7

The Way Back

ONE MINUTE OUT!” the Chinook pilot yelled to the crewman above the engine noise and whop-whop-whop of the twin rotors.

“One minute out!” the crewman shouted to the two soldiers closest to him. The soldiers, sitting in two rows facing each other along the sides of the bird, shouted the time alert down the line. The helicopter was flying blacked out, no lights inside or out, so the soldiers could see each other only through their night-vision goggles (NVGs), making everyone look bright green.

“Ten seconds!” the crewman yelled. No time for anyone else to yell. The closest soldier put his hand on the knee of the next, who put his hand on the knee of the next, and the chain reaction went to the end within a few seconds.

The Chinook touched down hard in the farm field. Thirty soldiers from the 501st Airborne Infantry Regiment jolted, got their legs, and poured out into the night.

This was the first air assault mission for Willingham and Lucca. He adjusted her Doggles over her eyes, held her leather leash looped in his hand, and tried to keep her out of everyone’s way while holding his M4, running down the ramp, and bolting over the uneven field through the dust and debris kicked up by the rotors. He and Lucca fanned out to their position. They had practiced this dozens of times. He’d lie down quickly on his stomach and keep his weapon at the ready, and she’d lie low right beside him.

But as he was going prone, he felt the smooth leather yank out of his hand. He realized the rotor wash must have spooked Lucca. He looked frantically around through the cloud of rapidly spiraling dirt and debris and caught sight of Lucca running away. He called to her, but the noise from the helicopter lifting off drowned him out. Within seconds all he could see was the infrared Cyalume ChemLight he’d attached to her harness. Its white-green glow was visible only through NVGs, and he watched it get smaller until it disappeared. His eyes desperately searched the green horizon for any clue of her whereabouts.

“All right, K-9, let’s go over here!” the squad leader called as some of the soldiers were forming up after the bird flew off.

Willingham couldn’t just go up to him and say, “I’m the new dog handler here, but funny thing—I don’t have a dog. She just ran off in the middle of Iraq on my first mission with you guys.” What to do?

“OK, K-9, you up?”

He didn’t want to think of what could happen to Lucca, alone in hostile territory. At least the enemy couldn’t see her ChemLight, as long as they weren’t wearing NVGs. But no way he was leaving her out there by herself. He jogged over to tell the squad leader what was going on, to admit his error, but the guy was busy talking to a couple of soldiers.

Willingham couldn’t take his eyes off the spot where he had last seen Lucca. He thought he saw something move. A speck, almost a mist, then a tiny white-green glow, now moving up and down. He held his breath. Under the glow of the ChemLight on top of her harness, he made out the shape of Lucca about two hundred feet away, nose down, tracking her way back to him.

“Lucca! Come!”

She lifted her head, looked toward where she heard his voice, and dashed straight to Willingham. As he bent down to hug her and stroke her head, she wagged so hard that her entire hind end wiggled, just like when they’d first met. She was panting hard.

“I feel exactly the same, Mama Lucca,” he said, and he praised her up for coming back. She briefly stopped panting, came close to his face, and seemed like she was going to plant one on his cheek. But not being a big kisser, she refrained and went back to panting.

He vowed that from then on, he would attach her leash to a carabiner on his vest before air assault missions. Chinooks for Dog Handlers 101. He’d have to pass that little tip to other handlers.

The whole incident had taken maybe two minutes. Two long, long minutes. No one else had even noticed what happened. He grabbed her leash and reported for duty.

WHEN WILLINGHAM ARRIVED at FOB Kalsu the previous day, he could see immediately that this was nothing like the “give the poor guy a break” venue he’d been dreading. The place was alive with missions coming and going.

A new operation—Marne Avalanche—was getting under way here. The area around FOB Kalsu was similar to Arab Jabour before Marne Torch: an al-Qaeda refuge laced with weapons caches, protected by IEDs, and with very little military intervention for months. And it was within the Triangle of Death.

Just the kind of territory Willingham wanted.

Instead of doing the kind of clearance ops they had done along Route Gnat, he learned that most of his and Lucca’s work would involve nighttime air assaults, targeting people or places intel showed to be important to al-Qaeda. Chinooks would do fast offloads a few klicks from an objective, and then he, Lucca, and the soldiers would walk in formation, usually through farm fields, to get there.

The fields had proven safe from IEDs, since they were far off the beaten path. So Willingham and Lucca would search roadways only at points where the soldiers would cross over, and other areas along the way where there could be a danger of explosives. They’d all arrive at the objective with an element of surprise, and dirty boots. Once there, he and Lucca would search exteriors and interiors of compounds and afterward make sure there were no newly planted IEDs on the way back to the Chinook pickup area—which was never the same as the drop-off, just in case.

There would be no tent mates here. No tent, even. He and Lucca had their own containerized housing unit, CHU. Four walls, a bed, and a little desk and chair. It was little more than a shipping container made livable, with a couple of small windows. But the living area felt absolutely luxurious compared with Patrol Base Murray and was a step up from FOB Falcon.

Since missions usually lasted several hours, not days, he was at the FOB more than he’d been at Falcon. He got to talk to Jill regularly and kept in touch with Knight. Part of him wanted to talk to them about how he continued to be haunted by the loss of Wiens and Cooper, how their deaths crept into his CHU at night and kept him awake, tormenting him with the what-ifs, causing him to imagine all the ways it could have ended differently, without sending them off in body bags.

He wanted to tell someone about the enormous guilt that clung to him. But he wouldn’t be convinced it wasn’t his fault, and Knight and Jill would try, so why bring it up?

He wondered if Lucca missed Cooper—if the scent in the morgue told her it was over, or if she was still waiting for him to come bounding through the door with a smile on his face and a flabby football in his mouth.

ANOTHER NIGHT OP starting. He was ready. Willingham and Lucca ran toward the compound door. She swiftly sniffed its seams. Nothing. They stepped to the side, and two soldiers behind them kicked down the door and entered the compound. Several soldiers followed, rifles drawn.

From outside, Willingham heard the commotion of the “hard knock” mission. He knew it well by now, after a couple of weeks of nighttime air assault missions for high-value targets, HVTs. The men they were seeking weren’t the former teenage delinquents who planted IEDs and terrorized the locals. They were more the brains behind the insurgent operations—some in charge of IED production, others funding it, some coming up with intricate plans to foil, or destroy, coalition forces.

He bent down to pet Lucca as he heard the now familiar sounds: The soldiers who knew some basic Arabic shouting instructions to the home’s occupants. The pounding footsteps of military-age males being separated from the others and led to an area outside the compound. The explanation of why they were here, the request to please cooperate. The women and children inside, some crying, the soldiers telling them in their limited Arabic—but mostly simply through a much gentler tone of voice—not to be scared. The interpreters helping with communications.

As soon as the people were secured in their areas, Lucca and Willingham set to work, searching each room for explosives. In these situations, the goods could be hidden in walls or even secret rooms. Tonight they found nothing, so they went back outside as others in his team started their detailed hand search of every room, looking for intel.

On this mission, they were after a man in his twenties who was responsible for the financial side of an IED-making operation. Willingham had been told after his search that none of the men here matched the photos of the man they were seeking. That meant hours of questioning of the others and intel inspections to see if they could determine where he was. And that meant a long night of nothing to do for Lucca and Willingham, whose job was over until they headed to where the Chinook would pick up the squads at the end of the mission.

He didn’t like the waiting business. Never did, but especially not since Wiens had been killed. He wanted to keep busy, to use his and Lucca’s time to stop the enemy before they could hurt anyone else. It would be at least three hours before the soldiers were done with the intel gathering. He looked at Lucca, who was lying down at his feet.

“Lucca, you want to find some weapons?”

She sprang up, wagging at a mellow clip, eyes cast up to his.

It would be too dangerous to search for weapons on their own, at night, on the property of a man known to be in deep with al-Qaeda. So he put together a four-man fire team. The soldiers were also happy to have something to do. They’d have his back while he focused on watching Lucca and guiding her by voice through the dark.

They started at the back side of the property, which led to a large farm field. The fire team was spread out about ten steps behind him. Lucca, off leash now, walked in front.

“Lucca, left!” Willingham didn’t have to say it loudly. The sounds from the house had died down, and the night air was heavy and quiet. Lucca turned left and searched for about twenty yards.

“Lucca, right!” She changed directions. Her nose guided her through the rough, dry field, but she would have no problem seeing at night, since dogs have strong night vision. The humans on the mission had to wear NVGs to see. They all kept pushing ahead, angling across the field. Willingham doubted they’d find anything, but it was better than sitting around with nothing to do all night.

They were about twenty yards from a large canal when Willingham saw Lucca throw a change of behavior—and not the usual. Willingham didn’t know what to make of it at first. He watched as she stopped and lowered her head, staring in the direction of the canal. He could almost hear her think.

What the hell is going on here?

To an onlooker, her behavior wouldn’t seem like a big deal. Just a dog stopping and checking something out. But to Willingham, it was a red flag that she was onto something other than explosives.

It was a different game now. He leashed Lucca and quietly talked to his team.

“Hey, fellas, she’s seeing something out here. We gotta be careful.”

They took two more steps and Lucca stopped and lowered her head again—her ears were slightly back, her tail stiff and raised. She let out a low, menacing growl. Willingham had never heard anything like this from her. She had growled a couple of times when Iraqis were taunting her, but nothing like this. She looked like she was ready to attack if she needed to.

The fire team walked up to be in line with him and Lucca, rifles poised to protect the team from whatever lay ahead. Willingham walked forward with Lucca, who was still in an attack stance. The dry soil crumbled under the soldiers’ boots as they walked to where Lucca was staring. Suddenly the soldier to Willingham’s left screamed out one of the Arabic phrases they had all learned in predeployment training: “Er-fah EE-dee-yek! Get your hands up!”

A second later, Willingham saw what the soldier had seen. There, crouched in the bottom of the muddy, nearly empty eight-foot-deep canal, was a clean-shaven man in his twenties. He was wearing a traditional long cotton garment, a thawb, in light blue, or maybe white—Willingham couldn’t tell exactly, because it looked glowing bright green through his NVGs. His arms were now raised above his head. A soldier jumped into the canal and cuffed him with zip ties. The canal was wide, with forty-five-degree banks, so it wasn’t hard for the soldier to escort the man out.

The man eyed Lucca nervously. They brought him back to the compound, only about a hundred yards away, and turned him over to the intel experts for identification. Willingham had no idea if he was the one they were looking for. He just knew they’d found someone hiding in a canal, and people who bolt and hide in canals at night tend to have something to hide.

After some data comparison, it looked like he was the HVT they had been seeking.

“We never would have found him if it weren’t for her,” a squad leader told him as he patted Lucca’s head.

Willingham could feel his heart quicken with this praise of his girl.

Word of Lucca’s heroics quickly spread. For the rest of the night, Lucca was the recipient of many thanks and ear rubs.

“How’d she do it?” asked one of the soldiers who was on his fire team. “I didn’t know she’s an attack dog.”

“She’s not. Never even been trained on scouting, much less aggression,” Willingham answered, still stunned at the evening’s turn of events.

“So what happened?”

“I figure it this way. If she can find a minute amount of explosives buried in the ground, she can smell a hundred-and-fifty-pound man scared shitless a few yards in front of her.”

“And she was gonna do something about it. She wasn’t just saying ‘Yoo-hoo! Looky at this guy here!’”

“Well, there’s a reason for that,” Willingham said. “It’s ’cause Lucca is a real marine.”

MISSIONS AT KALSU sometimes took them to strange places. One evening Willingham and Lucca found themselves in a large cemetery surrounded by single-occupant, aboveground concrete crypts. They were only about waist high, and mostly unadorned.

Lucca took an interest in an old-looking tomb with a side seam that was wide enough to let her nose get a good whiff. She wagged happily, looking at Willingham, who could have thought of a thousand places he’d rather have her respond.

“Really, Lucca?”

He rewarded her with his usual enthusiasm but hoped she hadn’t just gotten happy over the smell of old corpse. His spotter notified the platoon leader, and a few soldiers came over and lifted the heavy lid off the tomb. They looked inside.

“Whoa, check it out, Staff Sergeant!” one called to him.

Willingham walked over, not knowing what to expect, and looked down into the crypt.

There was no body, just a small cache of several bags containing RPK machine-gun rounds and some AKs.

Willingham wondered what had become of the bodies and then decided not to go there. It was getting dark now.

A FEW DAYS later, Willingham and Lucca were leading a squad through a chicken barn at night.

“Never thought you’d be doing this when you signed up for the marines, did you, Mama Lucca?”

He looked at her through his NVGs and could tell she was enjoying the atmosphere. Running birds, flying feathers, and the smell of chicken manure. “Doesn’t get much better than this for your kind, does it, Lucca?”

The chickens were getting underfoot in an annoying way as the squad searched for weapons that were supposed to be somewhere on the property. Willingham flipped his rifle’s infrared laser to its normal red mode and took off his NVGs. To his surprise, the chickens ran away from the laser. Left and right, he aimed the laser, and left and right they scattered. He used this technique to clear a chicken-free path for everyone to walk in.

“We’re like Moses parting a sea of chickens,” he told Lucca. But she was too busy sniffing for explosives and enjoying the crazy surroundings to acknowledge his joke.

THE MONTH AT Kalsu passed quickly, filled with air assault missions to kill or capture high-value targets, and sometimes simply to search for caches or IED factories. The platoons Willingham and Lucca supported never had to kill HVTs, but a couple of HVTs may have been intent on destroying themselves—along with many others. During raids, suicide-bombing vests were found in two insurgent leaders’ homes. Willingham knew the kind of loss of life that could have led to if they hadn’t been discovered.

When they arrived back at FOB Falcon, the operation tempo had slowed down considerably. There was talk of the successes of Marne Torch, and it looked like there was something to it. The areas he and Lucca were now clearing appeared less treacherous, with IED finds and insurgent encounters greatly diminished.

Whether or not it would stay this calm would remain to be seen, but for now, Willingham continued to try to keep as busy as he could, even without back-to-back missions. Being at FOB Falcon resurrected the ghosts of time spent with Wiens—how the two of them sat up and talked for hours in this tent, how he laughed at Wiens gorging himself on chow-hall food at that table, how Cooper and Lucca played tug-of-war over in those open areas. Being fully engaged in working with Lucca or other dog handlers was a way of keeping the grief and guilt from overwhelming him.

Roche heard the pain in Willingham’s voice when they spoke by phone after mission reports. One afternoon she made him an offer.

“I can’t promise anything, but I want to do what I can to get you back home for the birth of your daughter,” she told him.

He wanted to tell her what he was feeling: I sent Kory home in a body bag, loaded him up myself and sent him back to his family. Now I get a chance to go home early? I don’t deserve this, and I can’t do this.

But he didn’t say that.

“You know how much I want to be there for Jill and the baby, but I’ve still got a job to do here with Lucca. Thank you anyway, but don’t even try.”

LUCCA SNIFFED THE trunk seam of the parked car, sat down, and looked at Willingham. He saw her through his NVGs and told his spotter, who radioed the find to the platoon leader.

It was 0300, and they were wrapping up an air assault out of FOB Falcon, heading back to a landing area to meet the Chinook. The soldiers had come up empty on their search for the HVT they were seeking, and all that separated them from their cots was a half-a-klick walk and a short Chinook ride back to FOB Falcon.

A couple of locals who were working with their platoon told them that the property belonged to some men involved with al-Qaeda. Between this, Lucca’s strong response, and the late hour, the platoon leader decided not to wait for EOD. The car was history no matter what.

He called in an Apache to dispatch it with a Hellfire missile.

Willingham and most of the soldiers were sitting on the ground, waiting at the helicopter landing zone, when they heard the helo. Lucca, who had fallen asleep with her head on Willingham’s lap, didn’t stir. Willingham couldn’t see anything through the rows of palm trees blocking the view. The Apache flew slowly to its target and locked in on it with the laser guide, then paused in the air as the trigger on the air-to-surface missile was pulled.

Whoosh! Boom! BOOM!

One hundred pounds of missile slammed into the car, and the large explosion was followed immediately by a smaller secondary explosion, courtesy of the contents of the trunk.

Lucca opened her eyes, stretched, looked around, and fell back to sleep.

It wasn’t the first time ordnance was dropped because of Lucca’s nose, but Willingham never ceased to be amazed by the ways his dog could stick it to the enemy.

As she lay there, the BADASS on her harness seemed to glow brighter than ever from Willingham’s view—no NVGs needed.

ON SEPTEMBER 20, Willingham sat in a chair at the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation facility at FOB Falcon, phone clamped tightly to his ear. On the other end, at the hospital at Lackland Air Force Base, Jill was undergoing an emergency cesarean. Willingham had been on the phone with her every hour or two throughout the day and night, encouraging her the best he could from so far away as she went through labor. Eventually it was decided that the only way this baby was getting out was by C-section.

Her sister held her cell phone out toward Jill’s belly as the doctor lifted their daughter, Claire, into the world. She came out screaming at 1:22 A.M. San Antonio time, 9:22 A.M. Iraq time, and Willingham whooped and high-fived everyone within reach.

That evening, as he celebrated with some soldier pals, it struck him how much his life had just changed, and yet had also stayed the same.

“I’m in a shit-hole country, I walked into the MWR like I always had, and I’m walking out a brand-new dad. But still in a shit-hole country,” he told them.

He passed out cigars. Someone brought a plastic pink flamingo to the occasion. It wasn’t exactly a stork, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.

ON THE C-5 home at the end of their deployment a month later, Knight and Willingham talked across the aisle, each sitting in their own row of seats again.

“I didn’t tell you about Bram’s little issue on the roof of a compound yet, did I?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So there he is, strutting around all proud with his Kong. He’s running around and he drops it and it bounces off the roof. Without hesitation, before I could say or do anything, he jumps to retrieve it.”

“Your crazy dog! What happened?!”

“The roof was eighteen feet off the ground. I gotta show you pictures. That crazy bastard’s lucky to be alive. He was on light duty for three weeks.”

Willingham laughed.

But there were signs that all was not well with Willingham. Knight realized he was still carrying the burden from the death of Wiens and Cooper. Eventually he brought the conversation around to this, to try to reassure him, once again, that he did nothing wrong.

“You know logically it’s not your fault. He went on that mission happily. No one forced him to. He loved working.”

“I know. I’ll be OK.”

“Yeah, you will. And you’ve got your little girl now.”

“Claire. Claire Elizabeth.”

“You’re going to be one great dad. You already are. Just look at Lucca!”

Willingham knew he should be feeling over the moon. Soon he’d be with Jill again and meeting his baby. He was excited and couldn’t wait to see them. At the same time he could not let go of the feeling that he did not deserve this happiness, that he couldn’t celebrate life when Wiens’s dad was mourning his son’s death.

“Want to go check the daooooggs?” Knight asked Willingham. “I think they could use a visit.”

JILL GREETED WILLINGHAM at the airport with Claire. After Jill hugged Lucca and thanked her for bringing her husband home safely, Knight took Lucca to the side with Bram so Willingham could focus on his family without worrying about a leash. Claire, one month old, was wearing a marine cammy outfit.

She was asleep, and her father held her carefully, not knowing quite what to do with her head. While he held her close, there was nothing else in the world. Her tiny body even crowded out his sadness.

He felt his family would be complete if he could take Lucca home. But she had to go back to the kennels. It was the rule, and as much as he didn’t like it, he had been at this long enough to know there was no fighting it.

Spending nearly 24/7 on deployment with dogs and then having to put them back in a concrete kennel when they got home was hard on handlers. He imagined it wasn’t a walk in the park for the dogs, but they seemed to adjust to almost anything. After their return, he saw Lucca as much as he could, taking her on walks, bringing her with him to specialized search dog classes. They did some detection problems, but he took it easy on her. She’d done enough detection in Iraq to last a lifetime. He liked to go hang out with her in her walk-in kennel. He brushed her, talked to her, just sat with her without having to say a word. They had been through so much together over there. He felt they could read each other just by being near each other.

On one bad morning, as he was sitting and thinking about Wiens, he felt her eyes on him. He turned his head and saw her studying him, ears forward, her little black brows raised a little, pointing slightly toward each other. He thought she looked so wise and concerned.

“Come here, Mama Lucca,” he said, patting the floor next to him.

She lay down, put her head in his lap, and looked up at him. Then she sighed, closed her eyes, and within a minute, drifted off.

WILLINGHAM AWOKE IN his bed with a start and looked for Lucca. Not on the floor, not in the bed.

“Lucca! Lucca!” he called out.

Then he realized where he was. Home, in bed with Jill. He was used to Lucca being at his side all the time. But she was back at the kennels. He had to start remembering that. It wasn’t the first time he woke up worried that Lucca wasn’t there. He wondered if she woke up looking for him sometimes.

He had other disturbing dreams, nightmares. Wars, violence, people getting shot or exploded. Jill had to wake him up a few times in the early months home because he was screaming in his sleep. Once he woke himself up shouting, “No, Kory!”

Jill never questioned him, never pushed him to talk about his experiences. Once she found him sitting on a box in the garage, crying with his head in his hands, surrounded by the military gear he stored there. Jill realized something had reminded him of Wiens, but she didn’t ask. She just sat with him a minute and held his hand, then let him grieve on his own.

He was grateful.

A part of him had not come home. In one year, he would be back in Iraq on his second deployment—and a part of him would remain with Jill. This could mess with anyone’s head.