The Vietnam War Unit That Hunted The VC With Dogs (You’ve Never Heard Of Them)

The Vietnam War Unit That Hunted The VC With Dogs (You’ve Never Heard Of Them)

You are on patrol in the jungle.  The ambush happens instantly. A few seconds of shooting, then silence.  By the time you raise your rifle , the enemy is gone— he has disappeared into the greenery, as if he were never there.  There are no tracks or sounds to chase.  Just the question that every American commander in Vietnam asked: ” How do you catch an enemy who doesn’t want to be found?” The army’s response was not a combat helicopter or a battalion.

  There were five people and one dog.  And you’ve almost certainly never heard of them.  No one realized at the time that the solution had already been invented.  Not by the United States and not in Vietnam. Years before the first American set foot in that jungle, the method had been practiced in another war, in another country, by a completely different army.

  And the unit that eventually brought this to Vietnam was called the Combat Pathfinder Teams.  To understand how the Labrador Retriever became one of the most formidable tools of that war, we must begin with the jungles of Malaysia.  In the 1950s, Britain fought a grueling battle against insurgents in Malaya— communist guerrillas who exploited the jungle in much the same way the Viet Cong would later do.

  They were hiding.  They attacked.  And they disappeared.  To combat them, the British created small groups of trackers trained to follow a faint trail through dense undergrowth.  They perfected this skill during the confrontation in Borneo.  It was slow, painstaking work.  More like hunting than military service. Based on a simple truth.

  No man can pass through the jungle without leaving a trace.  A bent blade of grass.  A scratched root, a print in wet clay— the British spent years learning to read all of this .  According to the American Legion, when American commanders in Vietnam faced this same crazy problem, they turned to those who had already solved it.

The soldiers were secretly sent to the British Jungle Warfare School in Johor Bahru, Malaysia .  So, here is the first mistake in most stories.  The Pathfinder program was not an American invention.  The entire method , the dogs, and even the instructors came from British colonial soldiers.  And since Britain and Malaysia officially remained neutral in this war, this arrangement had to be kept secret.

  Historian Susan Merritt, in an article for HistoryNet, describes how American soldiers traveled on temporary government passports , in civilian clothes and with British equipment, so that nothing would link them to the war they were preparing to join.  Which, looking back, was either incredibly brave or incredibly weird, depending on how you feel about sending your people to a secret school in a foreign country.

  Everything was ready.  The soldiers simply didn’t yet know where it was all leading. Now, when most people imagine a fighting dog in Vietnam, they imagine a German Shepherd.  And they are not wrong, strictly speaking.  The army did use thousands of German Shepherds, but they were scouts and guard dogs, and their work was very different.

  A scout dog would walk ahead and warn its handler of an ambush or ambush before the patrol encountered them.  He gave advance warning.  He didn’t give chase. The groups of trackers needed something completely different.  They needed a dog that could take an old cold trail and follow it silently for hours .  The army first experimented with bloodhounds, and it didn’t work.

  As the military’s Combat Operations Research Group noted, the bloodhounds made such a noise during the chase that they gave away the entire group. The British have already found a better solution, and it surprised almost everyone.    The Labrador Retriever became the tracking dog.  The same breed that families keep as gentle pets, and no, that’s not a mistake.

  The reason is beautiful in its simplicity.  Labradors were bred for generations to retrieve downed birds, which meant they remained calm while being shot.  They moved quietly, and most importantly, they were designed to follow a trail on the ground, finding a downed bird in dense undergrowth.  This last trait was exactly what was required to pursue a man through the jungle.

John Dupla was a combat pathfinder in the 1st Cavalry Division.  And years later, he was interviewed for the podcast “Echoes of the Vietnam War.” Created by the non-profit organization that built the memorial in Washington.  To explain in your own words why a Labrador was the best dog for the job. They had already been trained and bred to be quiet and not afraid of gunfire.

  And they had to develop a sense of, uh, finding game by ground scent. Because they, uh, didn’t care if the bird was shot in the air, the bird was on the ground, so where did it go?  So, they became very good dogs for working on a ground track.  And they were pursuing a specific goal. Which the tracker was, uh, very skilled at.

  So, Labradors, first of all, didn’t bark.  A lot of people asked us, “Did you , uh, cut their vocal cords?”  I said, “No.  The Labradors were quiet.”  They were resilient. So this is the amendment worth remembering .  In Vietnam, the dog that actually hunted was almost never the German Shepherd of popular imagination.

  Michael Lemish, who wrote the seminal history of American military dogs, documents how small this Labrador program was.  It has completely been overshadowed by the reconnaissance dog program , which people remember instead.  And it was never just about the dog.  John Dupla described how human trailblazers were taught to develop a kind of sixth sense, borrowing methods from Native American scouts: reading broken branches, overturned leaves, and displaced rocks.

  The Labrador found the scent, and the man read the story that the earth was quietly telling. But knowing what a dog is capable of is one thing.  Watching a team of five actually use it in the field—that’s where this story takes a turn that few expected.  Each combat group of trackers consisted of only five people.  There was a group commander and a visual tracker, whose main task was to read tracks on the ground.

  There was a covert officer who kept an eye on the enemy while everyone else kept their eyes on the trail.  There was also a radio operator and a dog handler with their Labrador. Earning a spot on one of these teams was extremely difficult.  The course at the British School of Jungle Warfare lasted for weeks in the Malaysian jungles .

  And, according to the American Legion, the failure rate was staggering.  One veteran, Charles Stewart, recalled that about half of the non-commissioned officers dropped out because they simply could n’t stand it. It’s worth reflecting on how strange this war has become .  The same conflict that gave rise to a secret dog training school in Malaysia also gave rise to a secret cross-border campaign led by a group called MACV-SOG , where surveillance often went the other way —enemy dogs hunted American reconnaissance teams in Laos and Cambodia.

If this hidden side of war interests you, I have put years of research into a book, which is linked in the description on truevietnamdocs.com.  Now let’s get back to the trail.  The teams weren’t looking for a fight.  They were called after him.  When a patrol was ambushed or when an enemy unit broke contact and simply disappeared, trackers were flown in to intercept the trail while it was still fresh.

  And tracking down the fleeing enemy was only half the job.  These same teams were sent to search for downed pilots and soldiers who disappeared in the thickets. To follow a human trail through terrain capable of swallowing a person whole. Depending on the terrain, the trail was led either by a visual tracker or a dog.

    A visual tracer could study one footprint and tell you how many people had passed. How heavy their equipment was.  In what direction were they moving?  And how long ago was that?  The Labrador was working on a trail that the human eye could not see.  Immediately behind the one walking in front, a covert officer moved.

  Because the one who read the trail was focused only on the ground.  Not at the tree line.  And that’s the true essence of this story, the part of it that the headline can’t quite capture. The trackers were usually not the ones pulling the trigger. Their task was to find the enemy and determine their position, and then bring up the infantry for battle.

  As former special forces soldier and historian Gordon Rottman said, it wasn’t so much the team that went into battle.  They were accompanied by a regular unit. Dogs and their handlers were hunters in the most ancient sense of the word. They were closing the distance.  Someone else was finishing the fight. If stories like this, about units that have been quietly erased from popular history, are the reason you’re still here.

  Take a second to subscribe.  It really helps us to keep digging into the archives, instead of retelling old myths like others do.  So, the trackers could find almost everyone.  But the better they became, the more dangerous their own lives became.  Consider the black Labrador named Sam, known for the tattoo on his ear, who was led by a young soldier whom others called Animal Norwood.

  Trained by the British, Sam arrived in the country in the summer of 1967 and immediately began working with a platoon of pathfinders of the First Cavalry Division.  Dogs like Sam became so effective that, according to veteran trailblazers themselves , the enemy put a bounty on the leaders of the teams and their dogs.

    The five-person team and the retriever became so valuable that the other side sought their death.  This efficiency eventually backfired on the dogs themselves.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves. So how effectively did it work?  We have to be careful here, because the program was secret, and secret units do not leave clear statistics.

  The credit for eliminating the enemy was almost always attributed to the infantry led by the rangers, rather than to the rangers themselves .  What we can say comes mostly from the veterans themselves. Susan Merritt, who has written a comprehensive history of these teams, estimates that of the approximately 750 combat pathfinders who served, 43 died in action, noting that records are incomplete.

  John Dupla said a total of 54 Labradors served throughout the entire American program.  Compare that to the estimated 5,000 German Shepherds in Vietnam, and you see how small and inconspicuous these teams really were.  You would think that rumors of such a unit would spread. For the most part, this did not happen.

  And yet the soldiers who worked alongside them knew exactly what they were worth.  A 1968 report by the Australian Infantry Centre, cited in the historical publication Project Upland, described tracking teams as the only truly effective way to pursue the Viet Cong after contact had been lost.  By 1971, a different clock began to count time for the trailblazers .

  The war was coming to an end. American units were returning home, and a difficult question faced every dog ​​in Vietnam.  When the fighting subsided, the dogs did not go with them. Officially, service military dogs were classified as equipment, and equipment does not get a ticket to the United States. Most of them were handed over to the South Vietnamese army or simply abandoned.

According to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, of the thousands of dogs sent by the United States to Vietnam for various assignments, only about 200 returned home for a well-deserved rest.  This figure includes all fighting dogs: scouts, sentries, and trackers combined.  After all, even now no one has kept an accurate count of Labradors alone.

  What is not in doubt is the scale of what was left behind. People who trusted these dogs with their lives and owed them their salvation were forced to abandon them on the runway. Many dog ​​trainers have spent decades trying to come to terms with this. The Australians, who had their own Labrador Retriever training program, faced the same pain, and their dogs were also abandoned due to fears of tropical diseases.

  The Australian War Memorial still holds the badge of one of them—a tracking dog named Caesar.    It took a long time before anything changed.  In 2000, a US law known as the Robbie Law finally put an end to the policy of abandoning military dogs, allowing decommissioned service dogs to be adopted instead of being abandoned.

  This came too late for the Labradors of Vietnam.  So why is a forgotten five-man unit still important today?  Because the idea itself did not die with the program. Whenever a modern service dog sniffs out a roadside bomb or tracks a militant across rough terrain, it draws on the expertise that those combat tracking teams and their British instructors first demonstrated in the jungle.

The doctrine outlived the dogs.  When American and Allied forces returned to serious search work in later wars, they again relied on the calm nature of Labradors and the same patient method that the British had passed on in Malaysia. The Labrador, which almost no one perceived as a weapon, turned out to be one of the most inconspicuous and effective tools the army had.

  And for a long time, almost no one remembered the people and dogs who did this work.  There is now a memorial at Lackland Air Force Base honoring America’s military dogs.  For years, the plan was to depict only a German Shepherd. It was veteran dog trainer John Dupla who insisted until the Labrador Retriever was added to the bronze composition alongside the German Shepherd, Doberman, and Belgian Malinois .

  It’s a small thing, but it means that somewhere, cast in metal, the silent dog that hunted the Viet Cong is finally standing where people can see him.  That’s more than most of them received.  If you want to continue unraveling the threads of war that are not written about in textbooks, we are preparing even more materials.

  In particular, about the crews of naval tanks who fought for every house among the ruins of Hue. Subscribe and see you in the next issue.