How a war dog named Digger sniffed out Taliban leaders
Since World War I, the Australian Defence Force has used “war dogs” for tracking, explosive detection and sniffing out Taliban leaders. Here are some of their great efforts.
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While an Australian special forces patrol was searching through an evacuated Taliban compound in war-torn Afghanistan in 2012, they thought they had hit the military jackpot when they uncovered an enormous cache of weapons and ammunition.
But there was a far more valuable prize to be found, and it took a very special nose to find it.
The snout belonged to a black labrador retriever named Digger, a military working dog sent by his handler, Sergeant Graham Ellis, into a room in the compound which was filled with cushions.
“Digger sniffed and sniffed and came up to one particular cushion,” retired Lieutenant Colonel George Hulse, who was a pioneer of military dog training in Australia and now the vice president of the Australian Defence Force Trackers and War Dogs Association, said.
“So Graham opened the cushion up and out came a number of things including two books: one had all the names of the Taliban leaders in the area and the other had all their codes for their radios.
“So our intelligence guys swooped on that and they were cleaning out the Taliban for weeks. And all because of a dog named Digger.”
For decades, canines have been the unsung heroes of the battlefield, saving countless lives. Since World War I, the Australian Defence Force has used military working dogs or “war dogs” for varying roles including tracking, explosive detection and early warning of enemy position.
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Hulse, who served in Malaya, Papua New Guinea, Kashmir and Vietnam – where he fought in the ferocious Battle of Coral-Balmoral that saw 26 Australian soldiers killed – said he could not imagine a defence force without dogs.
“When people are shooting at you, the most reliable thing you’ve got is a dog,” the 76-year-old said, adding he wrote a book, In Dogs We Trust, which is a collection of war dog stories released in June.
Hulse first came across war dogs in Vietnam, where he was a troop officer of combat engineers, a role which includes clearing minefields.
While the Australian infantry had tracker dogs, they had no dogs trained for sniffing out explosives.
“Every other day there was someone being blown up by a mine,” Hulse, who lives in Brisbane with his second wife Beverley (his first wife, Linda, died in 1999), said.
“As combat engineers we were out there trying to find the bombs, and we heard the Americans were training dogs to do it.”
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After Vietnam, Hulse was sent to the US to learn how their defence force train war dogs. Armed with knowledge, he set up the Explosive Detection Dog Wing at Sydney’s School of Military Engineering.
Dogs of varying breeds are trained there, along with their handlers.
“Because what we’re asking the handlers to do is to get in front of the infantry and not look for the enemy, just look at his or her dog, and then trust that the dog will point out if there’s someone or something bad ahead,” Hulse said.
One Belgian Malinois called Kuga saved an entire Special Air Service Regiment patrol in Afghanistan in 2011, Hulse said.
The patrol had come into an open area and on the other side of a nearby river the Taliban had set up an ambush.
“And Kuga got onto it and started swimming across the river,” he said.
The dog made it across the water and attacked an insurgent, who managed to shoot Kuga, seriously wounding him.
But by then, the damage was done: “The ambush was blown,” Hulse said. “Kuga saved that whole patrol.”
Kuga, who managed to swim back to his handler but never fully recovered and died nine months later, received the Dickin Medal, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross for animals.
Another war dog worthy of an award was a kelpie-labrador cross called Caesar, one of the 11 tracker dogs used by the Australian infantry in Vietnam.
Caesar was with a unit on patrol on a road approaching a T-junction when he suddenly ran back to his handler, Peter Haran, and plonked himself on top of his boots.
“Peter understood that the dog didn’t want him to go any further,” Hulse said.
“So the combat engineers investigated and in the middle of the intersection they pulled up a daisy ring of mortar bombs and mines.
“That tracker dog had never been trained to find explosives. It goes to show that the dogs think, they’ve got rational perception.”
They also provide a morale boost, Hulse said, a cancer survivor who now runs in triathlons.
“When it’s the middle of the night and you’re far from home in the pouring rain, you see a dog and it reminds you of home,” he said.
“And you pat the dog and the tail wags and you feel great.”
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Australian war dogs are remembered and celebrated each year at Brisbane’s RSPCA Animal Care Campus on National Military Working Dog Day, June 7.
It was on June 7, 2010, when Australian combat engineers Jacob Moerland and Darren Smith, who was also a dog handler, and war dog Herbie were killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Smith remains the only Australian dog handler to be killed in combat.
There is also a monument at the campus dedicated to those Australian dogs killed in action.
“We’ll never forget those dogs that we’ve lost,” Hulse said.
Originally published as How a war dog named Digger sniffed out Taliban leaders