Local airman's dog sniffs out weapons in Iraq
A nose for trouble
The bad guys don’t want our troops and our Iraqi allies to find their weapons, so they bury them. Deep. But a couple feet of sand is no match for the sharp nose of a local airman’s faithful comrade-in-arms.
Since 9-11, when Air Force Staff Sgt. Terry Mace Jr. said, “I’m going back in,” he’s been a military working dog handler, said his dad, Terry Mace Sr.
Mace Jr. had previously served in the service, but left to work for various law enforcement agencies, specializing in dog handling. Before returning to active duty, he handled a drug dog in South Dakota.
“He’s been on several presidential and U.N. details,” his dad said proudly. “Actually, the Secret Service would ask for Terry by name.”
Staff Sgt. Mace’s current partner, Palli, has more than earned his keep, detecting several caches of weapons buried in the sands of Iraq. These are guns, ammunition and explosives that insurgents had hoped to later dig up and use against American and Iraqi government forces.
While on patrol in the village of Tarmiyah, toward the end of 2009, Palli alerted on a pile of brush and debris. It turned out to mark the burial site of a cache containing two AK-47 assault rifles, 150 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition, and 15 7.62 mm magazines. The weapons were at least two feet underground.
Staff Sgt. Mace and Palli are based at Camp Cropper, north of Baghdad, with the Army’s Third Security Forces Squadron. Being an airman assigned to an Army unit is sometimes a bit awkward, Mace Sr. said.
“He told me, ‘Dad, they talk to me different than us,’” he said. Terry Mace Sr., a facilities maintenance supervisor at Northwest Florida Regional Airport, is retired from the Air Force. He is also a member of the Crestview Police Department Auxiliary.
Since 1996 the Mace family, including Terry Jr., his brother Tim Mace, a North Okaloosa Fire District firefighter, and their parents, Mace Sr. and Yvonne, have lived in Crestview. Tim currently lives in Holt.
Palli trained at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio before he deployed to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, where Terry Mace Jr. picked him up. The 3-year-old shepherd seems to enjoy his current assignment to Camp Cropper, except for one thing, Mace Sr. reported.
“He doesn’t like the night flights,” he said. “He can’t see nothing from the chopper windows.”
