Angela Hill / Eyewitness News
LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas – Among the U.S. Navy SEALs who carried out the mission to get Osama bin Laden was a dog, one of over 1,000 military working dogs serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and trained at the Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio.
These dogs are mainly used to find IED's, or improvised explosive devices, the biggest killer of American soldiers.
These are dogs of war. Some have been to Iraq and Afghanistan, others are training for their deployment as bomb sniffers, or as specialized search dogs looking for those who planted the bombs or as protectors of their handlers – the men and women they work with.
The animals’ gifts are their incredible sense of smell, their powerful jaws and their ability to be trained.
These are military working dogs.
As someone said, these dogs are just like soldiers. They want to know their boundaries, they want discipline and they are trained to accomplish a mission.
Their mission is simple: to save human lives. They do it for a pat on the head, a tennis ball, or something called a kong.
“They will live and die for this little piece of rubber, which makes it possible for us to train them even easier,” said Marine Sgt. Sam Corns.
Corns is part of the Air Force's 341st Training Squadron where, together with the Army and Navy, they train not only the military working dogs but also their handlers.
“Basic obedience is the foundation of everything we do,” Corns said.
They are taught to follow the lead of their handler, to react to every command, including to attack.
But, these military working dogs are not just the hyper-aggressive dogs of the past. They are trained to be composed until their handler gives a command, and even to be able to change it mid-command.
“It’s difficult to train because the dog has the drive to bite and we are teaching them it’s O.K. to bite. But when I tell you not to, that means you can't,” he said.
But these military dogs are also trained to attack, even without a command if they sense their partner is in danger.
Once these dogs are trained, they are sent to military installations worldwide. If they lose even 5 percent of their ability to sniff a bomb or drugs, they are decertified and sent home to be retrained.
The 341st is spread over 400 hundred acres with kennels for over a thousand dogs. Today there are 670 in various stages of training.
Army Sgt. Russel Minto, the logistics superintendent for the 341st, has a staff of 63 who take care of the animals 24/7.
“You have to be patient, you are working with an animal that can't speak, they can't communicate with you, except with the different behaviors they show,” said Minto.
It takes two hours each morning and each evening to feed 670 dogs breakfast and dinner: 26,000 pounds of dog food a month. Each military dog's intake in monitored and recorded for health issues as is their output.
“To ensure there are no digestive issues,” Minto explains.
The level of their care and the level of their training merely underscore the importance of the military working dogs. Their job is to find explosives and to protect their handlers. But in the field they also serve as a morale booster.
“Because they get to see you with your dog and they get to talk about your dog and touch your dog and it’s a little piece of home every time you go on a mission,” Minto said.
In a second training maneuver, a soldier posing as the enemy plants a fake IED. He then hides himself in a culvert; first, to test the specialized search dog who, on the command of his handler, tracks and finds the IED. Troops then come in to make the area safe. A second dog known as a combat tracker is then sent in, finds the scent of the enemy who planted the IED, and follows the path to the culvert where the enemy is hiding.
A veteran combat soldier, now training to be a handler, has seen the importance of these dogs in battle situations.
“They save lives. They go where we don’t want to put human lives. They do a lot of things people don’t see every day,” the soldier said.
“He (the dog) is definitely a soldier. He outranks me. He’s a sergeant. That’s my senior NCO (non-commissioned officer),” he said.
It’s not an official rank. It’s what these soldiers do to give respect to their four-legged partners.
Army Staff Sgt. Randy Jensen has been a handler in Bosnia, Hungary and Iraq. He has nothing but respect for these furry warriors.
“I don’t think they can be replicated,” Jensen said. “The dogs can do things that we are not going to be able to do with any kind of machinery.”
That echoes the sentiment of all those who work with or train these military working dogs and their soldier handlers.
“I've got the best job in the Marine Corps: training dogs and training people to save lives,” explained one of them.
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Tuesday at 10 p.m. on Channel 4, Angela travels back to Lackland Air Force Base to the incredible veterinary hospital that serves these military working dogs and she discusses the effects of war on these special animals.
