My neighbor just returned from a war. I noticed something different about him right away—an edge that I hadn’t noticed before. It wasn’t a drastic change. Nor was it concrete. It wasn’t something you could see or grab, only feel, like a bullet whizzing by your ear.
And what of this edge? What tragedies lay behind it? What sort of experiences are so profound that they can alter a human being’s personality, even slightly?
“My name is Corporal Seth Reil of the United States Marine Corps,” he said lighting the first of a dozen Camel Lights he would smoke during our interview. “I work with the military working dogs. My dog was trained for attacking and also finding explosives. My unit worked in eastern Ramadi in the al-Anbar province.”
Reil and his unit were stationed in a small combat outpost known as an FOB (Forward Observing Base). The dogs and the dog handlers all lived together in a hardened building called The Hooch.
“A hardened building is made out of cement and is constructed to withstand small-arms fire and mortar rounds,” said Reil. “The FOB is a big complex with different command posts, army platoons, mechanic’s bay, and medic’s bay. It has about 15 to 20 buildings. It actually used to be an agricultural college that shut down at the beginning of the war, and we just turned it into a base.
“When we first got to our hooch, we had to build it up some. We built some rooms, and a couch and a patio. The reason they let us have the patio is because we said it was for the dogs. We knew we wanted one, but needed to [justify] it, so we said it was for the acclimatization of the dogs because they can’t work if it gets too hot, which was kind of a bullshit reason—but we wanted the patio, so that’s what we told them.”
Whether the dogs actually need a patio for their well-being, one thing is for certain. They don’t like war any more than humans do. Some of them are even coming down with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder).
“It’s not surprising because dogs live in the now,” Reil explained while extinguishing his 6th or 7th cigarette into a small candle holder-turned ashtray. “They can’t say, ‘Hey, I’m getting shot at today, but tomorrow will be better.’ If they get shot at one day they’re going to think they’re going to get shot at the next day, and the day after that. So the dogs start shutting down. They think that every time they go out, there they’re gonna get blown up or get heat exhaustion. But the benefits of having dogs far outweigh [the risks]. If the dog dies or it gets PTSD, chances are he found stuff that made him that way, which means it was good that we had him there.”
According to Reil, a typical mission occurs at night. The supporting unit picks them up in their Humvees; they convoy to the target zone, and proceed to clear the area, usually houses, streets and courtyards.
“They break things down to pushes,” Reil explained. “They will clear one section of the city and secure all the insurgents. Then they’ll push the next section, until that section is cleared.”
Another role of the k9 units is to clear buildings for “meet-and-greets," which are gatherings of civil-affairs officers and local sheiks. They would meet in a building, say, a power plant, and discuss different ways the Marines could facilitate the rebuilding process and how they could better serve the Iraqi people. It was Reil’s unit’s job to go into the power plant and make sure no shenanigans were planned by rival sheiks or insurgents.
Whether to clear a building for a meet-and-greet or clearing a house suspected of harboring weapons or insurgents, the way it worked was just like in the movies. First, the guys with the M-16s would rush through the building one room at a time, yelling, “Clear!” after each room was checked. Then, when the building was secure, Reil and his dog, a Belgian Malanois named Tino, would go in and sniff out explosives.
“We look for what’s called a ‘change in behavior,’ Reil says. “His ears go up and his tail stiffens, and then the dog will pull me in the direction of the odor. During the al-Iskan push… my dog and I found four pressure plates, which are IEDs [improvised explosive devices] but designed to go off when trucks or tanks or people step on them. When we find them, we call over the EOD [explosive ordinance disposal], and they do a controlled detonation.”
It was during the al-Iskan push that Reil and his unit ran into trouble. After the incident with the pressure plates, they commandeered a house for the night. When a house is commandeered, they put all the occupants into one room and post guards.
“[The occupants] usually don’t mind too much because we pay them for their troubles and because unemployment is so high over there, it’s often the only income they see. The ones that do mind, it’s usually because they’re hiding something.”
The next morning, the unit exited the house they commandeered and almost instantly started taking incoming fire.
“I don’t know if it got leaked that we were staying there,” Reil said. “We took cover behind a wall and returned fire. Then we called for a gun truck, which is an up-armored Humvee with a .50-caliber mounted. We followed behind the Humvee until the insurgents scattered.”
Corporal Reil didn’t seem to mind talking about this particular firefight, probably because nobody was hurt. But when asked about other, similar situations, he fidgeted in his seat, lit another cigarette, and respectfully declined to elaborate.
“People get hurt,” he said, eyes becoming red and glassy. “It’s really hard to talk about.”
And there it is—that thing. The thing you hear so often when soldiers come back from war, the thing they can’t or won’t talk about, the thing that gives them that "edge” they bring home with them. The things like the time the suicide bomber detonated himself in front of an Iraqi police checkpoint.
“After the explosion, my dog and I had to search the area for secondary devices,” Seth said. “When we got out of the Humvee, before I could stop him, my dog started licking and eating the remains. That was hard. It was a long time before I let my dog drink out of the same water bottle as me.”
Reil said that, while in Iraq, he didn’t follow politics all that much. He was too focused on the job. He did say however that he did not believe the anti-war movement was undermining what they were doing over there, that it did not affect their morale to such a degree that it weakened the troops and emboldened the enemy– a mantra we kept hearing over and over by certain supporters and members of the Bush administration.
“People saying they didn’t support the war—that’s fine. Being American, they have that option. I’m trying to defend that option, just so long as when the troops come home, the [people] show support.”
Apparently that’s what he’s received. Most everyone he’s encountered has been respectful and supportive of his sacrifice to our country. And though he did not lose life or limb, his sacrifice has been enormous. Not just the friends for whom he mourns, or the new bride torn from him, but also his personality, his former self, now as gone as his twelfth and last cigarette of the interview.
“I have been avoiding big groups of people. . . It freaks me out. I smoke way more than I ever did. . . My wife says that I’m more serious, and I space out. It’s kind of a defense mechanism. If something bad happens in Iraq, you shut it down otherwise it will eat you alive…. You get thrown into this hostile environment and your mindset just completely changes. Things you wouldn’t think of as dangerous before all of a sudden become extremely dangerous. Like, if you see a pile of garbage on the road, here in the states you would think, ‘Oh, that needs to be cleaned up.’ But if you see a pile of garbage in Iraq, you say, ‘Oh no, we’re gonna get blown up!’ In Iraq, you are in that mindset all the time. You can’t let your guard down at all. We have a saying that says, ‘Complacency kills,’ and it does.”
Ed Decker
11/14/07
