The furry patient was unconscious, had an obvious leg wound, and was struggling for air. So the medic worked in a breathing tube past a set of fearsome teeth.
Fearsome but fake teeth.
The patient was Diesel, a sophisticated 60-pound manikin dog that can simulate a pulse and breathing, and even growl and whimper. But the most unusual thing about this military training exercise wasn't the robotic dog. It was who was getting the training in canine combat casualty care.
Not veterinarians, but a group of Army medics whose normal job is keeping human soldiers alive on the front lines.
"We were just giving them a one-day taste of what it would be like if they were to ever receive a military working dog downrange or in any sort of emergency capacity," said Capt. Karen Hood, a veterinary corps officer with the Fort Bragg-based 44th Medical Brigade, who helped lead the training.
The lessons covered basics like how to muzzle a dog, stop bleeding, dose drugs, treat a collapsed lung, and read a dog's body language for signs of its condition.
Hood said veterinarians do deploy to combat zones, but they're typically kept well back from the front lines — which is why training the medics who will be on the battlefield can make the difference.
"Having a medic who is at the point of injury can make a really big impact, even if it's just stopping a dog from bleeding out," Hood said. "That could be enough to save its life."
That's become especially important on modern battlefields, where enemies can keep swarms of drones overhead around the clock, making it difficult to quickly evacuate the wounded — human or canine.
The Army isn't just cross-training medics — something it has been doing for several years. It's also working to improve its practices for canine casualty care more broadly to meet the new challenges of warfare.
The Department of Defense has collected and digitized the medical records of working dogs and is collating the data, said Lt. Col. Emily Corbin of the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps, who leads two departments at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research.
"We can mine that data to be able to extract useful information to inform our canine trauma and combat casualty care practices and determine the knowledge gaps where we need more research," Corbin said.
An early study using the data has underlined that wounded dogs often pose the same medical challenges as wounded soldiers.
"It highlighted the importance of early resuscitation and pre-hospital care of working dogs with traumatic injury, so this requirement for early intervention to improve survival is similar and parallels the findings in human trauma and combat casualty care," Corbin said. "That's where that handler and that medic who is more likely to be out there with that dog at that moment need to be trained in this."
Blood loss, for example, is a top cause of trauma-related mortality for both humans and dogs after a battlefield wound.
"So the same things that we're researching for the human side, we're also researching on the canine side," Corbin said. "For example, strategies for shelf-stable blood products that could be carried to the remote warfront and remain shelf-stable without needing a cold supply chain like whole blood."
The Defense Department has about 1,600 military working dogs. Their jobs include finding bombs, sniffing out drugs, tracking people, and providing non-lethal force.
"Our working dogs are an incredible asset to our force," Corbin said.
These efforts to improve trauma care for military working dogs is part of a broader shift toward treating them more like teammates. Until a law opened up military dogs for adoption in 2000, they were treated as equipment and typically euthanized when their service ended; thousands were left behind or killed when the Vietnam War ended.
Attitudes are different now.
"They are treated similarly to our service members," Corbin said." They're considered service members. They're amazing animals. Their athleticism, their work drive, their ability to be a force multiplier is just so humbling, and I feel lucky to be involved in optimizing their care.
There are also practical reasons for going to lengths to patch the dogs up and return them to service. Military dogs are irreplaceable for some functions, and they can represent a government investment of more than $75,000 each — over and above the incalculable emotional pull they have on many soldiers.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
