And the recent news about two fellow dog handlers, Jeremy and Jasco, in his deployment, has been bad. Sometimes frantic locals will rush a bleeding kid up to Alcatraz for medical help. On base you sometimes hear them go off in the distance, set off by a goat, an unsuspecting villager. This is what a dog handler tries not to dwell on: the risk associated with the need to find bombs and with the possibility of missing one. troops have received disfiguring injuries. It’s been a graveyard since for many Americans, and a place where numerous U.S. It’s where British forces, before pulling out of Sangin altogether in 2010, lost more than a hundred troops. Sangin is littered with IEDs and teeming with enemy fighters tucked behind thick mud walls. In this place especially, the threat is palpable. Maybe he’s just doing his job, or maybe he needs just one find to allay whatever doubts he harbors about his-and Zenit’s-ability to do the job. Maybe there’s a little chip on Jose’s shoulder, or maybe he feels there’s a lot to prove-to himself, to the marines of Third Recon, and to his family back home. As exhausting as it is, Jose always says yes.
Each time he and Zenit go out beyond the wire, they’re walking point along with a marine carrying a metal detector, making themselves the first targets as Zenit scours the area for any whiff of nitrate that might signal a buried IED. Jose and Zenit are asked to accompany practically every mission. The marines of Third Recon, in groups of a dozen or so, take turns disrupting the enemy, mapping active pockets of Taliban fighters. But as thankful as they may be, Jose knows it’s natural for them to wonder: Is this guy any good? Will he fit in? How will he respond in that first firefight?Īt this moment in August of 2011 the stated mission in Sangin is to secure the 320-foot-high Kajaki Dam, to keep the Taliban from blowing it up and flooding the Helmand Valley.
His job is to accompany that platoon, to clear a path through hostile territory for his fellow marines.
And no dog can find every bomb every time.įor the past three months Jose’s been stationed at Patrol Base Alcatraz, at the edge of a town called Sangin in Helmand Province, without a “find.” Despite his optimism-the man always beams a disarming smile-the lack of finds is beginning to wear on him almost as much as the 100-degree heat, which feels even hotter rucking 75 pounds of gear.Īs a Marine dog handler, Jose is a perpetual outsider, assigned to platoons that have been together for years, tight-knit combat brotherhoods that regard newcomers, especially dog handlers, with a high degree of circumspection. Tomorrow, on patrol, the objective will be finding not a toy but an improvised explosive device, or IED, one of the Taliban’s most brutally effective weapons against American troops here in what many consider the most dangerous province in one of the world’s most dangerous countries. Voice commands met by precise canine action, always with the same end goal in mind-to find the toy.
On Jose’s command, Zenit bursts forward, zigging in search of it, tail wagging. Jose has Zenit sit, which the dog does obediently, and then Jose jogs 50 yards down and hides a rubber toy, a Kong, up against a mud wall, covering it with dirt.
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