Sarbi was listed as Missing in Action, the first Australian military working dog to be lost during an operation in Afghanistan. Sergeant D was stricken. But he reckoned his devoted mongrel would try to make her way back to the remote firebase. She had a nose trained to track familiar scents and a store of memories of familiar places. And, typically dog-like, she had an inbuilt GPS for direction. Stories abounded of extraordinarily dogged canines that had survived against the odds in the harshest of environments or had been lost for weeks, months and even years and miraculously found their way home—even after their two-legged families had moved.
An Australian cattle dog Sophie Tucker fell off a boat in shark-infested waters in north Queensland and swam five nautical miles to an uninhabited island and survived by hunting wild baby goats for four months before she was found. In 2007, an Iraqi desert dog with cut-off ears famously adopted a group of US Marines, who dubbed him Nubs for his missing lobes. The Marines were banned from keeping stray dogs as pets and left the dog at a remote fort when their fast-moving convoy moved to the Jordanian border 110 kilo-metres away. But Nubs wasn’t one to obey official orders. He tracked down his beloved Marine, Major Brian Dennis, in a two-day odyssey across inhospitable, snowbound terrain. Dennis also defied orders to get rid of Nubs and began a mercy mission to repatriate the mutt back to the United States, where he now lives with the soft-hearted Marine. Nubs is a canine celebrity. He has appeared on American TV chat shows and a book has been written about him.
Sergeant D remembered a training session a month earlier, when the headstrong Sarbi picked up a scent and got lost in her olfactory world. He called her off, but she was out of hearing range and kept going, determined to find whatever odour the wind was delivering into her nostrils. D let her go, amused at her tenacity. Suddenly, Sarbi stopped. She realised she was on her own, without her trusted handler. She swung around, searching for the soldier, who was now a couple of hundred metres away, out of her line of sight and well beyond hearing range. She swivelled her head around one way—nothing—then the other way. Still nothing.
D could see Sarbi’s uncertainty. Oh no, where’s my master? He yelled her name at the top of his voice and waved his arms above his head, tossing a tennis ball in the air.
Sarbi began to retrace her tracks, looking around in circles for Sergeant D. Finally she tracked his voice.
‘She came bolting over to me. It was almost as if she was saying, I was busy searching, what happened?’ he says now.
Sergeant D hoped Sarbi would show the same tenacity now she was out in Khas Uruzgan on her own.
Before Sergeant D flew out of FOB Anaconda he asked his mates from the SAS and US Special Forces to keep an eye out for the black dog. Many of the soldiers were dog people with their own pets at home, and Sarbi had become a much-loved member of the team.
‘Let me know as soon as you hear anything,’ he said.
‘No worries, mate.’
Some went one better. A couple of the guys went through Sergeant D’s gear and left sweaty clothes at strategic points around the perimeter fence and front gates of Anaconda, hoping Sarbi would pick up D’s scent and be lured back to base by her nose. The dog handler knew the Special Forces boys would have Sarbi’s back. That is, if she was alive.
The next day Sergeant D was under the surgeon’s knife at the Dutch-Australian hospital at Tarin Kot.
‘They basically scrubbed me with a wire brush and pulled out all the frag and stitched me up,’ he says now. ‘The padre came around and gave me a medallion for healing. I’m not religious, but I still took it from him because it gave me something to focus on.’
The commanding officer of the Special Operations Task Group met with the wounded soldiers at Tarin Kot and the story of the battle made headlines back in Australia, though minus the drama of the ambush. The CO reported all nine of the injured men were faring well and ‘morale is high’.
But Sergeant D was frustrated. He was itching to get back out there to find Sarbi. He’d received intel from the soldiers at Anaconda that his dog had been seen wandering outside the base. ‘The Special Forces boys are awesome that way; they always have someone there to let you know what was going on,’ he says.
A senior Australian military official said later that Sarbi had returned to the base she’d been calling home but the dog-averse Afghan guards had shooed her away.
The US Special Forces soldiers had developed a good relationship with the villagers in the Khas Uruzgan district, through a series of food-for-work and cash-for-work projects they’d been conducting with the US Agency for International Development (USAID). They also helped repair the key mosque in the district, and were building an irrigation canal with the locals. Hearts and minds. The goal was to empower the Afghan population and improve their lives while reducing their support for and reliance on the Taliban. The strengthening relationship had tangential benefits: it provided for quid pro quo. We help you, you help us. Pashtunwali.
Nine days after the ambush, covered in bruises and with a row of neatly stitched sutures holding his wounds together, Sergeant D and another soldier returned to FOB Anaconda on a mission. Recover Sarbi. The operation was strategic and methodical.
The US military intelligence staff recorded messages about Sarbi in Pashto and Dari and broadcast them over the public address system and local radio stations. They asked villagers to pass on any information they might have about the missing dog and gave instructions about how they could give her back. ‘An Afghan version of a lost-and-found notice,’ an Australian Defence spokesman said.
Conflicting intelligence filtered back. Sarbi had been sighted at one village, then another. Sarbi had been shot dead. But the information was rated as single source intelligence and therefore wasn’t reliable; none of it could be adequately confirmed. The Afghan culture is an oral culture, and stories about Sarbi were passed from villager to villager as if in a game of Chinese whispers.
‘It was pretty hard hearing all those things,’ Sergeant D says now. ‘But we couldn’t act on it.’
Afghan police in the region reported that a local Taliban commander Mullah Hamdullah had Sarbi in his possession. It was a strong lead. Hamdullah, who was in his mid-thirties, was one of two or three Taliban leaders in the region and had been vying for power with another Afghan. Sarbi would be seen as a status symbol, a prize of war. According to a former Dutch diplomat and independent political analyst presently based in Kabul, Hamdullah was proud of his war booty and paraded her around.
Martine van Bijlert is fluent in Dari and has spent more than eleven years in various roles with government bodies and non-government organisations in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. She meets regularly with Afghan people and has a good and open relationship with them. One of the tribal elders from the area had recently told her that Sarbi had taken refuge in a building after the bombs and rockets had stopped flying and the ambush was over. A local boy ventured out to gather spent cartridges from the firefight as soon as the coalition soldiers had left the bullet-strewn valley and the Taliban retreated from the area around Ana Kalay. The boy was rummaging around the building when he found Sarbi and took her home.
‘As soon as Mullah Hamdullah heard about it—it was still the same day—he came and collected the dog,’ van Bijlert says now. ‘He took it and was very proud of it.’
Hamdullah’s father had been arrested. The coalition forces used the local radio to spread the word that the old man would be released if the son returned Sarbi to the US firebase.
‘It was not Hamdullah who tried to trade,’ says van Bijlert.
But the Taliban commander rejected the dad-for-dog swap. ‘I am not sure why,’ she says. ‘Maybe he wanted to show he was dominant and he didn’t want to cave in.’
Or perhaps Hamdullah thought the highly trained explosive detection dog was more valuable to him than his father. It is possible he wanted to keep Sarbi to trade her at a later date when the stakes were higher. The Taliban knew that NATO troops did their best to retrieve equipment left on the battlefield or destroy it if that was not possible, not that the latter would befall Sarbi. Hamdullah might also have wanted to use Sarbi as collateral in the internecine world of tribal politics and Taliban power plays. Nothing would surprise in Afghanistan, where alliances shift as quickly as they form.
Eventually, Hamdullah’s father was released but Sarbi’s whereabouts remained a mystery.
Sergeant D says the SAS boys were keen to launch a search mission for the dog based on the intelligence, but the risks were too high. There was no telling why a bunch of hardened men, trained to fight wars in foreign lands, were willing to put their lives on the line to find a dog, but they were. Some things you just can’t explain, like the bond between man and his best friend, like protecting your mates, like needing to finish a mission. Problem was, they just couldn’t do it. The troopers were restricted by operation orders and rescuing a missing dog wasn’t on them. It didn’t matter how precious Sarbi was and how well she’d performed her duty. The brass simply would not risk the lives of their elite soldiers to find Sarbi.
The soldiers accepted the logic of war and understood the rationale behind it. But it still felt like a kick in the guts. So they did what resourceful Special Forces do. They adapted. Whenever they went out on patrol, they kept an eye out for Sarbi. They gathered intel, slowly, day by day, week by week.
Sergeant D spent ten exasperating days at Anaconda. Because of his injuries he was not permitted to leave the base. He hammered away at the intelligence to pinpoint Sarbi’s location. He walked the boundaries of the firebase repeatedly, scanning the horizon with binoculars, searching to no avail. He bombarded his American mates as soon as they returned from patrols. They returned empty-handed. No news.
The dog handler returned to Tarin Kot in mid-September.
The herringbone of stitches was removed from his wounds. He was cleared to return to active duty. But he was without a dog and there were no free canines with which to work. Sergeant D was reassigned to the Persons Under Control (PUC) unit for the final ten weeks of his deployment. He conducted biometric assessments and processed suspected Taliban and insurgent captives who had been brought in by SOTG soldiers. He fingerprinted them and took iris scans and DNA samples. The PUCs were then either sent elsewhere for interrogation or freed to return to their homes. Sergeant D also did one final mission outside the wire on a combined Australian–British patrol.
Sergeant D missed Sarbi and his hands-on role as a dog handler. He kept his lines of communication open with the American Special Forces boys. He never lost faith she would be found.
‘I was hopeful,’ he says now. ‘I always hoped that she was still out there because nothing definite had been said either way.’
But he was troubled by a niggling thought.
‘It was always in the back of my mind that I would never see Sarbi again.’
Sarbi went missing in action on the cusp of winter, when sub-zero temperatures, snow and fierce blizzards did cruel things to the landscape and those who inhabited it. She had survived the initial contact and shrapnel wounds, dodged enemy weapons and terrain booby-trapped with lethal land-mines and IEDs. But how would she survive beyond the razor-wire perimeter of the Australian base without the constant care and supervision of her handler? Sergeant D hoped like hell his beloved dog wouldn’t suffer the same tragic fate as the three Australian explosive detection dogs who had been killed in action in Afghanistan. The deaths of those little Diggers, as they were dubbed, had been soul-destroying. He didn’t dare think of what the Afghans might do to her.
Sergeant D returned to Australia on 13 November 2008. His deployment was complete but it felt hollow. Leaving Sarbi weighed heavily on him. This was the first time he had exited an operation without his four-legged partner. He was like a kid whose puppy had been taken away.
‘I was pretty upset leaving Afghanistan,’ he says.
On 16 January 2009 the ambush in Khas Uruzgan was back in the headlines, dominating the hungry beast of the news cycle.
SAS Corporal Mark Gregor Strang Donaldson was presented with the Victoria Cross for his courage under fire in Ana Kalay on 2 September 2008, during a dignified ceremony at Canberra’s Government House, attended by his wife and young daughter. A retinue of SAS troopers decked out in civilian gear and wearing sunglasses to protect their identities crowded the back of the fancy room, quietly proud of their mate.
‘You have cradled life in your arms and opened your heart to its meaning,’ the Governor-General Quentin Bryce told him. ‘By your doing and knowing, you will shoulder more than most. You are the finest example and inspiration.’
Donno was the first soldier to receive the prestigious medal since the Vietnam War; the ninety-seventh Australian awarded the highest recognition for gallantry under fire the country has to offer.
‘I don’t see myself as a hero, honestly,’ he said after the pomp and ceremony was done. ‘I still see myself as a soldier first and foremost. I’m a soldier. I’m trained to fight, that’s what we do. It’s instinct and it’s natural. And you don’t really think about it at the time. I just saw [the interpreter] there; I went over there and got him. That was it.’
No false modesty, no barely concealed sense of grandiosity. Just an honest bloke doing an honest, heroic job.
Later, when Donaldson was asked by a journalist how far he had sprinted across enemy ground, he replied with his trademark verbal continence: ‘Oh, look, I don’t know . . . You know, I didn’t have a tape measure there.’
The newspapers and television stations hailed the modern day hero, who did his genuine best to deflect the attention and share the honour and glory with the mates who had fought with him in Khas Uruzgan. As Donaldson said, there were eleven other heroes on the mission.
But the media was missing a prized piece of the puzzle, the thirteenth hero.
Sarbi.
The military hierarchy still had not released the news of the explosive detection dog’s disappearance. It was as if Sarbi had never existed. Behind the scenes, though, the hound had not been forgotten, especially by the tight-knit Special Forces community in Afghanistan. Always faithful, ever loyal, perpetually playful, Sarbi had gotten under their collective skins. The soldiers lived by the credo of never leaving a fallen comrade behind and their four-legged comrade was no different. If Sarbi was alive, they would find her. No matter how long it took. She might not have been on the official radar, but she was in their collective consciousness.
‘Plans were prepared to retrieve her, should the situation allow,’ a defence spokesman later confirmed.
*
Sergeant D had been teamed with a new dog, Tana. He was a dopey Lab, easily influenced by moods.
‘You have to be the alpha dog, show him you’re not worried or upset. With him, you can’t get angry because he won’t do anything,’ D says now.
Tana is motivated by a hunt drive, not a retrieval drive. When he first deployed with his handler to Afghanistan in 2010, Tana caught five chickens during the deployment, including a couple of sickly birds. Hardly challenging. ‘The Afghan soldiers had to pay the locals and then left the chickens for them,’ he says.
Sergeant D suspects his expectations might be too high.
‘The dogs have to be on the ball all the time. Tana can work well and he does work well, but he needs a lot of work to get him to the standard and a lot of work to keep him at the standard. I measure all dogs against Sarbi.’
Tana was no Sarbi.
Sergeant D still held a candle for his single-minded Newfie–Lab cross a year after she went MIA. Harder heads had given up on her, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
Sergeant D was on a promotion course at the School of Military Engineering in October 2009 when he took a phone call from his old boss, Corporal Murray Young.
It was around midday Sydney time; 0700 hours in Tarin Kot where Young was then deployed with Rafi, who had already notched up a stint in the Solomon Islands and was proving as adroit at bomb detection as his sister.
‘Mate, we think we’ve got Sarbi,’ Young said. ‘Have you got a picture you can email over?’
Sergeant D was ecstatic. Murray wouldn’t be taking the mickey. He had a vested interest in getting Sarbi back. D emailed a photograph of Sarbi to Camp Russell and waited for confirmation.
The early intelligence was right. The ever-resourceful pooch had used her canine charms and made a new home amid the Afghan people.
Mullah Hamdullah had had Sarbi since the ambush thirteen months earlier. She had made the best of her new surroundings, even though her Afghan existence could not have been more removed from the intense relationship she had with Sergeant D.
But for some unknown reason, Sarbi had worn thin her welcome. Afghan elders told Martine van Bijlert that Ham-dullah had engaged a local malek to help him do a deal. A malek is a member of the community, viewed by many as a man of integrity and with a reputation for dealing with government officials. He was from a different tribe to Ham-dullah and was not Taliban, says van Bijlert. The malek also served another function—NATO forces wouldn’t arrest him as an enemy combatant.
Hamdullah dispatched the malek to Anaconda to propose a deal. Hamdullah would sell the dog for a fee. The princely sum of US$10,000 was rumoured. ‘I don’t think it’s a fixed price tag. Again, it could be one of the different details,’ says van Bijlert, who had been told about the doggie drama by locals.
The US soldiers told the malek the US army required proof of life to ensure the dog was Sarbi, the lost Australian explosive detection dog. The Americans have more than 300 of their own bomb-sniffing, tracker and sentry dogs in Afghanistan. Many of the soldiers regard them as more reliable— and loving—than metal detectors.
US Special Forces don’t mess around. They refused to exchange money until they saw the dog. Establishing proof of life was standard operating procedure in ransom and hostage situations, even a canine version.
The malek dutifully returned with a photograph of Sarbi on his mobile phone, and the Americans recognised her beautiful black face and white blaze. She looked pretty healthy, too. She hadn’t gone hungry during her time in Khas Uruzgan, unlike the unkempt, half-starved mutts native to Afghanistan. Still, no deal. The US soldier told the malek to bring the dog.
The malek made good on his end of the deal and returned to Anaconda with Sarbi. A US Special Forces soldier known as John noted she was in good condition—even though she hadn’t been washed in a year. Sarbi was eager to please. Her ears pricked up, her front paws danced on the ground in excitement and her tongue hung at a lopsided angle from her mouth, anticipating contact. She flicked her snout up and tossed her head to the side as if to say, throw the ball.
John took the dog’s demeanour as a sign of encouragement.
He gave Sarbi some commands in English, albeit with an American accent.
Pant, pant, pant, wag, wag, wag. Sarbi’s body shook side to side from head to tail, wobbling with pure joy. This was a language she could understand.
The soldier tossed a tennis ball. Sarbi responded in an instant. Her reaction was proof positive of her pedigree and provenance. She was the Aussie’s MIA EDD—the missing-in-action explosive detection dog.
‘Good girl,’ John said, giving the canine warrior a pat.
He clipped a leash to her collar, handed the malek a small amount of money—not the promised $10,000 jackpot— and walked back inside the base with the dog. Coalition soldiers have access to discretionary sums of money for payment to locals, to settle grievances and right wrongs in accordance with accepted cultural practice.
‘Hamdullah was not happy with how it turned out,’ van Bijlert says now. ‘The malek still owed him for getting the dog back cheaply.’
She believes the Taliban leader was killed in a coalition airstrike in 2010.
The Special Forces boys put Sarbi on a US Army CH-47 Chinook helo as soon as possible and she was flown to Camp Russell in Tarin Kot.
Corporal Young recognised Sarbi as soon as she leapt out of the chopper. This was home. Sarbi raced over the rocky airfield. Young nudged a tennis ball to her with his foot and Sarbi took it straight away. ‘It’s a game we used to play over and over during training,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing, just incredible to have her back.’
Sarbi was a little greyer around the muzzle and she had gotten fat. Her extra bulk had nothing to do with the winter coat she was growing in, in preparation for another season in sub-zero temperatures. The mongrel usually weighed in at 27 kilograms but came home a very healthy 32 kilograms.
‘Either they were feeding her very well or she was getting into their food stores,’ Sergeant D says with a laugh. ‘I’m thinking probably the second.’
Sarbi was sent to the United States Veterinary Corps in Kandahar to have her microchip scanned for verification and she received a full medical check-up. The American vets look after all the dogs in Afghanistan and boast one of the most sophisticated animal clinics in the country. They conducted doggie blood drives and stored all six canine blood types for emergencies in a high-tech operating theatre. ‘When you know some of these dogs are saving others’ lives you place a very high priority on caring for them,’ said one US Army vet. ‘And when you hear a story first hand about how the dog on your exam table saved others’ lives by finding explosives planted on a vehicle or beneath it, it really validates [the dog’s] importance in the war effort.’
The microchip in Sarbi’s shoulder positively identified her as EDD 436, a member of the Australian Army, Royal Australian Engineers, School of Military Engineering, Explosive Detection Dog Section.
The American vets gave Sarbi the all clear. The greatest fear was that she’d contracted rabies, a common disease in Afghanistan, but she hadn’t. Her pads were fine. No sign of coughs or worms or parasites, any of which would prevent her ultimate return to Australia.
Sarbi had defied the odds.
‘I was over the moon,’ Sergeant D recalls.
Sarbi received a hero’s welcome at Camp Russell.
The black mutt got her first bath in a year. She was soaped up and got a good scrubbing while posing for the cameras. She lapped up the attention. Her shining coat now had the look and touch of black velvet. She was a prima donna dog. A box of tennis balls was brought out and Sarbi, true to form, was back in business, thundering across the rocky ground to fetch.
It was as if she’d never gone missing.