What the Dog Knows (27 page)

These dogs carried saddlebags filled with medical supplies that wounded soldiers could remove once the dogs arrived at their sides on the battlefield. The Germans used German shepherds; the English used a mixture of breeds from Airedales to collies to mutts. All of them became famous as “mercy dogs” or “ambulance dogs.” At one point during World War I, the Red Cross estimated that ten thousand dogs were working on both sides of the front. While their existence and their help are well documented, the skeptic in me looks at that suspiciously round number with a bit of distrust—it makes me wonder if the Red Cross PR machine was working overtime a century ago.

Mercy dogs dealt only with the living. That was a position that organizations like the Red Cross maintained, even throughout World War I. Despite the combat saying “Leave no man behind,” on the battlefield, in the fog of war, the dead are left. In war, we create piles of dead. In “great” wars, like World War I, where Siegfried Sassoon was awarded a medal for bravery and bitterly witnessed his comrades obliterated in muddy trenches; in “good” wars, like World War II; in wars that we admit were disasters. During World War I and World War II, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were left where they fell or were thrown into mass graves. Tending to the living and wounded was already an overwhelming task. That hasn't changed—on disaster scenes today, we prioritize finding the living before trying to recover bodies.

“Dogs are never trained to scent out the dead,” wrote Ellwood Hendrick in a 1917 issue of the
Red Cross Magazine
. “Their business is to assist the wounded.” He went on in a vain effort to dampen the
patriotic fervor that the dogs encouraged: “We do not have to go about killing people to make dogs worthwhile.”

The issue of recovering the war dead had long been a central concern. In the United States, the first official efforts to recover soldiers' remains were after the Seminole Indian wars of the early 1800s. That program was highly ineffectual: The laws provided no funding from the government to pay the expenses to return a dead family member. As Michael Sledge noted in his marvelous history,
Soldier Dead
, relatives could have the remains shipped back if they provided a lead-lined coffin to the “designated Quartermaster at a port.”

Few families could afford the coffins. Nonetheless, trying to recover soldiers—at least those on the winning side whose families were wealthy—had begun in earnest. By the Civil War, Sledge notes, the country started “honoring the death of the common soldier.” Although the war dead in that conflict became a logistical nightmare, the federal government stepped in. By 1873, more than three hundred thousand soldiers had been reinterred in seventy-four new national cemeteries. Though the total number of dead on each side of the conflict is still a mystery, the national cemeteries were reserved for Union soldiers. “The absence of official concern for the Confederate dead stood in stark contrast,” wrote Drew Gilpin Faust in
This Republic of Suffering
, her recent history of death in the Civil War. An
Atlantic
magazine writer on a tour of Virginia shortly after the war, Faust noted, came upon two bodies in the wilderness. His guide examined their uniform buttons. “They was No'th Carolinians; that's why they didn't bury 'em,” the guide informed a horrified John Trowbridge.

Civil War historian J. David Hacker now thinks that earlier estimates of 620,000 men dying on both sides—a figure that has stood since the nineteenth century—was far below the actual number. His most recent work puts that number at 20 percent higher: that the war was responsible for more like 750,000 men dying.

But what do these numbers mean? Why do they matter? Partly, as
Hacker, an assiduous and brilliant historian, notes, “it's our duty to get it right.” His new estimate suggests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined.

And yet all too often we count everything—and understand nothing.

In the Pacific Theater during World War II, journalist Ernie Pyle drafted what was to be his final column. It was found in his pocket when his body was recovered on the island of Ie Shima on April 18, 1945. He had been shot by a Japanese machine gunner: “Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer. Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand.”

•  •  •

E pluribus unum
. Out of many, one.

Although there were scattered reports of Israel using dogs during the Sinai War in 1973, it took until 2003 for the U.S. military, which had been involved in the earliest experiments on the feasibility of cadaver dogs, to use them to recover dead soldiers. Even then it was a modest yet controversial experiment—to send just one man and his two German shepherds from the Northeast into the jungles of Vietnam to look for MIAs who had disappeared decades before.

The military sent Rhode Island state trooper Matt Zarrella. It was February, and Vietnam was hotter than Rhode Island. Matt's nine-year-old female shepherd, Panzer, was panting. His one-year-old male, Maximus, was panting. As well as they could. The nervous Vietnamese pilots had insisted that the two dogs be muzzled before they climbed into the helicopter to fly toward the southernmost tip of Vietnam.
Now they were over rice paddies where the craters from carpet bombing from decades before were still visible. The temperatures inside the old Soviet helicopter were rising with the humidity of the jungle air. Matt wasn't muzzled—although with his propensity to speak his mind, that might have been a good idea.

The mission to find MIAs had added urgency. Witnesses to fighter jets that had been shot down during the height of the Vietnam War, in the 1960s, were dying out. The recovery efforts had slowed, with fewer and fewer U.S. soldiers' and pilots' remains found. That was when senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy, impressed by dogs working at the three 9/11 disaster sites—Shanksville, Pennsylvania; the World Trade Center; and the Pentagon—went to the military. Why weren't cadaver dogs being used in Vietnam to find servicemen who had been missing more than thirty years? The idea was far from universally embraced. It went forward nonetheless.

Matt Zarrella and his dogs had a reputation in the Northeast for finding the dead and the buried, so he got the call one day. Would he consider consulting with the military unit that oversees the recovery of servicemen—the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command—about whether dogs might be effective?

The retired military officer assigned the job picked Matt's brain. What would they need to get such a program started? What would the handlers need? The dogs need? The conversation moved in an obvious direction.

“It just came down to asking me if I would do it. I was extremely honored,” Matt said. He would become the first cadaver-dog handler to officially search for missing soldiers from any U.S. conflict. When Matt flew to Hawaii to prepare himself and the dogs at the JPAC Central Identification Laboratory, 1,889 servicemen were still missing in Vietnam.

Matt, a former marine himself, was a believer in the credo “Leave no man behind.” Nothing, though, is ever that simple. The repatriation of soldiers' remains from Vietnam had been a disaster during the
1970s: politically fraught, expensive, often based on unreliable information, and dangerous.

Two years before the fall of Saigon, a field team trying to recover deceased U.S. servicemen was ambushed. The team's leader, Captain Richard Reese, tried to save his men by standing up and telling the Vietcong they were unarmed. He was killed in a fusillade of bullets. For the rest of the 1970s and until 1985, the United States made no more efforts to bring the dead home.

Even when the effort resumed, some of the recoveries were spectacular failures. One, at Yen Thuong in central Vietnam, was based on faulty information: It was probably a missile site or a downed Soviet plane, not an American plane. Military anthropologists excavated in any case. They dug a hole that was fifty by one hundred feet, and forty feet deep, sifted through all that removed clay, and found nothing.

Matt, who knew some of the political problems, couldn't help wondering if he was being set up, consciously or unconsciously, to be the fall guy for this first military cadaver-dog project. He knew holes had been dug all over Vietnam to no avail. He had already witnessed the tensions between anthropologists and military personnel about whether he and his dogs were capable of finding human remains, or whether Matt simply had canine versions of Clever Hans. There was an argument on the military base in Hawaii over whether they would have to kennel and quarantine his search dogs for six months because of rabies regulations if they left the base, but the base had no reasonable kennels. The dogs ended up staying in a tiny retrofitted closet. Once Matt got to Vietnam, the vermin- and spider-infested hotel in Ho Chi Minh City didn't improve his mood. He didn't mind tough conditions and carrying a fifty-pound backpack, but he was forty-one. Not as old as his female shepherd in human years but no longer a young man.

Matt also wondered whether he was setting up his own dogs to fail. He knew that Panzer could find the dead and the buried: She'd done it for years in the Northeast United States. But the oldest buried remains she'd found were a decade old, not going back nearly four decades, as
they would be in Vietnam. The temperatures and conditions were not only unfamiliar, they were grueling. Panzer could work in snow and ice, but mangrove swamps and rice paddies with 100 percent humidity and heat indexes above one hundred were new territory.

Matt talked to Andy Rebmann. Andy considers Matt the equivalent of an adopted son, and Matt adores and respects Andy. They both have an ability to argue. They argued about whether Panzer was too old to go. Gunner, Matt's middle-aged Swiss mountain search dog, had gotten cancer and had a leg amputated after Matt committed to going to Vietnam. Matt couldn't back out; he'd promised two dogs. So he rushed to the pound and found a six-month-old German shepherd. The adolescent shepherd had been labeled aggressive. He wasn't; he had drive. Matt called him Maximus and trained him hard over the next six months—but the one thing he couldn't do was make Max age faster.

So Matt was left with a one-year-old dog and a nine-year-old dog—positioned at the extreme ends of the age spectrum for search dogs. One unproved, just certified, and the other old and soft enough to tire quickly or even die. A bunch of skeptical anthropologists in Hawaii and Vietnam were keeping track. Not a warm and fuzzy atmosphere.

“I tried to explain. We're not here to replace you. We're just another tool. We need good investigative tactics. We're only a small portion of a team,” Matt said. He was secretly worried that his two “tools” might not be operational.

Captain David Phillips's fixed-wing fighter jet had been shot down on July 3, 1966, in a thicket of mangrove trees on the southern tip of Vietnam. A witness told authorities that he had recovered Phillips's remains and buried them. Others had reburied him. The jet, if there had been pieces left, had been entirely repurposed. It was acidic soil. Bones would disappear—if they had been there in the first place.

The search went quickly once they descended. Panzer alerted on the exact spot that the villager said he had buried the remains near his home. Fine. The anthropologists were planning to excavate there anyway.
Despite a preference to search blind, Matt couldn't help thinking that might not be the end of the story, “just based on the profile.” So he and Panzer wandered toward the back of the house and the thick jungle at the outskirts of a village, toward an old family cemetery and garbage dump about 150 feet away from the site that was supposed to be ground zero.

That was when he noticed Panzer's body language start to change. She eyed Matt, threw her head, worked a small area hard, but didn't give a final alert. She was getting tired. He put her up and got young Max. Max did the same thing Panzer had, in the same area, except Max gave his final alert. “He was sure it was there. It was in his eyes.”

Matt put Max up and went to talk to two of the anthropologists, who were intrigued. Matt and the dogs flew to other sites. Some would be burials; some would be crash sites; some would be spots where prisoners of war reportedly died in camps and were buried by villagers; some would be entirely invented. Matt would come in, search, and the dogs wouldn't show any interest. Nothing here. The villagers would look at Matt's dogs and changed their stories about remains being there, probably to what was closer to the truth. The dogs hadn't been trained for this new task, but apparently they were good lie detectors.

Nearly a month later, Matt was in the lobby of his Ho Chi Minh City hotel and ran into one of the anthropologists from the Phillips site. Matt and the dogs had just finished their last case. They'd found nothing tangible. Matt's morale was rock-bottom.

“Did anyone tell you what we recovered at the site you searched?” the anthropologist asked. Matt had heard nothing. The anthropologists had excavated the general area where Max had alerted and Panzer showed interest. Six inches down, they'd found a pocketknife. A zipper from a flight suit. Pieces of life support equipment. And what the anthropologist thought was a human patella, a kneecap, although that hadn't been determined. The term “osseous remains” was the one that stuck.

“I wanted to break down and cry,” Matt said.

A couple of years after that, having heard nothing more, Matt decided to pick up the phone and call the Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. He got a sympathetic guy on the other end who looked up the case. Captain Phillips's remains had been identified in September 2004. Panzer had died of cancer in September 2004. But Matt now knew the rest of the story. Maximus went on to many more searches. In 2011, he, too, died of cancer, at the age of ten.