Despite precautions and bite suits and a high level of expertise, accidents did happen to even the most experienced dog handlers. As I said, Cairo’s first real bite had occurred not on deployment but during an early training exercise in Virginia, when he got a taste of my friend Angelo’s lower leg.
Payback came more than a year later, when I got bit for the first time—and the perpetrator, appropriately enough, was Angelo’s dog, a Malinois named Yari. I’d already been through one deployment with Cairo by that time; I’d seen what a combat assault dog could to a human being. Many times. But I’d never experienced a bite without the protection of a padded suit. It was, to say the least, enlightening.
It happened on a Friday afternoon, shortly after I’d gotten out of work for the day. I stopped by the kennel, and Angelo asked if I wanted to help him work on a scenario.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.” I had nothing else going, I loved my job, and it was always fun to work with Angelo.
We drove together to our training center, maybe twenty minutes away, and began setting up for the scenario—a combination of perimeter security, odor detection, and bite work. My job was to help one of the newer handlers get into his bite suit and prepare to serve as bait. It was an exterior scenario—Yari would exit a vehicle and run into some deep weeds or tall grass nearby, where the target would be hiding. Yari was a seasoned dog by this point, so it didn’t take him long to find the handler and begin biting.
The guy began screaming immediately, which wasn’t unexpected; it was part of the exercise, intended to give the dog an experience similar to what he would encounter on a mission. Real bites hurt, after all, and victims always scream. Still, I wanted to make sure everything was okay, so I began walking into the weeds. There, I saw the handler on his back, with Yari attached to his wrist. The guy had pulled his hand up inside the suit to stay protected, but Yari’s bite was dangerously close to an unprotected area. It looked like he had probably caught Yari exactly as planned, but in the process had lost his balance, and now, as a relatively inexperienced handler, he was in trouble. In that situation, Yari might adjust his bite, meaning he would release for a second and then clamp down somewhere else—perhaps on the hand or even the face.
I stepped in and took hold of the handle on Yari’s harness. Then I applied some gentle pressure against his back, This, again, is standard operating procedure, since it usually prompts the dog to just maintain his bite, rather than adjusting to a more vulnerable spot. Angelo would be rushing in soon enough, and he would call the dog off and the exercise would end safely. What I didn’t realize was that Angelo, at that very moment, was giving Yari a hit with the e-collar—in effect, telling him to let go and return. The combination of stimuli—the bite, the shock of e-collar, and my hand on his back—sent Yari into a frenzy. Suddenly, he released his grip, turned around and bit me on the knee.
“Ah … shit!”
The first thing that went through my mind was … Well, that really hurts. The second thing was, How am I going to get out of this?
I still had Yari by the back of his harness, but now he had me by the knee.
“Yari,” I said firmly. “Los!”
I knew Yari well, and he knew me. But as I looked in his eyes, I didn’t see even a flicker of recognition. Yari was a combat assault dog, and right now he was in assault mode. It wasn’t his fault—this is what he had been trained to do.
“Yari!” I said again. “Los!”
This time, he let go. But only for a moment. Before I even had a chance to react, Yari bit me in the biceps. As with my knee, the bite felt less like getting cut by something sharp than getting whacked with a baseball bat. That, I realized, is exactly what a puncture wound feels like.
At this point, I knew Yari wasn’t going to quit, so I stood up, calmly and slowly, with him hanging from my arm. I lifted him by the harness so that he wouldn’t rip my muscle or try to adjust his bite again, and then I began walking back toward Angelo and the rest of the team.
Slowly. Calmly.
Protocol in this situation dictates that you let everyone know exactly how serious the situation is by saying two simple words:
Real bite.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t try to run. I just shuffled along with Yari dangling from my arm, repeatedly saying, “Real bite … Real bite.”
Angelo rushed right over and quickly got Yari to give up the fight. Then he drove me to the hospital. Along the way, both my arm and knee began throbbing. I was legitimately surprised by how much it hurt. Neither bite was that deep or that serious, but the pain was significant.
“Well, this is fair,” I said to Angelo at one point. “My dog got you, and now your dog got me. I guess we’re even.”
Angelo just laughed. He continued to laugh in the emergency room, when one of the doctors explained that while both wounds were easily cleaned and appeared not to involve too much muscle damage, there was a possibility that the first bite might have punctured the bursa sac in my knee. And if that happened, surgery would be required. The surest way to determine whether the sac had been punctured was to insert a needle and fill the sac with fluid … and see if it leaked.
“Is this going to hurt much?” I asked the doctor with a laugh.
“It’s not too bad,” she said.
This was not true. It hurt like hell. And I say that as someone who has experienced a fair amount of pain and some big needle sticks. Fortunately, though, the bursa sac had not been ruptured. It was a clean bite, and I recovered quickly, but the whole experience gave me even more respect for the awesome power of a combat assault dog.