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

would suspect of harboring it. They determined that Sergeant Matt Hammond with the personal security detachment for the commanding general fit the bill.

Matt Hammond is a good Marine, dedicated beyond belief, a patriotic kind of guy who grew up an army brat and worshiped the Marines from the time he was a kid, who always knew he’d sign up, who to this day says the Marines were his childhood heroes, which makes the rest of us feel like imposters, because we grew up worshiping the Beaver’s big brother and Cap’n Crunch.

This is how loyal Matt Hammond is:

He’s in Fallujah, right? Patrolling or whatever, and it’s bad there now, right? Like, there’s no electricity, water, or sewage in the city, and because dead bodies rot everywhere—under the rubble, inside the houses, out on the streets—the air is as alien as gas on another planet. In all at least twelve hundred insurgents and an unknown number of noncombatants have been killed and forty-four Marines have already been processed through the Mortuary Affairs Unit at the camp.

Matt gets wounded one night in an alley, and the guys load him into a Humvee and rush to a nearby aid station. But on the way a grenade hits the Humvee and the door’s locking mechanism dislodges, sending Matt out onto the street. They have to turn around to pick him up, and while they’re looking for him in the dark, another firefight erupts. Matt is conscious during all of this, lying there on the street, and to hear him tell the rest of the story almost kills your throttle:

“I didn’t know what happened. They came back for me, but it was so dark, they couldn’t see me and there was another firefight. I remember I couldn’t breathe and I was trying to crawl toward them. All I remember after that is hearing them yell, ‘We found him! We found him!’

“After that, I was transported to a hospital in Baghdad, but when they told me I would have to go to a hospital in Germany, I snuck out and called my buddies back at Camp Fallujah and told them I didn’t want to leave. I told them to come and get me.

“I was on a lot of morphine, and one day I was just lying in bed in the hospital half asleep and I hear this voice that sounds like the commanding general. I could hear him saying, ‘Put on your boots. You’ve got a war to fight.’ I thought I was dreaming but it was him. He’d come to Baghdad to take me back.”

When the chopper landed at Camp Fallujah later that day, Matt’s team sat in Humvees waiting for him in the landing area.

“It felt like I’d just hit a grand slam and was coming into home base with everyone there waiting to cheer me on.”

Matt is, like, dedicated. Loyal as a cliché. And he loves dogs.

So while he’s recouping at the camp in his team’s building and the Lava Dogs sneak the puppy to him, he looks at it like a mission. See, he can’t stand the fact that the guys in his team are going out to work every day while he’s stuck in the building trying to learn how to walk again, so taking care of Lava gives him something to do.

Only he learns right away what a little beast Lava is and starts wondering if the puppy has coyote blood in him or something. He’s smaller than a sandbag but acts like a wild animal. That’s a direct quote: “. . . acts like a wild animal.”

Lava chews on anything that belongs to anybody—pillows, blankets, clothes, plastic gun butts—and when he discovers the guy’s rubber shower shoes, he goes on his own little search-and-destroy mission. Then he singles out one Marine’s boots and pees on them—and only them—night after night. And then there’s his compulsive need to protect the guys from noise and shadow, any noise or shadow, and his incessant roo-rooing starts getting on their combat-sawed nerves.

Matt finally decides that in order to save his life, especially from the Marine with the squishy boots, he’d better get Lava his own barracks. So he commandeers the navy Seabees on base to build Lava a little plywood hooch, which they hide in back of the building.

And eventually Matt and Lava fall into a nice little routine. In the mornings, Matt and Lava water the makeshift garden grown from seeds Matt’s mom sent from Arizona. Then they sit behind the building and play with toys sent by the team’s family members back home when they heard they had a puppy. Then they amble down to a bombed-out sewer at the edge of the camp to feed a litter of puppies the guys found one day.

But everyone knows it’s just a matter of time before the wrong people find out about Lava. For one thing, he’s growing bigger and getting louder every day. For another, a week or so after Matt starts feeding the stray puppies, someone following orders covers the sewer with the puppies in it over with dirt.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

January 2005

The Syrian Border

By the time the elections are one week away, Annie is in flight to Baghdad, Lava is still at Camp Fallujah, and I’m at the Syrian border. I’m back to babysitting Iraqi soldiers, who in this part of the country call themselves the Desert Wolves.

I’m worried about Lava, whom I haven’t seen in more than a month. I’m also worried about Matt and his guys, who are arranging a special convoy they’re calling a “chow run” to get him to Baghdad. Marines are prime targets these days, and the insurgents and everyone related to them hate our guts for what we did in Fallujah. But I’m most worried about Anne, who’s going to have to pick him up somewhere in the city the Ref seems to be pissing on these days.

The election is scheduled for January 30; Iraqis will vote for a national