From Baghdad with Love by Jay Kopelman (a court of thorns and roses ebook free .TXT) 📕

The next ten pounds came off during his first month at Triple Canopy’s fortified compound at the edge between the Green and Red Zones of Baghdad.

Because the US military was stretched to its breaking point, the private company won government contracts in 2004 to protect the thirteen headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which governed Iraq during the US-led occupation. The company, newly formed by two retired members of the US Army’s Delta Force, shipped armored vehicles, weapons, and rucksacks full of cash to Iraq, where its employees used them to protect American dignitaries. Most of Triple Canopy’s recruits came from Latin America, mostly from Peru, Chile, Colombia, and El Salvador, and while they didn’t like to be called mercenaries, they probably could have pasted the word into their résumés if necessary.

Brad and Vischa’s first job for Triple Canopy was to protect the company’s compound in the Green Zone by checking incoming ­vehicles for explosives. Only one bomb went off while he was there—an improvised explosive device detonated at the entrance of the Iraqi National Guard camp across a field from the Triple Canopy camp, but it was close enough to blind Brad when its shock wave sent a fine layer of dust his way.

The last thirty pounds came off one month at a time during the twelve weeks he spent searching for explosives at the entrance to the US/British Embassy in Kirkuk. It didn’t seem like a long time when looking back, but wearing Kevlar 24/7, moving only in armored vehicles at high rates of speed, and holding your breath in every time a vehicle approached the embassy went a long way toward inciting homesickness. He’d held his breath so many times during the past four months, going home felt like gulping air.

But he had to do this one last thing for Ken.

CHAPTER SEVEN

November 2004

Fallujah

After three weeks in Fallujah, I return to the main base with Lava on Thanksgiving Day in a Humvee—which, after serial bombardments, firefights, and crashes, looks more like a secondhand stock car than a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle that costs slightly less to assemble than the average American mansion.

I have no idea what I’m going to do with Lava, but he loves the loud, rumbling trip, and as I drive and he perches on my lap and drools all over the window and roos at the thousands of Fallujah evacuees we pass by, I enter yet another excuse to the catalog of why I’m breaking military rules: I can’t help it.

I don’t remember exactly when the excuses started, but it was sometime between the afternoon I saw the dogs eating dead bodies and the time I found Lava rolled up in my sleeping bag. After that, the excuses flowed: because the Iraqi soldiers were failing; because I was tired; because so many children hadn’t been evacuated by their parents when they’d been warned; because I was out of cigars; because I couldn’t sleep at night anymore unless some little fur ball was nestled up against me and breathing on my feet. By the time I’m scheduled to leave Fallujah, I have so many excuses scattered around, I just roll them all up into one big ball of hazy justification and plop Lava in the Humvee.

I call friends and family back in the States and tell them about Lava and ask for help. I call on a cell phone, so I think at first that the silences on the other end are the usual international lag, but I realize, as the silences stretch out, that my friends are trying to place the word puppy within the context of words they have concerning me.

See, they’re all scared that if I don’t get killed, I’ll lose my mind in Iraq and end up eating raw meat, collecting weapons, and sending anonymous scary letters to people I don’t know. So when I tell them I have a puppy and then there’s this long silence, I can sense them connecting the dots between who I was when I left and who they’re terrified I’ll be when I get back.

Like, when I call one of my best buddies back in San Diego, Eric Luna, and ask him if he knows how to get a dog out of Iraq, I hear nothing for a long time but some static.

“Hey, Easy E, you still there?”

“Yeah, man, I’m here. What did you just say?”

Talking between Iraq and California is expensive and often disrupted, so you have to say everything as quickly as you can. It’s an art, and fashioning my explanation into an understandable form that begins with stolen candy and ends with stray dogs eating dead bodies only fuels Eric’s worst fears.

“What?” he keeps saying, like he can’t hear me.

“RPGs . . . MREs . . . M&M’s . . .”

“What?”

“. . . bloated bodies . . . bootlaces . . . satellite wires . . . psychological operations . . . we’re not normal . . .”

“What?”

“. . . and, see, there are these dangerous portable toilets . . .”

“What?”

“Pup-py. I have this pup-py. Can you help me figure a way to help me get him out of the country?”

Eric collects his wits and decides that in order to avoid future repercussions, the best thing to do is to agree.

“Sure, man. Yeah, anything you want.”

The trip between the city and camp is only about twelve miles, but it’s a pretty tricky stretch, and targeting a military convoy is easier than picking lice off a bald dog.

Contrary to sensible belief, the twenty thousand Humvees they have us driving around Iraq are not all armored vehicles. While their characteristics look cool on paper—weight: 5,200 pounds; engine: V8, 6.2-liter displacement, fuel-injected diesel, liquid-cooled, compression ignition; horsepower: 150 at 3,600 rpm—without armor, they are just big tin cans. We dress them up ourselves with sandbags, metal, and plywood, but that only weighs down the suspension and drivetrain components and creates more shrapnel when we’re