Sarbi was a high-octane shot of morale for the men and women at Camp Russell, a welcome distraction from the ever-present spectre of death and destruction beyond the wire. They could use a boost.
Five days before Sarbi returned to her army family, a fellow explosive detection dog, Nova, was killed. The two-year-old black and white mongrel died from injuries sustained in a car crash during a training exercise with her handler inside the base.
Nova had been adopted from an animal shelter on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. The staff spotted the intelligent dog’s obsession with balls and thought she would make a great bomb-sniffing hound for the army. Nova passed the initial trial and was shipped to Sydney for the EDD training course. Fully qualified, she joined the Townsville-based 3CER with her handler Sapper Rueben Griggs.
She was a popular and successful addition to the task force in Afghanistan. Her face was almost albino-white, topped with a black nose and translucent pink ears held aloft like wimples. The mutt had had a tough start in life and came to the army with a stumpy tail, the result of either a mishap at birth or accident along the way. Griggs carried a big red plastic bowl on operations and she rarely left his side. When riding in the back of the MAC troop transport truck she stood up, paws perched on Griggs’s lap, while peering over the heads of soldiers, her nose in the wind and dust.
A month before Nova died, she starred in Operation Baz Panje, one of the largest air mobile missions in Uruzgan. The operation aimed to route the Taliban from the Mirabad Valley, where they had operated unchallenged for seven years. By then, the lightweight dog was battle-hardened. She had recently survived an IED blast while riding in the back of a Bushmaster with Griggs. Fellow engineer Sapper Tristen Westkamp from 3CER suffered a fractured jaw and cuts to his face and mouth. ‘There was no noise, just the desert coming up to meet me,’ Westkamp said. ‘Afterwards we were dragged out by our Doggie, Sapper Rueben Griggs, who was in the back with his dog Nova. When I woke up I thought “What a rush”. Now I have a lot of faith in the Bushmaster. Anything else and I would be dead.’
The regimental medical officer at Camp Russell put Nova down when it was determined she would not survive the injuries suffered in the accident. The soldiers were heartbroken. EDD 472 Nova was the fourth member of the Doggies killed in Afghanistan. The soldiers held a ceremony at the base and formed a guard of honour when her coffin was carried up the back of a RAAF Hercules for her return to Australia.
No wonder Sarbi lightened the load. She became the unofficial mascot in charge of morale as she padded around the sprawling forward operating base on her daily rounds. Soldiers hammed it up with her and Sarbi played along. She seemed to divine that her extra-curricular duties now included mood management and being extra cute. She roamed their offices and supervised soldiers at work. The cooks treated her with raw chicken necks and photographed her gnawing away as if she’d never been fed—a typical Labrador response to food.
Sarbi went through the mandatory Return To Australia Psychological Screening—known as an RTAPS debrief— in which she sprawled on a chaise longue, Freud-style, while a soldier took notes of what she had been through.
If only she could talk!
The question everyone wanted answered was how Sarbi had survived in such dramatically changed circumstances?
One can imagine her constantly in peril, sniffing out the explosives and weapons she had been trained to detect, staring patiently at her dangerous finds. She’d be wondering why her new ‘handlers’ weren’t calling her off and telling her ‘good girl, Sarbi, attagirl’ and tossing her a tennis ball, like Sergeant D used to. Did her temporary owners even have a ball for her?
What did the local Afghans make of the intelligent dog whose nose never stopped working? Did they ask her to do tasks for which she was never trained? Did they take her on missions with them? Had they tried to turn her against her comrades, her Australian Army family? Did she growl at their foreign dress, like she did when on patrol with her handler Sergeant D? Did she get on with the children? Where did she sleep? Was she moved from quala to quala by Hamdullah to keep her hidden from coalition forces? What mangy mutts did she play with?
The missing months prompted journalist Misha Schubert to speculate humorously that Sarbi had been on a top-secret undercover mission all along. ‘You can see it now: Sabi (sic) swathed in the cornflower blue of an Afghan burqa, the only clue to her real identity a glimpse of paw beneath its crimped hem.’
There was no denying Sarbi’s appeal. Her story reached the highest political office.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd flew into Camp Russell on 10 November 2009 with the Chief of the Australian Defence Force, Angus Houston, and the Minister for Defence, Senator John Faulkner. Travelling with them under a cone of silence was a small, hand picked media contingent including Katharine Murphy from The Age and veteran political reporter Malcolm Farr from the Daily Telegraph.
That night the dignitaries were guests of honour at an Australian-themed barbeque in Poppy’s Bar, where the commanding officer handed out achievement awards to his troop and the prime minister presented the soldiers with a new coffee machine. Murphy thought the huge roll-out was for the prime minister but the Diggers assured her it was for the food. When VIPs come to town, the quality of the tucker improves markedly and while there’s no beer, they make do with a substitute the Diggers dubbed ‘Near Beer’.
With the presentation night under way, the commander called out each soldier’s name. Each shuffled through the applauding group to the front of the recreation room, where they were handed a certificate in recognition of their performance.
‘Private X,’ the commander hollered.
X moved to the front. Salute.
‘Thank you, Sir.’
The exercise was repeated with military efficiency for ‘Private Y.’ Salute.
‘Thank you, Sir.’ Handshake.
‘Private Z.’
No movement.
‘Private Z.’
Silence.
‘Private Z,’ the CO called, this time louder.
‘Redraw,’ a Digger up the back wisecracked.
‘I will crack the jokes around here,’ the CO retorted, to howls of laughter.
Says Farr, ‘It was my favourite moment of the trip.’
The amiable event underscored the gravity of the meeting the next morning. Prime Minister Rudd and his cohorts were to meet with United States Army General Stanley McChrystal, the go-to man for fighting the Taliban and anti-coalition militia. It was a crucial time for the war. The outlook was depressing, as McChrystal had written in his recent appraisal to the president. ‘Inadequate resources will likely result in failure. While the situation is serious, success is still achievable.’ The general’s singular mission was to fulfil President Obama’s mantra of ‘disrupt, dismantle and defeat’ the enemy in Afghanistan.
EDD Sarbi had been doing just that as part of the Australian war effort.
Rudd had been briefed on the shaggy dog story and was taken by Sarbi’s extraordinary tale. Why not introduce the four-legged top dog of war to her two-legged counterpart?
Rudd had it all worked out. After breakfast with the SAS troopers he led the general outside the mess tent to where Sarbi was sitting quietly beside her handler. McChrystal appeared slightly confused about meeting a dog, says Murphy. But, being part diplomat, part warrior, he played his role for international relations and knelt down to pet Sarbi. She accepted the attention with aplomb and greeted the stranger with a sniff and a lick. ‘She showed no signs of stress,’ wrote Katharine Murphy in The Age.
Rudd couldn’t contain himself. Grinning widely, he hailed Sarbi as a ‘loyal daughter of Australia’ and said her return sent a significant message about the nation’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan. ‘[It] may seem quite small, but in fact the symbolism is quite strong, and the symbolism of it is us out there doing a job. Sarbi is back home in one piece and she’s a genuinely nice pooch, as well.’
Cameras moved in tight for their close-ups of Sarbi flanked by the prime minister and general. Shutters clicked and whirred. Farr and Murphy, seasoned journalists with decades of political reporting between them, understood the value of the story.
‘There we were at this strategic moment of great import for the Americans who were at a key decision-making point with their policy on Afghanistan,’ Murphy says now. ‘It was a global moment of importance and we thought, “It will be all about the dog”.’
She was right. They were on a winner.
The Australian newspapers fell in love with the hero hound and the public took her to heart. Sarbi’s story went global. The pawparazzi was on her tail. The BBC in the United Kingdom focused on Sarbi’s gritty canine survival. So did the Canadian national broadcaster and agencies across Europe and Asia. An EDD Sarbi fan page was established on Facebook and soon had more than 1000 friends, who left messages of support and adoration for the mutt. Sarbi received fan mail by the bagloads from people who had mistaken her wonder-dog status for an ability to read! A child from Charlotte in North Carolina sent a heartfelt postcard wishing Sarbi well. ‘You are very brave and deserve to spend your life in safety. We read your story on the Internet. Love Brandon + Wishbone + Toby.’
Sarbi had become an instant part of the cultural conversation. She showed up on the social network website Twitter, as a member of a fictional panel for the ABC television current affairs show Q&A. Her fellow guests were Simone de Beauvoir, Winston Churchill, Hadrian and Leo Tolstoy. ‘Churchill is drunk but in the morning Sarbi will still be a dog,’ some wit tweeted.
At a well-attended press conference the following day, a journalist questioned the army’s humanity in sending dogs to war. Later a Canberra commentator, with tongue firmly in cheek, asked if was appropriate that female dogs such as Sarbi were on the frontlines in combat. Another queried sardonically if Sarbi should be hailed a hero after, effectively, going absent without leave for thirteen months.
‘Mythmaking aside, it’s a great tale and the dog is cute,’ Murphy says now. ‘It also makes an incomprehensible conflict comprehensible. The power of the story was that it personalised and made a distant conflict have a heart and have meaning. It was pretty obvious that this was a dog with a great deal of meaning to these soldiers on the base. I don’t think you can engineer or fake that. It was obvious there was a bond between the people at Camp Russell and Sarbi.’
When the news broke, SAS Corporal Donaldson was in London to meet Queen Elizabeth II at a biennial ceremony to honour recipients of the Victoria Cross and its civilian equivalent, the George Cross.
‘Sarbi’s the last piece of the puzzle,’ he said, resplendent in full dress uniform. ‘Having Sarbi back gives some closure for the handler and the rest of us that served with her in 2008. It’s a fantastic morale-booster for the guys.’
Curiously, Sarbi’s VIP status had even filtered back to the Afghan elders in Khas Uruzgan. One old man told Martine van Bijlert the story about Hamdullah’s experience with the dog when he visited her in Kabul, where she had her headquarters. Other people in the region confirmed the details for her, even if some of the fine points differed.
The dignified elders were quietly amused that Sarbi, a dog, had had an audience with the prime minister of Australia. Not only the leader of a country, but also the most powerful military man in Afghanistan—a four-star general from the United States Army. Van Bijlert noted that one tried not to smile too broadly under his turban. ‘It must have been a very high-ranking dog,’ he said.