Saving Private Sarbi

by Sandra Lee

  Most importantly, though, the handlers must have a general love of the scrappy hound with all its quirks, foibles and strengths. A soldier lacking a genuine affinity for man’s best friend won’t last long. The course supervisors know it and so do the animals. In fact, the intuitive dogs use it to their advantage, picking up the nervousness of a handler only to manipulate it to its own advantage. One dominant golden retriever at the SME recognised a distinct lack of experience in her new handler and ran roughshod over the sapper, disobeying commands and ignoring well-intentioned entreaties. Named Mandy, she bolted off into the bushes to play hide-and-seek every time she was given an instruction, hoping to be chased instead of working.

  Sarbi was perfectly placed with EDD instructor D, an athletic, tall man with thigh-thick biceps and broad shoulders. Confident and intelligent, he has a mellow, handsome face uncreased by age. His Central Casting good looks once won him a male modelling contest in 2003, a fact he acknowledges he will probably never live down and for which he is constantly ribbed by his fellow Doggies, who occasionally attach a beefcake picture of him to the monthly duty roster. He smiles at the piss-take.

  D joined the army in 1995 as a nineteen-year-old, with every intention of being a dog handler. He had a border collie as a child and after that bred a mixed-breed bitch. He named her Chelsea Brown because Chelsea was cute and brown she was. ‘Not very imaginative, I know,’ he says now with signature soldier-like economy. Chelsea Brown, a boxer-mastiff cross, threw a litter of beautiful pups and, being a motivated teenager with an entrepreneurial flair, he sold all six for a tidy profit.

  Originally from Mackay in northern Queensland, he moved with his sister and mother 1600 kilometres south to Griffith in western New South Wales after his parents divorced. He attended the local schools, and played rugby and excelled at darts and hockey. But, like so many restless teenagers eager to get on with life, he left school at the end of year eleven. Raised in a family that appreciated the value of hard work, D got a daytime job as a trainee manager in a fast food outlet and a part-time job delivering pizzas by night, both of which proved less than satisfying for someone keen on adventure, the second even more so because his clapped-out car wasn’t up to the task. Not so incidentally, neither accounted for his passion for dogs. He cast around for a better-fitting career and remembered a school visit from an army recruiter, who had informed the student body about the various jobs available in the Australian Army, including the explosive detection teams. The only familial link to the military was through his grandfather, who had been in the army decades before, but D researched the EDD Section, figured it would be ideal for a young man like himself, and signed up to serve his country.

  He began the thirteen-week basic recruit training at the First Recruit Training Battalion at Kapooka in southwest New South Wales, where he and a couple of dozen other new recruits were taught basic military skills—shooting, navigation, first aid. After the passing out parade, his platoon was offered a range of positions across the army but the idea of working as a cook or clerk or in the quartermaster’s store held no appeal. D was driven. He wanted to join the RAE to be a dog handler. As it happened, eleven places were available in engineer corps and he listed the RAE as his first, second and third preference. He was determined but D’s dream of working with dogs would have to wait. The army had other ideas for him. Despite his first three choices—in fact, his only choice—the brass allocated him elsewhere.

  ‘You are going to be an air defender,’ the commanding officer said.

  ‘I don’t want to do that,’ the disappointed recruit replied, forgetting he really had no choice in the matter, this being army, not a project meeting.

  ‘We need a couple of the smarter guys to do it,’ came the final pronouncement.

  ‘I think they were trying to build me up, to make me think it was a good thing,’ he says now with a measure of self-deprecation.

  The young soldier was assigned to the Sixteenth Air Defence Regiment in Woodside, South Australia, as part of the artillery corps, and in August reported for duty as a ‘missile number’ for the Rapier surface-to-air towed missile launcher. It wasn’t his dream job but it was, at least, action driven. ‘You’re basically shooting missiles at enemy planes.’

  He moved west, bought a flash car and fancy motorbike, and made himself at home. For now. In his head, the gunner had the future mapped out. He expected to make a good impression and, after completing the first mandatory year, apply for a corps transfer to the RAE. Things were working according to plan until a sharp bend in the Adelaide Hills got in the way of things. The motorbike aficionado came out of one bend in the twisting and picturesque hills at the legal limit but was too fast for the next hairpin turn and crashed his powerful CBR 600 Honda motorbike. The end result was a leg snapped in four places that required a 45-centimetre pin inserted into the bone, held in place by three screws. The injuries gave him an early education in the scale of pain from one to ten, which he would draw on years later in Afghanistan, when a Taliban ambush left his body riddled with shrapnel. A painful and slow recovery delayed the corps transfer until 1997, when D was posted to the 1st Combat Engineer Regiment (1CER), a mechanised unit of the RAE at Holsworthy.

  From gunner to sapper, he was one step closer to the Explosive Detection Dog Section but still had to mark time for a couple more years as a combat engineer. He easily mastered the fundamentals of engineering in the initial employment training (IET) and was a dab hand at demolition, bridge building, watermanship and mines. His official duties also included ferrying troops in an Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) and chauffeuring the regimental commanding officer, the latter of which came with certain privileges.

  The regiment moved to Darwin in late 1999 and soon after was deployed to East Timor as part of the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET), a peacekeeping mission under the command of Major General Peter Cosgrove, raised in response to the civil strife that erupted after the East Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia. After four months driving a thirteen-tonne APC through the dangerously narrow and steep streets of Dili, D finally scored a coveted spot on the EDD handlers’ course with four other soldiers. He received orders to report to the SME for the course beginning in March 2000.

  ‘I finally got there,’ he says.

  The sapper was teamed with Vegas, a stock standard, good-looking yellow Labrador retriever true to the breed; eager, biddable, food and ball obsessed, and as loyal as could be. At two years of age, Vegas was at the tail end of puppy–hood and had only just finished her own nineteen-week training course. She had had little, if any, follow-up training during the Christmas holidays and was a little bit rusty and a little bit disobedient when D began working with her. It meant he had to work harder to pull the dog into line while learning the ropes himself.

  Their days started with an early morning run with the dogs, for fitness and to burn off the dogs’ excess energy before training, followed by mucking out the kennels, a sure-fire way to get to know how healthy your dog really is. The first two weeks were devoted to basic obedience training, the theory of dog behaviours and the role of the EDD Section. The handlers were taught how to transport their dogs, and safety and first aid for themselves and the hounds. This included carrying the heavy mutts if they were incapacitated on patrol by slinging the dog up and around its handler’s neck and across the shoulders with the front and rear paws held together at the chest. This variation of the fireman’s lift was usually no problem with the smaller dogs but a tough task with the bigger hounds that could weigh as much as 35 kilograms, especially when the soldier is loaded with his regular weapons, webbing and pack. They trained on agility and obstacle courses, over barrels, up and down ladders two metres high, across logs, through tunnels, windows and doorways, in preparation for deployment.

  Four weeks were devoted to learning intricate search patterns for four distinct and separate locations: buildings, open areas, vehicles and routes, with a week to master each. It was exhausting work
. The cut-off point was the end of week six, by which point if the handler lacked aptitude he would be booted out of boot camp, no correspondence entered into. This is life saving work—you don’t get second chances in a war zone.

  ‘It’s quite stressful for the guys on the course, thinking, “here comes week seven, the cut off. If I am no good, I’m out”,’ says D. ‘And you can still fail even at the end of week thirteen after the two-week final assessment, which is called “Mad Bomber”. You can fail on the very last day, and that’s it, you’re out.’

  Failing was not an option. He’d waited five years for this gig and he had no intention of throwing it away. Mad Bomber tests the sappers’ dog-handling skills and overall search abilities in public venues around Sydney and in the bush, or any environment to simulate every type of threat. The handler is also assessed for leadership qualities when working in a team. Human and hound are evaluated together but the burden of responsibility remains with the handler. The sapper has to recognise when his dog has failed to follow procedure and correct its behaviour, and keep the animal motivated and on track for the 40-minute searches over several kilometres. The pressure is enormous, particularly with an instructor standing a metre behind you every step of the way, with a notebook in hand, writing critical notes that could determine the end of a career with the dogs before it has even begun.

  ‘The biggest failing point is on safety for the Doggies— either walking into an unsearched area or missing areas,’ says D. ‘You have to maintain situational awareness at all times, to know where you’ve been, where the dog’s been, what has been searched, what hasn’t been searched. The other failing point is not being able to read the dog’s indications. You need to recognise when the dog has a change in posture to indicate to you that something may be in the area.’

  All dogs have a tell, much like a poker player when on to a winning or losing hand—a slight twitch of the eye, a faint smile, or two fingernails clicking against each other. The tell is an honest and consistent response, an instinctive reaction, and the well-trained handler can recognise his dog’s tell instantly. Some dogs freeze; others put their tails straight up or out, or raise a paw, or prick up their ears. Some might even signal verbally, though this is uncommon.

  Sapper D and Vegas passed and went straight to work at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 with the entire EDD Section. The Olympics occurred in the pre-9/11 days when the clearest and most present danger wasn’t hidden explosives or weapons of mass destruction, but over-eager tourists and athletes wanting to pat the lovable dogs. The golden Labrador retriever sniffed her way through countless athletes’ villages, venues, vehicle checkpoints and public spaces. Vegas, with her smiling Lab face, always drew attention despite being a professional military working dog on a mission.

  Even Queen Elizabeth II fell for Vegas’s canine charms. D and Vegas were part of the security detachment for the Golden Jubilee Royal Tour of Cairns in 2002 and had lined the red carpet at the airport waiting for the Queen and Prince Philip, to stroll past as custom dictates. As the animal-loving royal made her way up the receiving line she spied the soldier with Vegas sitting neatly beside his left leg, a fine example of an obedient and well-trained dog. Her Majesty is a die-hard dog person. She fell in love with the quirky corgi breed as a child when, in 1933, her father King George VI brought home Dookie and Jane, the first of a long line of famous royal corgis. These days the Queen has several Pembroke Welsh corgis and dachshund-corgi crosses that tootle behind Her Majesty through the hallowed halls of royal residences across her vast kingdom. Many of her current pack are descendants of a corgi she received as a gift for her eighteenth birthday, that the young princess gave the un-doglike name of Susan.

  Queen Elizabeth stopped in front of Vegas. Her handler was surprised, not exactly expecting a one-on-one royal audience but like every soldier, he came prepared.

  ‘Good afternoon, Your Highness,’ he said with a smile, posture ramrod straight, shoulders back. As the small talk progressed above her, Vegas surreptitiously went to work on the new smorgasbord of scents that had materialised in front of her. With as much dexterity as she could muster from her seated position, the cheeky Lab craned her neck as far as she could, her inquisitive nose testing the air, twitching with each inhalation. Seconds later, an emboldened, black, wet schnozzle sniffed the royal handbag, as if searching for treats. Had Her Majesty not been so fond of dogs, Vegas’s wayward sniff could have been a diplomatic disaster reminiscent of Paul Keating’s infamous ‘lizard of Oz’ moment in 1992, when he undiplomatically snaked an arm around the royal back.

  ‘The Queen just laughed,’ D says now.

  Pooch protocol, being slightly more relaxed than political protocol, had not been breached and you couldn’t blame Sergeant D for thinking Vegas had just received the royal imprimatur, however unofficial. D, too, got the unofficial royal thumbs up. When it came to the Doggies, he was blessed, as would become clear years later in Afghanistan.

  Chapter 8

  A NOSE FOR WAR

  Canis familiaris, more humbly known as man’s best friend, has been going to combat since 400BC—possibly even earlier. Back then dogs were used as forward attack elements in the Peloponnesian War between the Greeks and Corinthians. Attila the Hun relied on dogs as sentinels during his conquest of Europe in the fifth century. Eleven hundred years later the Italian naturalist, Aldrovandus, detailed how the ancient Greeks bred particularly ferocious war dogs, trained to ‘be an enemy to everybody but his master’. They were given names indicative of their roles: Symmachi, for allies, and Somatophylakes, for bodyguards.

  The English were fond of the fighting dog too. King Henry VIII and his daughter, the first Queen Elizabeth, used hundreds of hounds in battle. Across the English Channel the French emperor Napoleon, no lover of dogs as previously noted, employed them against the enemy and famously chained them to the walls of Alexandria to warn of looming danger. Napoleon later wrote of being stirred to the point of tears at the sight of a devoted dog sitting beside his slain master at the end of a battle in Europe in 1798. The dog’s grief haunted him unlike any other tragedy he had witnessed at war.

  Soldiers in the Confederate and Union armies in the American Civil War trained dogs to catch fleeing prisoners and called them, somewhat ominously, ‘hounds of hell’. The author of War Dogs, A History of Loyalty and Heroism, Michael G. Lemish, writes that the escapees would have been terrified of the massive beasts on their trail, for to be caught ‘meant severe mutilation or death’.

  In the Second World War, the United States military finally caught up with its Australian counterparts and officially used canines to patrol the coastline. Shortly after, it began the Dogs for Defence program in which Uncle Sam called on the public to donate healthy, obedient dogs to defend the nation. To support the war effort, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted his dog in the army. Fala, a Scottish terrier, achieved the rank of private. The promotional stunt worked and more than 19,000 family pets were contributed, of which more than half passed the recruitment test. Dogs have been deployed ever since.

  Over time, war dogs have been used as messengers, mascots, ambulances, combatants, carriers, couriers, trackers, scouts and sentries. They have attacked approaching enemy fighters and horses wearing body armour and sharply spiked collars, and guarded fortress perimeters to prevent entry as much as escape. They pulled carts loaded with machine-guns and small cannons and wagons with wounded soldiers; they delivered messages to distant commanders, located fallen troopers, dragged them from the line of fire and delivered medication, water and, poignantly, comfort to the dying. Fast and agile, they also made for smaller targets and thus were more difficult to shoot than humans.

  Fast forward to the present day. High-tech dogs abseil out of helicopters and parachute from planes to land with their masters in otherwise inaccessible places. The dogs love it. They have no concept of height and the rush of wind on the dog’s face is their equivalent of nirvana. The highest human-hound air assault was a 30,000 f
oot leap by a US Navy SEAL and his dog, Cara.

  The now famous SEAL Team 6 that tracked down and killed the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, took with them a highly trained dog named Cairo. The fearsome warrior was winched down into bin Laden’s fortified compound in Pakistan from the MH-60 helicopter along with the twenty hardened Marines. Details of Cairo’s mission are closely guarded but he was trained to sniff out explosives or find the high-value target if he had been hidden in the compound. Cairo was also trained as an attack and guard dog. Cairo, a Belgian Malinois, has since had a private audience with President Obama and will be remem-bered for his role in one of the most daring combat raids in contemporary military history.

  The modern military dog like Cairo fares much better than its historical counterpart. Today’s combat hounds wear sophisticated body armour and custom-built life vests. Heavily armoured assault jackets have been constructed to be bulletproof, stab proof and shrapnel proof. They even have vests equipped with long-range GPS systems. According to Foreign Policy magazine, the elite SEAL dogs like Cairo have infrared night-sight cameras and intruder communications systems able to penetrate concrete walls.

  For all their brilliant agility and utility, the dogs also provide something more. Loyal guardianship.

  In Afghanistan three stray dogs named Sasha, Rufus and Target prevented a suicide bomber from penetrating a US army barracks where 50 soldiers were relaxing in 2010. The mongrels attacked the intruder who detonated his suicide bomb vest, blowing himself up with 25 pounds of C4 explosives. Sasha was killed but Rufus and Target, who was pregnant and would later give birth to five pups, survived the blast. The soldiers nursed them to health—‘they were our babies’. The grateful men whose lives they saved repatriated Rufus and Target to the United States. Unfortunately, Target was later wrongly euthanised by an animal shelter when she wandered away from her home. Her tragic plight and pretty beseeching face made headlines around the world. Dog lovers grieved as if they had lost their own cherished pet.