By the time we went on our next full deployment, in the fall of 2010, it was obvious that Cairo was once again ready for active duty.
For the better part of a year, we were based in Virginia, training every day for the next extended tour in Afghanistan. During this period, Cairo and I were mainly working partners. I was still Dad, but the restrictions around taking dogs home became even tighter, and so Cairo spent most of his nights at the kennel. There were plenty of training trips, though, where we worked on skydiving or backcountry hiking or other mock operations, and Cairo accompanied me on almost all those trips. As far as I could tell, there were no psychological ramifications related to his injury. He wasn’t spooked by gunfire or explosions, didn’t seem reluctant to enter a dark building, and obeyed every command he was given.
In other words, same old Cairo. Low maintenance, high energy. Friendly, tireless, loyal, and reliable. A fantastic dog.
On the next trip to Afghanistan—my third extended deployment there, Cairo’s second—we were stationed at Jalalabad (J-Bad). By this time, the canine program was deeply established, as was our military presence in Afghanistan, so we had a pretty good setup, easily the best of any I experienced. We had two or three dogs throughout that deployment, and as handlers, we actually had our own little hut and training area, as well as a private kennel. This was convenient for us, and a bonus for some of the other guys who didn’t necessarily like sharing their living quarters with dogs—even dogs that were as cool as Cairo.
My friend Angelo was there taking care of his dog, Yari. Angelo was one of those masters-at-arms I mentioned earlier, the kind of guy you trusted with your life on a mission, even though he wasn’t a SEAL. We went on tons of operations together, and in addition to being adept at working with dogs, he was a hell of a fighter. Every time he was asked to step up and fight, well, he absolutely crushed it. We also had another trainer from back home, a former cop named Kevin who took care of a spare dog and got to see the kind of work we did on deployment. Kevin didn’t go out on missions with us, but he did valuable work by helping out around the base, training and working the dogs. His experience at J-Bad also allowed him to return with knowledge about the kind of work we did in Special Operations; in turn, he could pass that information on to his bosses and help make any necessary adjustments to the canine training program.
Although the ever-changing rules of engagement in Afghanistan made our lives more difficult on this deployment—without getting into details, let’s just say the term bad guy became a little bit harder to define—it was not a mission that resulted in any catastrophic losses or any high-profile victories. Which was fine. We did our job, day after day, night after night. Lots of ops, lots of targets eliminated. And everyone on our team came home in one piece. God knows that wasn’t always the case. Just two months before our squadron arrived in Afghanistan, a helicopter crash in Zabul Province took the lives of nine American servicemen, including four Navy SEALs. It happened like that sometimes: multiple fatalities in a single incident. We all knew it could happen, and we were both motivated and repulsed by the possibility.
Personally, I really hated the idea of dying in a chopper crash, with no opportunity to fight my way out of it. I also knew that if I was going to die, a helicopter crash was the most likely scenario. Our chopper pilots, mostly guys from the U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (nickname: the Night Stalkers), were some of the most amazing guys I knew in the service. They were cold-blooded. And by that, I don’t mean they were killers; I mean they had ice water in their veins. These guys handled a Black Hawk or a Chinook like they were driving a Maserati. Every one of them was a badass who could weave in and out of the tightest spaces, evade gunfire and RPGs, set a bird down on the side of a mountain in a dust storm … and they could do it without breaking a sweat. We relied on them to take us in, and we relied on them to get us back out. They never let us down. But the risks were great, and we all knew it. No matter how talented and fearless the TF-160th guys might have been, helicopters went down. It was a fact of life. And death.
Being a Navy SEAL is dangerous. That is no secret to anyone who signs up for the job, and especially not to anyone who has been through a few years of training and deployment. But the truth is, you’re just as likely to die or get seriously hurt in a chopper crash or even during one of the endless stateside training exercises that make up so much of a SEAL’s career as you are in a firefight. Every time we went off on a mission, we knew it was possible. We didn’t talk about it, but it was always there in the back of our minds. And sometimes in the front, as well. In fact, the closest I came to serious injury on the J-Bad deployment was on a mission that, like so many others, involved a helicopter, a dog, and a rope.
The safest and least complicated way to get a dog on the ground during mission insert was to set the bird down and jump out, then hike in to the target. Sometimes this wasn’t possible. There were occasions when parachuting was the best option, and other times when the pilot would lower the chopper to a safe distance above the insertion site and the team would exit.
Needless to say, fast-roping or rappelling out of a chopper, while holding a seventy-pound dog could be perilous. Cairo was generally even-tempered and not prone to freaking out about anything, but still … you never knew. In some ways, skydiving with a dog, safely packed away in a pouch, barely able to see anything, was less risky than fast-roping with a dog.
On this mission, our target was an isolated compound built into the side of a mountain. There was no place to land within several miles of the compound; rather than inflict upon us an exhausting hike of two or three hours, it was decided that we would get as close as possible, while still maintaining the element of surprise; we would do this by fast-roping out of the chopper.
Ordinarily, when fast-roping, I would just hook Cairo’s harness to my belt with a carabiner and lower us both with my hands on a fixed rope. I also had the option of using a canine fast-rope device, which, while arguably safer, was much slower and more complicated. It really was an ingenious little tool, one that was a blast to use on training exercises. But I had only occasionally used it on missions simply because it took so much extra time and effort and because there was a chance, however slight, of things getting really fucked up on the ground. In a traditional fast-rope insertion, I just let go and got out of the way like everyone else. When using the canine fast-rope device, there was one additional step, and it was critical: I had to detach from the device … which was attached to the rope … which was attached to the helicopter.
Picture all of this happening at warp speed. Insertions are designed to be fast and efficient. Seconds after the last guy is off the bird, the pilot gets out of Dodge. He can’t just hover fifty feet above the ground for thirty to sixty minutes while we complete our mission; he’d be a sitting duck for an RPG. Normally, this is not a problem. Last guy hits the ground, pulls the rope behind him, and the Black Hawk disappears, only to reappear at a prearranged extraction point sometime in the future. But when the last guy out of the chopper is a dog handler who has rarely used the canine fast-rope device on a mission … well, that could be a problem.
And on this night, it was.
The insertion began smoothly enough. All but two members of the team exited quickly and fast-roped to the ground. Then the final assaulter held Cairo while I attached us to the fast-rope device.
“Okay?” he shouted before exiting the chopper.
I nodded. “All good.”
Cairo and I made a smooth and steady descent. As the ground reached up below us, I figured everything was okay; however, as soon as my boots touched down, I realized that the hillside was extraordinarily steep, probably forty-five degrees. Again, we had targeted compounds on difficult terrain in the past, but typically we would walk in from a distance. There was some margin for error, as well as time to adapt to the uneven terrain. This time, as soon as my boots touched down, I could tell that Cairo was uneasy. The rotor wash from the chopper sandblasted us nearly off our feet. Pelted by dust and debris, Cairo naturally recoiled and began pulling me downhill, away from the spray of the chopper blade.
Normally, this would not have been a big deal; it was a perfectly understandable response on Cairo’s part. If I had fast-roped with my hands, no problem. Just get away from the bird and the rotor wash. Unfortunately, the helicopter was moving uphill, and we were still attached to the helicopter via the fast rope and the canine fast-rope device.
This was one of those occasions when time seemed to stand still. There was a flicker of recognition as Cairo tried to yank me downhill and the Chinook slowly began pulling us uphill, that we were in very deep shit. At first, it seemed almost impossible—unreal. And then the urgency began to sink in.
Holy shit—we’re going to get dragged right off this mountain.
I thought about how it would feel to get yanked into the sky, and perhaps crash into a huge rock along the way. I thought about how I’d let him down. I thought about my teammates out there in the night, already walking toward the compound, and how they would accomplish their mission without a dog to take the heat off them. I was scared and angry and shocked … all at the same time.
And yet, it also seemed kind of funny.
What a way to go. No one is going to believe this.
Had we landed on level ground, without significant rotor wash, Cairo would have waited patiently for me to unhook him from the device. I could have done this in a matter of seconds. But now with the rope taut, I was faced with trying to pull myself back up the hill toward the slowly evacuating helicopter so that I could gain enough slack to unclip the carabiner. And to do that, I had to convince Cairo to march back into the rotor wash, which he wasn’t willing to do. Reflexively, I scooped him up by the handle on his harness, tossed him a few feet in front of me, and then ran up after him. As soon as I had enough slack, I tried to detach the carabiner in a split second.
No chance.
I did this several times. Each time I tossed him ahead, Cairo would start to run back downhill. I’d have to retrieve him, pick him up again, and march back uphill toward the helicopter. The chopper pilot was in a terrible position, trying to hold the bird steady until we were released. We weren’t communicating, so I didn’t even know if he realized I was still down there, fighting for my life. And with each failed attempt at escape, I was growing increasingly fatigued.
After what seemed like an eternity, I finally got close enough to make one more attempt at detaching. This one was successful. Instantly, the Chinook peeled off into the night, while I fell to the ground, exhausted and beat to shit.
And the mission hadn’t even started yet!
I rolled over onto my knees and tried to catch my breath. My arms and legs were burning. Cairo walked up and looked me over quizzically. He gave me a nudge with his head as if to say, “Let’s go, Dad. Time to work.”
I shook my head, stifled a little laugh. It’s strange how a potential disaster can seem almost funny. Afterward.
“What are you looking at?” I said, giving Cairo a pat on the head. “That was your fault.”
Not true, really. It was just … one of those things. We had the best pilots, the best soldiers, and the best dogs. Nevertheless, sometimes things went wrong. Sometimes things were beyond our control.
“You okay, Cheese?”
The voice coming over the radio was our troop chief. As it turned out, the entire team had been watching me wrestle with the helicopter. Amusement had turned quickly to concern, and then horror, and now relief. I’d gotten kicked in the nuts, but we still had a mission to accomplish.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said.
“Cairo?”
“He’s good, too. Be there in a second.”
Thankfully, the rest of the night went off without a hitch. We hiked through the mountains to the compound, dispatched a few bad guys, and we all went home. Safe and sound.
But that was the last time I ever used the fast-rope device.
I loved Cairo, and I loved being a dog handler, but incidents like that one certainly underscored the challenges of the job and helped me understand why even the most dog-friendly guys in Special Operations and in most of the military were reluctant to accept the assignment. Everyone in the squadron valued Cairo and the work he did for us—he was a brother—but the vast majority of them wanted no part of being responsible for a dog while on deployment. It was incredibly rewarding, important work, in my opinion, but there was no break from it. Where I went, Cairo went, usually attached quite literally to my hip. And the logistics of such a relationship were sometimes challenging, to say the least.
One mission grew out of intel, including live video footage, about a contingent of fifteen to twenty men marching through the desert at night. Admittedly, sometimes in Afghanistan—and Iraq, as well—it was hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys, or at least the benign guys from the bad guys. Generally speaking, a group of young men this large in number, moving as a group through the desert, with no women or children or animals in their company, was a sign of suspicious activity. If the group appeared to be unarmed, we might take a wait-and-see approach. In this case, however, it was clear that the patrol was weighed down with an assortment of AKs and RPGS and other weaponry. The video tracked the men as they made their way to a large house on the side of the hill and disappeared inside.
Watching the footage was part of our afternoon briefing. To my eyes, and to the eyes of everyone else in the room, this was an easy one. An entire houseful of bad guys and weapons. Just blow the roof off that fucker.
Except, of course, we couldn’t do that. The ever-changing rules of engagement forbade the demolishing of any structure without knowing, as clearly as possible, the identity of all inhabitants. By that, I don’t mean we had to have names and ages, but we did have to be reasonably certain that destroying the building would result in no civilian casualties. And even when we were certain, the enemy would sometimes claim collateral damage in the aftermath of an explosive attack, simply as a political strategy.
Practically speaking, our hands were often tied. For the most part, we were resigned to the fact that most confrontations would have to be handled on an intimate level. It was at times frustrating, but we accepted it. We had been trained to fight under any and all conditions; moreover, none of us wanted to be responsible for taking the life of a woman or child or anyone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“This is the target,” our team leader said. “These guys are not just out for a walk. This is a patrol; this is a training exercise.”
The sheer number of people walking in and out of the house made this a more dangerous mission than usual. We had footage of fifteen to twenty men, but it was possible that twice that many, or more, were hidden in the house or in the area nearby. If we had to root them out on our own, without an air strike, there was likely to be a significant firefight involved. Again, we were totally prepared for this type of mission—we’d done it many times—but if you want to grade missions on a scale of one to ten in terms of danger, this one was well above the middle.
A few hours later, I found myself in the back of one of the ATVs, roaring through the desert with a Malinois sitting on my lap. With his tongue hanging out and his ears pinned back by the open air, Cairo seemed almost to be smiling.
“Get serious, buddy. We’ve got work to do.”
On some level, Cairo knew what was coming. That’s why he was happy and excited. It was time to fight.
By the time we got within range of the target, my lap was soaked with sweat and my lower back was sore, so I was happy to push Cairo out of the ATV and begin marching. Quietly, we advanced to a position only fifty meters from the front of the house. A sentry was posted outside, and when Cairo saw him, and doubtless got a whiff of him, he began tugging at his lead, straining to get away. He wanted nothing more than to be released and attack.
He wanted to bite!
But this was neither the time nor the place for that tactic. Cairo’s role for the night had yet to be determined, but for now, I mainly needed him to remain quiet so that he wouldn’t give away our position.
Outside the house, we set up a standard L-shaped formation—a time-honored battlefield strategy that allows a team to ambush an opponent from two sides, without any risk of cross fire and injury to its own men. The L-shaped formation presents a huge tactical advantage—presuming you can get the enemy to walk into the ambush. There are a few ways to accomplish this task, but the one that seemed to work best, and that was also the safest, was a simple flyover with the Black Hawk. Low and fast and loud. The sound of a big American chopper served as an effective kick at the hornet’s nest, provoking someone—maybe everyone—to run outside, guns at the ready, to see what was happening. And when they appeared …
The crackle of automatic weapons instantly filled the air as several of the insurgents spilled out of the house and tried to scatter across the hillside. Some were killed instantly, but several ran off. Some returned fire; others did not. We knew they weren’t merely fleeing. Their plan was to escape down the hill to the valley below, then regroup, perhaps with reinforcements, and renew the fight from a more advantageous position. To prevent that from happening, we gave chase. Eventually, the bad guys, knowing they could not outrun us, turned and fought. Over the course of the next half hour, we engaged in a heavy firefight that stretched from the target building to a position roughly a quarter mile away. Eventually, we dispatched every one of them.
Or, at least, everyone who had left the house.
Now it was cleanup time, which was sometimes the riskiest part of a mission. If we were sure the house was empty or occupied by only one or two remaining bad guys, we could have just called in an air strike, dropped a bomb, and called it a night. That was not an option. Instead, as was so often the case, we had to clear the building, room by room.
As we slowly approached the building, I kept Cairo close by my side. I was about to unhook him and send him inside when suddenly the front door flew open and a man ran out into the night, screaming at the top of his lungs and spraying AK fire wildly in every direction. Cairo strained at his lead.
“Easy, boy!”
In a heartbeat, the suicide gunner was down, hit by rounds from a half dozen SEALs, but not before coming perilously close to accomplishing his goal of taking someone with him. One of our guys had taken a round directly in his torso; fortunately, the bullet had been stopped by his side plate. He was bruised, but otherwise unharmed.
Now it was time to clear the building. I wanted to send Cairo in first, to see if anyone was still there, but something about the setting was unnerving. Cairo was accustomed to entering darkened buildings. This one was well illuminated, with several lights visible from outside. The front door was still open following the exit of the suicidal gunman. Just inside the door, in a seated position, leaning awkwardly against a wall, was the body of a man. He was clearly dead, but for some reason, Cairo wanted to attack him. This was not typically the case. Cairo usually ignored bodies and went after living, breathing targets, but something about the position of the man’s body, combined with the lighting in the building, threw him off. He nipped and growled at the body.
“No!” I said, giving Cairo a little tap with the e-collar, but that got his attention only briefly. I tried to guide him through the doorway and into the building, but he was too focused on the body. Eventually, I decided to call him off, and we cleared the entire building ourselves. As it turned out, there was no one else inside. The dead guy must have been a straggler who took a bullet during the early stages of the firefight when we unloaded on the front of the building.
It was hard to find fault in anything Cairo had done. He was trained to bite and attack, and being denied that opportunity when confronted by what appeared to be a bad guy must have been frustrating. And my insistence that he enter the building despite the presence of a bad guy leaning against a wall just inside the doorway would surely have been confusing. It was, to Cairo, counterintuitive:
Wait a minute! I’m not supposed to go in there until after I bite this guy. Right?
Sometimes circumstances dictated a change in tactics. We all had to adapt and adjust on the fly. Even Cairo. Fortunately, he was a quick learner. Before long, we had cleared the entire building, packed up all our gear, and boarded a helicopter for the ride back to J-Bad. We had killed a bunch of heavily armed bad guys and sustained no casualties despite a hot and heavy firefight.
All in all, a pretty good night—better than most in the ever-evolving and seemingly endless war against terrorism.