Photo by Charles Champagne
When Marine Corporal Jared Heine and his dog, Spike, arrive at my home for an interview, my dog, Suzie, is dividing her time between terrorizing the cat and dismembering a shoe. Suzie is a four-month-old mutt of indeterminate heritage, adopted from St. Francisville’s West Feliciana Animal Humane Society shelter. At this stage in her brief life, she is still getting the hang of commands like “Sit!” and “Stay.” Frankly, we would be pleased if she would just come when called. Spike, on the other hand, is a six-year-old black Labrador retriever trained to identify the chemicals used by Taliban explosives makers to build the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that have killed more than 1,400 coalition troops in Afghanistan since 2001 and injured ten times that number[1]. In 2011 Cpl. Heine and Spike were assigned to the Twelfth Marines division in Afghanistan, where they served as a K-9 bomb detection team walking foot patrols and house-clearing operations in Helmand Province. Up to six days a week, Heine and Spike patrolled with soldiers from the Second Battalion, Spike directed by Heine’s voice and hand commands to range ahead of the troops, scrutinizing trails, treelines, and ditches for hidden IEDs.
When it comes to sniffing things out, dogs leave us humans in the dust. According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine[2], a dog has something like forty times the number of olfactory receptor cells that a human does, and with as much as thirty-five percent of the canine brain assigned to smell-related operations (compared with our five percent), it becomes easier to understand why it’s hard to get your dog’s attention when he’s got his nose into something he shouldn’t. So when Heine pulls up and opens the tailgate, Spike
comes out, nose to the ground, conducting an olfactory surveillance sweep of his new environment from which, presumably, little escapes. Trim and sleek with a glossy, black coat, Spike appears relatively compact by Labrador standards. He’s sporting the purple and gold LSU collar that he wore throughout his Afghanistan tour, and as he follows his nose around the yard, getting his bearings, Heine explains that Labs tend to be the military’s choice for bomb dogs for their combination of three characteristics: a superlative sense of smell, a relatively small stature (with a weight that won’t trigger a bomb’s pressure plate), and the breed’s inexhaustible desire to please. “You want them to have that ‘strive,’” Heine explains, “that happiness.” Other breeds, including German shepherds, bloodhounds, and golden retrievers, share the olfactory firepower to sniff out an IED, but there’s no other breed with the persistence required to stick with the task all day long, day after day, quite like a Labrador.
(Pictured: In 2011 Marine Corporal Jared Heine and dog Spike were assigned to the Twelfth Marines division in Afghanistan, where they served as a K-9 bomb detection team, walking foot patrols and performing house-clearing operations in Helmand Province. Photo by Charles Champagne.)
We set off on a walk toward a nearby pond and the two dogs romp ahead, snuffling in thickets, wallowing in mud puddles, doing what dogs do. But a word from Heine, and Spike calls off his site reconnaissance and snaps to attention, all his goofy, loping playfulness replaced by a steely, preternatural focus for his master’s command. Ears erect, every faculty alert, Spike is suddenly a soldier, the scrambling puppy forgotten at his side. We set off again and for once, I don’t need to spend ten minutes trying to get Suzie’s attention; wildly impressed with her new acquaintance, she is never more than a paw print behind Spike as he sweeps the path in front of us in a zigzag formation that seems less erratic than that which our own dogs typically take. As we walk, Heine explains that training a bomb detection dog is rather like training a duck dog. Only more dangerous. Like most bomb dogs, Spike was about one and a half years old when he was matched with Heine via a personality test; the pair was sent to a company named American K-9 Interdiction in South Carolina for training. “I was his first handler, so we had a really good bond,” Heine noted.
At K-9 Interdiction, the pair learned to work as a team, Heine directing Spike with voice, hand, and arm signals and rewarding him with praise and food treats for work well done. By the time they arrived in Helmand Province, Spike had learned to seek out the chemical vapors, or “volatiles,” associated with nearly twenty chemicals—from TNT to C4 to various homemade combinations—commonly used in roadside bombs and had also learned, crucially, to respond by lying down when identifying one, leaving his quarry undisturbed.
“Where we were, there were plenty of people who would plant bombs, but only one bombmaker,” explains Heine. “What he used was potassium nitrate.” Before going out on a patrol Heine would direct Spike to focus on potassium nitrate by sensitizing him to a sample.
“Anytime he smelled it, he would lay down, usually within six feet,” Heine notes. “Then we’d call EOD, or just use spray paint to mark them up and move on.” In this way, Spike alerted his patrols to more than ten IEDs, and, according to Heine, saved a lot of lives. But the work was grueling. On a patrol, Heine would direct Spike to run various formations ahead of the unit, directing his movements while taking into account variables such as tree cover, terrain, and wind strength and direction. All this was made more hazardous by the fact that the Taliban knew that the K-9 teams were effective and would post a bounty on the handlers, knowing that the loss of a good dog/handler team made their IEDs more deadly.
Originally, Second Battalion was assigned four bomb-detection teams. But according to Heine, two teams didn’t work out, leaving Heine and Spike and one other K-9 unit to protect all of the battalion’s foot patrols. “Essentially, we were walking two foot patrols and two training sessions a day, six days a week,” says Heine. “We’d get one day off so Spike could rest up and let his pads heal. Then we’d go again.” That kind of a schedule is as hard on the dogs as it is on their handlers, and it’s one of the reasons why Labradors, with their joyful temperament and eagerness to please, make highly effective bomb dogs. Heine explains that sometimes, on a long patrol, he would see Spike losing heart, getting tired, his attention and enthusiasm flagging. “Because he has that ‘strive,’ all I’d have to do was bring him in and let him smell the [potassium nitrate] sample again, and encourage him, and he’d take off again, ready to go for hours.”
So it went for seven months, until the day in 2012 when a roadside bomb exploded at close quarters, leaving the marine with a traumatic brain injury, shrapnel wounds to a knee, and hearing damage that ended his tour. Heine came home to St. Francisville; Spike got a new handler. And although Heine applied to adopt the dog through official Marine Corps adoption agency channels, when Spike finished his military service he was reassigned to a U.S. police force K-9 unit, disappearing into the system. As highly (and expensively) trained as K-9 bomb dogs are—Heine notes that a fully trained dog represents a greater than sixty thousand dollar investment—they are rarely retired early without compelling reason. Back home, while working his way through a chef-training course at the Louisiana Culinary Institute, Heine struggled with post traumatic stress disorder and found himself missing Spike badly. But he had no idea where the dog was. Concerned for his welfare, Heine’s mother, Mary Strahan Heine, set about trying to locate Spike and got in touch with an organization named Boots and Collars that helps reconnect military handlers and the dogs with whom they served. After posting a “Were You My Battle Buddy?” query and photo to the Facebook page “Military Working Dogs,” Mary discovered that Spike was in Richmond, assigned to the Virginia Capitol Police and conducting bomb sweeps of the state capitol building, which houses the oldest legislative body in the Western Hemisphere. She got in touch with the police chief, Colonel Steve Pike, and more than two years after Heine’s return from Afghanistan, mother and son drove to Richmond for a reunion. There Col. Pike, recognizing the strength of the bond that still existed between the black lab doing his state capitol sweep and the injured young veteran who had driven all the way from Louisiana to visit him, arranged to have Spike retired and sent to St. Francisville for good.
Old habits die hard; the pair still train daily. On the way back from the pond, Suzie and I get a demonstration. Producing a small, green rubber bumper, Heine calls Spike to heel and shows him his quarry. The dog is instantly alert, sitting erect and motionless, focused only on the bumper and undistracted by the overexcited puppy flopping about trying to get his attention. While she’s no retriever, Suzie has grasped that the bumper is something desirable because when Heine hurls it deep into the knee-high grass of the adjacent field, she tears off in a fruitless quest to track it down. Not Spike. Quivering with anticipation, he remains rooted to the spot while his master murmurs “Sit ... sit.” Then, with the word “Back!” the Labrador is off, haring out into the tall grass into which the bumper, and the puppy, have vanished. Waving fronds betray his location, revealing that Spike, by a combination of instinct and exhaustive training, is methodically crisscrossing the field, nose down, homing in on a prize invisible to those used to relying on their eyes for everything. Then he gets a whiff and abruptly changes direction. Three turns and he has it, back to Heine’s side basking in his master’s lavish praise: “GOOD dog; GOOD dog,” delivered in a high-low, singsong voice. Suzie, emerging empty-mouthed from the grass, sidles up looking impressed and steals the bumper from between Spike’s feet. The dog doesn’t complain.
1: icasualties.org
2: “The Education of a Bomb Dog,”
Smithsonian Magazine, July, 2013.
Details. Details. Details
Marine Corporal Jared Heine and Spike will be guests of honor at the West Feliciana Animal Humane Society’s third annual gala. Saturday, August 1, from 6 pm–10 pm at Hemingbough. $25 tickets are available online through Brown Paper Tickets, and at the door.
