Recently I had the good fortune to head down to Lackland Air Force base near San Antonio. Lackland is where anyone who has enlisted in the Air Force does their basic training. But it’s also a boot camp of a different kind — boot camp for dogs.

Military Working Dogs are crucial to the war in Iraq. They have bomb sniffing duties, can search buildings for bad guys– not to mention the general intimidation factor. But the dogs are far from intimidating when you first see them. Lackland breeds some of the dogs it trains and boy are they cute. At about seven weeks, they go to live with foster families in the area. Training of those and other dogs begins at about a year old. But first the dogs have to prove they’re ready for the program.

The dogs are first trained in the basics — sit, stay, heel, and then advance to more complicated tasks, like attacking, called “controlled aggression,” and bomb sniffing duties. It’s exciting to see the dogs work. They obviously like to get out and go to it. and there’s an obvious bond with their handlers — who train the dogs with rewards of heaped on praise and playing.

And about the handlers. They all get trained at Lackland too. The students start out — on buckets. As one instructor told me, “We can’t take a hundred pound dog that’s capable of really doing damage and teach someone how to do basic obedience.” So they start with the buckets until they’ve worked up enough confidence to work with a real dog.

Both the handler and dog courses are quick– the dogs are “made” in a 120 days. And Lackland says they can’t train the dogs fast enough, because every branch seems to need one. At any one time there are about 800 dogs at the center and about 665 are trained each year. Imagine what that takes, the vet visits, the grooming, the food. But the men and women at Lackland seem to take it all in stride and provide happy, healthy dogs ready for the next mission, always cognizant of the fact that the dogs they train here could be saving lives somewhere else soon.