11

Special Forces

THE SMELL OF hashish wafted in through an open door of the compound. Lucca turned her head toward it and sniffed a few times. The smell meant nothing special to her, and she returned to observing what was going on inside.

About a dozen Green Berets and Afghan Local Police were sipping tea with a village elder and a few friends who were visiting his home. The elder and his chai boy walked around the room pouring the brew from a large silver vessel into small glass cups, handing them to anyone who looked interested when they inquired, “Chai?”

“Manana,” Rod said, easily remembering the Pashto word for thank you, which was taught to him by his friend and brother in arms, U.S. Army Special Forces Sergeant Jake Parker, who had learned the language—considered a Category IV language because of its level of difficulty for native English speakers—as part of his Special Forces training. Rod held the glass of steaming amber liquid in his hands and took a sip. Tea was not his usual drink of choice, but its warmth and the spicy taste felt good on this January afternoon, especially after the seven klicks he and the others had walked to reach this small village in the Nahri Saraj District of Helmand Province.

Lucca sat quietly, observing the curious tea party. The four members of the Afghan Local Police wore such different uniforms from one another that it looked like someone had gone through the clearance bin at an army surplus store. One wore an official ALP khaki uniform; the others wore hand-me-downs from the Americans—anything they could get ahold of that would mark them as not Taliban. None wore any sort of protective gear.

Rod had grown as much of a beard as he could since arriving for deployment the month before, and now matched the rest of the Green Berets he and Lucca were supporting, as well as the local police working with them. He welcomed the break from daily shaving and was glad that his beard came in better than his mustache, which wasn’t making its presence known nearly as well.

Parker sported a similar look, with a naturally short beard and just a shadow of a mustache. He knew of guys who couldn’t grow more than fuzz on their faces, so he was grateful for what he had. It wasn’t a matter of blending in with locals. It was a matter of building rapport. Around these parts, clean-faced males were looked on as less than manly—as boys, even. So any facial hair was better than nothing. It was common knowledge that you’d be taken more seriously if you sported a beard. But not too long a beard. That was generally reserved for village elders.

There was one man, however, who didn’t need a beard. Jan (pronounced John) Mohammed, the de facto leader of the Afghan Local Police in the district and beyond, towered over all the other Afghans and even most of the Green Berets. He was a robust six foot four, and his only facial hair was a vast black mustache that started and ended well beyond the corners of his mouth. The Green Berets dubbed it a “power ’stache.”

Those who bathed near him saw that he bore scars all over his body from the bullet and shrapnel wounds he had collected during his thirty-eight or so years of living and fighting here. “He looks like Swiss cheese, he’s got so many holes,” one soldier who had seen the evidence firsthand told Rod.

Mohammed, known to the Americans as “J Mo,” or sometimes just “Mo,” drank his tea and spoke with the owner of the compound in Pashto, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. Pashto, the native tongue of the Pashtun people, Afghanistan’s main ethnic group, was widely spoken in this rural area. Dari, Afghanistan’s lingua franca, could also be heard here but was used more commonly in urban environments. Mohammed had arranged for the men who were having tea, and the other dozen pulling security outside, to bed down here for the night, as they were conducting village stability operations.

A native of the area, Mohammed knew almost everyone in the nearby districts, or at least their relatives. His connections throughout Helmand Province were strong. He had proved invaluable for helping the Americans train Afghan Local Police to patrol their area, and for making inroads to remote rural communities where the Taliban liked to take their business. It was a strategy endorsed by General Petraeus, who held that the strong local policing of thousands of rural villages was essential for defeating the Taliban.

Since Parker was the only one on the Special Forces team who spoke Pashto, he spent a lot of time with Mohammed. The team had hired native Afghan interpreters who helped with heavy language lifting, but Parker was the go-to man when Mohammed wanted to speak on his own to the Americans.

The two worked together on several matters, including some relatively mundane ones, such as payroll for the dozens of Afghan Local Police who worked with them. Parker voluntarily took on creating a payroll system for these men, who had no bank accounts and who were part of an ever-changing base of workers with very little structure. Here today, gone tomorrow, but here’s this guy’s friend to take his place. If Mohammed vetted the new guy, he was OK.

What would have been an HR specialist’s nightmare back home was only a temporary headache for a Green Beret like Parker. If he could get through some of the world’s most challenging training—including a Special Forces SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) course about, among other things, how to handle being held in the worst ways by bad guys, as well as the grueling two-week Robin Sage warfare exercise, which served as a sort of Green Beret final exam—he could handle payday in a remote combat outpost. Besides, Mohammed was there the first couple of times to introduce the men until Parker got to know them himself. He got it under control quickly, and payday became an excellent way to interact with the men.

As part of earning their monthly cash, the local police, sometimes with Mohammed but usually without, would join the Green Beret team and hump from the combat outpost for up to a week at a time, walking from village to village. They wouldn’t go the most direct route, because Taliban could easily plant IEDs on the roads, and they weren’t set up to do route clearance. Instead, they walked through farm fields and other areas far from the beaten path. When possible, they avoided even the smallest roads and trails.

On patrols, the Green Berets, with the help of the local police, established relationships with local elders, finding out how they could help the villages, and getting information from them about suspected insurgents. They developed strategic checkpoints that would house several police and keep the Taliban at bay when fighting season started. They cleared suspicious buildings and surrounding areas of IEDs and caches. They were prepared to root out Taliban, too, if they came across any.

Lucca once again had a big role to play, helping lead the way through the rural areas and being an essential part of clearing compounds of deadly explosives. There was plenty of work to do, and most days, many miles to walk.

She was enjoying something of a job-share arrangement with a specialized search dog named Darko. The high-energy Belgian Malinois had a Kong obsession Lucca had probably seen only once before, with Bram. His handler, Marine Corporal Daniel Cornier, said he was the only dog he’d ever met who could chew apart an “indestructible” Kong in less than thirty minutes. The dogs were highly regarded by the Green Berets, many of whom had worked with other dogs—dogs who didn’t have anywhere near the noses or drive these dogs did. “We had a couple dogs once that couldn’t smell a stick of C-4 right in front of their noses,” one soldier told Rod.

As lauded as Lucca and Darko were, they were as opposite as they could be in personalities and search methods. Lucca was methodical, taking her time on searches. Anyone who watched her said they could almost see her thinking. When she wasn’t working, she loved hanging out with the team. She made friends with whoever had time to pet her or snuggle her. Parker was one of her favorites. He rubbed her just right around the ears and talked to her in an enthusiastic and kind manner.

Lucca was a huge morale booster around the combat outpost. Despite the relatively nonviolent months leading up to fighting season, being a Green Beret in Taliban country was still an intense job. And while Special Forces are among the toughest of the tough, that didn’t stop them from missing home. As she had in Iraq, Lucca brought a piece of home with her. Soldiers petted her, talked to her, told her their troubles. “She’s really calming,” Parker told Rod while petting her one day. “You can’t say that for a mine sweeper.”

They couldn’t say that for Darko, either. One cold night on a mission, Parker—who was used to seeing Lucca lie right next to Rod on overnight missions—tried to lie next to Darko. Darko snapped at him. End of cuddle time.

Darko had such high energy on missions that if you didn’t know better, you’d swear he had a stash of Rip Its hidden under his bed. Some military dogs tremble in anticipation of being able to do bite work. This dog trembled and whined in anticipation of being able to do searches. His investigations were completed in the blink of an eye. Forward, left, right, come, done. Fast, but disciplined and careful. He had never missed. Neither had Lucca.

Parker had great admiration for both dogs and felt much more secure knowing Lucca and Darko were helping them maneuver safely through areas known for IEDs. They seemed to embody most of the core attributes of the Special Forces, including adaptability, perseverance, a team player mentality, courage, capability, and professionalism. The other two attributes, integrity and personal responsibility, could possibly belong to Lucca. Darko he wasn’t quite so sure about. “You never know what he’s thinking,” he joked to Cornier. “He’s in a world of his own.”

On missions, either Lucca or Darko would walk point while the other dog walked toward the back on leash without searching. When the point dog needed a break, the dog teams switched places. On other occasions, the dogs would split up, going with different elements for part of the day. When they headed off to go separate ways, Lucca would sometimes watch Darko for a few beats. But Darko never looked back.

Darko didn’t often interact with Lucca. If he had a Kong, that was his world. If he didn’t have a Kong, his world was all about getting one. He had little time for the frivolities of dog life.

It was the cold, rainy season in Afghanistan, a time when Taliban activity tended to be at a low. The Green Berets and local police were working hard now, before fighting season, to prevent insurgents from even being able to set foot in the area, much less set up operations or plant a bumper crop of IEDs. Their jobs in these months tended to be more diplomat than warrior—not the kind of exciting work some Green Berets signed up for, but all part of the unconventional warfare that helped them earn the moniker “the quiet professionals.” These Special Forces soldiers were well aware that an ounce of prevention now could save a bunch of guys later. Not that that made the long slogs without action any more appealing.

For Lucca and Darko, enthusiasm for the job never waned. Noses to the ground, they sniffed one klick after the next. Even Mohammed, while reluctant to pet the dogs, more than once told their handlers, with a nod and a smile, “Shah spay”—good dog.

Lucca looked up at Mohammed when he spoke. To Rod, it appeared as if somehow she knew what he was saying. Or maybe she smelled his authority. But whatever the reason, when he spoke, she paid close attention.

PROVERBS ARE FAR more popular in Afghanistan than they are in the United States. They come up regularly in conversation, pepper everyday speech, turn the mundane into the poetic.

The proverb that seemed most fitting for Parker on this deployment was a simple one. “The first day you meet, you are friends. The next day you meet, you are brothers.”

The first time he met Rod and Cornier was on a very cold winter evening when the handlers were manning the small guard-post area on base. It was located outside, and shifts were long. Parker was with two friends, Navy EOD1 Sean P. Carson and Lieutenant Christopher Mosko, also a navy EOD specialist, who happened to be out at the same time as Parker, so they joined him.

Parker was a Bravo, the team’s weapons sergeant. Teams usually have two soldiers with this military occupational specialty, but on this deployment, Parker was the only one. As the weapons sergeant, he was in charge of the security at the camp, so he went to see the new guys. When the three approached Rod and Cornier, it was clear that despite being fairly bundled up, they were very cold. So Parker, Mosko, and Carson collected some wood and came back and built them a fire. They stayed with them and talked. They felt like they’d known one another for years. Friendships were natural and fast and quickly became solid. Brothers.

Parker never expected two marine dog handlers and two navy EOD specialists to be among his closest friends on deployment, but then again, it didn’t really surprise him. Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan were used to working with men from other branches of the military when they needed expertise beyond what was available to them within SF. It was all about the mission, not about the uniform. And formalities are out the window. Everyone was on a first-name basis, and to a great extent, even rank didn’t come into play when it came to friendships.

That meant it was easy for Parker when he decided everyone on the team needed to learn some Pashto. He’d already given some very basic English lessons to the local police stationed at the outpost. He didn’t need to do this. They could get by just fine without English. It was more about building that all-important rapport. The dozen or so men who showed up seemed to enjoy it, and Parker had fun spending time with them.

He wanted the Americans to learn some Pashto for the same reason—creating trust and understanding with locals. So at a weekly meeting, he passed out worksheets he made up. He listed several key words and phrases, in transliteration. Things like:

Stah num tsa dhe—What is your name?

Ta sanga yee—How are you?

Da khoday pa amaan—Good-bye.

Simple stuff, but it could make a difference. If the Afghans trusted them and wanted to work hard with them, everyone was safer. There could be more intel. There would be less chance of green-on-blue surprises. As an article in the National Review said, “The old joke that you cannot buy an Afghan, you can only rent him has much truth to it: Afghan troops are very loyal until they are not.” Learning some of their language could go a little way toward gaining the coveted loyalty.

Parker reminded the Americans whenever he saw them that they needed to study their words. In a couple of weeks, he gave a pop quiz. Those who didn’t do well had to write and rewrite the phrases during the next week until they memorized them.

When he was assigned Pashto as his language back in the Special Forces Qualification Course (aka the Q Course), he wasn’t thrilled. Most of his friends were learning Spanish or other Category I languages. He and his four Pashto classmates were still struggling through the Pashto alphabet while the guys in Spanish were learning basic sentences. Their course lasted weeks longer than the Spanish course did. They went to class five hours a day, five days a week, for six months. And there was a lot of studying after hours. But in the end, he was glad he’d been chosen to learn the language. It brought him closer to the Afghans, and he hoped in turn, that would bring the Afghans closer to the Americans.

Lucca was already doing a pretty good job of that herself.

ROD REACHED AROUND Lucca and unbuckled her harness. He had received a new harness for this deployment. Instead of one side reading BADASS, he had customized it with a smaller name tape with the word LEGEND.

“When it comes to the military dog world, she’s a legend,” he told Willingham when he showed him the patch.

Rod and Lucca were back at their Special Operations outpost in Nahri Saraj, just settling in at an outdoor table for dinner after a three-day patrol. Within a minute of her harness coming off, a young member of the Afghan Local Police approached her.

“Looooka?”

Rod nodded and smiled. “Yes, Lucca.”

“Loooooka!” He cautiously stroked her head, and when he saw that she seemed to like it, he grinned and petted her in earnest.

Parker walked over to Rod and Lucca.

“Ready for some real food?” he asked.

“Absolutely.” Rod didn’t mind MREs as much as some guys, but he was hungry for a decent meal.

They walked in the direction of the kitchen, avoiding the flooded and muddy areas along the way. Inside, a small Afghan man named Rauf was dishing out a local chicken-and-rice specialty he had cooked.

“Spay sarray!” he greeted Rod. When Rauf first started calling him this, Parker translated. “He said, ‘dog man,’” a name Rod was used to, only in its more casual American form, “dog guy.”

“Salim!” Rauf greeted Parker with his Pashto name. Rauf ladled fragrant-smelling chicken with red sauce on top of a mound of rice that was dotted with raisins. One of the perks that came with being in Special Forces here was hiring local cooks when possible. It helped village relations, brought a little money to the locals, and boosted morale around the outposts. A from-scratch hot meal was a luxury few at such remote outposts took for granted, even if it wasn’t the kind of food they were used to back home.

At the outpost, Rod, Cornier, Lucca, and Darko shared a small room. The handlers slept in bunk beds. The dogs slept on an exercise mat their handlers had taken from the makeshift gym there. Darko liked his space, so they cut the mat in half so the dogs would have more room. They topped the mats with green wool blankets.

One evening, Rod and Cornier left the dogs in the room by themselves for a couple of hours when they went to eat and watch TV in the common area. It was something they’d done several times, and the dogs were usually sleeping when they returned. But when they came back this time, the dogs were awake, sitting and looking blankly at them, surrounded by mauled MRE containers, torn-up bags of Jolly Ranchers and Starburst fruit chews, and slobbery wrappers that had once contained granola bars and potato chips. It looked like a party gone bad.

“What?!” Rod and Cornier shouted at the same time.

“I can’t believe it!”

“Rod! Look what Lucca did!”

“Not my Lucca! That’s Darko’s work!”

Lucca’s dark brows darted diagonally over her eyes as she glanced from Darko to the mess to Rod and back. Her ears wilted alongside her head. Darko appeared to get physically smaller.

Mosko and Carson came out to check out the commotion. They burst out laughing when they saw the mess of care-package contents and MREs. Rod and Cornier started laughing, too.

On seeing the reaction, Lucca’s eyebrows relaxed and her ears perked up. Darko inflated back to his normal size. Their tails wagged, and Rod thought they looked not only relieved that they weren’t in trouble, but pleased with the merry and impromptu gathering in their room.

The handlers cleaned up and stayed up late to make sure the dogs were OK, giving them a couple of extra walks. They vowed never to leave food anywhere within reach again.

When they finally went to bed, Lucca snored heartily. Despite his fatigue, Rod had to chuckle.

“So much for my perfect princess,” he said before drifting off.

THE RAIN CAME down in plump drops that rolled off Lucca’s thick fur. She was walking point down a narrow dirt trail between farm fields. As she kept her nose to the ground, droplets ran off it in little rivulets.

“She’s like the postman,” one of the Green Berets walking next to Rod said. “Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night . . .”

Lucca approached a ten-by-ten mud-wall structure at the edge of a field. One of the sides had crumbled from age and the elements, revealing a mound of old hay stacked inside.

“Forward, Lucca.” Lucca knew exactly what he wanted. She trotted over to the structure and sniffed to the right, along the open front. Her wet nose then inspected the bottom perimeter of the three walls. Finding nothing to report, she trotted back to Rod.

“She’s a great dog,” the Green Beret said when she continued walking point.

“She’s amazing,” Rod said.

Rod knew how special her talents were. Most dogs need to be directed to search the exteriors of buildings and vehicles, often with handlers using sweeping hand motions wherever they want the dog to search. Lucca didn’t need any guidance with these tasks. It was her job, and even though it had been more than a couple of years since the end of her last deployment, she hadn’t lost her touch. She knew what was expected.

Each time he asked her to search a car or structure exterior, she gave him a split-second glance of confirmation, as if telling him, Don’t worry. I got that.

Right . . . left . . . around . . . checking any door seams, every perimeter . . . done.

The Green Berets, Afghan Local Police, Rod, and Lucca continued for a couple of klicks. Along the way, the rain stopped, and Lucca shook the excess off her coat. They came to a small road that dead-ended into a walled courtyard. There was no house structure, and the ground appeared to have been ripped up in places. It was already drying. Around here, with the earth so dry most of the year, it takes a lot more than a downpour to keep the ground wet.

“I don’t like it,” Rod told Parker. “Looks shady to me.”

After having Lucca check around the outside of the wall, he sent her inside the walled area to search without blow-by-blow instructions from him, trusting her nose to lead her where she needed to go, and following closely so she wouldn’t get so far ahead that he couldn’t spot red flags. If she found nothing, he would direct her in a more systematic search.

She walked in, continued for about fifteen feet, stopped, and looked up at Rod with a little tail wag.

“Lucca, come!”

She ran toward him, and he praised her up for a few seconds before telling the guys behind him what they’d already come to know. Lucca had another potential find. They set up a security perimeter so no insurgents could surprise them. The Green Berets faced outward with their M-4s, and the Afghan Local Police did the same with their AKs.

A Special Forces engineer checked out what Lucca had responded on. It was buried loosely under some dirt, and he didn’t want to move it. He set up some C-4 close to it and ran a fuse back to a safe distance.

A fiery flash, a boom, and the IED was history.

Compliments all around.

“Nice work, Lucca!”

“Loooooka!”

She looked up from where she was lying and wagged a couple of times. But she had a Kong to chew and got right back to business.

“HAYSTACKS ARE NICE at home, not so nice in Afghanistan,” Rod told Lucca as they approached the first of three haystacks along the mission route. Whenever they came to areas where intel indicated Taliban activity, every haystack was suspect. The five-foot-high mounds of hay or straw were popular hiding places for weapons caches. They were easy to access, and if the weapons were found, no one could take the rap for them—unlike those found within the walls of someone’s compound.

The caches posed no immediate threat. The greater danger was when insurgents—knowing haystacks were subject to inspection by their enemies—concealed IEDs in or near them. Most haystacks were just haystacks. You couldn’t tell the good ones from the bad ones without a dog.

“Seek, Lucca,” Rod told her when they got close to the haystack. She needed no more guidance. She went in, nose down, and circled around the haystack. She sniffed upward in a few spots and was done in thirty seconds.

The second haystack also turned up nothing.

A little farther away, Lucca walked up to the third haystack, went partway around, came back a little, then back and forth a couple more times, as if narrowing in on a cone of scent. Rod knew what was coming next.

Lucca stopped and stared at him.

“Come!” She trotted over to him, wagging. “Gooood girllll!”

“Lucca responded over here on this haystack,” he called out to one of the Green Berets behind him. The engineer walked over as Rod was giving Lucca a belly-rub paycheck. Rod stood up and indicated where Lucca had responded.

Everyone cleared out. The engineer tossed an incendiary grenade to the bottom of the hay. Even though the hay was still damp from the recent rains, once the grenade activated, it burned quickly, heaving up light gray smoke. For a moment, Rod wondered if it was a false alarm.

An explosion put an end to that question.

Parker walked over and fist-bumped Rod. “Lucca does it again!” He reached down and scratched her behind the ears.

“I hate those things,” Parker told Rod. “IEDs are like snakes. You keep messing with them and you’re gonna get bit.”