Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
“I go to places I know to be safe, because a 'gator may not attack me, but it will have my
dog for lunch.”
• • •
Friends, if we retreat to the hollow ships, and yield this body to the horse-taming Trojans, who'll
drag it to their city and gain the glory, that would be small fame indeed for us: better the black earth
swallow us instantly where we stand.
—Homer, the
Iliad
Since their arrival in Iraq in September 2009, Kathy Holbert and Strega had started to adjust
to the oppressive heat, the wind, the sand—and the danger.
In November, just two months after their arrival, the military sent them into Afghanistan,
fifteen hundred miles to the north. As they flew in, Kathy could see the country's wild beauty
below: its glorious tan and ocher mountains, its winding rivers, its stunning farms and orch-
ards, which were finally starting to recover from being razed and bombed by the Soviets dur-
ing their nine-year occupation fighting the mujahideen. Kathy knew the beauty would be
offset by what she and Strega would face on landing: a harsher and even more dangerous en-
vironment than Iraq.
“Afghanistan was different,” she said flatly. “They try to kill the dogs.”
Military K9s and handlers get targeted there much more purposefully than in Iraq. Afghan
fighters know how demoralizing it is when the U.S. military loses a handler or K9. Those are
the teams that go out first. The dog sweeps a hundred feet or more in front of his handler,
searching for the scent of IEDs. Both dog and handler are ahead of the troops. Some of the
IEDs have wires running into nearby ditches where someone waits to detonate them. First
out. First to die. Kathy keeps an increasingly long list of dogs and handlers killed.
It's not only the Taliban and their sympathizers who pose a danger. In Afghanistan, Strega
was just another occupier. Children, mostly girls, followed them after they landed. They were
beautiful, Kathy said. She turned to greet them and hand them candy. They countered by
throwing rocks at Strega. “They tagged her pretty good.”
Soon, Kathy and Strega were in a convoy, heading farther north to a search in the
Murghab River, near the border of Turkmenistan—a six-hundred-mile-long river that flows
north and disappears in the sands of the Karakum Desert. Two paratroopers had drowned. It
was a classic tragedy—a crate of supplies dropped out of an aircraft by parachute that ended
up in the river instead of onshore. he first paratrooper was in full battle dress. He waded out
on the shelf of the river, where the water was calm and shallow, and grabbed the supply crate
as it floated by. He must have been pulled hard off the shelf 's rim by the palette's weight just
