As is often the case in life, chance played its hand as much as circumstance. A fortuitous combination of both, mixed with the felicity of fate, had Sarbi assigned to explosive detection dog handler D. His facility with dogs had seen him promoted from handler to instructor and, more recently, rise up a rank. He was, in short, something of a dog whisperer, and was without an explosive detection dog for the first time in five years when Sarbi and Rafi arrived at the SME in June 2005. Vegas, his beloved golden Labrador retriever, had been retired to live out her life as her handler’s pet after a distinguished career serving her country alongside D at home and abroad, including a six-month stint in the Solomon Islands on Operation Anode.
Rank has its privileges and the EDD Section’s chief trainer, Corporal Murray Young, chose to train Rafi. By default the dogless D took Sarbi.
He immediately noted Sarbi’s retrieval drive was excellent. She didn’t game, that is, chase birds or prey, a habit that can mean the end of an EDD career before it has even begun. And she had the hallmarks of a good working dog: eager to please, a disposition to work closely with a master and a love of playtime, the latter of which turned out to be a strong point because, in reality, all work for the explosive detection dog is a form of playtime.
The explosive detection dogs’ role is straightforward, though training them is not. The nineteen-week course revolves around a few fundamentals, starting with the dog’s innate retrieval drive, the tennis ball—the reward—and a custom-built harness, all of which leads to teaching the dogs how to detect the chemical compounds of explosives through the process of scent imprinting. The dogs are not trained with food as a reward because it is impractical for their handlers to carry extra food on patrol when their packs already weigh in excess of 40 kilograms, not including webbing, weapons and equipment.
Sarbi and Rafi took to the basic training and obedience lessons with alacrity and sailed through the initial two-week assessment period designed to see how they coped in various situations and conditions: indoors and out, with various physical and audible distractions. They trained over a specially made obstacle course consisting of ramps, platforms, ladders, tunnels, A-shaped walls and simulated windows and doorways, to prepare them for the harsh terrain and exacting mission demands of real patrols. EDDs search tight and unfamiliar spaces, compounds, caves and bunkers, under and in trucks, tanks, in cargo containers, aircraft holds, on board airplanes and in helicopters. In fact, wherever it is suspected that dangerous materials and weapons are hidden, even under water. There are no off limits.
Dogs have acute hearing and are sensitive to the noise and percussive impact of exploding rocket propelled grenades, roadside bombs, mortars, and machine-gun and small arms fire. Sudden, nerve-jangling explosions will spook them. The high pitch of chopper blades, the roar of aircraft engines and the racket of tanks and trucks can be their undoing. Therefore, they had to be conditioned to cope with the thunderous noise of war.
A meticulous program to desensitise the EDDs to battlefield noise has been developed over the decades and is used around the world. D began by firing a starter pistol from about 100 metres away, to familiarise Sarbi with the sound while she was calm and settled. He moved in small increments closer until she could withstand the gunfire and percussive shock waves at close range, including when tethered by leash to his body armour. Most dogs are initially affected by weapons fire—in other words, gun shy—and their reaction can make or break their careers. ‘The initial testing is to determine that the dogs won’t run away or react badly or savagely,’ says D. ‘Dogs are generally fight or flight and if they can’t get away they might bite.’ He had never seen a dog bite anyone when exposed to gunfire or explosions, but he never discounted that dogs were dogs.
But all this is mere entrée. The real work of scent imprinting came next, the moment the dogs had been waiting for. The aforementioned harness is the trigger for the dog to know it is about to go to work. ‘It’s a game for the dog, he thinks he is looking for a tennis ball. As soon as the search harness is put on the dog he knows he’s in for a game,’ said Corporal Fred Cox, a former chief trainer at the SME.
D unpacked the explosive training kit and stashed the first explosive odour that Sarbi would be trained on in a metal cage. He held Sarbi while Corporal Young ran down to the explosive, where he placed a tennis ball next to the cage. Sarbi didn’t take her eyes off the tennis ball and watched in anticipation. When Young ran back past Sarbi’s handler without the ball, the dog instinctively knew what to do. She waited patiently for her cue, the magic words from her handler.
Sarbi, seek on.
The trainee hound sprinted down to the cage and picked up her ball not knowing that her handler was actually training her to associate the smell of explosives with the tennis ball. Sarbi was smart, but for her this was a simple game of retrieving the ball. As the training progressed Young repeated the exercise, but over time, instead of putting the ball beside the cage, he hid it in his pocket and ran back empty handed. D released Sarbi with the routine command.
Seek on.
Sarbi ran down to the cage and couldn’t find the missing ball. But she recognised the explosive odour that she had been trained to associate with her ball. She stared at the cage that was emitting the newly familiar smell. Young threw the missing tennis ball in over Sarbi’s head. Fortunately, he had a well-trained arm and the ball landed precisely on the cage. The dog was ecstatic—her ball had appeared out of nowhere. The training was done in small steps, working towards the required response, and after a week Sarbi was able to follow a dummy run and sit within one metre of the cage containing the explosives and stare at it without moving. Sergeant D quickly identified her signature tell; it was obvious. She froze, raised her tail and went into a slow motion sit, staring intently at the object, just as Gemma said she had done as a puppy in Bowral.
Good girl.
D repeated the process until Sarbi automatically identified a range of explosives. In no short time she proved that her explosive detection skills were not to be sniffed at.
‘Some dogs learn slower than others, some never pick it up,’ he says. ‘Sarbi was pretty much excellent right from the get-go after her initial training. Once she learnt it, she was very good. She is an awesome searcher, very responsive. I don’t have to try to control her too much because she searches everything that needs to be searched. Quite obedient and very steady under all conditions. And she loved the tennis ball.’
Her schnoz finesse and TTPs were tested daily on simulated patrols and in mock situations. Every morning D loaded Sarbi in the EDD Section’s purpose-built vehicle, dubbed the ‘ice-cream van’ because it looked like a refrigerated van and could carry up to eight dog teams, and headed out to search. He and Corporal Young spent hours with Sarbi and Rafi, hiding weapons and explosives until both dogs effortlessly identified any number of hazardous threats in any situation. D hid explosives from the explosive training kit for Rafi and Murray to discover, and vice versa. Both handlers and dogs were tested. They rarely failed. Sarbi had become a canine Sherlock Holmes. Ditto Rafi.
Nose-work is only one part of the game. Sarbi was taught the same four basic search patterns D had learnt years earlier— building, area, route and vehicle. EDDs searching for improvised explosive devices on routes work in a box pattern, up one side of the road, across and returning down the other side to the starting point. For vehicle searches, Sarbi circled a vehicle and checked under it before going through one door and out the other, front seat first then rear, followed by trays and truck sections. Large open areas are zigzagged, left to right with the dog off leash and metres out in front of its handler. The teams search vulnerable points and choke points including bridges, river crossings, riverbanks, and defiles, army speak for places where the road or route narrows due to a man-made or natural obstruction, increasing its risk as a site for ambush or attack.
Circumstances dictate the distance at which the animal works. Each handler has his own preference for how far the dog should be ahead of him. D liked Sarbi to roam at least 40 metres in front of him but she could be as far as 70 to 80 metres from her handler, depending on the segment of the search pattern. Monitoring distance is absolutely vital. As he says, the dog is in the most vulnerable position and the crucial element in each search is to ensure the safety of the following troops. Visual hand signals and audible commands for the dog remain the same in every instance. Consistency is king.
To the untrained observer, the intricate teamwork between man and mutt must seem magically telepathic and, in a way, it is. It is as if the dog has insinuated its way into the handler’s head, and vice versa. They have become attuned to each other’s needs. ‘Streamlined and instinctive,’ he says.
When trained, the military mutts can detect lethal explosives from 100 metres, with a nose that is ten to 100,000 times superior to the exceedingly limited human olfactory tool. In monetary terms, they are worth an estimated $90,000 and cost thousands of dollars a year to run. The American military working dogs cost $40,000 a year to maintain and care for and are designated rather coldly as a ‘highly specialized piece of equipment’. It’s worth remembering that the eleven Australian dogs that served in Vietnam were also robbed of their actual dogness and described as ‘engineer stores’. Decades later the faithful hounds were finally afforded the respect they had earned and deserved when granted a proper title, explosive detection dog. But the dollar figure and designation devalues the true worth of the smart animals. To their handlers and the soldiers whose lives they save, ensuring they will go home safely, they are priceless.
For these dogs had skills other than those for which they had been meticulously trained. How could you put a price on the ability to boost troop morale or comfort the grief-stricken or provide faithful companionship or act as an emotional crutch for young soldiers who put their lives on the line daily for their countries? What price their unconditional love, as pure and as old as the ages, or the happiness they bring by just being a dog? All the mutts want in return is to be loved, fed and taken care of. Occasional playtime is a bonus. As warriors go, there are none more uncomplicated than the four-legged variety. They are creatures of unbidden affection as well as marvels of military training.
Sarbi and Rafi were trained to a gold standard and knew every hard edge and right angle of operational deployment. They proved to be star performers and graduated in November 2005. Yet, for the first time in their lives, the dogs that had done so much together were to be separated.
Corporal Young chose to take Rafi, now with the official rank of EDD 435, to Townsville and he reported for duty in January of 2006. EDD 436 Sarbi remained with D, who was assigned to the specialist Incident Response Regiment at the Holsworthy Army Barracks under the aegis of the Special Operations Command.
It was time to seek on, for real.