When it’s time for canine soldiers to retire, some head right for a well-deserved cushy life devoted to rest and relaxation and a few leisure activities while others find a pursuit where they can give back to others but that still allows for a good chunk of leisure time.
Just like their human companions do. But one difference is that because most military working dogs have had extensive aggression training, all soon-to-be-retired canines soldier must be thoroughly tested and screened before they can be adopted out. Of course, any non-handlers who wish to adopt them must also go through a similar testing process.
Before the year 2000, military working dogs who retired were required to be euthanized as a matter of course; the government believed the dogs were deemed unsuitable for living in a home situation with a family, and by the age of nine or ten many of the dogs also suffered from chronic health problems that are common in MWDs. “A lot of these dogs have joint issues and other aches and pains because they have been working their whole lives,” said Daniel Heinzig, an operations sergeant with the 504th Military Police Battalion at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. “They’ve put a lot on the line and have risked their lives for us. The least we can do is give them a home.”
Despite the potential hurdles, most would maintain that these dogs deserved a happy retirement no matter what. Thankfully, the future of canine soldiers changed in 2000 when Congress passed “Robby’s Law,” named for the MWD who inspired the legislation that would green-light retired dogs for adoption—previous handlers get first dibs before members of the general public—provided the canine passes a number of tests, which include aggression exercises, veterinarian reports on the dog’s health, and also personal recommendations from previous handlers and kennel masters who can vouch for the dog’s character. One thing is certain: everyone is gunning for the dog to live the life of Riley in retirement.
“It means a lot to me,” said Pfc. Jared Bridges, a dog handler with the 510th MP Detachment at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. “They work their entire lives here, working hard days, long hours, and deploy multiple times. It’d be nice to just go see them get a couch somewhere and just relax and live the good life of an actual dog.”
Some dogs who retire mid-career do so because of medical problems. When he was just five years old, a Belgian Malinois named Sato started to limp on his regular rounds as a bomb dog alongside his handler, Tech. Sgt. Ashley-Marie Umstead. Like many dog handler teams, Umstead and Sato—whose home base was the 10th Security Forces Squadron at the Air Force Academy in Colorado—spent so much time together that they were keenly aware of minute changes in each other’s physical or emotional state.
While they were deployed to Qatar their bond only grew. “I was away from my six-month-old daughter, and Sato was like my counselor and best friend,” Umstead said. “I told him everything, and he would sit with me and look at me like, ‘I love you.’ ”
Umstead knew that Sato’s days as a crackerjack detection dog were quickly drawing to a close, but she realized he could still serve his fellow soldiers, only in a different capacity. “He was too young to stay at home without eating my couch,” she said. So after she adopted him she set about finding a retirement job for him that would suit his temperament. She occasionally brought him to her office at the Academy, where she worked as a flight chief, and she had already realized from their regular rounds around the base that Sato enjoyed interacting with other soldiers and civilian employees, serving as a kind of unofficial therapy dog. It wasn’t unusual for colleagues and visitors to stop by her office several times a day just to get in a few pets and scratches.
“He’s a good asset to have here every day,” said Airman 1st Class Khari Berry, an entry controller with the squad. “He’s usually happy-go-lucky and a good stress reliever after a hard day.”
But Umstead wanted to make things official as well as expand Sato’s reach, so she signed up for a program with Therapy Dogs International so that Sato could become certified and they could go off base to visit people at hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and other health facilities.
“I’d like to work with wounded warriors because I can tell them that Sato was in the military, he deployed and is now medically retired,” she said. “It gives them some rapport to connect and I think it makes the relationship more special.
“I enjoy seeing people forget their cares for a couple minutes when they’re with Sato,” she added. “Sato doesn’t judge. He doesn’t care what you’ve done or what you’re going to do, he just wants to spend that moment in time with you. That’s all he wants and all he has to do.”
The attack was a total blur.
On that fateful day in April of 2012 near Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, even though most of his left leg had disappeared in the IED blast, the only thing S.Sgt. Brian Williams could think of was his canine partner, Carly. Where was his dog and was he okay?
When Williams heard that Carly had escaped injury, only then could he focus on his own pain and recovery. He was airlifted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for surgery and rehab, while Carly was transported back to their home base of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. Whenever colleagues from his own 87th Security Forces Squadron came to visit him and expressed concern for his injuries as well as good wishes for his recovery, he always brushed them off.
“Every time we went down to visit Brian, his first question was always ‘How is Carly?’ said S.Sgt. Allison Price, a dog handler with the squadron. And so on one of the next visits they decided to bring Carly along to surprise both of them.
“The first time we brought Carly down to see him, he jumped into his lap and started licking his face,” said Price. “Carly never forgot who his dad is. They truly have an unbreakable bond.”
They continued to bring Carly on visits to the medical center, but instead of getting easier, it got harder. Price said that with each visit Carly had an increasingly hard time leaving Brian. One day, Carly simply refused to leave Brian’s side, barking and crying. About the same time, Brian was getting ready to leave the hospital and head home, but he realized he was going to need some help getting around and managing on a daily basis.
That’s when the lightbulb went off: Why couldn’t Carly be his service dog?
The seed was planted, and happily, about eighteen months after Williams was injured in Afghanistan, with a little bit of string pulling, Carly was officially retired from the military and began his new career as a service dog.
When Stephen Heath, a dog handler with the U.S. Marines, first set eyes on his new canine partner in 2010, he would have been the first to admit that he was less than impressed. After all, he was expecting a big, burly male German shepherd or Belgian Malinois. After all, that’s what most of the other handlers he knew had.
He got a surprise when he was introduced to Ivy, a slightly built black Lab, significantly smaller than the other newly assigned canine partners and a different breed besides, not one known for being particularly ferocious.
Not to mention, she was female.
But orders were orders, so he and his specialized bomb-detection dog headed off to Afghanistan for a seven-month deployment in Helmand Province. Despite his initial misgivings, Heath said that he became attached to Ivy in a matter of days, and vice versa. Indeed, it was a rare moment when they were separated. “She was my companion, my best friend, and she protected me, too,” he said. “We were like family.”
When Heath’s deployment ended he headed back to the United States, but Ivy had several more years to go, so she teamed up with another handler. Heath was determined: he planned to adopt Ivy when her contract was up. Ivy was a Contract Working Dog, or CWD, owned by a private company that raises and trains detection dogs before hiring them out to the military for a specific period of time.
When Ivy’s term was up in 2014, she arrived back at the company’s facility in Virginia and the contractor got in touch with Heath to see if he still wanted to take her, with one catch: Heath would have to pay her way to Houston, where he lived with his fiancée. He told the contractor yes, of course, he wanted Ivy and hung up the phone. He started to research different possibilities for transport, and that’s when he discovered a nonprofit organization right in Houston called Mission K9 Rescue, which helps rescue and find new homes for retired working dogs as well as reuniting them with previous handlers.
After a couple of phone calls, it was finalized: Ivy and Heath would be reunited.
Though handlers and their canine partners are joined at the hip more often than not, the truth is that this attachment can create more than its fair share of frustration and stubbornness between the two sides, in good times and bad. But like many equally close human partnerships, it’s often the more contentious relationships that end up forging bonds that can be closer and more intimate than anything else in life.
“You grow to love your dog because of the amount of time and effort spent with them,” said Tech. Sgt. Gabriel Travers, a handler with the 31st Security Forces Squadron out of Aviano Air Base in Italy. “Then there are times when the dog is telling you ‘No, I’m not going to do it today,’ and they frustrate you to no end.”
When Travers completed handler training and teamed up with his first canine partner, a narcotics-detection dog named Fuels, they worked well together and respected each other and the dog performed his job admirably, though his aggressive tendencies were pretty much nonexistent. It wasn’t until Travers was transferred to Italy and was teamed up with an explosive-detection dog named Tora that he realized how close such a partnership could become, in part because his new canine partner was so different. Unlike Fuels, Tora was so aggressive and contrary that she fought both Travers and others at the base on absolutely everything, like a small child who was constantly questioning everything in her path.
Travers was initially aggravated by his new partner’s temperament in part because she continually challenged him. After all, when Tora fought him Travers had to shift his own approach and outlook in order to convince the dog to do what he wanted her to do, which even included eating and sleeping.
Soon, however, Travers came to appreciate Tora’s orneriness and revel in the closeness of the partnership. In fact, he began to regard his canine companion in the same way he would view—and protect—a family member. In 2012 they deployed to Afghanistan, and after a short adjustment period they began to go on regular patrols outside the wire. As time passed, the dangers increased, and soon Tora began to rebel. “There was a time when we were in too many firefights and she didn’t want to work anymore,” he said. “She was mentally done after being so close to explosions. All I could do was to try and ask her to put her life on the line for me and let her know I’d protect her.”
As a result of Tora’s reluctance—and the increasing peril—Travers took a cue from his dog and he began to question things as well, asking himself, How can I ask her to do it again? “If you’re scared to walk outside the wire, the dog can sense that and they’re not going to work efficiently,” said Travers.
However, the end of their deployment was still months away and he felt he and Tora owed the soldiers they were protecting their best efforts. So once again, he shifted his mind-set to accommodate his canine partner, which, in turn, helped ease Tora’s anxieties, and she eventually became a little more relaxed whenever they went out on patrol. “At the end of the day in those environments, we loved each other and survived through it together. She’s more than a dog, she is like my child,” said Travers.
When their deployment was over, they headed back to Italy and worked together for three more years until it was time for Tora to retire. Travers adopted her, and his wife, Megan, and their two sons welcomed Tora as a member of their family.
“I look at her not only as a dog, but as a person who saved my husband’s life,” said Megan Travers. “I respect and love Tora, because I know what they’ve been through.”
Traditionally, handlers get first dibs on adopting a military working dog who was their partner. If there are no takers, the dog is offered up to a specially screened and pre-approved member of the general public, who’s probably been on a lengthy waiting list for months, if not years.
But sometimes the dog is so popular that the handlers have to draw straws to see who gets the honor of adopting the soon-to-be-retired canine soldier. In that case, the dog’s last handler typically gains precedence.
That’s just what happened with an MWD named Bernie, a Belgian Malinois based out of the Marine Corps air station in Yuma, Arizona. In fact, Bernie was so well loved by her handlers that several had already made it clear that they wanted to adopt her, setting the stage for a fight. But in the end, Cpl. Bret Reynolds, her last handler and the one who’d spent two-and-a-half years with her, won out.
“Every handler dreams of this, to be able to adopt a dog they’ve handled,” he said.
As things turned out, Reynolds left the Marine Corps shortly after Bernie retired, and he happily reported that his former canine partner had no trouble adjusting to the relative cushiness of retirement. For one, the dog has already mastered the art of maneuvering her way onto the bed to sleep with Reynolds and his wife.
But neither one particularly minds.
“Trusting her with my life is one of the biggest commitments I’ve ever made,” said Reynolds. “Trusting someone who doesn’t speak, who can’t tell you what she feels, trusting her with my life on bomb threat calls has been huge and something I’ll always take with me. Besides, she’s the only girl I’m allowed to love other than my wife.”
