Red Patch Bobby V. is a master at teaching dogs to trust and so much more. PHOTO BY JEFF KAMEN.
USAF T. Sgt. Bobby V. is one of those people who keeps his mouth shut until he has something to say. His eyes take in everything. Bobby, a US Air Force master sergeant, doesn’t miss a chance to find a teachable moment as his team moves each K9 through its training. His concentration is unyielding. Maybe it’s all that time in combat—more than a hundred patrols with his MWD partner, or that long period when he led a Security Forces team guarding nuclear weapons. Bobby has the Lackland Magic. He’s a master trainer. The Red Patch that’s stitched onto his government-issued coveralls proclaims it.
It’s just after 0630 hours, and the warrior pups in Lackland’s kennels are excitedly anticipating the arrival of the trainers. They know the sounds of their truck-drawn trailers and the scents of the trainers themselves. The dogs love the sounds and those scents because they mean that they are about to have fun. For the dogs, training is all about play.
Bobby strides into a long kennel building, leash in hand. Seventy other trainers are on the same mission: to get the pups they are scheduled to train that day.
The MWDs come bursting out of their kennels. The combined noise of their excitement is deafening! The dogs and their trainers are all moving in an agile, high-energy dance. If you don’t know the steps, it’s a whole lot smarter to hang back, far back, and watch. There is no room for incompetent third persons getting in the way.
When Bobby and his team pull dogs from the kennels or work them in the exercise yards or inside the warehouses or airplane fuselages, they have to make sure each dog knows who is leading—and it cannot be the dog. The trainers must radiate self-confidence, have a reliably loving, calm demeanor, and be firm but never harsh. Like anyone, Bobby has his moments of frustration with the job, but never with the goal. He’s a combat veteran with a big heart, a ripped upper body, a rapid-processing brain, and a very slow fuse. He needs all of that to do his job.
Red Patch Master Trainers like Bobby are highly esteemed by the officers who command the 341st Training Squadron. When Major Garon S. took over the unit and wanted to help his people communicate better, he asked Bobby’s advice. Bobby said, “Have joint training days so the most experienced instructors from all teams can share their favorite techniques.” It worked. Training improved.
“Training these dogs demands paying attention to a lot of moving parts at every moment,” he says as he supervises another session of carefully planned instruction for sixteen-month-old canines. These dogs are halfway through their 120-day curriculum. “From the first second you pull a K9 from his kennel, through every moment of the day’s training to that last second when you put him safely back into his kennel, you have got to be on the ball, fully focused and really awake. It’s a lot of stress because we’ve got to get this stuff right. We are responsible for creating the foundational learning of every one of these dogs. If we get it right, the men and women responsible for advanced training will have a much easier time preparing these dogs for actual battle.”
In one exercise, warrior pups are being taught to reliably alert on the odor of dynamite—a common element in IEDs. When a dog alerts on the odor by jumping up and pawing at the drawer in which the bait with the dynamite is hidden, a lot happens fast. One of the trainers immediately “pays” the pup by throwing the dog’s favorite toy in front of him. The dog dives at the toy. His jaws snap shut on it. At the same time, all the trainers in the small room whoop for joy in the high-pitched voices the dogs love to hear. The young dog gets to chew on his most beloved toy. But only for a minute.
Then, the trainers take it away from the pup. That builds up the dog’s natural prey drive to grab and then hold what it wants. When you watch working dog demonstrations, you always see the dogs staring at the handler’s face with focused intensity. What you’re not seeing is that during training the handler has placed the beloved tennis ball or Kong toy in his armpit, and the puppy is fixated on that desired object. That is how the dog learns to stay focused on his handler.
Being a Dog Training School instructor is a challenge to the body as well as the mind and spirit. Even a thirteen-month-old “green” dog is so powerful he can smash you to the ground in an instant. These dogs aren’t being mean. They just play hard.
Here, Bobby offers guidance to young instructors on the subtleties of keeping a young dog focused on the odor they want him to detect and alert on. PHOTO BY JEFF KAMEN.
Bobby explains, “These dogs tear you up. It’s just what they do. I go to the gym a lot. It’s a help. But it’s still not enough. I’m in physical pain a lot of the time. We do whatever we can to not get re-injured. You re-injure the same spot, the pain gets even worse.”
First as a handler in combat, then as a trainer whose remarkable skills, discipline, and intuition marked him for leadership inside the elite universe of DTS trainers, Bobby has learned to have enormous respect for the dogs. “Once they graduate our basic course and get their first handler, they have to go through a lot,” he says. “I’ve seen dogs switch handlers as much as twelve times in their careers,” which can last a decade. “So these dogs have to adapt to new people all the time. It’s quite difficult for a dog to do that,” says the Red Patch trainer, “but our dogs do perform very well. That high adaptability comes from everything we do. That includes careful breeding, the very careful way we train them, and all the follow-up training and care they get from their handlers after they graduate here and go off to the world out there, beyond Lackland.”
Red Patch Bobby and his boss observe the joint teams training that Bobby proposed to improve results. PHOTO BY JEFF KAMEN.
Bobby keeps his eyes on his training team as they walk dog after dog through the same detection scenario. “You know, handlers are human and that’s great but not at every moment. So, part of what we train into the dogs is a kind of backup system against predictable human error.”
In Bobby’s world, an error can be fatal. “If the dog alerts on trouble and the handler misses that alert because there are distractions like gunfire, explosions or people screaming, an IED can be missed. Then it’s triggered and we’ve got more dead and wounded Americans.”
That kind of preventable loss of life, limb, and sanity haunts Bobby. He’s not a dramatic guy, but his young face reflects the enormous responsibility he carries into every single day working these dogs. “In reality, a handler isn’t always able to be fully focused on his dog,” Bobby says. “The handler can miss a cue. And it can be something as small as a change in leash tension—meaning the dog is responding to something. If he does realize his dog is pulling in a new direction or has slowed down, the handler has to take his eyes off the overall situation to put his eyes on his dog.”
Bobby says a handler can miss a slight change in leash tension if “he’s not feeling well-protected by his security team, or because he’s worrying about getting shot and his eyes are sighting down the barrel of his gun.”
A handler must watch for every subtle change in the dog’s body language, which could be a signal that the squad is about to walk into a lethal trap—an IED blast or an ambush.
Bobby has a humble, self-deprecating sense of humor, but there’s no mirth in his eyes when he says, “You know we don’t employ any superheroes here. But the truth is that this work demands a scary kind of perfection from handlers. It’s just the way it is. Of course, some handlers are prone to making mistakes and we may never know that, because in combat they have to operate mostly by themselves with their dog. My job is to help train each dog to be as close as possible to foolproof in that kind of situation.”
How does he make this happen? “We do it by building the dog’s confidence by making him really good at finding what we want him to find, by learning to alert on it in a way that quickly gets his handler’s attention,” Bobby explains. “We teach him to be bold and confident about sticking to his find, until his handler pays him for it. If the dog is in full, clear alert and sticking to it, that forces the handler to think about what is going on and to act on it, fast!”
This may sound simple, but consider all of the moving parts. First, a dog has to be trained to signal very clearly when it identifies an odor. That means instead of a mild change in leash tension, that dog—if it’s trained right—will stare with its nose pointed directly at the source and sit. He won’t move until his handler releases him. That instantly forces the handler’s full attention on his dog. In a flash, the handler will yell at the troops walking behind him, “Heads up! My dog’s alerting!”
Long before a Military Working Dog is ready for action, the fundamentals must become ingrained. That requires enormous concentration and loving patience by the trainers. One of the most important commands that Bobby and his team must teach the dogs is to immediately stop biting when the trainer says, “Out!” It’s an absolute requirement and teaching it successfully can be a long process. It can take many weeks, depending on the dog.
It takes Bobby almost twenty minutes to wear down the young Mal. He’s teaching the dog that he will get what he wants by trusting his trainers. PHOTO BY JEFF KAMEN.
At one training session, Bobby is working with a dog who is being especially resistant to obeying the “Out!” command. Bobby is ready for him. He’s using a thick black Kong toy with a metal pipe threaded through its middle. This allows enough room for him to put his hands on either side of the toy. The highly determined seventy-pound Mal seizes the Kong and is committed to not letting go.
Bobby’s unprotected skin is less than an inch from the clenching teeth of the dog. The Red Patch trainer believes the dog only wants the Kong and has no desire to hurt him. Bobby has to get the dog to release the chew toy and he does it by facing the dog and holding tight. For nineteen seemingly endless minutes, Bobby uses his back, legs, and upper body to wear down the young Mal. Each time the dog releases its grip even a tiny bit, Bobby relaxes a little bit, giving the Kong back to him to increase the dog’s awareness that if he will “Out!” he will still receive the coveted toy.
PHOTO BY JEFF KAMEN.
Bobby and his team do this kind of exercise, in varying degrees, day in and day out to teach the dogs that they can get what they want by trusting their trainers and doing what they are told to do. When the pups graduate DTS, that trust is then transferred to their first handlers, with whom they will become a unified MWD team. Bobby knows how that must go because he’s already done it. He may never meet those handlers face-to-face, but he feels an enormous personal responsibility to them, and he takes it seriously day after day. 
Breeding Program puppies quickly learn the “Out!” command because releasing has been part of their fostering and Puppy School experiences. Baby pups are rewarded immediately for trusting and letting go, knowing they’ll get it back.