They Sniff at Danger

Translators accompany the students, though the foreigners learn basic commands in English, such as "sit," "search" and the international toilet directive -- "take a break." The American trainers help them adjust, Bohan says: A Jordanian villager was stumped by water fountains; the Egyptians came back from the flea market waving Confederate flags; the Malaysians drank "stone-hot Budweiser," until the American explosives experts taught them how to ice the beer in the bathtub.

The Labradors experience their own period of adjustment. Most are 12 to 18 months old and are dropouts from other programs. In Ricky Bobby's ATF class, two sisters, Wendy and Wags, had failed the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection course because the reward system involved playing tug-of-war with a towel. The sisters did not want to play.

ATF uses food rewards; the dogs get fed only when they sit to signal the presence of explosives. They can detect more than 19,000 kinds of explosives from up to a third of a mile away. "My last dog would work all night for baby carrots," Bohan says. "A dog's instinct is to hunt, but he learns, 'If I follow Dummy over here, I get food.' "

Many of the Labradors have been dismissed from guide-dog schools. "We have dogs that are bouncing off the wall, wild-horse dogs. If you have a handicapped person with him, it's going look like a chariot race," says Bohan, a 2007 Homeland Security finalist for a Service to America Medal. "We channel that energy into detection."

As a puppy, Ricky Bobby's energy level was so high, three families took him home and then rejected him. The Howard County shelter was about to euthanize him when Joann Chambers, 71, a Lab Rescue volunteer, spotted his potential. Lab Rescue placed Ricky Bobby in the Falls Church home of Amy Waggoner, a graphics designer who fostered him until ATF admitted him.

"I think he could have hung onto the ceiling fan and twirled," says Waggoner, 28, who sprinkled Parmesan cheese on Ricky Bobby's food, turned on Animal Planet on two televisions when she left for work, and shared her pillow with him. ("I love dog breath, I love dog kisses, I love dog drool.")

At first Waggoner opposed sending "my lovely baby boy" to work abroad. She imagined him sleeping in a dark kennel, on hot, concrete floors. But ATF staffers assured her, and then one night a friend's 9-year-old came over to play and raised her arm to throw a ball. Ricky Bobby sprang, knocking the child into a wall. The dog needed a job.

Mary Jane, Ricky Bobby's ATF classmate, had also been a misfit. Mary Jane's parents, says Janet Sommerville of Guiding Eyes for the Blind, "came from long lines of guide-dog producers. Our creme de la creme." Three of Mary Jane's siblings, Alba, Alexis and Alec, had all passed the entrance exam. But when Mary Jane took her guide-dog test, "she whined the whole time." She shrank to the floor when she saw an opened umbrella.

John Pucci, 62, an inmate serving 25 years to life for his involvement in a 1978 drug-related shooting, was not surprised. He had adopted Mary Jane at 8 weeks through a program called Puppies Behind Bars. He had trained her from the winter day he'd zipped her into his jacket. "She licked me all the way back to the unit," Pucci recalled from the Fishkill Correctional Facility in New York.

For 15 months, Pucci slept next to Mary Jane's crate, on top of his prison bed, so he could jump up if she whimpered, he said: "Mary Jane never had an accident."

"She keeps me smiling!" Pucci wrote in a letter to his daughter. "I take her for a walk. Around and around I go, and it seems like I'm miles and miles away from here."

Though satiny black and affectionate, Mary Jane was "not a confident dog," Pucci said. She wasn't a leader, but she could be led, so she was transferred from Guiding Eyes for the Blind to the bomb-dog program.