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

CHAPTER EIGHT

November 2004

Camp Fallujah

As we pull through the gates of Camp Fallujah, the holiday scenery provides what you’d expect from an abandoned Iraqi military installation and former Iranian terrorist training camp taken over by US forces located midway between Baghdad and Fallujah, about eight thousand miles away from Plymouth Rock. Congested landing pads. Humvee graveyards. Rows of portable toilets making some civilian contractor lots and lots of money.

What I don’t expect is all the activity at the Mortuary Affairs building with do not enter posted at its doors. That’s something new. It makes me think of Anne Garrels’s stories. I hope she got out of the country okay.

At least the weather is cool, and after stuffing Lava in my backpack and sneaking him into my room in the officers’ building, I turn on the heater to keep him warm.

“You okay in here, little guy?”

Lava looks up at me and cocks his head. As I stare down at this cute but fairly drastic breach of military law, I wonder if I’ve done the right thing. Lava will be vulnerable here at the camp, which under regulations can’t harbor any dogs other than the military’s working canines. As it is, stray dogs and cats swarm the camp looking for food, and rumor has it that they’re being drowned in a nearby pond.

The officers’ building is the worst place on base to hide a bouncing ball with vocal chords, but the need to decompress from the last three weeks drains me of incentive to do anything but sleep, so I pull Lava up on the cot next to me, where neither of us moves for the next nine hours.

I dream, though. Only I dream reality, can’t get away from it, even in sleep.

I’m patrolling one of the main streets of Fallujah in front of a mosque and the Iraqi soldiers are waving their guns around and I’m yelling at them to safety their weapons and Tim O’Brien is telling me to take it easy on them, because they don’t understand English.

And I turn on Tim and say “Well, they better learn fast,” and he starts grinning and saying something, only suddenly his head isn’t there anymore, it’s on the ground, and grenades explode around us, and I grab up his head and try to jam it back onto the neck of his body, try to make it work again so I can hear what he has to say, only it’s not sticking, so I try connecting the tendons from his neck to the tendons in his head only they’re all tangled up and sticky and I can’t put two and two together, and the grenades keep exploding, and then the eyes in the head in my hands start swiveling back and forth and the mouth starts spewing blood, but it’s grinning, it’s working, it’s spewing and grinning and working and saying “It’s only a flesh wound, man. It’s only a flesh wound.”

In the morning the bed is soaked, and Lava shivers under the covers drenched in his own pee. It’s the first time this has happened since he started sleeping in my bag in Fallujah.

“Humiliated?”

He whimpers.

“Nightmares?”

Lava pushes his nose and then most of his body under the pillow. I hum the Marine anthem to him. His tail starts patting the bed.

“Me too.”

I decide I’ll risk talking to the dog handlers at the other end of the base where they actually grow green grass for the dogs to walk on. They treat the military working dogs well.

As in Delta Force or the navy SEALs, the working dogs make up an elite unit that outspecializes any weaponry or high-tech mapping systems the US armed forces possess. Several hundred thousand years of evolution make their noses stronger, their teeth sharper, and their legs faster than any human being alive. That’s what the handlers tell me anyway.

Most are Belgian Malinois and German shepherds, and like the rest of us, each possesses his own military service record book and each learns to attack on command without thinking first. Before they ever arrive in Iraq, the trainers tell me that the working dogs attend boot camp at Lackland Air Force Base, where the Department of Defense maintains a high-tech veterinary hospital that includes specialists in pathology, internal medicine, surgery, radiology, and epidemiology who can perform fundus photography, endoscopy, arthroscopy, laser surgery, electrodiagnostics, hip replacements, fluoroscopy, and echocardiography in state-of-the-art clinical laboratories, dental suites, surgical areas, radiology areas, intensive care units, and anesthetic recovery rooms.

Boot camp for the working dogs consists of explosives detection and patrol, where they drill, they march, and they pace like any human recruit. The dogs learn the four classics—sit, down, heel, and stay—but the command get him is added to the syllabus as well. They learn to obey the commands in upwinds, downwinds, and crosswinds in addition to a variety of movements including march, rear march, column left, and column right.

Because of the large number of receptors in their noses and the large olfactory parts of their brains, the working dogs enhance the Marines’ ability to detect faint odors and intruders by about a thousand times, with about 95 percent accuracy. A well-trained military dog can detect dynamite, detonator cords, sodium chloride, potassium chloride, time fuses, and smokeless powder.

When the dogs finish initial training, they’re issued bulletproof camouflage vests that weigh seven pounds and cost about a thousand dollars each. The vests contain compartments for cold packs to prevent heatstroke and attachments that enable the dogs to be dropped by parachute or hauled up by rope.

Once equipped, the dog is paired with a handler. At Camp Fallujah, the two live and work together—they’re rarely apart—and the dog and handler become so dedicated to each other that after two years, the dog is rotated out to keep the pair from becoming too attached. They trust each other to perfection. They know each other’s breathing patterns. The bond between them is so strong that if