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

Defense hired contractors to kill all nonmilitary dogs found on American bases in Iraq. Seems word got out about the stray dogs eating dead bodies, and while it’s perfectly okay for us to make the bodies dead in the first place, it’s not quite cool to have dogs walking around eating them. There’s some fine line there I guess we’re not supposed to notice. Maybe it has to do with cooties.

Anyway, it also turns out that I’m not the only loon who wants to get a dog out of Iraq. There are actually a lot of guys writing home looking for help. I mean, there were all these stories online about it, which I found while Googling “Iraq dogs out” and “Iraq puppy out” and that sort of thing. I was at a complete loss until I found the story about an army sergeant who said that his unit tried to get their dog back to the United States—but the “dog killers,” he said, got her first. They hid her and fed her and then found someone going back to the States who would take her, but then at the last minute, as she was actually in the flight line ready to go and all the guys were saying good-bye, some jerk following orders comes up, yanks her away, and shoots her.

That’s the kind of thing that makes you pause and wonder, What the fuck?

So I start Googling anything I can think of—puppy passport, help, help puppy, helpless puppy needs passport, help Marine help helpless puppy—I’m feeling kind of frantic about the whole thing and getting nowhere at the speed of light.

As I’m trying to go to sleep that first night without Lava, all this crap is shooting through my head with the velocity of bullets fired in rapid succession. GO-1A. Vaccinations. Bodies. Rules. Regulations. Reasons. Will it hurt? Then as things get weirder and weirder like they do in the middle of the night, the unauthorized thoughts start rolling in to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” oo-rah, oo-rah. So I get up, start the Humvee, and drive across base to the Lava Dogs’ building seeing all these weird things and thinking all these weird thoughts like how in the hell could someone shoot a dog like that? Orders? Orders? Since when do Marines follow orders?

When I get there, it’s all dark and everyone’s zonked out and I can’t see Lava anywhere.

“Hey, little guy,” I whisper, expecting him to leap into my arms with tail-pounding joy.

Instead I hear this tiny growl, Lava’s warning that he’s about to kick my ass, and then see this wienie shadow rush toward me with tail erect and fur on end screaming roo-roo-roo-roooooo.

Bodies shoot up on every cot.

“Hey, hey, hey, it’s me . . .”

“Who the hell is me?” someone grumbles as I hear the click of several rifles being readied for some action.

I bend down and pick Lava up. “Shh, shh. It’s me. Just me.”

The bodies plop back down on their cots. Several pound pillows back into place; several Marines use my name—and God’s—in vain.

“Hey, hey, calm down,” I tell Lava, who’s quivering with delight over what he’s done and with what he’s found. I sit there for a while in the dark scratching his little ears until he finally calms down and curls up asleep in my lap.

Am I insane?

I am a lieutenant colonel in the United States Marine Corps. I am an officer in a brotherhood that always goes in first, and that pretty much sums it up right there. We’re brave to the point of insanity, so being a Marine takes a certain kind of mind-set to begin with.

Which means you don’t always follow orders.

The common belief is that you go in a boy and come out a man, like they have this magical ability to change who you are, but the truth of the matter is, we were insane going in and insane coming out, only now we sing this anthem and know cool martial arts.

Insane isn’t the right word exactly. None of us really believes Marines guard the streets of Heaven, but how sane is it to want to go in first? I can sit aside from this and in a cool, calculated, scientific manner look at it for what it is: not insanity, but a primitive gene that requires some of us to be the fittest and the bravest and the best-est there is, and then the public relations brass throws in the word proudest so we don’t feel like cavemen on caffeine.

It’s not because we didn’t belong or didn’t like team sports, and it’s not because we couldn’t afford college or were manipulated by recruiters or dumped by some chick and then had to prove a point. Those guys joined the army. We didn’t have rotten childhoods, we didn’t hate math, we didn’t bully skinny kids on the playground and didn’t start fires in the garage.

And it’s not like we joined up without thinking about it, or like once we got in they didn’t give us time to think about it. Believe me, sleep deprivation, food rationing, and sit-ups make you think a whole hell of a lot about it. We weren’t coerced. We weren’t brainwashed. Our souls weren’t plundered.

We just can’t help it.

We aren’t cut out for anything else. We were Marines going in and Marines coming out. We don’t want to take orders.

And you want to know something? I don’t care anymore. I used to, when I first joined up. I worried about my parents’ objections, my college buddies’ sneers, being called a “jarhead” for the rest of my adult life. But hell if I could help it. The minute I signed on the dotted line, I had this sort of out-of-body party that hasn’t been matched since.

Oo-rah.

Listening to these guys snore around me, I really like what I am—a Marine. I like being strong. I like being brave. I like going in first. I want to go in first, and