The worst rescue call of his life

It was an odor unlike any he'd ever experienced, and one he'll likely never forget.

"How can we possibly search this? Where do we begin?" Dave Perks told himself as he first laid eyes on the smoldering World Trade Center wreckage. Enormous steel beams curled through the rubble like ribbons, and noxious gray smoke gave everything a ghostly cast.

"You ever smelled a dump on fire?" asks Dave. "That's what it was like." He pauses, remembering. "Today, nobody can tell me to go to hell. I've been there twice."

First, the Oklahoma City bombing. Then, two years ago, New York City. As soon as the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, "I knew we'd be going," says Dave, 56, manager and dog handler for Rocky Mountain Rescue Dogs.

"I knew it would be bad, but it was worse than I thought. One hundred and ten stories were pressed together like a stack of newspapers. You don't forget that."

To commemorate the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Dave invited me for a Free Lunch chat at the rescue dogs' training compound in Magna.

While his wife, Gail, and another trainer, Marianne Crowell, led five German shepherds and black Labradors through an agility course and practiced finding "victims" in a rubble pile, Dave watched from the sidelines with his oldest dog, Tonto, and recalled the worst rescue call of his life.

Normally, when his phone rings late at night, Dave knows he'll soon be searching in a dark forest for a lost hiker or a child who has wandered away from camp.

He never imagined he'd be looking through ash in Manhattan. After finding 10 victims with Tonto in the Oklahoma City tragedy, he'd hoped there would never again be a disaster of such magnitude.

So, as part of Utah Task Force One, a FEMA emergency response team, it was with an uneasy stomach that Dave observed the smoldering rubble from the window of his plane approaching New York City.

"I grew up in Newark, N.J.," he says. "I saw those towers go up. To look out and not see them there was unbelievable. It would be like sitting here and not seeing the mountains."

Dave and his daughter's black lab, Kenji, searched ground zero for 10 days but found nothing except a few human remains. "We didn't even find a single telephone or one computer," he says. "There were no keyboards, no desks, no chairs. Everything was just gone."

Because the search dogs were getting discouraged, it was arranged for firefighters to hide in the debris and be "rescued."