What the Dog Knows (28 page)

Today, 1,664 Americans remain unaccounted for from the war in Southeast Asia, 225 fewer than when Matt went over with his dogs. Three hundred thousand Vietnamese soldiers are still missing. The military has not sent another dog-and-handler team back to Vietnam.

Captain David Phillips's wife died in 1989. His daughter Debra Stubbs went to the military laboratory in Hawaii to bring back her father's remains, wrapped in a military-green wool blanket, according to news accounts. She slid her hand inside, she told an
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reporter. That was the closest she ever got to her father, who had gone to Vietnam before she was born. Her mother, she said, had worried for years about whether her husband was a prisoner of war. She kept telling the family she was going to get on a plane to Vietnam to try to discover the truth for herself. She never did.

Captain Phillips's three daughters and his brother buried his repatriated remains in the Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, overlooking the Wilmington River—a cemetery filled with live oaks strung in trellises of lichen. In 1897, the writer and naturalist John Muir had camped in Bonaventure for five days. He was penniless, and the cemetery drew him in. It was, Muir thought, a safe and quiet place to be. It was safe. It wasn't quiet.

“Many bald eagles roost among the trees along the side of the marsh,” Muir wrote. “Their screams are heard every morning, joined with the noise of crows, and the songs of countless warblers, hidden deep in their dwellings of leafy bowers. Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive
gladness. The whole place seems like a center of life. The dead do not reign there alone.”

•  •  •

The number of missing servicemen from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was small, but the military had learned its lesson from the Vietnam conflict and was going to make sure no one was left behind. By the time the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the military was quite clear that dogs could be useful for any number of things: bomb and land-mine detection, sentry duty, and enemy tracking and apprehension.

Kathy Holbert was one of the cadaver-dog handlers invited to apply to go to the Middle East as a contractor. Kathy runs a kennel in the mountains of Barbour County, West Virginia. Self-deprecating, self-sufficient, and humorous, she trains detection and patrol dogs, boards people's pets, and breeds a variety of working shepherds and Beaucerons, an ancient French herding breed. She occasionally throws a Malinois into the mix to keep things interesting.

Kathy had been in the military, first as a parachute rigger and then as a military-dog handler. That didn't go swimmingly. Her first dog, a “find 'em and bite 'em dog,” appropriately named Dick, bit her at least a hundred times. “Actually, I was a terrible, terrible handler,” she said. “My timing was awful. They used to use me to show handlers how not to do things.”

That's hard to believe. Watching Kathy with both dogs and people makes the work seem simple, straightforward, and low-key. When Kathy got the call about going to the Middle East in June 2009, she was working her second cadaver dog, Strega, a sable German shepherd with an extra-long tail, big ears, and a witchy, mature intelligence. The decision about whether to go was oddly easy. Kathy and her entire family—her grandfathers, her father, her brother, and her husband, Danny, an electrician—had been in the military. She said yes. Then she
thought, “You crazy woman, your dog's eight years old, and you're fifty, and you're going into hundred-degree weather. What the hell are you thinking?”

She did it anyway. Kathy remembered Vietnam. “They didn't put that much in trying to recover our boys at the time,” she said. She took it personally. She and most of her family had served overseas. So Kathy started getting in shape, running, lifting weights, losing weight. She didn't want to be, as she said, “the missing link,” the person who put soldiers in more danger than they already were.

Yet getting off the plane in September in Iraq felt like a body blow. “It's hard to describe the heat. It's like having a blow dryer in your face.” A fetid blow dryer that smells like urine and blows sand at you. Kathy put booties on Strega, but they sometimes melted. The temperatures there average 110 in the summer. That's before one puts on heavy equipment and a flak jacket. Instead of trying to escape the heat, Kathy decided to embrace it. She stayed outside with Strega as much as she could. They both adjusted, and the experience made Kathy rethink what breeds and personalities of working dogs work best where. Strega, though a German shepherd, had a big, boxy nose but not a lot of huge muscle mass. She worked longer than some of the snipier-nosed breeds and seemed to do better in the heat than some of the big-muscled Labradors. She was a methodical worker, not too fast, not too slow, plenty of drive, but not flashy. Those qualities served her and Kathy well.

Greg Sanson, the personnel recovery advisor to the U.S. military in Iraq from 2009 to 2012, had a complex job: first to prevent kidnapping or abduction; then, once a contractor or soldier did go missing, to find him or her alive. If that failed, the next phase involved bringing in teams like Kathy and Strega. It was, he said, “an honor” to talk to me about the work Kathy did in the Middle East with Strega to help find the missing. “We don't quit looking for them,” he said.

The work of looking was hard, both physically and emotionally. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) shatter people. Kathy and Strega found themselves looking not for bodies but for small pieces of tissue.
Being able to slow a dog down when searching for someone blown up with an IED was terribly important. At first, Kathy said, just as at any explosion site, Strega didn't do perfectly. The scent of death was both everywhere and nowhere. Kathy understood that their job went beyond gathering enough DNA material to identify the victim. Kathy and Strega's job was different: to keep searching for anything and everything that could be found of someone.

Soon enough, with adjusted training, Strega understood the job. She started finding the little that remained.

“Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,” he went on dreamily . . .

“Look ahead, Rat!” cried the Mole suddenly.

—Kenneth Grahame,
The Wind in the Willows
, 1908

David and I could hear Nancy Hook muttering in the kennels, getting the dogs watered and fed so we could leave. Our helping only slowed her down. “You son of a bitch,” she told a massive pit bull mix. She kept her tone conversational. He had been biting people. Nancy would fix him. She specializes in dogs who bite without being ordered to.

Near the kennels, the bass boat sat on a rusty trailer, hitched to Nancy's pickup. Weeds had sprouted inside the boat. I plucked at them until Nancy arrived and told me to leave them alone. She was growing them on purpose, she said. Last night's rain had left an inch of murky water to water and fertilize the weeds. I offered to bail, but Nancy said a bit of water wouldn't sink us.

So off we drove, trailer bouncing, to Taylors Millpond. Two women, a man, a dog, a boat.

We were going to work on water.

Stories about dogs alerting on submerged bodies sounded vaguely apocryphal to me at first. But water is an ideal medium for transporting cadaver scent to a dog. Bodies seem to effervesce in water, like slow-motion Alka-Seltzer tablets. They are doing the same thing bodies on land do: decomposing and sending off gases. In the water, those gases bubble up to the surface and hit the air, then the dog's nose. Oils float up as well, providing a slick on top of the water that sends out additional scent.

Lakes or rivers can veil a body, though, even when searchers have the latest sonar equipment on hand. Often, especially in the Southeast, divers can't see their hands in front of their faces. Even when the water is relatively clear, diving and dragging don't always locate the body. A good water cadaver dog's nose can narrow the search substantially.

Solo and I had just one or two or twelve training issues. Nancy thought she could fix us.

Taylors Millpond is more lake-sized than pond-sized, more than a half mile long, created before the Civil War and now the site of bass tournaments. It's a few miles down the road from Nancy's farm. A general store faces the concrete boat ramp. A small group of men often sit on the concrete porch, chewing or smoking, cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon in hand. Today was no exception. I nodded, and they nodded back. The store owner shook her head vehemently as I tried to hand her the two-dollar boat-launch fee. She knew Nancy. She also knew we weren't there to drink beer and troll for largemouth bass.

We backed the trailer down the ramp and got the boat freed and floating in the duckweed without too much embarrassment and only minor slipping and sliding. David and Nancy planted themselves in the boat; Solo, who had already swum several laps across one end of the pond, leaped on board, spraying water over them. Solo loved boats. He thought it was fun to jump into them and even more fun to jump out of them. I pushed us off and leaped as well. The boat rocked woozily, and Solo climbed over us to the prow, a soggy figurehead. David fiddled with the trolling motor. He'd lowered it into the water, but it wouldn't start. He scowled. He was irritated. He likes things to work.

“It was free,” Nancy reminded him. Like the trailer. Like the boat. Like Nancy working with us to train Solo on water cadaver. Acrid smoke oozed off a battery connector. I wondered aloud if batteries could explode. Nancy said no, but we knew she was lying. Bent over the dead motor, David noted that he could feel the boat moving. It was following the pull from Moccasin Creek. As we drifted closer to the edge of the overflow, I could see where the pond ended and water slid over the concrete edge in a fat silky ribbon and disappeared. I could hear the ribbon shatter ten feet below. I may have said something to David, because Nancy told me to stop giving him directions.

“Is she always like this?” she asked him. They smiled at each other. I shut up and took one of the paddles so I could save us. The motor sputtered to life and then settled down into trolling-motor Zen. The boat, finally under David's control, crawled away from the overflow and toward the center of the huge pond, dotted with floating islands of lily pads.

Water is not my element, though I like to look at it. My childhood swimming lessons were spent in a quiet panic. Water came up over my nose even in the shallowest end of the pool. I was short and skinny, with big bones that jutted out and no fat to help me float. I would sink, gulping chlorinated water; my long pigtails were ropes pulling me under while the instructor looked on, disappointed.

Water is Solo's element. He loves it and knows he has blanket
permission—unless I specifically forbid it and sometimes even when I do—to dive into any available body of water or mud hole. Now he was singing a throaty paean that carried across the pond.

I could see his point. A great blue heron rose up out of the loblollies in primordial slow motion. Crappie, bullhead, bass, and catfish lurked beneath the lily pads and hunkered under the scrubby swamp roots that reached out into the alluvial floodplain. I couldn't see them, but a blue-gray-and-chestnut belted kingfisher knew they were there. She was perched on a snag, her outsize head cocked slightly. At our approach, she dropped and flew along the edge of the shore with a chittering rattle of irritation.

Though she was out of my league, I, too, knew how to fish. My grandfather, my father, and my brothers had taught me everything from worm-and-bobber fishing to fly-fishing. I knew how to creep up on a deep hole in a creek without casting a shadow or creating bank tremors that the brook trout could feel. In high school, I had made my own spinning rods, carefully layering thread to fix the guides onto the graphite poles. I stopped fishing thirty years ago. I wasn't patient, and I ended up feeling sad for the fish. I still like to eat them.

It was past time for me to return to the water. This time, I could let Solo find the fish. He was now seven years old. In the not-too-distant future, his increasing mental prowess would no longer be able to compensate for his slowly decreasing physical prowess. But as long as Solo had a good nose, water cadaver might extend his callout life.

That was why Nancy was pushing us out onto the water, toward certification. I'd turned down a healthy handful of water searches, and I hated saying no. One investigator swore that the victim had just walked straight out into the lake with his boots on, no way it was a criminal case. Could I please bring Solo? I was so sorry to say no. Mike Baker pointed out to me that all the investigators had to do was put on hip waders and walk straight out into the lake a few yards to find the victim themselves. Sometimes it is that simple. Sometimes the
body floats. Mostly, it's more difficult. For people, that is. That's when dogs can help.