those brown napkins universally stocked in public toilets. There, as plain
as day, is a sizeable piece of duct tape, hastily plastered above the keyhole of the clearly broken cabinet. It is out of place against the otherwise well- maintained and clean bathroom. He pulls back the tape and opens the silver compartment, revealing the bomb. In my hurry to perform wellor get away from the crowd of observersId breezed right by this painfully obvi- ous visual clue. If I had been looking more carefully, it wouldve been the very rst thing I saw coming into the bathroom. But I hadnt been using my eyes; I was relying on Haus to do the work and focusing all my attention on him. My clear inexperience, my confusion ran right down the leash to the dog. He knew the moment I gave up even as I was trying to hide it, and he exposed me by sitting in the middle of the room and giving up his search. It was a fast but effective lesson. Haus didnt trust me, and he revealed not only my limits but also his own when I failed to give him the proper guidance. Its a lesson I only learned by doing, but its at the heart of the folly of all the poor or misguided decisions made by those who do not un- derstand how to work with dogs or who have never gotten close enough to see it for themselves. Jakubin comes into the bathroom and relieves me of Hauss leash. The dog cant get away from me fast enough. Jakubin is amused. Not so easy, is it? he asks. His eyes are twinkling too. If you know what to listen for, the sound is unmistakable. The attuned human ear can hear when a dog has found the sought-after odor usually long before he gives his nal alert. And depending on the training and the kind of detection work, the dog will either sit at the source of odor or lie down to the ground. For obvious reasons, search-and-rescue dogs will bark. A practiced handler will recognize his dogs personal tells the dog may twitch his ears or his movements may slow down and become more deliberate, or he may even have an Im denitely on odor expres- sionbut its really the sound that is the big giveaway. Its the deep, staccato inhale and then the rush of a perfunctory and heavy exhale. It is the sound of satisfaction. It is the sound of discovery. 978-1-137-27968-2_Frankel.indb 95 8/20/14 2:12 PM 96 war dogs The canine nose is a masterful creation; all earthly schnozes 1 are not cre- ated equal, anatomically speaking. While the average dog has roughly 220 million scent receptors in his nasal cavity, the average human has around 5 million. 2 The canine sense of smell is a thousand times more sensitive than a humans. One of the best visual analogies of the dogs acute sense of smell is given by author Mark Derr in Dogs Best Friend: Unfolded and attened, the smell receptors from the average dogs nose could cover it like a second coat with hair dragging on the ground. 3 Even the way a canine nose functions is more developed than ours. A dogs nose has four passages, two inner ones and two on the outside, almost like gills. The inner canals pull in the scent and then exhale to the outer, so that the exhaling air doesnt disturb the ground or source of the next odor, allowing always for the intake of fresh scent. Humans, in contrast, have just the two nasal passages, and what goes up comes back out again the same way. (We can of course draw breath through our mouths when we ingest or exhale oxygen, but it is not the best way to smell, although it is one of the best ways to use our sense of taste for certain foodsby orthonasal, or mouth, breathing. On the other hand, while dogs are great perpetra- tors of mouth breathing, theyre not using it for scent. Though they have good reason to do so. Dogs actually pant through their mouths to cool off, whereas we humans sweat.) That always-damp and cool-to-the-touch quality of the canine nose also has its purpose; moisture that is secreted by mucous glands in the nasal cavity captures and dissolves molecules in the air and brings them into contact with specialized olfactory epithelium inside the nose. 4 Its not that we humans dont use our sense of smell, but as a sense its powerful for very different reasons. Scent recalls memories and awakens our emotional subconscious. We associate different odors, good and bad, with people and placesand theres no accounting for taste in what we relish either. My father, for example, loves the smell of a good barn populated with fragrant livestock. As a family driving the New England interstates, we inevitably passed open pasture, and as we did, my father would lower his window to get his ll of the open air heavy with manure, while my sister 978-1-137-27968-2_Frankel.indb 96 8/20/14 2:12 PM a dog of many talents 97 and I groaned and pinched our noses. He was taking in the scent of his childhood on the farm and all the memories that came with itwe children of the suburbs were just smelling, well, shit. Most people dont make a conscious effort to imprint particular or spe- cial smells, to le them away for later usethey register more like back- ground noise, though invariably certain things punch through the ether, people and places we are reminded of by the power of scent. But perhaps we should take our lead from dogs and program our brains to catalogue smells in more proactive and useful ways. In one of the great old Disney movies, The Parent Trap (with Hayley Mills and Maureen OHara), when one of the girlsSusan, pretending to be her twin sister, Sharonmeets her grandfather for the rst time, she sniffs the lapel of his jacket with such earnest investigation that he pulls back. My dear, what are you doing? he asks. To which she replies, Making a memory. She puts her nose back to his tweedy chest, calling out the scents she identies. When Im quite grown-up, she tells him, I will always remember my grandfather and how he smelled of tobacco and peppermint. 5 Making a memory of a smell, or imprinting odor, is exactly how a dog learns to seek out bombs, weapons caches, narcotics, missing persons, and, sadly, human remains. The process involves training a dog to associate odors with a reward. Dogs become visibly excited when theyve discovered an odor they have been trained to detect. The less disciplined ones will cast their heads back, looking, waiting, and watching for the Kong (or tennis ball, or treat) they know is coming, too eager to contain themselves. In this age of modern warfare and police work, dogs are trained to detect homemade explosives. These bombs are potluck-style concoctions, and while the recipes vary greatly, the ingredients are basically the same. 6
So each dog is trained onor should be trained ona handful of key bomb-making ingredients. This catalog of explosive scents includes TNT, smokeless powder, potassium chlorate, C-4 plastic explosive, detonating cord, and ammonium nitrate. And in order for military trained detection dogs to become certied, military regulations require that they meet a very high accuracy rateexplosive-detection dogs must hit 95 percent accuracy, 978-1-137-27968-2_Frankel.indb 97 8/20/14 2:12 PM 98 war dogs and drug dogs must meet 90 percent accuracy. The key to this kind of training is repetition and reinforcement. Maintaining prociency at such a high rate requires a minimum of four hours of explosive-detection training a week. 7 Whether or not this rate of accuracy also takes place in the arena of combat has not been proven and may be impossible to quantify. 8 This is at least in part due to the fact that there really is no way to assess how many bombs or bomb materials go undetectedunless, of course, they go off after a dog team has cleared an area. Whereas in a controlled environment, when planted materials are used in training, their hiding spots marked and known, those nds can be quantied and qualied. A dog hunting for scent is like a linguist who, even when standing before the Tower of Babel (or more practically speaking, an international airport), can hear not only a cacophony of many tongues clamoring at once, but who can pull apart the sounds to nd and comprehend the individual voices. Imagine a leaf floating down a creek. Shiny and wet, it winks out from the moving water. At rst the leaf spins in lazy, loop- ing circlesaround and around like a carnival ride. Then it meets with a new current, picks up speed, and travels much farther and faster than you thought possible. Powerful, unpredictable, this is the nicky prerogative of the wind. A rocky, dry path in the desert doesnt much resemble a stream, but when the wind passes through the dust, moving around clusters of shrubs and bushes, you can imagine how the analogy of a leaf on moving water captures the movement of scent on airthe sensory path a dog must follow and all the obstacles in between. The shrubs would be like rocks in the wa- ter, parting the current and creating little eddies or pockets of scent. When a dog following scent across the desert oor comes upon a bush, he might pause and sniff around a little more, exploring the eddy created by wind, searching for a stronger pool of the odor he is tracking. In order to harness the power of a dogs natural scent ability, a handler has to understand how a dog reads a scent trail, because its the handlers 978-1-137-27968-2_Frankel.indb 98 8/20/14 2:12 PM