Alabama Strongwood Log Homes

Baron was KIA on April 7, 1969, when the platoon he was supported was over run by the NVA.  His handler was wounded but not killed. 
_________________
As I was saying yesterday, while I was commander of the 39th Scout Dogs we had the  enviable (or lucky) record of 13 months of combat without a casualty.  I need to say that the 13 months run from July 1968 - August 1969 for the 39th did loose men and dogs to this war.  During the period I commanded the 39th, the first credit for the great record must go to the men and the dogs.  They did a superb job.  After that, we must give credit to commanders of the respective companies and battalions of the 173rd that we supported.  They used our teams properly and that made all the difference in the world.  I don’t want to give all the credit to others as we had the responsibility to train the S3 and the commanders in how to use our support and we also needed to think proactively about how to do our jobs better.  In that regard, I have two innovative things that we did while I was commander.  The first one came as a suggestion from one of the handlers.  That was we allowed for and allowed the training our men and dogs to work off leash.   The idea was, you could train a hunting dog to run 20 meters in front of your to hunt for birds, why not train dogs to run 20 meters in front of us to hunt for an enemy, an enemy that shoot back.  That sounds good but we couldn’t really train the dog to go 20 meters in front because, in a jungle, they would be totally out of sight.  Out of sight of the handler means out of control.  What we really did was, for handlers willing to do this, we allowed them to train their dogs to move forward but to stay within SIGHT of the handler.  This put additional distance between the enemy, the scout dog and the men it was protecting.  This proved quite effective as a leash is only about a meter long.  For each meter you put the dog farther forward, you give the troops that much more time to react.  Tomorrow I will talk about the second innovation we used that I feel helped save lives.  Information on the men and dogs of the 39th can be found here. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 10:32 am and is filed under Our Background. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.