Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Captain David Phillips's wife died in 1989. His daughter Debra Stubbs went to the milit-
ary laboratory in Hawaii to bring back her father's remains, wrapped in a military-green wool
blanket, according to news accounts. She slid her hand inside, she told an Atlanta Journal-
Constitution reporter. That was the closest she ever got to her father, who had gone to Vi-
etnam before she was born. Her mother, she said, had worried for years about whether her
husband was a prisoner of war. She kept telling the family she was going to get on a plane to
Vietnam to try to discover the truth for herself. She never did.
Captain Phillips's three daughters and his brother buried his repatriated remains in the
Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, overlooking the Wilmington River—a cemetery filled
with live oaks strung in trellises of lichen. In 1897, the writer and naturalist John Muir had
camped in Bonaventure for five days. He was penniless, and the cemetery drew him in. It
was, Muir thought, a safe and quiet place to be. It was safe. It wasn't quiet.
“Many bald eagles roost among the trees along the side of the marsh,” Muir wrote. “Their
screams are heard every morning, joined with the noise of crows, and the songs of countless
warblers, hidden deep in their dwellings of leafy bowers. Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds
of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness. The whole place
seems like a center of life. The dead do not reign there alone.”
• • •
The number of missing servicemen from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was small, but the
military had learned its lesson from the Vietnam conflict and was going to make sure no one
was left behind. By the time the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the military was quite
clear that dogs could be useful for any number of things: bomb and land-mine detection,
sentry duty, and enemy tracking and apprehension.
Kathy Holbert was one of the cadaver-dog handlers invited to apply to go to the Middle
East as a contractor. Kathy runs a kennel in the mountains of Barbour County, West Virginia.
Self-deprecating, self-sufficient, and humorous, she trains detection and patrol dogs, boards
people's pets, and breeds a variety of working shepherds and Beaucerons, an ancient French
herding breed. She occasionally throws a Malinois into the mix to keep things interesting.
Kathy had been in the military, first as a parachute rigger and then as a military-dog hand-
ler. That didn't go swimmingly. Her first dog, a “find 'em and bite 'em dog,” appropriately
named Dick, bit her at least a hundred times. “Actually, I was a terrible, terrible handler,” she
said. “My timing was awful. They used to use me to show handlers how not to do things.”
That's hard to believe. Watching Kathy with both dogs and people makes the work seem
simple, straightforward, and low-key. When Kathy got the call about going to the Middle
East in June 2009, she was working her second cadaver dog, Strega, a sable German shepherd
with an extra-long tail, big ears, and a witchy, mature intelligence. The decision about wheth-
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