Page 663 - Total War on PTSD

I think this is when I knew where I was meant to go. I wanted to join the Navy and go be a SEAL. However, due to a couple of major mistakes I made as a juvenile, they said I wasn’t the right fit, just in a not so nice way. Next up, the Army. I was deferred away from going into the 18X program (Army Special Forces) because my security clearance was going to be a huge hurdle. I was told by my recruiter not to apply for one and to establish a few years in service before attempting to breach into the Special Operations Command.
So, I enlisted as a Combat Engineer. I told him I wanted to build stuff and blow stuff up. I left for Basic Training in January of 2003 and traveled to the Fort Leonard Wood Missouri. During Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) I was selected to pilot and stand up a new military unit, the 67th Engineer Detachment.
If I remember correctly, I think two or three of us from my class were selected for this program. When we first arrived, we were checking into a one room office in a small office building on post. There were only about a dozen of us there and we were paving the way for a new military capability, using the Military Working Dog (MWD) as a counter mine asset. The British military had been using K-9s in this way to clear large suspected mined areas.
In the later portion of 2003, a group of seven of us were sent to Melton Mowbray in the United Kingdom to train with the Royal Army Vet Corps. We weren’t just being trained on handling these MWDs, we were trained to train them. We taught the dogs scent discrimination, basic obedience, and the clearing patterns they were to use both on leash
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