4
Hey, a Dog! BOOM!
WILLINGHAM FLIPPED OPEN the frayed door flap of the general-purpose tent.
“Ladies first.”
Lucca entered and immediately went to work. She didn’t have to sniff every corner, every seam, the plywood floor. She just couldn’t help it. Finding no bombs, she lay down and watched Willingham unpack, as she had five weeks earlier at Camp Slayer. He unrolled his sleeping bag on one of four folding steel cots. On another cot he laid out his uniforms—army and marine, flak vest, Kevlar, and a small photo album with pictures of Jill, his parents, grandparents. Mouthwash, deodorant, razors, shaving cream, water bottles, baby wipes went on top of a broken air-conditioning unit in the corner.
He took two steel bowls from one of his bags and poured water in one. The ping of kibble as he scooped it into the other bowl caught Lucca’s attention. She stood up, stretched, and chowed down.
This was their first FOB experience together, and Willingham was excited about finally getting close to the real action. FOB Falcon wasn’t big; maybe one and a half miles around if he walked the inside perimeter of the twelve-foot-tall, steel-reinforced concrete protective T-walls. Falcon housed a few white two-story concrete buildings, but most of the soldiers here slept in tents, which were arranged in neat rows separated by gravel paths. It was Tim Burton–esque in its oddly perfect layout. There was hardly any vegetation, and what little there was had gone mostly brown and crispy. A few hardy trees had managed to hold on to their green despite the conditions. They stood out to Willingham, who admired their fortitude.
It was far more Spartan than Slayer had been, but Willingham didn’t mind. He wasn’t here for the aesthetics.
Well, not entirely.
He surveyed the tent. It was general-purpose medium, thirty-two by sixteen feet, which felt like way too much space for one marine and his dog, even with all the equipment they had brought along. He figured he’d be getting some company soon, so he didn’t spread out too much.
It was slightly dark inside because of the semi-opaque olive-green tent. It needed something to liven it up, he thought. He reached under a cot and unzipped a duffel. At the bottom of the T-shirts, underwear, and socks, he felt what he was looking for. He took out his two flags—U.S. Marine Corps and University of Alabama—and hung them along the walls next to his cot. He stepped back and took in his handiwork. The red of the two flags brought some life into the gray and green interior.
“That’s better! Roll Tide! Home sweet home, Lucca.”
He looked around again. It was a little more colorful, but it still seemed empty. He was the lone marine in a sea of soldiers, the only dog guy on this entire FOB, and Lucca was the only dog. It could be a long five months if no one else showed up.
Not that they’d be spending all that much time here. FOB Falcon would just be a place they’d come back to for a little rest. “This is where you’ll come to relax between missions,” someone had told him. A big op was brewing, and they were going to be heading out within days. He knew nothing more about it, but there was something he needed to start doing right away if he and Lucca were going to get out there and help save soldiers from IEDs. He had to brief some key people on the capabilities and limitations of dogs and what they bring to the fight.
He was aware that most people in the military didn’t realize the work that dog teams do. In fact, many didn’t even know there were dogs in the military. Maybe they’d seen a slide of a dog team during a PowerPoint presentation back in basic training, but it was usually quickly forgotten. Earlier, on the way to their tent, he could see the surprise on the faces of several soldiers. “A dog?! Cool!” was the typical reaction, with a request to pet Lucca.
He had his work cut out for him. He decided he’d start by talking to some higher-ups. He didn’t want to oversell or undersell what Lucca could do. Proven, not perfect—a phrase he drilled into his students at Lackland. He always told his students not to be cocky about what they could do. Confidence is one thing. But you have to be realistic. IEDs are a nasty business that can evade even the best team. Dogs are a huge added asset, but they’re not infallible.
“Ready to let ’em know what we’re made of?”
Lucca walked to his side and sat, panting a little from the heat of the tent. He leashed her up and they walked out into the bright, hot afternoon. As they walked away, he turned around to give the tent a quick look from the outside so he’d know where to return later, since the GP tents all looked alike. He didn’t notice that over the door, stenciled with red paint that had blended into the fading green tent, was the number thirteen. It would be a few more weeks before he became aware of it. . . .
WILLINGHAM WOKE UP the next day before his body was ready to. A familiar sound, something from his time at Camp Slayer, only louder.
Boom!
Thunder? WTF?
He rubbed his eyes, trying to come out of a dream and back to wherever he was.
Boom!
Mortar. Of course.
The voice on the loudspeaker would have told him so a second later.
“Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!”
He bolted up in his cot, ready to run with Lucca to the nearest bunker—the one they’d showed him yesterday with comments like, “You’ll definitely need to know where this is.” Only minutes before that part of the tour of the Falcon grounds, he had been told the price of admission to the chow hall: Everyone who entered had to fill a two-gallon sandbag that would be used to fortify the building, which had been rocketed more than once. Grabbing a shovel and digging into the pile of sand near the entrance seemed like a small price to pay for added safety.
The sirens on FOB Falcon were wailing now. You never knew how many mortars would come in once they started. Strange as it seemed, sometimes it was just one. Sometimes it would be a barrage lasting several minutes, multiple times a day. Willingham was just about convinced it was time to beat a hasty path to the bunker, but Lucca did not share his sense of urgency. She remained lying on a blanket next to his cot and lifted her head only when she saw him move toward her food bowl. Willingham hoped her calm foretold the end of the mortaring for the morning. He slid his feet into his running shoes without bothering to lace them, just in case.
Streeeeek, BOOM!
The ground shook with this one. Lucca didn’t startle. She just looked at Willingham to see what was up. He knew from experience in Baghdad that mortars make that little whining sound just before impact if they’re close. Farther away it’s usually just the explosion.
He grabbed Lucca’s leash. “Come on, girl, let’s take a walk!”
They hustled over to the bunker and squeezed in with the soldiers who were already there. It was tight but felt secure. A room with thick concrete walls, more like a small hallway, no door to shut, but a wall of sandbags just outside the entrance.
“Hey, a dog!”
“Check it out! A dog!”
Boom!
“Damn!”
“What’s his name?”
“This here’s Lucca; she’s a specialized search dog; she finds IEDs off leash. We just got here yesterday from Slayer.”
“I miss my dog. OK if I pet her?”
“Sure you can pet her. She loves people.”
Before Willingham could get the words out, the soldier was stroking Lucca’s head, bending down, and talking to her.
“I got a dog back home. Oscar,” another soldier said. “He’s s’posed to be a shepherd mix.”
“Great dogs,” Willingham said. “Lucca is half shepherd herself.”
“How old is he? He don’t bite, do he?” the lanky soldier next to him inquired.
Another soldier toward the back lit a cigarette. Crowded, smoky, friendly. It reminded Willingham of this one bar back in Tel Aviv.
“You going down on the big op?”
“I believe so. I’m going to a briefing later to find out more.”
“She finds bombs? I hope she comes with our platoon!”
“That’d be great, man.”
As everyone talked, Lucca sat there, looking for all the world like she was simply meeting people at a small party—maybe one of the poker games in someone’s garage back home—and enjoying their attentions and the closeness of the space. The men appeared equally at ease. Lucca seemed to have that effect on everyone. Willingham looked at her and smiled, proud that she tended to bring calmness everywhere she went.
About fifteen minutes after the last mortar hit, the all clear was given. The men filed out slowly, with Lucca leading the way. Last in, first out.
“Nice meeting you, Lucca! You, too, dog guy!”
“See you ’round, OK?”
Willingham and Lucca walked back to the tent to start their day again.
“Good morning, Iraq!” Willingham said to no one in particular, but Lucca looked up at him anyway.
A PETRI DISH for al-Qaeda to grow.
As Willingham turned in that night, he thought about the briefing he had just attended and how Lieutenant Colonel Ken Adgie, commander of the First Battalion, Thirtieth Infantry Regiment (1/30th) of the Third Infantry Division, had described the Arab Jabour region. Any day now, Willingham and Lucca and hundreds of others would be heading straight into that petri dish—part of the so-called Triangle of Death.
Arab Jabour, southeast of Baghdad, was known as one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq. There was no government structure, no police, and it had been too long since coalition forces had made their presence known. Most al-Qaeda members there appeared to be not so much hard-line Islamists as simply local thugs. They worked for al-Qaeda because of the money, not because of the ideology. For more than a year, they’d been using “ultraviolence” to bring locals under their control through fear. To further control behavior, they severely limited essential resources such as water, food, and electricity.
The conditions provided a perfect setting for al-Qaeda to proliferate. It grew, with members enforcing Islamic fundamentalist law, lining roads with IEDs, and transporting IEDs into Baghdad for lethal use there.
The situation in Arab Jabour was desperate for the Iraqis caught in the grips of a full-throated civil war. Preyed on by al-Qaeda terrorists and Shi‘a militiamen alike, ordinary Iraqis struggled to survive amid the daily horrors of car bombs, rocket and mortar attacks, and sectarian cleansing. Statistics gathered later in a CENTCOM update would reveal that during the week of Adgie’s briefing, there were nearly sixteen hundred violent incidents in Iraq. In the month of June alone, roughly two thousand Iraqi civilians would be killed due to ethnosectarian violence.
But there was a plan—part of the huge Iraq War troop surge announced in January by president George W. Bush to salvage an increasingly unpopular and to date largely unsuccessful war. Adgie and his team described it to the twenty or so key personnel—including Willingham and Lucca, the only marines assigned to ground forces there—who were gathered in a large tent. In attendance were company commanders, first sergeants, and section leaders, as well as enablers supporting the operation, such as explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) technicians, snipers, and engineers. Willingham, as the expert on military dogs, fit into the enablers category.
In the middle of the space, on the plywood floor, was a terrain model of the area of operation, showing roads, the river, villages. Those giving the brief referred to it frequently during their explanation. Those listening sat perched in chairs around it.
Willingham looked at the briefing paper he’d been given when he and Lucca entered the guarded area. Normally these documents are one page long. This one was ten pages. Typed across the top were the words Operation Marne Torch.
It would be an enormous operation involving coalition forces, including elements of the Third Infantry Division, bolstered by Iraqi Army soldiers. Their numbers could climb to three thousand. They would soon begin methodically and painstakingly clearing roads and buildings from north to south. U.S. forces would get out of the FOBs and move closer to the locals, where they’d provide security and gather intelligence on the enemy. The goal: to stop the flow of “accelerants of violence” into Baghdad, defeat sectarian violence, and secure the local population. It would be a hard-striking, fast-moving operation, from both the ground and the air.
Troops would maintain a presence, not abandoning a location once they’d cleared it of bombs and bad guys. A core piece of the operation was getting to know the local population, what the people wanted, what they needed—and what they knew. Sticking around and providing protection had obvious benefits for locals but also was advantageous for the operation’s goals. It was great for gathering intel on al-Qaeda. A secure area, where people are shielded from violent revenge—including beheadings, an al-Qaeda favorite—meant they might be more inclined to open up about operatives in their villages, and other information only locals would know. And it would make it more difficult for insurgents to reenter and begin their game anew.
Headquarters for Marne Torch was to be in what had once been a weekend retreat home for Saddam Hussein’s sons, brothers Uday and Qusay, who had been killed in July 2003 by U.S. forces. Uday was notoriously cruel, known for his torture, murder, rape, and fraud. Younger brother Qusay had been accused of ordering the deaths of thousands of political prisoners. Their onetime getaway—a sprawling, one-story house overlooking the Tigris River—featured a swimming pool and a horse stable. Coalition forces would soon convert the whole vacation destination into Patrol Base Murray.
For the ground teams, the operation would involve a slow, arduous, door-to-door search. No one could predict just how long Marne Torch would last. There are plenty of unknown factors when disrupting deeply rooted insurgent operations, taking away the weapons caches that are the tools of their trade, and doing it along IED-laden roads.
The meeting broke up, and everyone turned in their ten-page briefs. On their way out of the tent, Willingham looked down at his dog. She walked with an easy, confident stride.
“Yup, Lucca,” he told her. “We got this covered.”
A FEW DAYS later, June 16, was moving day. Hundreds of soldiers from the 1/30th gathered around Adgie as he stood on a Humvee and gave a motivational mission speech. The lieutenant colonel told the men that they’d be out there making split-second decisions and that their leaders had their backs. Willingham, age twenty-seven, liked how Adgie seemed to understand the stress of combat for these younger soldiers. The average age of the soldiers on their first deployment looked to him to be about twenty, if that. This was a large operation in a dangerous area, and Adgie didn’t hide the fact that they were expecting casualties.
In his speech he acknowledged that these young men were well trained and that many of them were going to face combat for the first time. Going through compounds, coping with IED threats, dealing with an enemy that doesn’t dress like the enemy, possibly losing a friend in battle—it’s a lot of pressure on anyone, much less a twenty-year-old. Adgie assured them that those in leadership positions understood the challenges to the troops and were there to support them.
Willingham had packed his weapons, essential gear, enough dog food for a couple of weeks, and a sleeping bag. He left most of their belongings in the tent, since they’d be coming back to FOB Falcon fairly frequently to send after-action reports to Roche and to rest up a bit. He wondered what kind of place they were headed into that would make this mortar-prone FOB seem like a relaxing retreat.
Dozens of vehicles were readying to head out of the compound as a convoy. The parade south would be made up of tanks—Bradley fighting vehicles and M1 Abrams—as well as a variety of vehicles vital for route clearance, including RG31 mine-protected armored personnel carriers, a couple of big six-wheeled Buffalos, and other mine-clearance vehicles. The Humvees in the rugged lineup looked diminutive in comparison.
The soldiers were wrapping up their precombat checks, making sure they had everything they needed and that it was in good working order. Some were already climbing into their assigned vehicles—heavy-duty tanks, usually. It was only about fifteen miles to the future Patrol Base Murray, and the route had been cleared of IEDs, but this wasn’t going to be a fast ride. Probably at least an hour to their destination, with everyone in tow.
Streeeeek, BOOM! BOOM!
Soldiers jumped; some hit the ground. A couple of mortar rounds landed inside the compound wall, in an open area about fifty yards from where Willingham and Lucca were loading into the Humvee. No one hurt, but close call. Smoke spread and Lucca calmly sniffed the familiar scent. Even Willingham could smell the explosive and its aftermath—a mix of gunpowder, burned plastic, and charred weeds—but he figured Lucca had analyzed it down to the molecule.
“Well, that’s a fine send-off!” the Hummer driver said to his passengers as they jumped in. “No need for coffee this morning!”
And they set off down the dusty road to the outskirts of the Triangle of Death.
UDAY AND QUSAY HUSSEIN’S former riverside getaway property was larger than Willingham had expected. It looked to be about 450 yards long by 150 yards wide and extended to the banks of the Tigris River. If he used his imagination, he could see that it had once been a decent place, but during the four years since the brothers’ deaths, the sun and the heat had taken their toll, making it a faded, ghost-town version of its former self.
Despite its proximity to the river, there was almost no vegetation. The fronds on the dozen or so palm trees next to one of the outbuildings were now dry and a dead shade of gray. It looked to Willingham like they’d tried to stay alive for a while after the caretakers left but had just about lost the battle against the brutal heat. Even weeds didn’t seem to stand a chance, and the few that had emerged from the ground were long dead. Everything—the horse stables, the large main house, the smaller buildings, and all the roadways—was covered in powdery sand that reminded him of moondust.
Willingham and Lucca linked up with a squad whose job was to sweep the area for explosives. They started in the horse stables. They searched the two rooms attached to the stables, then the stables themselves. It was a concrete open-air stable building, and Willingham thought it didn’t seem like it would protect horses from the harsh heat. Then he realized being nice to horses was probably not a top priority for the Hussein brothers.
They searched the drained pool and then the house. Marble floors, thick sandy dust on every surface, empty rooms. Lucca nosed her way through, snuffling up dust here and there. Willingham wondered if the scent of the Hussein brothers still lingered, if their skin cells—humans shed about 50 million a minute—were still detectable, if Lucca was taking a private tour of the microscopic body flakes called scurf.
Can she smell evil?
WILLINGHAM AWOKE BEFORE dawn the next day on the roof of a compound a klick or so down the road. Most of the soldiers from the platoon crammed into rooms and hallways inside. The only guys on the roof with him were pulling security. At least up here there was plenty of real estate for him and Lucca, and it didn’t reek of bad Iraqi plumbing and soldier sweat.
No time had been wasted. They had already started pushing south, clearing roadsides and compounds as engineers and workers set about transforming the Hussein estate into the shored-up, walled-off Patrol Base Murray. Compound rooftops were likely to be Willingham’s bedroom for at least the next few days. He didn’t mind. The moon had set hours ago, and the sky was brilliant with stars. He enjoyed waking up under the gauzy stripe of the Milky Way.
They had a long day of clearing ahead, and he was hoping the platoon leader would ask them to go first into situations where a dog’s nose could be useful—to walk and point on the way through potentially dangerous areas. This is what he and Lucca were here for, after all, to keep these guys safe. But the platoon leader didn’t put them in any forward positions.
Willingham didn’t like it, but he understood. Most of these men had probably never worked with a dog team. Besides, those guys were soldiers; he and Lucca were marines. Trusting their lives to a stranger and his dog from another service wasn’t a decision to be made lightly. He knew he had to be patient, to show them what they could do, and wait for their chance.
The previous day during a break, he had put on a demo of Lucca’s capabilities, as he had done several times at FOB Falcon. He hid a couple of explosives scents and let her find them off leash with the quietest of commands.
“She’s like remote control,” one of the soldiers observed.
“That’s what dogs like her do. You all do everything you normally do. I’m just going to be an added asset to you,” Willingham told them. “I’m here to support you. I got the ability to walk on point, so we have the chance to detect an IED before we get to it. We can help search for caches. Lucca is a force multiplier. She can search a lot bigger area than soldiers can, in a faster time. She’s trained to search roadways and buildings, vehicles and open areas. I’ve also got her trained up on some local odors, you know, explosives odors.
“She’s a great dog,” he finished. Then he remembered to add his rehearsed line, “But like all dogs, she’s proven, not perfect.”
That first day, there had been no caches, no IEDs, nothing to add to Lucca’s CV. But Willingham figured that in a place called the Triangle of Death, something was bound to show up sooner or later.
At 0600 the platoon linked up with another and continued south on “Route Gnat,” the main road from Arab Jabour to Baghdad, paved in places, but around here mostly compact dirt and rocks. They searched four or five compounds and the surrounding areas. When it started getting too hot—it was supposed to get up to 120 degrees—they firmed up in an abandoned compound until evening. Willingham stayed inside with Lucca for a couple of hours so she could rest and cool off from the morning’s search. Only the soldiers who were pulling security on the roof were outside.
Willingham chatted with soldiers in the house while Lucca lay on her side and enjoyed a steady stream of belly and side rubs from her admirers. It was too stifling to eat lunch, but Willingham forced himself to down the peanut butter and crackers from his MRE. He drank some water—warm and not refreshing—and offered Lucca more water in her portable bowl. He took her outside for a minute because she gave him the look that said it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take care of business now.
Back inside, she followed him up two short flights of stairs to the concrete compound’s flat roof. Willingham asked the five soldiers if they could use help pulling security. It wasn’t anything dog handlers were expected to do, but he wanted to be useful, to pull his own weight.
They were happy to have another set of eyes, and he set up a sector of fire that wasn’t as well covered by the others. They all faced different directions, keeping watch for trouble, weapons ready.
Lucca stretched downward-dog fashion, circled once, and settled herself in the shade of the three-foot wall that encircled the roof, lying on a mat Willingham had found in the compound. She put her head on her paws but didn’t sleep. For the next hour, she ticked her eyes from one soldier to the other, but mostly looked at the marine standing right next to her.
A few hundred yards off to the right of his sector, Willingham could see the Tigris—wide, winding through an area of thick palm groves and grasses of the Tigris River valley. He thought about the times he and his dad and some friends would float down the North River in canoes and flat-bottomed boats for hours and hours, just float through miles of western Alabama. After a while, they’d set up camp in just the right clearing, grill burgers and gulp cold drinks, take some .22s and shoot targets and go fishing.
Willingham sensed the wall of rushing heat a split second before he heard—and felt—the explosion. He swung around and saw a ball of flames receding and a section of cinder-block wall twenty feet away in rubble. Another blast, farther away, sent a tree and nearby foliage into flames. The work of rocket-propelled grenades, RPGs.
Immediately the compound began taking fire from PKM machine guns and AK-47s. Willingham adjusted his position so he had some protection from behind a high post, and fired his M4. The soldiers did the same, including one with an M249 machine gun. Radios exploded with communications from the platoon leader and the other soldiers.
As Willingham fired, he noticed that Lucca had jumped up and was wagging her tail, excited, as if they were playing a game. He realized what was going on. It was a game, at least to Lucca. They’d done so much gunfire training together before deployment, with constant praise and rewards for being calm, that it was just more fun in her view. Out of habit, up on the scorching roof during a firefight that was anything but a game, he began praising her as he returned fire.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
“Good . . .”
Pop. Pop.
“Girllll!”
When it was over, he gave her a Kong and she went back to her blanket to enjoy her reward as if nothing had happened.
BREAKFAST MRES WERE slightly more appetizing to Willingham than lunch or dinner MREs. It was just too hot later in the day to enjoy eating food that came out of pouches and was supposed to be heated in the flameless heater enclosed in the package. He chose from his stash a meal ready to eat containing a cheese and vegetable omelet with hot sauce on the side, hash browns with bacon, toaster pastry crackers, apple butter, and a cinnamon scone.
He ate as much as he could, not bothering to heat anything. Lucca’s eyebrows shifted as she glanced at the food. It was hard to be subtle with dark eyebrows like hers. She didn’t beg. She peeked, discreetly. Willingham thought she looked like someone trying to see what was on the plate of a fellow customer at another table in a restaurant. He wanted to try to keep her diet as close to normal as he could, so he refrained from giving her his leftovers. She never pushed the issue, and he was glad, because after he saw how she’d handled the firefight the day before, he might have been tempted to give in.
Time to gear up. Before putting on his flak jacket, he pulled the chest panel’s protective plate out of its pouch a few inches and looked at the photo he had taped at the top with electrical tape. His favorite photo of Jill. She was smiling—beaming, actually—with her face turned three-quarters to the camera, her hands on her hips, and a red rose tucked into the deep V-neck of her form-fitting olive-green shirt. When he was in Israel, she’d gone to a restaurant back home with some friends, and they decided to take a photo to send her husband halfway across the world. He’d kept it with him since.
Willingham took Lucca for a quick walk in the area they had already swept, and then met up with the soldiers gathering at Route Gnat.
“Hey, Lucca!” a soldier called. Lucca turned her head toward him and gave a wag of recognition, in what Willingham thought was kind of an “Oh yeah, hi, sorry, I don’t remember your name, but you look familiar” way.
“Hey, dog guy, have a good one!” he called to Willingham, who didn’t mind if others didn’t know his name. He enjoyed being dog guy.
He and Lucca were ready to go. With her BADASS harness on, she knew it was work time. She stayed by his side, glancing up at Willingham, looking down the road and back up at Willingham. He smiled at her eagerness. It was as if the firefight the previous day was an appetizer, and she was hungry for whatever came next.
“Soon, Lucca, hang on.”
She lay down alongside the road, nose pointed south, while they waited for their spotter, who would keep his eyes out for bad guys and his rifle ready to fire. You don’t walk down roads like this without someone with a weapon watching your back.
Willingham reached into a small pouch on the side of his pack and pulled out a set of dog tags—the one his father had given him, from his time in Vietnam. He rubbed them between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the raised letters on the warm metal as he thought about this man who had been through such hell but never showed it. Never talked about it, either. He tucked the tags back in the pouch.
The spotter arrived, they discussed the plan, and the workday began. “Forward,” Willingham told Lucca in a gentle voice, not demanding or commanding, but like he was asking a child to do something. Lucca walked down the left side of the road, sniffing intently for all those scents she knew he wanted her to find. When she got about fifty yards away, he called her back. They did the same on the right. She didn’t detect anything. A large route-clearance vehicle rolled slowly ahead for fifty yards and waited for them to sweep the next strip. The vehicle looked like a combination tank and tractor and was equipped with ground-penetrating radar for detection of buried explosives. Mine detectors like this had a good reputation, but Willingham would stake his money on Lucca’s nose any day.
Fifty yards at a time down Route Gnat, machine followed dog. With Lucca doing her job on the sides and the vehicle clearing the center of the road, it was safe for the rest of the vehicles to follow. As they pushed south, the Bradley fighting vehicles, which were lined up in a long convoy, began spreading out and setting up blocking positions. It wouldn’t do any good to spend all that time clearing a road if you weren’t going to protect it afterward. The armored Bradleys, with their cannons, missile launchers, and machine guns, provided the muscle to prevent insurgents from backfilling the cleared areas.
After a couple of hours of this, no one—dog team or route-clearance vehicles—had found any explosives. Lucca was panting, slowing down. Willingham returned to the Humvee with her and asked the driver if she could rest on the empty seat.
“Hop in, Lucca! We’ve got air-conditioning!” the driver said. It wasn’t strong air-conditioning, but it would give her some relief.
Willingham walked back up Route Gnat to see how he could help without his dog. He wanted the platoon leaders to know that he was dedicated, that he’d do what it took to contribute to the mission, even when Lucca couldn’t work. He wanted them to see he was serious about their safety and that he should take her up front on missions.
ROADS HAD TO be swept for bombs, but so did every structure along the road, and the roads leading to those structures. Not only were the troops looking for IEDs and insurgents; they were seeking information and building a database. Most people seemed to welcome their presence, letting them into their homes, talking behind closed doors in a way they could not do on the streets.
Interpreters explained the importance of an all-inclusive database. Willingham was surprised that few people balked at having their photos taken or supplying iris scans and fingerprints to Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT) and Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE). In other areas of the surge, BATs and HIIDEs had already been proving effective at matching fingerprints on IEDs to people in the database.
Most searches in the early days of the operation, before there was much intel, were “soft knocks.” Soldiers surrounded a compound, effectively cordoning it off, knocked, and used an interpreter to explain that they were going to search the compound. At first, Willingham would take whatever position he and Lucca could get to search the compound—from open areas and courtyards to inner rooms. They weren’t first in. Sometimes they were last.
Within a few searches he got the platoon leader to understand that it was better for his dog to go through a building as soon as it was cleared of people—before other soldiers went through and disturbed odors of possible hidden explosives. He and Lucca began going in first, once the residents were no longer inside. After finishing the search, the two would go outside while the soldiers did a hand search. He knew most people there would not be comfortable with a dog in their home—even if it was Lucca.
So far Lucca had found only a few weapons, nothing to raise concern. People were allowed to have certain firearms. Willingham was making progress with the platoon leader, but he wasn’t where he wanted to be yet—walking point down a stretch of Route Gnat to the next set of compounds.
But during a morning search on the fourth day, Willingham heard the words he had been waiting to hear. “You and Lucca can walk point.”
“You won’t regret it,” Willingham said.
TO LUCCA, IT was just a walk down a road on a warm afternoon, sniffing for scents that made Willingham happy. He wondered if she thought it was strange that he would become so excited when she responded to certain odors. He was glad she didn’t know the stakes. If she got distracted, or if the explosives were buried too cleverly, it could prove fatal—to her, to him, to anyone near, including local children.
They’d been working toward this since they met, and he felt a calm exhilaration walking out front with Lucca. The morning of walking point had gone without incident. That was fine with him. He didn’t need Lucca to find IEDs to know his dog was great. Just so long as she didn’t miss one.
The soldiers reconvened later in the day, when the sun was less taxing and everyone had rested. They needed to clear a portion of a smaller dirt road off Route Gnat on their way to check some compounds. In sections of the road, tall concrete compound walls jutted in close on both sides, so there was no way to get out. People going through would have to funnel closer in. It was still a wide enough road, but Willingham knew chokepoints like this could be deadly.
When they approached the first two chokepoints, he went farther ahead than usual with Lucca so she would have time to investigate before the others got there. No sense in the others being delayed as she searched. The system had worked well so far. They were making good progress.
He saw another chokepoint coming up.
“Lucca.”
She looked at him.
With his open right palm facing to the left, he sliced through the air while looking at the left side of the road.
“Forward,” he told her. He wanted her to be on the left, since the wind was blowing from the right. That way she could catch scents from the whole width of road. Knowing how to use the wind to the dog’s advantage is an everyday component of dog handling.
She walked up ahead, nose down, intent on her job. She got to the place where compound walls infringed on the roadside, and her pace picked up. Back and forth, back and forth, tail wagging. Each time she turned, she took fewer steps as she seemed to narrow in on a point of interest. She stopped, her tail went up slightly, and she looked at Willingham. He could see she was about to sit to indicate she had found something, but Willingham had seen enough. He didn’t need her to go through the whole response.
“Come!”
She trotted back, and he praised her. No Kong here, too dangerous. She didn’t seem to care. By this time the platoon leader had caught up. Willingham briefed him. EOD was summoned, and everyone moved away to a safe distance. The technicians assessed the situation. Since there was a lot of debris on the road—a thick layer of dusty dirt, pebbles, bits of dry vegetation—the techs couldn’t see any sign of an IED. They decided to use propelled water from special bottles to clear the debris and see if there was anything obvious underneath.
Almost as soon as the water hit the ground, there was a huge blast. Willingham could feel it rumble inside his chest.
The explosion left a crater in the middle of the road, twelve feet across by five feet deep.
If Willingham had let Lucca sit at what proved to be a highly unstable IED, it could have been over for her, maybe for him, too. If she had been a typical leashed bomb dog, or if Lucca weren’t so good at her job, that could have been the end of the road for at least the two of them.
“Luuuucca! Mama Lucca! Look what you found!” Willingham rubbed the sides of her face, the top of her head, stroked her back.
It was getting dark, so they started back to a compound they’d secured for the night. The platoon leader walked up to them.