Corporal Murray Young was flicking through the local newspaper in the Southern Highlands in June of 2005 when he stopped at the ‘For Adoption’ notice in the classified advertisement section. ‘Two beautiful, intelligent Labrador Newfoundland crosses—brother and sister need a new home.’ The words struck a chord with the experienced soldier, a member of the Explosive Detection Dog (EDD) Section in the Australian Army, a tight-knit team of men always on the lookout for good, strong dogs to join the niche unit with a reputation as one of the best of its kind.
The army has a long history of using dogs in the line of duty but, save for a brief time in the 1970s, did not breed its own hounds. The official policy was and is to adopt dogs that have failed to make the grade in customs or police work, or rescue dogs from animal shelters and council pounds. The latter also serves an altruistic purpose and saves unwanted and unloved dogs from being ‘put down’, the deceptively anodyne phrase meaning ‘euthanised’. Besides, the army has a high regard for dogs found at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty To Animals (RSPCA).
‘The RSPCA dog is like the Aussie soldier, he’s resourceful,’ former chief handler Corporal Fred Cox once said.
Then there are the dogs adopted from families in the unenviable position of having to find a new home for them. They tend to be a better proposition still as they come with a known history and a pen sketch of their personality, skills and talents. And, importantly, a well-loved dog usually means a good disposition and you can never overstate the value of that.
Murray scanned the ad and liked what he read. Experience had shown the best EDDs, as the dogs are known, were mixed-breed mutts like Sarbi and Rafi, and those with a working pedigree such as kelpies, Labrador-crosses and border collies. He picked up the phone and called the number.
Murray explained the army was recruiting dogs for the EDD Section at the School of Military Engineering (SME) based in the Sydney suburb of Moorebank. The unit trained dogs to sniff out a vast range of lethal explosives found in weapons, bombs and ammunition used by enemy forces. Dangerous work. The dog was paired with a handpicked soldier and together they went through a rigorous training program to build a symbiotic working relationship. Known as an EDD team, the dog and handler were then deployed to various regiments in the army including the three Combat Engineer Regiments (known as 1CER, 2CER and 3CER) located in New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory, or the elite Incident Response Regiment (IRR) based at the Holsworthy barracks in New South Wales. The IRR was raised in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and unveiled by the then Australian defence minister Robert Hill in 2001. When fully manned, the regiment’s 300-plus troops are trained to respond to terrorist attacks involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive hazards in Australia and abroad.
The first version of the dog section was established in Sydney in 1953 and was devised to train a variety of hounds to detect hidden mines and act as guard dogs.
This was not what Wendy expected. Like many, she had no idea that the Australian Army used dogs. Police dogs she knew about. Those gorgeous, hard-working beagles, Labs and spaniels that trot around the legs of exhausted travellers, sniffing their luggage for contraband and drugs illegally imported into the country or between states, yes.
But army dogs, no.
Wendy was curious. She and Carlos had what seemed like an unsolvable problem. No one wanted to take their beloved Rafi and Sarbi. So when Corporal Young, then the chief instructor at the SME, stepped in to the equation with a potential solution to their agonising predicament Wendy heard him out.
The Australian Defence Force has long employed a veritable military menagerie that has fed, fought, clothed, defended and supported its two-legged brothers- and sisters-in-arms on foreign fields. Among the feathered, furred and woolly troop have been pigeons, rabbits, cockatoos, camels, chooks, cats, horses, sheep, monkeys, donkeys and, of course, dogs. The first animal army deployment was a contingent of about 40,000 horses sent to assist Commonwealth soldiers in the Boer War in South Africa in the 1890s.
Dogs were officially introduced to army life in the First World War, as messengers and ratters in the forlorn and fetid trenches, ribbons of graves that tunnelled cancerously through the earth for mile upon miserable mile on the Western Front. One messenger dog, working with the Fourth Division Signal Company in France in 1918, gained notoriety for its, ahem, unreliability. Named Bullet, the mutt worked to its own schedule. One day it took a mere eight minutes to deliver an important message but a few days later the canine courier took a very elastic nineteen hours.
Infantry patrol dogs and tracker dogs were used in the Korean War. A patrol dog scouted ahead of the troop to find enemy positions and weapons and, once detected, a tracker dog, working on a leash in tandem with its handler, searched through the enemy positions, to help neutralise the threat. The teams were so successful that it made sense at war’s end to formalise the program in Australia, and in subsequent years dog teams were deployed as offensive and tactical tools to new battlefields in Borneo and again during the Malayan emergency.
The Tracking Wing was officially established in 1966 at the School of Infantry in Ingleburn in Sydney, with a solitary mongrel liberated from death row for the princely sum of three dollars. The first dogs to be enlisted into what were then known as Combat Tracking Teams were named after Roman emperors and given lofty titles including Cassius, Marcus, Caesar and Tiber. The last three had the distinction of being the longest serving of the eleven Australian dogs sent to the Vietnam War in 1967.
Once trained, these freshmen trackers were deployed to infantry battalions, to track fleeing enemy soldiers through impenetrable jungle woven thick with foliage. Like most of their canine predecessors in the First and Second World wars, none ever made it home.
Australia’s strict quarantine regulations prevented the return of the hero dogs, which was utterly soul-destroying for the men with whom they had bonded and whose lives they helped save. The Diggers took solace knowing their mates had found new homes in embassies or with civilians but they never forgot their best mates.
The early success of the tracker and mine dogs led to an ambitious attempt by the army in the 1970s to breed its own military working dog in conjunction with the CSIRO. Called the Psycho-Genetic Breeding Program (PGBP), the goal was to breed a miniaturised version of the German shepherd crossed with kelpie and border collie working dogs that would be small enough to be carried under one arm by a soldier in combat conditions. George Hulse, then a captain at the SME, was in charge of the program. He enlisted in the infantry at the age of seventeen and served in Malaya, Papua New Guinea and South Vietnam. By the end of the 1960s, he was an officer in the corps of engineers and one of the famous tunnel rats in the Vietnam War who took part in the battle of Coral and Balmoral.
In 1970 the brass dispatched Hulse to the United States to see how the allies went about producing mine and tunnel detection dogs. At the Aberdeen Proving Ground in the state of Maryland, Hulse noted that the US Army was also breeding its own dogs. On observing the pups, he realised that the little balls of fluff would learn various behaviours with minimal human-designed training processes. The observation convinced the Australian captain that there were development opportunities for canines in the military far beyond their current employment capabilities.
The goal of the PGBP was to breed lightweight, quiet, robust dogs with a strong retrieval drive that would not be gun shy or frightened by loud explosions. Hulse had one other criterion for the dream detection dogs.
‘It needs to be jungle green,’ he says now, with a laugh.
Scientifically speaking, he wasn’t joking. He believed it could eventually be done under the right circumstances.
The official response?
‘Forget your green dog.’
The first iteration of specially bred German shepherds was born at SME in 1972. Each breeding pair delivered about six dogs, 50/50 male and female. Over the next eight years, four generations of pups were born, and the best of these were to be crossed with kelpies and border collies for another four generations (a canine generation is two years) to produce a new ‘bloodline’. The plan then was that the best of the new bloodline would be in-bred for two more generations to produce a ‘phenotype’, or a specific dog breed that met the criteria for passive detection purposes.
‘The aim was to minimise the size of the “chassis” before out-crossing to the other working-dog breeds,’ Hulse says now.
He wanted to breed the dogs down to about 16 kilograms without losing their working-dog attributes. German shepherd dogs usually weigh between 30 and 40 kilograms and bitches between 22 and 32 kilograms.
The dogs showed promise and the pups were exposed to a whole inventory of combat conditions and battle noise simulation at the age of three weeks—when they opened their eyes. They were tested for courage and timidity, and tried on various transport media, with every pup’s performance noted daily on a score sheet for later analysis.
The program got off to a fine start but politics and fiscal restraints within the defence department meant it would be short-lived. The out-crossing to kelpies and border collies, under supervision from the CSIRO, did not happen. As a result, the program didn’t have the necessary time required to identify emerging trends or to see significant genetic changes in the breed. As Hulse says now, at least ten generations were needed.
‘This was the shortest time possible that the CSIRO could indicate a dog possessing the attributes we wanted,’ he says. ‘The next breeding program would have been to consolidate the breed standard and continue to develop the dogs to undertake very specific roles—for example, conduct reconnaissance at night controlled by radio and other remote-control devices. The dogs could be equipped with state-of-the-art mounted devices such as cameras and infrared detection scanners. The dogs could be trained to patrol routes and housing areas to detect caches, IEDs, personnel and ambushes. At least, that was the promise. I firmly believe that dogs are capable of all these things, and more. It’s just that we need to develop the dog and its training program for it to know what it is that we want it to do.’
The end of the program, however, didn’t mean the end of dogs in the Australian Army and, as it turned out, military working dogs went on to do exactly what Hulse had hoped in the 1970s.
In more recent years, Australian Explosive Detection Dog teams have served in war zones in Somalia, Bougainville, East Timor, the Solomon Islands and Iraq. Currently, several are on duty in southern Afghanistan. Fortunately, most have returned to Australia. After a month in quarantine they either continue working or retire to live out their days as pampered pets with their soldier-handlers or other adoptive families.
Not every canine is cut out for service, and fewer still are cut out for nerve-racking work in dangerous conditions. Some don’t have the patience or the smarts required. Others are incapable of being quiet and calm in stress-ful situations, when nerves of steel are required. (A wide yawn is a canine self-relaxation technique and usually does the trick; humans yawn for oxygen, dogs for calm.) Some hounds refuse to acknowledge commands or choose to respond in their own time (bad dog); others are unable to master the discipline required to hunt for the olfactory information that says ‘explosive’ when more delightfully pungent smells—well, at least to dogs—are calling.
Finding a pliable and workable dog was therefore essential, which is why Corporal Young had one, and only one, question for Wendy.
Do the dogs like chasing balls?
She laughed.
‘No dogs like chasing balls and retrieving balls more than these two,’ Wendy replied.
That was exactly what Murray wanted to hear. He wasn’t interested in how well trained Sarbi and Rafi were—though Wendy cheerily confessed, not very. They were innocently playful, mischievous and insistent, even demanding. Sarbi and Rafi were cherished and indulged family pets, she said, and pretty much got away with anything and everything. Gemma later reminded her mother how upset she had been when Sarbi chewed a pair of brand new boots, but her anger faded at the hound’s apparent contrition and Wendy consoled herself by buying another pair of the same boots. Even Marcelo laughed when pointing out the missing nose from his favourite Teddy, a huggable toy he had had since the age of one. Then again, as Gemma says, her younger brother was in no position to complain about a chewing pup, for it was Marcelo who had bitten off Teddy’s ear.
None of this worried Murray. On the contrary, he said, it was easier to train new canine recruits with negligible or no training than to undo previous training, in order to mould them into explosive detection dogs. He assured Wendy that the army dogs were happy and thrived in their challenging jobs. A team of dedicated, dog-friendly soldiers would care for them. Many had waited years to get into the elite EDD Section and considered it the dream job in the ADF.
The army preferred to take dogs between eighteen months and three years old, an age at which they normally should be out of the excitable, uncontainable puppy phase. Sarbi and Rafi were not quite three. They sounded perfect on paper yet the skilled dog handler needed to cast his eyes over them to be sure. Should Rafi and Sarbi pass muster their first deployment would be at the forthcoming Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. It all sounded positive.
That night Wendy told the children about the surprise phone call. After much discussion the family decided the army might just be the perfect fit for the energetic and rambunctious dogs; they would have an exciting and adventurous life while patriotically protecting our national interests at home and abroad. Even if the work was extremely dangerous. And Sarbi and Rafi would have company almost 24/7. That was a bonus.
There was one more key issue for the family and it was the lay-down misère.
‘We knew Sarbi and Rafi would also be able to save some lives,’ says Wendy.
No higher calling could there be for man’s best friend.
Corporal Young arranged to visit on Sunday, 19 June in 2005. It was the start of winter but Sydney was in the middle of its fifth mildest June on record and the day, which began as cloudy as it would end, was almost summery. The sun was shining in a clear blue sky and the mercury crept close to a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius. Murray, handsome with a kind face and of medium height and build, arrived dressed in casual gear rather than his uniform. The only indication he was army was his hair, cut to regulation length. The dogs introduced themselves to the friendly stranger with signature enthusiasm; they circled and sniffed, and generally ran amok.
Sarbi and Rafi were in terrific condition, not overweight as Labs have a tendency to be. Murray asked to see the dogs in action. The children said the magic word. Tennis. Rafi and Sarbi sprang to attention and ran around in front of the children, then sat back on their haunches, muscled bodies taut and ready to launch. The dogs stared at the children, brows crinkled, jaws ajar, tongues out, heads cocked to one side, the same side. They looked like they were smiling because they were. Labs smile.
Sarbi and Rafi correctly read every false move the children teasingly made, reacting with tiny jerking movements in the same direction, indicating where they expected the ball to be thrown. Sufficiently encouraged by the familiar play, they took a few steps backwards, rumps in the air, tails wagging, front legs positioned wider than their shoulders. Sarbi had her left paw raised up and tucked back under her chest like a true pointer, a habit she had had since her puppy days. Eyes pleading.
As one, the children belted the tennis balls with racquets, sending them sailing 100 metres down the tree-lined backyard. Rafi and Sarbi thundered off, barking competitively as they raced to the prize. Each found a ball and charged back to the waiting pack, dropping the balls with an accommodating bob of their heads as if to say, let’s go again, again. A few reward pats and Good Rafi, Good girl, Sarbi, and whoomph! Off they went, following the arc of the balls through the air.
The dogs were the apotheosis of natural-born retrievers, with a fanatical drive. That was the one thing the army’s dog handlers looked for and it trumped all other character traits. Dogs could be taught to do any number of complex tasks and tricks—sniff, detect, drop, high-five—but they could not be taught the retrieval instinct. Without it, they were cute and lovable but practically useless.
‘That’s what we need,’ Murray said.
He turned to Wendy and offered to take Rafi and Sarbi on the spot. Right then and there. Today. Now.
Wendy and Carlos were proud their dogs had performed so well but they were stunned by the immediacy. It was so sudden. And they were torn. They thought they would have days to say final farewells and shower the dogs with love and treat them with favourite food from the barbeque. Give them a few more days of romping through the backyard in wild pursuit of the tennis ball, or chasing the neighbour’s ducks in vain, the pretend hunters. And watch with delight as Sarbi’s ears pricked up at the sound of an unseen bus before romping down the driveway shadowed by Rafi, to wait excitedly at the front gate for the kids to come home from school. To consider the possibilities, maybe even to work out a compromise, a way to keep their cherished pets.
Wendy was nervous about the decision. Murray struck her as one of them, which is to say, dog people, and she and Carlos believed in their heart of hearts that Sarbi and Rafi would be looked after. She extracted a firm promise that the kids could visit the dogs at the army barracks in coming weeks and that they would receive regular updates of their training and work, but that held little currency right there and then.
If you’ve ever been stared at longingly by a devoted dog nestled at your feet, or felt its wet nose chiselling under your hand for a tickle under its chin, you’ll know why she hesitated. You’ll know the true meaning of mateship and how easily a dog can fill your heart. Imagine that multiplied by two and you’ll appreciate how difficult it was for Wendy and Carlos.
Reluctantly, Wendy agreed it was probably best to have the miserable task done as quickly as possible rather than draw it out, prolonging the painful goodbyes, delaying the inevitable and torturing everyone with the knowledge that a sad departure was imminent. She braced herself and broke the news to the children. Nic and Gemma burst into tears; Wendy too. Marcelo says bravely that only his father and he were able to keep their emotions in check.
The family smiled for a group photograph with Murray but deep down, the children’s stomachs were churning. Their idyllic world was about to implode. Nic, desolate, had his arms wrapped protectively around Sarbi, who was wearing a pink collar for the occasion. Gemma tenderly patted the big girl on the head. Carlos crouched next to Rafi for a hug and Wendy smiled but it was a smile born of politeness, not happiness. She and Carlos were equally forlorn. No amount of reassuring talk had convinced their children they should give up their dogs for adoption. Even to the Australian Army for seriously important life saving work, even though they knew it was absolutely the right thing to do, the best thing to do. Hard. But right.
And then they were gone. The lovably lumbering, clever dogs that had brought so much joy and given themselves so selflessly to the family were loaded in to Corporal Young’s vehicle and driven to their new lives.
The Bowral house echoed with emptiness and the family felt the dull ache of loss. As Wendy says, ‘There was a lot of sobbing in our house that night.’