With all the tactical lessons learned during the Vietnam years lost, those first military dog teams that went into Iraq were going into the unknown. Dowling and Rex, which were partnered together at Camp Pendleton, were one of the first to arrive. The military sent the first 30 dog teams into Iraq in the spring of 2004, a year after the invasion. Properly trained canines can detect IEDs, reigniting the military’s interest in utilizing dog teams. When the United States evacuated its troops out of Vietnam in 1975, it literally abandoned its war-ready military working dogs.īut in the early days of the Iraq invasion, the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), a crude tactical weapon, was hitting U.S. It had been the pair’s first mission of their deployment-and the first time in three decades the U.S. Mission completed, Dowling leaned down and praised the dog for a job well done. Rex obeyed, launched at the wall, and cleared the top suffering only a minor flesh wound. Dowling pulled his 75-pound German shepherd back to give him as much momentum as possible and gave him the command to go over. They’d prepared for this, but the high-intensity situation was not the happy, California afternoon training sessions at Camp Pendleton. Watch Long Road Home, airing Tuesdays 10/9c on National Geographic Channel.
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