned over years of research.
The book revolves around two little-known revelations: that military war dogs (MWDs) were a key factor in addressing soldiers’ extreme vulnerability to IED attacks in Iraq and have played a vital role in military conflict going back to the First World War. The prevalence and savagery of IED warfare in 2004 was a tipping point that prompted American forces to dispatch military dogs and handlers to wage war for the first time in nearly 30 years. Her ability to write behind the scenes is especially critical, because in spite of sometimes brutal scenarios of loss during what Frankel calls the “Dog Surge” of the mid-2000s, no centralized record exists of the injuries and fatalities suffered by war dogs.
And yet even without these numbers, as Frankel’s in-depth reportage reveals, the recent and not-so-recent history of canine military participation is full of memorable and significant characters, within and beyond the American armed forces. We meet Air Force Staff Sergeant Sean Lulofs, who knew he wanted to become a dog handler since the age of five and endured months in Fallujah with his dog, Belgian malinois Aaslan. There is Ron Aiello, a Marine who volunteered to train at the Army’s dog program at Fort Benning and deployed to Vietnam in 1966 with his German shepherd mix, Stormy. We even meet socialite dog breeders like Arlene Erlanger, who started Dogs for Defense—for which more than 20,000 Americans gave their pets over for service during World War II. Erlanger began making calls in the hours following Pearl Harbor to journalists and power brokers, saying “The dog must play a part in this thing.”
And play a part they have. Without a centralized record of injuries and deaths incurred by these dogs in combat, it is still unclear how we will measure the impact MWDs have made in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Frankel cites numbers of soldiers saved by MWDs—15,000 men in World War II and 10,000 in Vietnam—which she concedes are criticized by handlers as overly low estimates.
In addition to its promise of access, War Dogs provides necessary context for the popularity of war dogs, its own form of cultural currency in and of itself. The book had its origin in a series of photo essays and blog posts on war dogs she curated for Foreign Policy (where Frankel is now a senior editor), some of which went viral along with the purported canine sidekick to SEAL Team Six, Cairo, who became a mini-celebrity (prompting headlines like “Zero Bark Thirty” from the New York Post). One of the most compelling aspects of Frankel’s book is its demonstration that this popularity has a longer history; she introduces us to Chips, a collie-shepherd-husky mix in who saved his men from a group of Italian machine-gunners in Sicily during the Second World War. Chips became a personality in his own right, meeting FDR and Winston Churchill after being awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart.
Whether online or on the battlefield, as_ _this book makes clear, MWDs have had their own roles in the drama of winning hearts and minds, and those stories don’t always get happy endings. Dogs like Ron Aiello’s Stormy were lost in time. Back then, MWDs stayed deployed when their handlers finished their tours, and most dogs were left behind when the US pulled out of Vietnam. Aiello tried for years to learn Stormy’s fate, to no avail—and he is far from the only one who never found out what happened to his dog after his tours.
MWDs have had their own roles in the drama of winning hearts and minds, and those stories don’t always get happy endings.
Drawing deeply from Frankel’s own reporting and a wealth of secondary sources, the very richness of the varied cast of characters in War Dogs contributes to a lack of narrative coherence. But as a launching pad for a whole host of discussions about the past, present, and future of canine military engagement, _War Dogs _succeeds brilliantly, in large part because of the warmth and keenness of Frankel’s eye for the emotional bigger picture of the relationship between war and dogs. She writes that she is skeptical toward handlers’ resistance to the idea that they loved their dogs or that their dogs loved them—even when they risked their lives for each other. The mantra of a war dog handler is: “Where I go, my dog goes. Where my dog goes, I go.” With an epigraph to one chapter, Frankel invokes the similarities between this phrase and one from the Book of Ruth: “for whither thou goest, I will go”—a testament to the bonds between two people not connected by blood relation. While Frankel concedes that the connection between handlers and dogs does not mimic human love, she affirms their emotional reciprocity. As she quotes another handler: “The leash goes both ways.”
