DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997                TAG: 9704150511

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   74 lines

DOG AND HANDLER SEARCH IN DISASTERS

And then there was the time that the dog barfed on the shiny shoes of the Secretary of State.

To his credit, George Shultz did not blink.

``We're glad you came,'' the secretary said to Panda, the snowy German shepherd, and her handler, Beth Barkley.

Glad he truly was. The encounter took place on the sixth day of a 1986 recovery effort in the wake of an earthquake at San Salvador. Shultz's role was to reinforce the humanitarian presence of the United States; Panda and Barkley, a volunteer rescue team for the Virginia Department of Emergency Services, embodied that presence.

They had gone into an emotional war zone through collapsed Calle Ruben Dario, once an eight-story commercial building, to uncover the living and the dead. They had been on site when the earth moved again, turning tons of concrete into great random crushers. They had climbed corpses inside a prenatal clinic and located a solitary survivor trapped inside the pancaked Presidential Palace.

So Shultz wasn't sweating the shoes.

Instead he said, ``We won't forget.''

Search and Rescue by Samantha Glen and Mary Pesaresi (Ballantine Books, 198 pp., $5.99) ensures that.

The book is the compelling account of Barkley, 53, formerly a classical vocalist, and her extraordinary life-saving companions. It begins with her first canine encounter in 1980 and continues until her current experience as owner of her own training school, Find 'Em K-9 SAR, in Falls Church.

Panda came as a surprise wedding gift from Barkley's husband, Jed. The marriage didn't last, but her interest in dogs did. It took Barkley and Panda two years of ``scrambling through woods, crawling under buildings, sloshing through swamp and stream'' to test and qualify as a team with DOGS East, Inc., in northern Virginia. But the experience prepared them to be of service in finding lost Boy Scouts in the dense woods of Quantico marine base, a wandering Alzheimer's patient in Grayson National Forest and earthquake casualties in El Salvador's sacked capital city.

Also, yes, victims in the rubble of the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Barkley understands better than most how important it is to return people's remains to their families. Such closure is the first step toward grieving and eventual healing.

Panda and his white shepherd successors, Sirius and Czar, operated unleashed through 24- to 36-hour ``windows of survival'' and beyond. They were propelled by 220 million scent receptors that penetrated piles of debris and fathoms of water. Theirs was, and remains, dangerous work.

On a 1988 mission to Soviet Armenia, Barkley and Panda saw earthquake devastation in Leninakan that inundated tens of thousands. Inside a ripped apartment building, Panda scaled a slope of rubble that rained down on her handler, trapping Barkley to her knees and then, the dog scrabbling back, to her waist. She was well on her way to burial alive.

Beth laid her body on the shifting mass, displacing her weight. Rocks chipped her face, and she stilled. Her leg was bent in the press of the debris, but it wasn't packed tight enough to be trapped.

With infinitesimal exertion, she rotated her left hip. It moved. Yes! Inch by painful inch - her thigh came free; her knee; at last her left foot. . . .

Authors Glen and Pesarisi approach their subject with respect and affection. They also co-wrote Family: Everyday Stories about the Miracle of Love, honored by the Family Channel with a Seal of Quality for best adult book of 1996. Glen lives with her family in Nevada, Pesarisi with hers in Georgia.

Barkley became an instructor at the Ground Search and Rescue College of the VDES and Fairfax County Federal Emergency Management Agency Canine Disaster Schools. It is impossible to read this account without echoing the breathless response of the father of one of the scouts she and Panda retrieved from the Quantico wild:

``Hey, lady!

``Thanks. . . . '' MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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