Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The search went quickly once they descended. Panzer alerted on the exact spot that the vil-
lager said he had buried the remains near his home. Fine. he anthropologists were planning
to excavate there anyway. Despite a preference to search blind, Matt couldn't help thinking
that might not be the end of the story, “just based on the profile.” So he and Panzer wandered
toward the back of the house and the thick jungle at the outskirts of a village, toward an old
family cemetery and garbage dump about 150 feet away from the site that was supposed to
be ground zero.
That was when he noticed Panzer's body language start to change. She eyed Matt, threw
her head, worked a small area hard, but didn't give a final alert. She was getting tired. He put
her up and got young Max. Max did the same thing Panzer had, in the same area, except Max
gave his final alert. “He was sure it was there. It was in his eyes.”
Matt put Max up and went to talk to two of the anthropologists, who were intrigued.
Matt and the dogs flew to other sites. Some would be burials; some would be crash sites;
some would be spots where prisoners of war reportedly died in camps and were buried by vil-
lagers; some would be entirely invented. Matt would come in, search, and the dogs wouldn't
show any interest. Nothing here. The villagers would look at Matt's dogs and changed their
stories about remains being there, probably to what was closer to the truth. The dogs hadn't
been trained for this new task, but apparently they were good lie detectors.
Nearly a month later, Matt was in the lobby of his Ho Chi Minh City hotel and ran into
one of the anthropologists from the Phillips site. Matt and the dogs had just finished their
last case. They'd found nothing tangible. Matt's morale was rock-bottom.
“Did anyone tell you what we recovered at the site you searched?” the anthropologist
asked. Matt had heard nothing. The anthropologists had excavated the general area where
Max had alerted and Panzer showed interest. Six inches down, they'd found a pocketknife.
A zipper from a flight suit. Pieces of life support equipment. And what the anthropologist
thought was a human patella, a kneecap, although that hadn't been determined. The term
“osseous remains” was the one that stuck.
“I wanted to break down and cry,” Matt said.
A couple of years after that, having heard nothing more, Matt decided to pick up the
phone and call the Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. He got a sympathetic guy on the
other end who looked up the case. Captain Phillips's remains had been identified in Septem-
ber 2004. Panzer had died of cancer in September 2004. But Matt now knew the rest of the
story. Maximus went on to many more searches. In 2011, he, too, died of cancer, at the age
of ten.
Today, 1,664 Americans remain unaccounted for from the war in Southeast Asia, 225 few-
er than when Matt went over with his dogs. Three hundred thousand Vietnamese soldiers are
still missing. The military has not sent another dog-and-handler team back to Vietnam.
