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

So I Google “Military Mascots” and find out it’s a group of volunteers who help service members get their pets out of Iraq and to the United States. It’s perfect. It seems like all I’ll have to do is contact them and make sure Lava gets his vaccinations and paperwork.

That and get Lava from Baghdad to Kuwait.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

February 2005

Massachusetts

The Marine’s letter to Bonnie Buckley wasn’t that much different from the dozens and dozens of others she’d received during the past two years. At least it wasn’t another hate letter accusing her of being a threat to national security. For every e-mail she got requesting help with a mascot, she received another accusing her of aiding and abetting Iraqi spies or bringing foreign diseases into the country: “Foreign dogs carry the plague!”

Bonnie also received messages suggesting she find more worthwhile causes to support, even though she couldn’t imagine a better way to spend her time. And besides, this wasn’t about saving homeless dogs and cats in a foreign country; as a former animal control officer, Bonnie knew there were plenty of those in the United States already, millions and millions of them. Rather, Military Mascots, the volunteer group she ran from her home in Massachusetts, was about supporting the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by supplying a patriotic missing link.

She’d created the group in 2003 when she heard about a soldier who’d found a puppy in an oil field in Iraq and wanted to bring him home. She helped raise twelve hundred dollars and since then hadn’t stopped helping. She now had nine ports of entry at her disposal along with military parents and spouses, active and retired military members, civilians, and veterinarians across the world organizing everything from flight arrangements to vaccinations to border crossings to help get the animals to the States.

At first Bonnie had no clue how to cut through the international red tape to get an animal across the border. But the never-ending stream of requests drove her to make repeated phone calls to foreign embassies, spend enormous amounts of time on the Internet, and devote even more time to networking with animal rescue organizations, military personnel, and veterinarians across the world.

The organization now ran an underground railroad from Iraq and Afghanistan through Jordan and Kuwait. “Nothing illegal,” she would tell anyone who wondered, though some things hovered near the edge. Like, she used to try to smuggle dogs out on military flights by having them drugged, so they wouldn’t be noticed. But she didn’t do that anymore. Everything was on the up-and-up, all the paperwork, everything.

While she knew that in every war there were cases of service members finding and adopting pets in foreign lands, she sensed that those now deployed in the Middle East were especially in need of the morale boost the animals seemed to give. She received so many pleas for help.

“I have a dog here in Iraq that I am trying to get home to the US . . . I don’t want [him] to get shot like the rest of the dogs around here . . . I was hoping maybe you could find a way to get him home before he becomes too big or disappears.”

Or: “. . . she was crying and stuck in the barbed wire . . . I didn’t see her mother anywhere and I couldn’t leave her there to die.”

Or: “My Company and I found a furry friend that has been with us through both the best of times and the very worst of times here in Iraq . . .”

Or: “If you would help me I would be forever in your debt.”

What really got to Bonnie, though, was that for every service member Military Mascots helped, dozens more had to leave their pets behind. The service members had witnessed a lot of stuff. Bad stuff. Then they found these animals and couldn’t bear to leave them behind. They became almost desperate to get them out.

One soldier in Baghdad contacted Bonnie and said he’d found three puppies who were orphaned after their mother was shot. Despite his best efforts during the following six months, all of the puppies died except one, who ended up being promoted by his troops to the rank of PFC after he survived being run over, electrocuted, and witness to 189 mortar rounds.

“We cannot leave him behind,” the soldier wrote Bonnie.

But when the puppy’s soldier redeployed, he could not find a safe ride for him from Baghdad to any border where Military Mascots could pick him up. The puppy remained behind in Baghdad at the base and hadn’t been heard from since.

Then there was the pup found by a soldier in a garbage dump. The puppy slept with him, ate with him, patrolled with him wherever he went. The soldier’s family sent food and toys for the puppy, and his nephew’s school prayed daily for the puppy’s safe return.

The soldier had big plans for the little guy when they got home. First he would take him to his nephew’s school for a thank-you visit, then he would turn him loose in a big fenced yard, then he would let the pup have his choice of beds to sleep on in his new home.

But GO 1-A came down harder than hail that month and the soldier could no longer keep the puppy from being killed before he left for the United States. With no other options, the soldier took the puppy back to where he’d found him and left him there with promises from his comrades to feed him when they could.

Bonnie looked at the letter from Lieutenant Colonel Kopelman, though, and figured there was hope for this one. If he could get his puppy to Kuwait, she had a volunteer who could pick him up and put him on a plane to the States.

Still, she made it clear to the lieutenant colonel that Military Mascots did not support the movement