So how, when you hear the word cancer, does it affect you emotionally? Uh, does it affect your outlook on life, like?

It's, it's tough because not only, um, have I lost, you know, my three dogs, my mom is a, is a two-time, a two-time cancer survivor, and I just lost my dad, um, about a couple months ago to, to cancer.

But the beautiful story about this with my dad, and you know, I talked about in the beginning of this interview how my dad left when I was young, and my dad was in and out of my life.

Um, well, well, two stories to that, and um, I'll get to the ending part first.

But on my 18th birthday, my dad had gotten me tickets to, I live in Baltimore, right outside of Baltimore, to Cal Ripken's, um, record-breaking game, and I thought it was gonna be this great, great bonding moment, um, you know, with my dad.

And my dad ended up not showing up, and it, it broke my heart, and I, I lived with that trauma for, for years, right? So fast-forward to last year, um, you know, Tambo going through his cancer battle, getting a lot of recognition.

Baltimore Orioles call, my hometown team, they wanna honor Tambo.

Tell us about the cover, how long it took you to write that book, all that good stuff.

How do you how did you manage that? And do you have thoughts on that work in several dogs and working amongst different handlers and units like where people can have that? What am I looking for? I'm almost looking for that allowance to make mistakes, because for me, my perception of when a dog's called out, like all eyes are on, you're like, you know, it's it's up to you to make or break this case.

Yeah.

And, and I had, I had to learn early on my, my first dog was a, you know, a dual purpose dog.

And, and back then, you know, when Bernie brought me on, they gave me this, I was living at home with my mom and they gave me this Malinois and they're like, here's your dog.

And I'm taking this, this dog home.

And it was like taking this Ferrari home.

And, trying to figure things out.

so now comes kind

That's a, what a lot of people don't get.

Absolutely.

And, you know, one of the funny things with, uh, you know, with Tambo is, uh, you know, when I got him, um, you know, I came back to the unit.

I had retired two dogs and left, and then I came back as our commander and, uh, they weren't gonna give me a dog.

And so I went back and forth with my, my boss at the time, who was, uh, somebody I came up with on the K9 unit.

You know, and they said I was gonna be too busy.

So we bantered back and forth for a year.

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