CAIRO. The Multi-Purpose Canine went together with NSWDG Red sqdn. during the raid on Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011. He passed away last April 2, 2015
On a prior mission before the raid:
As the canine team, Chesney and Cairo’s main job was locating hidden enemies, and when they found one, Cairo was the first to go in. On one such mission, Cairo was shot. “Some guys were hiding in an ambush,” Chesney recalled. “(Cairo) got the drop on them before they got the drop on us, but he got shot. There’s no telling what would have happened if he hadn’t done that.”
The injury was serious, and Chesney worried that his beloved canine partner would die as a result of his injuries. Cairo not only survived, he made a full recovery and would serve in many more missions- including the siege of bin Laden’s compound.
The bad guy may not have been packing a bomb, but he was definitely packing. Let’s just say: If he’d been in America, he could have made a fortune in the adult film industry.
As we were joking about this unexpected anatomy lesson, our radio squawked: “Hey, we’ve got an FWIA.” That means friendly wounded in action. Our moment of levity popped like a bubble. We asked who it was—we never say a name over the radio, so we expected a call sign. But this time they said, “Friendly wounded in action is Cairo.”
Whenever a dog gets shot, it’s just over. I remember thinking,
Oh, S**t. We just lost Cairo, the best dog we ever had.
We got the story later. As we were doing our flanking maneuver, the other half of our team sent Cairo after the bad guy. Cairo, a lean Belgian Malinois with a black muzzle, went tearing up the hill. He leaped a wooden fence and sniffed his way to the base of a tree. The bad guy had climbed into the low branches out of the dog’s reach. As Cairo snapped and growled, the guy hit him with a burst from his AK-47.
One bullet pierced the dog’s leg and the other penetrated his working vest and lodged in his chest. Cheese, Cairo’s handler, couldn’t see what was happening but heard the shots and wanted to get his dog back. He used his remote to shock the dog’s collar, a signal to return. Poor Cairo, conscious but critically injured, couldn’t jump back over the fence, but Cheese didn’t know that. Even with two bullets in him and near death, Cairo dragged himself along the fence until he found an opening. Obviously, it took him a long time. When he finally arrived, Cheese wanted to smack him for not coming “back as soon as he was signaled. Then he saw the blood-matted fur.
Cairo had taken a bullet from the bad guy so one of us wouldn’t have to. Now that we had the guy’s position in the tree, thanks to Cairo, the team spread out around his location and shot him off his perch.
But Cairo was in bad shape. We all assumed he was dying, but Cheese wouldn’t quit on him. He called another member of our team who’d been a medic, who treated Cairo exactly as if he’d been a human SEAL wounded in action. He shaved the wound, put on a chest seal, and applied pressure so Cairo wouldn’t bleed out. But everyone knew the chest wound was very bad news. They called for medevac. When the chopper arrived, Cheese and our point man, the medic, loaded Cairo in and flew with him to Bagram where they got a plane to Germany. None of us held out much hope.
Three days later we got word—Cairo had survived. He wouldn’t only fully recover, but before long he’d help make history.