Airbrushed acrylic on carved basswood, cherry tongue, maple teeth, and copper eyes.
From 1966 to 1967, Ron Aiello served in Vietnam with Stormy, a female German Shepherd and one of the first thirty Marine Scout Dog Teams to be deployed in Vietnam. Trained to find explosives, weapons, humans, and booby traps, Stormy led daytime and nighttime patrols to protect troops from ambushes – sometimes on nights so dark, Ron would only know is Stormy was alerting by the leash going slack.
In May 1966, Ron and Stormy were on their very first patrol, leading an inspection of two villages. With the first village cleared, Aiello and Stormy led the Marines on a heavily traveled dirt path to the next one. Stormy walked ahead with the other Marines following at a distance. As they reached a clearing, Stormy stopped abruptly, her body tensed, her tail high, her attention riveted to something in a tree to the right. This was her alert. Ron bent down on his knee and asked, “What do you see, girl?” Just then, a sniper bullet buzzed over his head. He would have been hit in the head if he had remained standing.
He looked for cover so that his first deployment with Stormy wouldn’t be his last. A mound of dirt was about 10 yards to his left. He yelled for his leashed partner to stay with him as they bolted to it and jumped behind it for protection. A Marine behind them gave them cover and fired up into the tree where Stormy had been looking. He took out the sniper, and the platoon moved on.
“A Marine walking into that clearing without her would have been killed,” Aiello says. “She picked up a sound of a twig breaking or a safety being released and alerted to it—she saved my life.”
When Aiello’s tour ended, he had to turn Stormy over to a new handler. “I tried to do another tour, but they wouldn’t let me as a handler because the new guy wouldn’t have a dog to work with,” he explains. He spent a few hours with the new handler to tell him all of Stormy’s likes and dislikes and how she communicates and alerts. He boarded a plane back to the United States—and never saw her again.
“Years later, I was able to track her up until 1970 by talking to three of her other handlers and some Marines who remember her,” Aiello says. “She was still working in Vietnam in 1970, but after that I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if she died, was abandoned, was euthanized.”
Almost 50 years later, Aiello has never forgotten that war dog who saved his life.