theatlantic:

We Need War Dogs, More Than Ever

Picture a sprawling grape field, row after row of low-leaning mud walls blanketed with dry leaves. It’s winter in Helmand, Afghanistan. In the middle of the field are 20 U.S. soldiers crouching for cover; they’ve just endured an insurgent attack. Now that the gunfire has quieted, K-9 handler Staff Sgt. Justin Kitts and his working dog, Dyngo, are clearing the area for explosives. Kitts watches his dog sniffing the ground and quickly sees the dog’s quick pace become slow and deliberate, the telltale change — Dyngo has found an IED. And a short time later, when the two of them search the road on the other side of the field, they find another. Each bomb, made of roughly 50 pounds of home-made explosives and buried two feet underground, is attached to a pressure plate hidden along these roads. The insurgents had used their gunfire to box the unit into an-IED trap.

Kitts told me that if either of those bombs had gone off that January day, the force of the blast would have been so strong that even 20 meters away, he, Dyngo, and the other soldiers in the grape field would have been well within the kill zone. During their seven-month deployment in Afghanistan Dyngo and Kitts spent over 1,000 hours outside the wire and uncovered 370 lbs of explosives and a total of four IEDs. In 2011, they were awarded the Bronze Star.

These last 12 months have been the year of the war dog. Today marks the first anniversary of the Osama bin Laden mission and the report that a canine known as Cairo was assigned to the elite Navy Seals team that hunted down the world’s most wanted terrorist. It was news of this dog that awakened the public to the wide world of U.S. combat canines. And while details of the dog’s assignment have still not been officially released, the very fact that Cairo was on the mission proves that the military working dog is one of our most valuable military assets.

But here we are a year later. The U.S. military, which has been fighting the war against IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, has pulled its troops from one country and is steadily moving to wrap up military business in the other. Inquiring minds are bound to wonder: What’s going to happen to our MWDs — our military working dogs?

Read more. [Image: Rebecca Frankel]

& I’ll say it again: dogs are just so fucking awesome.