Welcome to “Bomb Dog U,” Where Pooches Are Trained to Thwart Terrorism

When I first meet a young Labrador named Merry, she is clearing her nostrils with nine or ten sharp snorts before she snuffles along a row of luggage pieces, all different makes and models. They’re lined up against the wall of a large hangar on a country road outside Hartford, Connecticut. This is where MSA Security trains what are known in the security trade as explosive detection canines, or EDCs. Most people call them bomb dogs.

The luggage pieces joined shrink-wrapped pallets, car-shaped cutouts, and concrete blocks on the campus of MSA’s “Bomb Dog U.” Dogs don’t need to be taught how to smell, of course, but they do need to be taught where to smell—along the seams of a suitcase, say, or underneath a pallet, where the vapors that are heavier than air settle.

In the shrouded world of bomb-dog education, MSA is an elite academy. Its teams deploy mostly to the country’s big cities, and each dog works with one specific handler, usually for eight or nine years. MSA also furnishes dogs for what it describes only as “a government agency referred to by three initials for use in Middle East conflict zones.”

Strictly speaking, the dog doesn’t smell the bomb. It deconstructs an odor into its components, picking out the culprit chemicals it has been trained to detect. Zane Roberts, MSA’s former lead canine trainer and current program manager, uses a cooking analogy: “When you walk into a kitchen where someone is making spaghetti sauce, your nose says, Aha, spaghetti sauce. A dog’s nose doesn’t say that. Instinctively, it says tomatoes, garlic, rosemary, onion, oregano.” It’s the handler who says spaghetti sauce or, in this case, bomb.

MSA’s dogs arrive at headquarters when they are between a year and a year and a half old. They begin building their vocabulary of suspicious odors by working with rows of more than 100 identical cans laid out in a grid. Ingredients from the basic chemical families of explosives are placed in random cans.

Merry works eagerly down the row, wagging her tail briskly and pulling slightly on the leash. This is a bomb dog’s idea of a good time. Snort, snort, sniff, snort, snort, sniff, snort, snort, sniff. Suddenly, Merry sits down. All bomb dogs are schooled to respond this way when they’ve found what they’re looking for. No one wants a dog pawing and scratching at something that could explode.

“Good dog,” says Roberts. He reaches into a pouch on his belt for the kibble that is the working dog’s wage.

It would be tough to conceive of a better smelling machine than a dog. Thirty-five percent of a dog’s brain is assigned to smell-related operations, whereas a human brain lends only 5 percent of its cellular resources to the task. In her book Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz, a psychologist at Barnard College, notes that while a human might smell a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of coffee, a dog could detect a teaspoon in a million gallons of water—nearly enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools.

Where bomb dogs have really proved their mettle is on the battlefield. Before joining MSA as vice president of operations, Joe Atherall commanded Company C of the Marines 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion in Iraq’s Al Anbar province. The unit had three dog teams attached to it.

“One day, intel directed us to a school, but we didn’t find a lot. Then we brought in the dogs,” recalls Atherall. “There were French drains around the outside of the school, and the dogs started hitting on them. When we opened them up, we found an extensive IED cache, small arms weapons, and mortar rounds, along with det cord and other explosive material.” Detonation cord is the dog whistle of odors, with nearly unsmellable vapor pressure.

“I loved those dogs,” says Atherall. “They were lifesavers.”

It is hard to imagine a more high-hearted warrior than a dog. The canines work for love, they work for praise, they work for food, but mostly they work for the fun of it. “It’s all just a big game to them,” says Mike Wynn, MSA’s director of canine training. “The best bomb dogs are the dogs that really like to play.”

This doesn’t mean that war is a lark for dogs. In 2007, Army veterinarians started seeing dogs that showed signs of canine post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We’re seeing dogs that are over-responsive to sights and sounds or that become hypervigilant—like humans that are shaken up after a car accident,” says Walter Burghardt, of the Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Caught early enough, says Burghardt, half the affected dogs can be treated and returned to active duty. “The other half just have to find something else to do for a living.”

Because of the emotional wear on the dogs, scientists have been trying to build a machine that can out-smell the animals. At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, scientists are working on ionization technology to “see” vapors the way a dog does—the same basic technology used by security officers at an airport but far more sensitive.

On the other hand, says Robert Ewing, a senior research scientist, dogs have been doing this job for years. “I don’t know that you could ever replace them.”

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Warning: You Will Want to Adopt an Orphaned Baby Squirrel After Reading This

Our children learned to cherish life, no matter how small, by caring for an orphan baby squirrel.

My husband, Shawn, and I enjoy seeing life through the eyes of our five children. It’s amazing to watch as they discover their world.

While we were outdoors last summer enjoying the sunshine, our oldest daughter, Kaytlin, called me to the porch. Beneath the steps was a baby red squirrel.

We watched it from a distance, not wanting to disturb it or scare off its mother. But after a long wait—and looking all around our property for traces of a nest or a mother—we realized the tiny squirrel was likely an orphan.

Shaking terribly, he was frail, thin, and hungry. We tried to find an expert to help, but the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife website showed that there were no wildlife rehabilitators in our county. After some quick research, we concluded that the best way to give the squirrel a fighting chance was to care for him ourselves. So a trip to the local Tractor Supply store for puppy formula and supplies was in order.

More extensive research taught us how much to feed him, how to estimate his age, how and when to wean him, and that we should release him as soon as he could survive on his own.

Our daughters and I shared rotations of feeding “Squirt.” Kaytlin took on the most responsibility. She taught him to eat from a syringe, and she woke in the night for his feeds.

To our relief, Squirt soon began to thrive. Within a few weeks he became more alert and active. He would chatter for his next meal, playfully crawl around on the girls, and curl up on them for a nap. It wasn’t long before he was weaned onto solid food and reintroduced to the wild.

His first few visits to the great outdoors were comical. Just like a child, he would play in the grass some and then run back to Kaytlin for safety. Soon she had him climbing trees and finding nest material.

One day in the trees, he met up with a family of gray squirrels that was none too happy about his visit. They scolded and swatted at him, and he quickly learned some social skills. For several days he played all day in the trees surrounding our house but came down at bedtime.

And then one night, he didn’t. The rain pounded hard, and our girls fretted. But when the sun rose, there was Squirt, begging for a bite to eat. And that remained the pattern for a few weeks.

Squirt became well known in our neighborhood, and visitors knew to be on the lookout when they stopped by. But mostly he played in the trees, chattering away to anyone who happened to cross his path and occasionally swiping snacks from our toddler boys.

The experience was entertaining and heartwarming for our family. In the wild and somewhat silly moments of raising an orphaned baby squirrel, our children learned to value and appreciate life.

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My Father Was Dying in the Hospital. Then Another Patient Changed Everything.

When it came time to take my dad off of life support, I felt completely helpless. Then a perfect stranger made a heartbreaking situation slightly more bearable.

I got a call from my sister that my dad had taken a turn for the worse, and I needed to get home right away. I wasn’t ready for that. When I got to the hospital, he had already slipped into a coma. I had missed all the dramatic goodbyes that were said because everyone knew he was not gonna make it. So that was upsetting.

He was in a coma for a while. It was that weird place where everybody is connected by this thing and it’s killing us. After two weeks, I brought up the idea that maybe we should pull the plug. I don’t know where that saying comes from, ’cause nobody pulls a plug. Everybody stays plugged in.

But it was time. We all knew. I thought it would happen like on Days of Our Lives. I thought you would pull the plug, and there’d be a lot of crying for ten to 15 minutes, and then the person would pass, and you would be sad, but it would be over.

Instead, we waited for four, then five, hours. And you wanted to scream, ’cause it’s crazy. Right in the middle of this, they wheel another woman into our room, a woman who had just had heart surgery. I remember thinking, That’s not a good idea. My dad is dying. Why are you bringing in a woman who’s had heart surgery? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s bad management.

The woman was on a lot of medication and saying crazy things. She’s 80 and naked and kicking her covers off. I’m on this side of the room, with a curtain that is not very soundproof, sitting by my dad, saying, “I love you, Dad. I’m really going to miss you.”

From the other side, we hear, “Cinnamon.”

“You were such a great dad to me.”

“Cinnamon.”

“Dad, you were wonderful—”

“Cinnamon.”

Finally, you can’t help laughing, because your life is exploding in front of your eyes, and it’s that moment where you’re crying and laughing. Then my husband says, “Thirty ccs of cinnamon, stat!” It killed me, and we all stopped crying for a moment and laughed really hard.

Four hours later, the nurse says, “It’s probably time. His heart rate is lowering.” We are holding his hand, and she says, “Maybe if you tell him it’s OK to go, he’ll go.”

So we all say, “Daddy, it’s OK” and “We love you,” and my mom says, “John, you were such a great dad, and I love you, and it’s OK, I’ll take care of the girls.” And across the room from the old lady in the bed, we hear, “Don’t go, John.”

Yeah.

And I remember thinking, That’s what I feel. That was what was inside me. I think I gave that woman my words: “Don’t go, John. Don’t go.”

But he did. I had my hand on his chest and his heart stopped.

Later, we found out Cinnamon Lady—that’s what I call her, Cinnamon Lady—didn’t have anyone in her life named John. I thought, Wow, that’s crazy. But we also learned she was a baker. So we understood the cinnamon part.

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‘Sesame Street’ Nearly Killed Our Son With Autism

A parent recounts a harrowing tale about raising a child with an obsessive mind.

Our oldest son, Sam, has autism and Tourette’s, with powerful obsessions and compulsions. Some were episodic, one-time things that he had to do and had to do now, like go over the barrier at the zoo’s gorilla enclosure. Climb over the fence on the edge of a 200-foot fall into Lake Superior. Wander off at sunset in the Porcupine Mountains.

Others were more periodic, things he had to do every single day for a period of six months, a year, a year and a half. Some were harmless, like the year he wore a Band-Aid on his face every single day. And some were a little more frightening, like the stretch when he had to run out and touch the yellow line in the road with his finger to a count of four.

You couldn’t stop him. He could take off while I was cooking dinner or we were all asleep. The best you could do was to try to protect him. His obsessions and compulsions were like an itch that, if he didn’t scratch it, just grew and grew. We’d survived each episode with no casualties. But when he was about eight years old, there was one that I misunderstood.

Sammy was compulsively removing the wire ties that connected our chain link fence to the upright supports and top bar. He was using his little fingers to wiggle the ties back and forth to get them loose. It was taking him forever, but he was working his way down the fence. I’d go out at night regularly with my pliers, and I’d put them all back on.

Sam is not our only child. Over the years, my wife and I have raised 17 children. At the time, we had five other children, so I’d fallen behind. One day, I looked out the back window, and I saw the fence between our house and the neighbor’s house lying flat in the grass. Over by the power lines was Sammy with a wobbling 20-foot-long pole.

We’ve learned over the years that you can’t panic, you can’t yell. That only makes a bad situation worse. So I said, “Sammy, let me have the pole. Give Papa the pole, Sammy.”

Before I could get ahold of it, he swings it. Wham! Wham! You know that gray cylindrical box attached to a utility pole where the power line goes in? He hits it hard, and as he hits it, he yells, “Oscar! Come outta you can! Come outta you garbage can, Oscar!”

He thought the transformer was Oscar’s garbage can from Sesame Street. I had thought his compulsion was bending those wires, but no—it had a singular purpose.

I said, “Sammy, Oscar doesn’t live up there. Oscar lives on the ground.”

“He live on the ground?”

“Yes, he lives on the ground.” Then I said, “If you hit that, you could die.”

“I could die?”

“You could die.”

“I could die?”

“Yes, you could die.”

So 45 minutes later, I’ve persuaded him to come inside and see the Sesame Street video and show him that Oscar does indeed live on the ground.

But I’m not foolish enough to think I’ve talked him out of his compulsion. So I run to the fencing store and buy three big bundles of those wire ties.

Navigating Sammy’s diagnoses over the past 20-some years has taught my family to appreciate the little things.

My wife summed it up beautifully on one of our family camping trips. We were sitting around the fire having a well-deserved nightcap in our little tin cups. She looked up at me and said, “Honey, it was a good day. No fatalities.”

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