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

You never ask your men to do anything you won’t do yourself. You parachute first, you help clear the way, you count inventory alongside them so they trust you. But would I have done any of those things for anyone else’s puppy if he’d asked me to? To this day I’m not sure.

I should have just walked away from Lava the day I left Fallujah. Sure, it would have been tough, but guilt only annoys you if you pay attention to it, like a crook in your neck, and then I wouldn’t have had all these nights of worry about who was caring for Lava, what would happen if the wrong people discovered him, and how they would kill him if they found him. I wouldn’t have had to spend time playing with him and feeding him and finding a way to get him vaccinations and food from the military working dog handlers.

But all the things I did for him, I did for myself. They helped me forget all the crap over here, and I spend all day and night waiting to hear anything, anything at all, even that he hasn’t made it.

Now Anne’s e-mail sits before me with the potential of an IED.

You normally couldn’t worry like this, about how expensive life was here, about how you budgeted each breath and horded each heartbeat because it might be the last. Thinking about it is unauthorized, off limits, quarantined until notice, because if you obsess about death or search for stronger gods or stare too long at the navel of your own future, you lose focus and get shot in the head.

You have to be tougher than this, stronger than this, smarter than this. But when I finally work up the courage to open Anne’s e-mail, I break down and cry.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

January 2005

Baghdad

Anne always told me that most Americans don’t understand how two different countries exist within the boundaries of Baghdad. Even the Marines from Camp Fallujah who contacted her about handing Lava over didn’t quite get it. Her e-mail explains all of it, but what really gets me is how it ends.

Anne stays in a compound in the city’s Red Zone. It’s a far cry from the hotel she reported from in 2003, when she was one of only sixteen American journalists who stayed in Baghdad during the initial invasion of Iraq by US and British forces. While during the siege she faced constant censorship from the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein—she reported from her hotel room naked in case the Iraqi police barged in—at least she could go out on the streets and buy kebabs for lunch.

But now, two years after the first onslaught of Operation Iraqi Freedom, two distinct zones divide Baghdad—the heavily guarded Green Zone, where if clothed in a flak jacket you can still safely buy kebabs on the street, and the unprotected Red Zone, where captive Americans bring twenty-five thousand dollars apiece and flak jackets only weigh you down when you need to run.

At first the Fallujah Marines want Anne to meet them at the airport to pick Lava up, but that’s too dangerous, because she doesn’t have an armored car in which to travel the strip of highway between Baghdad and the airport known as “IED Alley.” When the Marines finally comprehend the impracticality of that plan, they think it’s simply a matter of meeting her somewhere in the Green Zone. But Anne lives in the Red Zone, which is an area of free-for-all violence consisting of bombed-out schools, bombed-out restaurants, and bombed-out office buildings that receive no clean water and only a few hours of electricity on good days. She wants to be there, in the real Iraq.

The Red Zone is governed for the most part by insurgents and private security contractors—hired protection specialists who, unsupervised by military law, drive down sidewalks in armored SUVs waving automatic weapons to clear their way.

No one leaves the Green Zone without an armed convoy. No one enters the Green Zone without credentials, and even those with the credentials have to pass through several checkpoints of heavy metal gates, coiled concertina wire, metal road spikes, blast barriers, and sandbagged isolation bays used for searches.

While some consider Fallujah the most dangerous place on earth, others believe waiting in line to pass into Baghdad’s Green Zone is worse. Stopped vehicles make easy targets for snipers, and car bombs explode here by the dozens, so US and Iraqi guards divide incoming traffic into two lanes, one for VIPs that moves fairly quickly and one for everyone else. The process of getting in is so time consuming that in January, Iraq’s minister of state resigned in anger over how he was treated when he tried to enter the Green Zone for a cabinet meeting.

In order to get into the Green Zone to pick up Lava, Anne has to wait in line with everyone else. Once inside, she can’t just travel wherever she wants. No one but the Marines can do that, so when they suggest meeting at one of the military bases on the inside, she informs them that she can’t go anywhere in the Green Zone but the former convention center.

The handoff grows even more complicated when the Fallujah Marines can’t find the convention center. They try calling Anne by cell, but the city’s only service, provided by Iraqna, has its daily four-hour siesta at that point. Iraqna, handed an exclusive two-year contract by the Coalition Provisional Authority, blames its blackouts on chaos—no fuel, no electricity, no banking system, no generators, no landlines—and sabotage and the US military, which regularly shuts down the network to keep insurgents from communicating with one another and from setting off bombs.

So Anne has to just sit tight and wait until she finally sees the whole group of them wandering around down the street carrying Lava in their arms.

When they finally connect,