How did you know the battle was over?
When we stopped shooting? [Laughs.] No, that’s actually a good question. Around, I don’t know, 0400, it started to taper off. Heads weren’t poking out as much. The moan was dying down. The officers didn’t tell us that the attack was almost over, but you could see them looking through their scopes, talking on their radios. You could see the relief in their faces. I think the last shot was fired just before dawn. After that, we just waited for first light.
It was kinda eerie, the sun rising over this mountainous ring of corpses. We were totally walled in, all sides were piled at least twenty feet high and over a hundred feet deep. I’m not sure how many we killed that day, stats always vary depending on who you get it from.
The dozer-blade Humvees had to push a path through the corpse ring just to let us get out. There were still living Gs, some slow ones who were late to the party or who had tried to climb up and over their dead friends and had slid back down into the mound. When we started burying the bodies they came tumbling out. That was the only time Senor Lobo saw any action.
At least we didn’t have to stick around for BS duty. They had another unit waiting in reserve to clean up. I guess the brass figured we’d done enough for one day. We marched ten miles to the east, set up a bivouac with watchtowers and concertainer walls. I was so damn beat. I don’t remember the chem shower, turning in my gear to e disinfected, turning in my weapon for inspection: not one jam, not the whole unit. I don’t even remember slipping into my bag.
They let us sleep as late as we wanted the next day. That was pretty sweet. Eventually the voices woke me up; everyone jawing, laughing, telling stories. It was a different vibe, one-eighty from two days ago. I couldn’t really put a finger on what I was feeling, maybe it was what the president said about “reclaiming our future.” I just knew I felt good, better than I had the entire war. I knew it was gonna be a real, long-ass road. I knew our campaign across America was just beginning, but, hey, as the prez said later that first night, it was finally the beginning of the end.
Ainsworth, Nebraska, USA
[Darnell Hackworth is a shy, soft-spoken man. He and his wife run a retirement farm for the four-legged veterans of the army’s K-9 Corps. Ten years ago farms like these could be found in almost every state in the union. Now, this is the only one left.]
They never get enough credit, I think. There is that story Dax, nice little children’s book, but it’s pretty simplistic, and it’s only about one Dalmatian that helped an orphan kid find his way to safety. “Dax” wasn’t even in the military, and helping lost children was a tiny fraction of dogs’ over-all contribution to the fight.
The first thing they used dogs for was triage, letting them sniff for who was infected. Most countries were just copying the Israeli method of sending people past dogs in cages. You always had to keep them in cages, otherwise they might attack the person, or each other, or even their handler. There was a lot of that, early in the war, dogs just going ballistic. It didn’t matter if they were police or military. It’s that instinct, that involuntary, almost genetic terror. Fight or flight, and those dogs were bred to fight. A lot of handlers lost hands, arms, a lot of throats got torn out. Can’t blame the dogs for it. In fact, that instinct was what the Israelis were counting on, and it probably saved millions of lives.
It was a great program, but, again, just a fraction of what dogs were truly capable of. Whereas the Israelis and, after them, a lot of other countries only tried to exploit that terror instinct, we thought we could integrate it into their regular training. And why not, we learned to do it for ourselves, and are we really that much more evolved?
It all came down to training. You had to start young; even the most disciplined, prewar veterans were hardwired berserkers. The pups born after the crisis came out of the womb literally smelling the dead. It was in the air, not enough for us to detect, but just a few molecules, an introduction on a subconscious level. That’s not to say it made all of them automatic warriors. The initial induction was the first and most important phase. You took a group of pups, a random group, or even a whole litter, put them in a room divided by a wire mesh. They’re on one side, Zack’s on the other. You didn’t have to wait long for a reaction. The first group we called Bs. They’d start whimpering or howling. They’d lost it. They were nothing like the As. Those pups would lock eyes with Zack, that was the key. They’d stand their ground, bare their teeth, and let out this low growl that said, “Back the tuck off!” They could control themselves, and that was the foundation of our program.
Now, just because they could control themselves didn’t mean that we could control them. Basic training was pretty much like the standard, pre-war program. Could they handle PT? Could they follow orders? Did they have the intelligence, and the discipline, to make soldiers? It was hard going, and we had a 60 percent washout rate. It wasn’t uncommon for a recruit to be badly injured, perhaps even killed. A lot of people nowadays call that inhumane, though they don’t seem to have the same sympathy for the handlers. Yeah, we had to do it, too, right alongside the dogs, right from day one of Basic, through ten more weeks of AIT. It was hard training, especially the Live Enemy Exercises. You know we were the first ones to use Zack in our field training, before the infantry, before the Special Forces, even before the Zoomies at Willow Creek? It was the only way to really know if you could hack it, both as an individual and as a team.
How else could you have sent them on so many different missions? There were Lures, the kind that the Battle of Hope made famous. Pretty simple stuff; your partner hunts for Zack, then leads him into our firing line. Ks on early missions used to be fast, run in, bark, then jam it for the kill zone. Later, they got more comfortable. They learned to stay just a few-feet ahead, backing away slowly, making sure they herded the maximum amount of targets. In that way, they actually called the shots.
There were also Decoys. Let’s say you were setting up a firing line but you didn’t want Zack to show up too early. Your partner would circle around the infested zone and only start barking on the far side. That worked with a lot of engagements, and it opened the door for the “Lemming” tactic.
During the Denver push, there was a tall building where a couple hundred refugees had accidentally been locked in with the infection and were now completely reanimated. Before our guys could storm the entrance, one of the Ks had his own idea to run up to the roof of a building across the street and start barking to draw Zack up onto the higher floors. It worked like a dream. The Gs made it up to the roof, saw their prey, made for him, and went spilling over the side. After Denver, Lemming went right into the playbook. Even the infantry started using it when Ks weren’t available. It wasn’t uncommon to see a grunt standing on the roof of a building, calling out to an infested building close by.
But the primary and most common mission of any K team was scouting, both SC and LRP. SC is Sweep and Clear, just attached to a regular unit, like conventional warfare. That’s where training really paid off. Not only could they sniff Zack out miles before us, but the sounds they made always Told you exactly what to expect. You could tell everything you needed to know by the pitch of the growl, and the frequency of the bark. Sometimes, when silence was required, body language worked just as well. The arch of the K’s back, the raising of dander was all you needed to see. After a few missions, any competent handler, and we had no other kind, could read his partner’s every signal. Scouts finding a ghoul half submerged in mud or legless among tall grass saved a lot of lives. I can’t tell you how many times a grunt would thank us personally for spotting a concealed G that might have taken his foot off.