Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
er to go was oddly easy. Kathy and her entire family—her grandfathers, her father, her broth-
er, and her husband, Danny, an electrician—had been in the military. She said yes. Then she
thought, “You crazy woman, your dog's eight years old, and you're fifty, and you're going into
hundred-degree weather. What the hell are you thinking?”
She did it anyway. Kathy remembered Vietnam. “They didn't put that much in trying to
recover our boys at the time,” she said. She took it personally. She and most of her family had
served overseas. So Kathy started getting in shape, running, lifting weights, losing weight. She
didn't want to be, as she said, “the missing link,” the person who put soldiers in more danger
than they already were.
Yet getting off the plane in September in Iraq felt like a body blow. “It's hard to describe
the heat. It's like having a blow dryer in your face.” A fetid blow dryer that smells like urine
and blows sand at you. Kathy put booties on Strega, but they sometimes melted. The tem-
peratures there average 110 in the summer. That's before one puts on heavy equipment and a
flak jacket. Instead of trying to escape the heat, Kathy decided to embrace it. She stayed out-
side with Strega as much as she could. They both adjusted, and the experience made Kathy
rethink what breeds and personalities of working dogs work best where. Strega, though a Ger-
man shepherd, had a big, boxy nose but not a lot of huge muscle mass. She worked longer
than some of the snipier-nosed breeds and seemed to do better in the heat than some of the
big-muscled Labradors. She was a methodical worker, not too fast, not too slow, plenty of
drive, but not flashy. Those qualities served her and Kathy well.
Greg Sanson, the personnel recovery advisor to the U.S. military in Iraq from 2009 to
2012, had a complex job: first to prevent kidnapping or abduction; then, once a contractor or
soldier did go missing, to find him or her alive. If that failed, the next phase involved bring-
ing in teams like Kathy and Strega. It was, he said, “an honor” to talk to me about the work
Kathy did in the Middle East with Strega to help find the missing. “We don't quit looking
for them,” he said.
The work of looking was hard, both physically and emotionally. Improvised explosive
devices (IEDs) shatter people. Kathy and Strega found themselves looking not for bodies but
for small pieces of tissue. Being able to slow a dog down when searching for someone blown
up with an IED was terribly important. At first, Kathy said, just as at any explosion site,
Strega didn't do perfectly. The scent of death was both everywhere and nowhere. Kathy un-
derstood that their job went beyond gathering enough DNA material to identify the victim.
Kathy and Strega's job was different: to keep searching for anything and everything that could
be found of someone.
Soon enough, with adjusted training, Strega understood the job. She started finding the
little that remained.
