Navy SEAL Dogs: My Tale of Training Canines for Combat

In an age when military spending is often (fairly) criticized as wasteful, there is one area that deserves as much money as it requires: the training of military support dogs. Ritland (Team Dog) does a superb job of educating readers on the incredible work these special animals do in protecting service personnel from injury and death. Dogs can detect the presence of an enemy soldier long before a human can, they can sniff out the various components of a bomb so that humans will know how to handle it, and even in pitch darkness dogs can sense that a deadly IED is buried nearby. Ritland describes in detail how a dog is trained to work in coordination with the demanding SEAL program, but it is when he tells combat stories of handlers and dogs that the book really gets exciting. Reader Michael Kramer's narration is steady, slightly husky, and mostly free of emotion, but the story tells itself and it is definitely suspenseful.