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B R U N O SCOUT DOG · GERMAN SHEPHERD REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM · 1970-1971 |
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WHO I AM
My name is Dick Driver. I'm 48. I live in Abilene, Texas, and I'm a road foreman for the county, which means I spend my days making sure the gravel goes where it's supposed to. My wife Carolyn put this page together with me over about six weekends. She typed and I talked. In 1970 I was nineteen years old, and the Army made me a scout dog handler. For eleven months I walked point in Vietnam with a German shepherd named Bruno. Every man in our patrols who came home in one piece owes something to that dog, and I owe him more than anybody. I'm not much for talking about the war, and this page isn't about the war. It's about a dog. If you came looking for war stories you won't find them here. FORT BENNING I got my draft notice in the spring of 1970, did basic, and went to infantry training. When they asked for volunteers for scout dog school, I put my hand up, mostly because I grew up on a place out in Jones County with six dogs and I figured a dog would be better company than a sergeant. I was right about that. They sent me to Fort Benning, Georgia. The first morning, they walked us down the kennel row and handed each of us a leash. On the other end of mine was about eighty-five pounds of black and tan German shepherd who looked at me like I was something he'd stepped in. That was Bruno. He was three years old. His papers said a family had given him to the Army. I've thought about that family a lot over the years. Every Army dog has a serial number tattooed inside his left ear. Bruno's was 8X51. I can still say it faster than my Social Security number. For the first two weeks he wouldn't take food from my hand. I fed him, brushed him, walked him, and sat in his run with him in the evenings talking about nothing, the way the trainers told us to. One morning in the third week I came down the kennel row and he stood up and wagged. After that it was the two of us. We trained together that summer and on into the fall. Obedience first, then scouting. The trainers hid men in the pine woods and laid out trip wires and buried things, and the dogs learned to find them. But really the dogs already knew how. It was us they were training. A dog smells and hears a hundred things a man never will. The handler's job is to read the dog, and that takes a long time to learn and you never finish learning it. WHAT A SCOUT DOG DID People ask me what a scout dog was for. Here's the short version. A scout dog team, which was the dog and the handler, walked at the front of an infantry patrol, out ahead of everybody. The dog worked on a long leash and the handler watched the dog. When the dog smelled or heard something that didn't belong, he'd let you know. Not by barking. A scout dog never barked. Barking would give the whole patrol away. He let you know with his body. That's called an alert. With Bruno it went like this: he'd stop dead. His head would come up and his ears would go straight up and forward, both of them pointed at the same spot. Sometimes the hair would stand up along his back. If it was something close and strong, his whole body would go stiff and lean toward it. If it was something on the ground, like a wire, he'd freeze and look at it and then look back at me. When he alerted I'd raise my hand and the whole patrol would stop and get down, and I'd go back and tell the lieutenant what Bruno had, which way, and how strong. Then the lieutenant decided what to do. A lot of times what he decided was to go a different way. Scout dogs alerted on people hiding, on trip wires and booby traps, on tunnels and holes in the ground, and on places where things were hidden. It depended a lot on the wind. Working into the wind, Bruno could pick up people a long way off. With the wind at our backs, he had to rely on his ears and his eyes, and so did I. The heat was hard on the dogs. A dog that size in a jungle can only work so many hours, and you had to know when to quit. I carried extra canteens just for him and poured water on his belly and the pads of his feet, and when he was done, he was done, and I'd tell the lieutenant so. BRUNO
He was a one-man dog. Scout dogs were trained that way, and Bruno took it more seriously than most. Nobody could walk into his run but me. The kennel men fed him through the fence when I wasn't there, and he let them know he didn't think much of it. With me he was a big goof. Back at base camp, if I lay down on my cot in the kennel area, he'd lie down alongside it and lean on it until the cot tipped. He drank out of my helmet. He'd do anything for a piece of ice, and I made friends with a cook just so I could bring him some. Every evening I brushed him out and went over his feet and his ears and his belly for cuts and ticks, and he'd groan the whole time like an old man in a barber chair. He hated helicopters. Every time we flew out he'd climb in, lie down flat on the floor, and put his head in my lap and keep it there until we were back on the ground. But he never once balked at getting on. He just let me know his opinion. And when he went to work, he was a different dog. I can't explain that to anybody who hasn't seen it. You'd clip on the long leash and something would change in his face. He'd go quiet and careful and listen to everything. The times he kept us out of trouble. I won't tell all of them, and I won't tell any of them the way you'd see it in a movie, because mostly what happened when Bruno did his job was nothing. That was the whole point. Here are three. One morning early on we were moving down a trail along a paddy dike, and Bruno stopped and stood there looking at the ground about two steps ahead. I couldn't see a thing. I got down on my belly and finally saw it: a wire, thin as fishing line, about ankle high across the trail. The patrol went around and the engineers took care of it. I'd have walked right through it. So would the man behind me. Another time, late in the afternoon, we were coming up on a tree line and he gave me the strongest alert I ever saw from him. Every hair on his back was up and he was leaning so hard on the leash he was almost standing on his back legs. I told the lieutenant. The lieutenant looked at Bruno, and looked at that tree line, and took us back and around another way. We never found out what was in there. Nobody got hurt that day. I'll take that trade every time. The third one he was almost proud of. He stopped at a clump of brush, sniffed, backed up, and looked at me, then sniffed again. Under the brush was a hole in the ground, a tunnel entrance, so well hidden I was standing on top of it. He had smelled the air coming out of the earth. The lieutenants learned to trust him. Some of the guys in the platoons we went out with started saving him pieces of their pound cake, which he was not supposed to have and which I did not stop. LEAVING HIM A handler's tour was twelve months. The dog's tour was the rest of his life. The Army classed the dogs as equipment, the same as a rifle or a radio. When a handler rotated home, his dog stayed behind and got a new handler. Everybody knew it going in. It didn't help. My orders came in the fall of 1971. The new man was a kid named Eric Ferrell, a farm boy, and I spent my last week showing him everything I knew about Bruno: how he alerted, what he liked, how he acted when he was too hot, how he'd lean on your cot. Bruno wouldn't have anything to do with him at first, the same as he'd done with me at Benning. On the last day he took a piece of ice from Eric's hand. I was glad and I wasn't. That last night I slept on the ground in his run. In the morning I scratched his chest and told him to be a good boy and work for Eric, and I walked out to the truck and didn't look back, because I knew if I looked back I wouldn't get in it. After I got home I wrote to the platoon. Eric wrote me back once, that winter. He said Bruno was working fine and still hated helicopters. After that I didn't hear any more. Around then the Army was bringing units home, and the dog platoons were standing down one after another. I'll be honest with you: I don't know what became of Bruno. I've read that about four thousand dogs served over there, and that fewer than two hundred of them ever left the country. Most of the rest were left behind when the Army went home, or put down. I've thought about it every way there is to think about it, and I'll never know which it was for him. What I choose to believe is that he worked until he was too old to work, and that somebody was good to him, and that at the end he had a cool place to lie down and somebody to scratch his chest. Carolyn says that's allowed. I think she's right. It was twenty years before I could have another shepherd. We have one now, Duke, a big old couch potato who has never done a day's work in his life. He sleeps on my side of the bed. I don't have the heart to stop him. FOR THE DOGS AND THEIR HANDLERS This page is for Bruno, and for every dog who walked point and didn't come home, and for every handler who had to walk away from his partner. There are a lot of us. Most of us don't talk about it. Since this page went up, men I've never met have written to me about their own dogs, and some of their wives and sisters have too. With their say-so, I've put their dogs on a page of their own: If you were a handler, or your dad or your brother was, write and tell me your dog's name and your years, and I'll put him up there with the others. |
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