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as it careened into the fast, deep water. It would have been like grabbing a floating boat that
suddenly revved up its engine and took off. Seeing his fellow paratrooper in trouble, another
trooper went after him. And like that, he was gone, too.
The Taliban, downriver from the site, claimed they had both men's bodies. Thus began a
massive recovery operation for the two deceased men. A team of British divers flew in and
started searching. After a week, they found the paratrooper who had gone in after his friend.
His body was around the bend in the river, well downstream. The recovery operation came
at great cost. Downstream was filled with Taliban fighters. The Associated Press reported that
eight Afghans were killed—four soldiers, three policemen, and an interpreter. Seventeen oth-
er Afghan soldiers and five American soldiers were wounded.
And no second body surfaced. That was when Greg Sanson, then the personnel recovery
advisor for the U.S. forces in Iraq, got the call asking for a human-remains dog team. He sent
Kathy and Strega.
Water was a familiar search area for Kathy. That was where she got her start with her pre-
vious dog, Mangus. Kathy was a sheriff volunteer with a narcotics patrol dog when she was
called to the scene of a drowning one summer. She sat with the family whose young son had
drowned. They couldn't find the body. he family knew, at some level, that he was dead. Then
again, they didn't.
“This went on for five days,” Kathy said. “I don't think that people understand what fam-
ilies go through when they don't know. One of the things I learned is you don't ever, ever say
the word 'closure' to that family. There's no such thing.”
Those wretched days started her thinking. Could a dog have helped? A state trooper told
her about Charm Gentry, a cadaver-dog handler in another part of the state. “I contacted her,
and it just so happened they were getting ready to do an Andy Rebmann seminar.”
Kathy certified Mangus by the end of the seminar. he week after that, he helped pinpoint
a drowning victim. Mangus ultimately helped recover twenty-seven people. He made it look
easy. He went to the front of the boat, lay down, and put his head over the bow, close to the
water. Just like that. A natural.
Strega, though, had her own ideas about how she wanted to run a water search. She kept
wanting to leap into the water. “She was a very stubborn dog,” Kathy said with pride. The
two of them finally worked out a system that made them both reasonably happy.
And then there they were. In Afghanistan, to work on water.
The terrain was steep, with willows along the edge of the river. The river looked placid on
its east side, where it was shallow and calm enough to reflect a hint of blue sky and a slightly
muddy color, with the sandy shelf just visible underneath. Farther out, the water turned white
with froth, a churning, greenish gray. Kathy suggested she and Strega start searching at the
place where the men fell in. They said they were sure the body had moved on, beyond the
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