Rebecca’s War Dog of the Week: U.K.’s bomb-sniffing dog, Jake, retires home with soldier

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

Andy
Hawkett was a career military man who had retired from service after tours
in Kosovo and Bosnia in 2002. But seven years later, he rejoined as part of the
British Army's volunteer force, the Territorial Defense, in 2009. And when Hawkett
was asked to join a bomb disposal team operating out of Camp Bastion in
Afghanistan, he went willingly.

Once in country, he was attached to a unit of seven other
men -- including a handler and his bomb-sniffing dog, a springer spaniel named
Jake. Over the next several months their job was to patrol for IEDs, and during
that time Hawkett became very fond of Jake. The days were long and hot for the
soldiers and the dog. And as Hawkett told
the Express, the tempo of their work
varied greatly, "sometimes [it would] be so monotonously
boring that the thought of finding a device or being shot at by the Taliban is
pretty exhilarating."

And then one day their team had one
traumatic find -- one of the members stepped on an IED during a patrol. The
blast knocked everyone off their feet, and the man who set off the explosives
lost both his legs. Jake happened not to be with them on that particular patrol
but was back at their base. The horror of what Hawkett saw overwhelmed him and
when they returned, he broke down. It was Jake who comforted him. "Jake came to
me and put his paws on my shoulders and I guess that was when the bond between
us really felt rock solid."

We've had a lot of stories here about handlers -- many, many
handlers -- who've stood in long lines to adopt the dogs with whom they've gone
to war or spent years with working stateside. Less common, rare even, is to
hear of a soldier who went to the same lengths to adopt a MWD who was just on
his or her tour. But it certainly reinforces how much these dogs affect all the
people who work closely with them. When Hawkett discovered that Jake's career
as a military dog would end after that tour in Afghanistan in 2010, he put in a
request to adopt him. After 18 months of silence, the Defence Animal Centre
contacted him asking if Hawkett and his family still wanted to take Jake. The
answer, of course, was, "yes."

The Hawkett family says that Jake is a
fully retired war dog who "may be good at sniffing out bombs but he's
definitely not so handy at finding lost socks or toys. He loves his walks
although he can't go as far as he used to."

Rebecca Frankel's book about
military working dogs will be published by Atria Books in August 2013.