Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
side 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 for-
ward 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.” Noth-
ing, 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 inform-
ation, 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 pro-
