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

of animals into the United States unless they were guaranteed a home with the service member’s family.

“We realize that having your companion with you all these months has provided you with a ‘touch of home’ that you may have longed for,” she wrote. “The sad fact is that the US is already filled with thousands of homeless animals and not enough good homes for them, therefore we want to know that your effort to bring your companion into the States has been an entirely thought out one and a lifetime commitment to your friend.”

She also made it clear that getting the mascots home was a costly, time-consuming venture. A commercial flight and export fees into the States, for example, cost as much as fifteen hundred dollars from Iraq and twenty-five hundred from Afghanistan. The animal also needed an import/export permit, a health certificate, rabies and distemper vaccinations, and a shipping kennel.

She told Kopelman to give her volunteer a few days’ notice of the puppy’s arrival and work out a location for the pickup. She closed her e-mail message with the following quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

She hoped this one worked out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

February 2005

Baghdad

Once a possible exit route through Kuwait with Military Mascots is found, Sam makes it his mission to get Lava vaccinations and paperwork.

But in Baghdad, everything goes up for grabs. When the election results are finally announced in mid-February, Anne reports that Shiites and Kurds turned out the big winners, which means the Sunnis, who will be underrepresented in the new government, are more pissed off than hornets doused with water. Violence flares, and getting “proper documentation” for anything, let alone a puppy, beds down next to impossibility.

This is in part because in our rush to hand out private contracts for Iraq’s reconstruction, oversight was shoveled away with just about everything else including sanity. The United States secretly awarded reconstruction projects, and US contractors earned excessive profits in part by subcontracting work to cheaper Iraqi companies, inflating charges, jimmying invoices, and welcoming kickbacks with bear hugs. They created shell companies in the Cayman Islands that falsely billed the US government. They paid ghost employees. They overpriced furniture contracts with kickbacks built right in and billed the government for products that were never delivered.

Embezzlement, payoffs, robberies. Later, a former senior adviser to the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority would say that Iraq was a “free fraud zone” as a result of the US government’s refusal to prosecute contractors and companies accused of corruption. With no Iraqi law and no US law, the official said Baghdad was like the “Wild West.” He told Congress that once he delivered two million dollars to a US contractor with bricks of cash in a bag.

On the Iraqis’ side, public servants supplied salesmen and consumers with stolen medicine and medical equipment. Iraqi ministry officials pocketed millions in reconstruction money. Housing officials took bribes to allocate homes.

So, like I said, getting proper documentation for Lava is going to be tough.

First Sam finds someone who has the vaccine but won’t sign the certificate of health because he doesn’t want his name associated with helping Americans.

Then Sam finds someone who’s willing to sign a certificate of health but doesn’t have any vaccine.

Finally Sam locates a veterinarian who has the vaccine and is willing to sign the certificate, but he lives eight hours away from Baghdad and can’t get there safely without a military escort, which even Sam, who can find puppy biscuits in Baghdad, cannot provide.

Anne is scheduled to leave for Cairo on February 26. She tells me she’s trying to find a driver to take Lava to Kuwait.

I’m worried, though, because we just got word that Iraq’s borders will be closed until February 23 for Ashura, a Shiite religious festival when tens of thousands of Muslims go on pilgrimage to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

Sam does it somehow, though. He turns up one day at the NPR compound waving Lava’s documentation papers—which, while wildly suspect, are proper documentation nonetheless, and that’s good enough for Anne and me.

I don’t ask for details, and all Sam says about it is: “I wish it was as easy to get a person out of Iraq.”

Anne e-mails Bonnie and me:

I am working on getting Lava by car to Kuwait. I am just trying to confirm exactly what documents I need to get across the border, though I’m assured a $50 bill would probably be enough. I will know in a couple of days and then will let you know when to expect him in Amman and what documents he will be traveling with . . . I will miss him but am anxious to make sure he has a good home before I am no longer here to take care of him.

Then I get an e-mail from John Van Zante confirming that Iams will make arrangements to get Lava on a flight out of Kuwait once they know the details of the handoff. John tells me he will meet Lava at the airport himself.

So I’m sitting at the Syrian border thinking everything’s going to work out just fine, right? I’m already planning my own trip home in one month and thinking about how the first thing I’m going to do when I get there is take Lava to the beach.

I e-mail John: “It looks like Annie will get Lava to Kuwait where he will be picked up by one of the people from Military Mascots and put on a plane, most likely LAX. I’ll provide the itinerary when I know it. I should be home about a month after Lava if all goes well for us both.”

I e-mail Bonnie: “. . . John will be the one picking up Lava . . .”

I e-mail