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

CHAPTER TEN

December 2004

Rancho Santa Fe, California

John Van Zante was having trouble concentrating on the conference call. It was an important one, meant to spawn ideas for an upcoming pet adoption drive for the Helen Woodward Animal Center, but the new mission kept bullying his concentration.

The new mission was when John’s boss, Michael Arms, had told him about a Marine who needed help getting a puppy out of Iraq. Apparently a series of e-mails sent out by some lieutenant colonel in Fallujah wound their way through friends and friends of friends to Michael Arms, who, as a former Marine in Vietnam and now the president of the Helen Woodward Animal Center, didn’t have a choice about whether he’d help out or not. The mission of the center—“people helping animals and animals helping people”—and the mission of the Marines, former or otherwise, wouldn’t allow it.

“Are you going to help?” John had asked.

“Of course we’ll help,” Arms said. “Will you take care of it?”

John shook his head. Help? His help? He didn’t know how much help he could offer from Rancho Santa Fe. The town was located just outside San Diego, a major military town, and while talk of the war infused almost every conversation, this story brought it closer to home than he was used to. Now when he heard the stories coming out of Iraq, they projected all sorts of images into his head that he knew were ridiculous but couldn’t turn off: little puppy squished to death in Marine’s backpack; little puppy run over by a tank; little puppy beheaded by insurgents.

What in the heck possessed a three-tour, tough-guy Marine to try to save a little puppy in the middle of a war, anyway? And why was he, an easygoing public relations guy, now being looked to for help? He wasn’t a soldier. He didn’t know anything about Iraq.

While the center offered a variety of programs supporting the bond between humans and animals, including a Pet Encounter Therapy Program, an adoption center, a therapeutic riding program, and an equine hospital, John wasn’t so sure they were equipped to rescue a puppy from Iraq.

The center focused on bringing knowledge, compassion, and respect to all living things. Lofty ideals, sure, but put into actual practice. The Pet Encounter Therapy, for instance, brought animals—dogs, rabbits, birds—to homes for abused children, hospitals, psychiatric facilities, and senior centers, where residents held and caressed the animals until their blood pressure lowered or their hyperactivity waned or their desire to crawl in a hole and die went away for a few precious hours.

But the center surely didn’t have time to focus on one little puppy in Iraq.

Then again, it probably didn’t have time not to.

The only reason John had taken this job in the first place was because there wasn’t enough time to do everything that needed to be done. Years earlier he had shaken hands with mortality after learning that his brother had a stroke and his sister had cancer. He’d decided that while his career in commercial broadcasting paid the bills, it didn’t promise great poetics on his tombstone. At least this job gave him a reason to take up oxygen. At least it gave him time to do something that meant something. At least it allowed him to save some people and animals from horrible lives and deaths, but the problem was, saving only some made it harder not to save them all.

And now, since Arms had ordered the go-ahead on helping this Marine and his puppy, John hadn’t thought about much else. He read news stories about the war with a new sense of urgency. He studied maps, he investigated export laws, he made phone calls and wrote letters to anyone he thought could help, including California’s senators.

The puppy was found abandoned during a house by house search in Fallujah. A Marine Lt. Col. from La Jolla, CA, fell in love with the puppy. We’ve been working to try to get the puppy transported to the United States . . .

Regardless of party affiliation, we firmly believe that it shows that the United States and our military personnel continue to hold respect for all life. Is there anything more innocent than a puppy?

Any help or direction you can provide will be greatly appreciated . . . time is of the essence.

Today’s conference call included John, his boss, and several executives and public relations people from the Iams pet food company, who were co-sponsoring the Home 4 the Holidays event—the world’s biggest pet adoption drive and the center’s most important adoption event of the year.

As the center’s PR manager, John played an instrumental role in Home 4 the Holidays. The theory of the event was that more families brought pets into their homes during the holidays than at any other time of year, so Iams, the center, and eighteen hundred animal shelters across the world marketed the idea with: “What greater gift can there be than to save the life of an orphan?”

John knew there was no greater gift than to be useful, but convincing people who use well-trained purebred dogs as status symbols to adopt untrained ill-bred mutts was about as easy as convincing lemmings to fight for independence. It was his toughest project of the year, and he had to concentrate.

“John?”

He straightened in his chair as he recognized Mike Arms’s voice on the other end of the phone.

“Hmm? Yes?”

“Why don’t you tell these folks the story about the puppy in Iraq.”

Even now, in the middle of the brainstorming session, nine-tenths of John’s mind remained burrowed in Fallujah.

“John?”

“Yes?”

“The story about the puppy?”

He had no choice. He launched into the story—“. . . and he finds this puppy . . . horrible fighting . . . can’t keep pets . . .”—sure that no one in on this conference call would care. He didn’t even pause to catch his breath, just sped through the