A Dog Named DASY

A Dog Named DASY
By Robert Forto, PhD

I am sure you have heard. Maybe you haven’t because the national media has not picked up this story and I don’t know why because it is a national outrage. All it took was a gunshot in the middle of the night for former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell to spring to action. You see, he can’t sleep. He is afraid of the dark from the atrocities of what happened to him in the war on terror in Afghanistan. Luttrell was the lone survivor of a dramatic battle in the war torn country in 2005. And when he heard the gunshots outside his house on April, 1, 2009 his training took over and Luttrell began a sweep of the house.

First, Luttrell checked on his mother with his gun drawn and told her to stay put until he came back to get her then he bolted for his front door. He then swept the yard and he found his beloved Labrador Retriever dead in a ditch with a head wound from a .357 magnum. He also saw car lights and heard people laughing--but we will get to that in a minute. You see, the Labrador Retriever was not just a dog, she was a service dog to help Luttrell recover from his own wounds both physically and mentally. Her name was DASY, named after Luttrell’s Navy SEAL team comrades. They all died in the fight one night in Afghanistan where Luttrell was the lone survivor.

“I could tell she tried to get away because there was a blood trail,” Luttrell recalled on a phone interview on Wednesday on The Glenn Beck Show. “When I saw she was dead, the only thing that popped in my head was, I’ve got to take these guys out,” Luttrell said.

In the middle of the night with his service dog dead and hearing laughter in the distance, Luttrell who had just been released from the hospital after another round of agonizing surgeries to mend a bad back, crawled under a fence and sneaked up on four strangers in a car who apparently killed DASY on a whim, for pure sport, for fun! Luttrell said they were unmindful and oblivious as he raised his 9-mm pistol from about two hundred feet away and he had one of them dead in his sights.

Their car pulled away and Luttrell did not fire. It took all he had not to pull the trigger. He was trained to kill. He was the best of the best that the United States Military has to offer but he held back.

Instead, Luttrell jumped into his truck and sped, sometimes over 100 miles per hour, after them through four counties in rural Texas staying in contact with each county’s dispatcher as he sped through the night intent on catching the thugs that murdered his service dog, DASY. Luttrell recalled telling the 911 operator, “You need to get somebody out here before I catch them, I’m going to kill them.”

The killing of such a special dog for the former SEAL played right into Luttrell’s deep wounds. The four-year old Labrador was given to him upon his return from the war to help him heal and return to somewhat of a normal life. Luttrell named the dog DASY after his fallen comrades. The acronym was for his SEAL team members lost in a bloody fight in which they were far outnumbered by Taliban fighters. Luttrell escaped death that night and was taken hostage by the Taliban fighters and worked over pretty good. The enemy then took him to a cave and he touted them to kill him but they did not. He was ready to die for his country that he was trained to fight for. Luttrell wrote a book about the experience, The Lone Survivor and it is a national best seller.

Back to the Chase

Luttrell finally caught up to the murders of his service dog at a police road block and was stopped by the Onalaska Police Department. He exited his truck and approached the men and asked, “Which one of you guys killed my dog?” and then the assailants started talking smack saying that they would get him when they get out of jail.

So far, two of them have been charged with felonies but there is little doubt they will serve much time as the law looks at a dog as “just a dog” in these kinds of cases. Probably just six months in a county jail is all.

In what turns out to be a related story, at least five other dogs have been killed in recent months in the area and they could be linked to Luttrell’s case as well. It looks like these thugs were just killing dogs for fun.

No matter what you think about the war and the politics that follow, Marcus Luttrell loves his country and his comrades that died fighting for our freedom. Luttrell doesn’t want to be a hero. He wants to just be a man, a man that loves his country, and a man that is just trying to take care of his family.

What these people did to DASY was despicable and makes me sick when I think about it. When I heard Marcus speak on The Glenn Beck Show this past week I sat in my truck crying my eyes out. How could people kill a dog in cold blood like that and then laugh about it? How could they take something so near and dear to someone and murder it in cold blood?

Marcus Luttrell is angry and he has every right to be. “They didn’t just kill a dog, they killed a member of my family, she was like my sister,” Luttrell said on the Glenn Beck interview.
DASY was part of his family, but also she was his service dog, a dog specially trained to help Marcus cope with his experiences and be able to live his life again, as a man, not a SEAL embattled in a war.

Denver Dog Works called the producers of The Glenn Beck Show and offered to donate another service dog to Marcus Luttrell, as did hundreds of others. Denver Dog Works trains service dogs for a multitude of tasks including mobility and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which I am sure that Marcus suffers from. If you know of anyone that may be in need of a dog like this or would just like to talk to someone that understands, we can help.

God Bless Marcus Luttrell and his family, and God Bless the United States of America because if it wasn’t for people like Marcus Luttrell this world might be a totally different place.
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Dr. Robert Forto is the training director of Denver Dog Works and The Ineka Project in Colorado and is the host of a weekly radio show, The Dog Doctor Radio Show. Dr. Forto can be reached through his website at http://www.denverdogworks.com