As army veterinarian Captain Emily Pieracci says, “You get these big burly guys and they melt with these dogs. They love them more than anything.” Everywhere you turn in the world of military working dogs, you will hear handlers trying to summarize how much their dogs mean to them: “My boss may be mad at me, my wife may be mad at me, but my dog is always happy to see me.” “My biggest fear is of not getting assigned a dog and having to be a regular cop. It’s like half of you is gone.” “War would have been hell without my dog.” Air Force Staff Sergeant Chris Keilman was only eight months into being a handler when he got picked—he thinks totally at random—for a deployment with a Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force unit in Afghanistan. It took a while for this elite group to trust the new guy and his German shepherd, Kira L471. But after enough missions with the dog team out front—and 95 percent of the time, Kira led the way, with Keilman not far behind, and the others covering for him—they came to appreciate these two.
