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

“Hey, come here.”

The puppy stops and looks back at me, ears high, tiny tail rotating wildly, pink tongue hanging out sideways from his mouth like he’s crazy. I realize he wants me to chase him, like he figured out he was bamboozled only he’s too proud to admit it and now covers up with this I-was-never-afraid-of-you routine. I recognize that one, too.

He leaps in a circle on paws as big as his face, hits the wall again, and repels into a puddle of daze. I’m, like, mesmerized by the little guy. Wipes my windshield clean just watching him, so I scoop him up off the ground with one hand and pretend I didn’t notice his wall slam.

“Tough guy, huh?”

He smells like kerosene.

“What’s that aftershave you’re wearing?”

He feels lighter than a pint of bottled water as he squirms and laps at my face, blackened from explosive residue, soot from bombed-out buildings, and dust from hitting the ground so many times.

“Where’d you come from?”

I have a pretty good idea where he came from and a pretty good idea where he’s going, too. I’ve seen it before, Marines letting their guards down and getting too friendly with the locals—pretty girls, little kids, cute furry mammals, doesn’t matter; it’s not allowed. So as I’m holding the little tough guy and he’s acting like he just jumped out of a box under the Christmas tree, I call my cool to attention.

It’s not allowed, Kopelman.

But he keeps licking and squirming and wiggling around, and I remember this part pretty well, because I liked the way he felt in my hands, I liked that he forgave me for scaring him, I liked not caring about getting home or staying alive or feeling warped as a human being—just him wiggling around in my hands, wiping all the grime off my face.

CHAPTER TWO

November 2004

Fallujah

The Lava Dogs told me they’d found the little outlaw here at the compound when they stormed the place, and the reason he was still here was that they didn’t know what else to do with him. Since they’d decided to use the compound as the command post, and since this starving five-week-old puppy was already there, the choices were either to put him out on the street, execute him, or ignore him as he slowly died in the corner. The excuses they gave me were as follows:

“Not me, man, no way.”

“Not worth the ammo.”

“I ain’t some kind of sicko, man.”

In other words, they had enough pictures already from Fallujah to torture them slowly for the rest of their lives; they didn’t need any more. Warriors, yes—puppy killers, no.

The puppy is named Lava, and while I’d like to say my comrades are creative enough to name him for symbolic reasons—like, you know, if they save him, they save themselves—I’m fairly sure they just couldn’t come up with anything else.

Lava is the newest grunt, de-flea’d with kerosene, de-wormed with chewing tobacco, and pumped full of MREs.

Just so you understand how tough Lava really is: MREs, officially called “Meals Ready to Eat” but unofficially called “Meals Rejected by Everyone,” are trilaminate retort pouches containing exactly twelve hundred calories of food, a plastic spoon, and a flameless heater that mixes magnesium and iron dust with salt to provide enough heat to warm the entrée. On the package, the meals state that “Restriction of food and nutrients leads to rapid weight loss, which leads to: Loss of strength, Decreased endurance, Loss of motivation, Decreased mental alertness,” which supposedly coaxes us into at least opening the pouch to see what’s inside.

Lava can’t get enough of them, though, and learns real quick how to tear open pouches designed with three-year shelf lives that can withstand parachute drops of 1,250 feet or more.

Still, the best part is how these Marines, these elite, well-oiled machines of war who in theory can kill another human being in a hundred unique ways, become mere mortals in the presence of a tiny mammal. I’m shocked to hear a weird, misty tone in my fellow Marines’ voices, a weird, misty look in their eyes, and weird, misty words that end in ee.

“You had yuckee little buggees all over you when we found you, huh? Now you’re a brave little toughee. Are you our brave little toughee? You’re a brave, little toughee, yessiree.”

And the whole time Lava knows I’ve got him pegged, and he’s stealing glances at me to make sure I see how he’s soaking it all up.

The Marines brag about how the puppy attacks their boots and sleeps in their helmets and gnaws nonstop on the wires from journalists’ satellite phones up on the roof. They tell me he can almost pick up an ammo belt. They tell me he loves M&M’s.

“Did anyone feed Lava this morning?” someone yells out as “I did” comes back from every guy in the room.

He’s like a cartoon character on fast-forward, always chasing something, chewing something, spinning head-on into something. He stalks shadows and dust balls and pieces of balled-up paper. He can eat an entire cigar in less than two minutes and drag a flak jacket all the way across the floor. I mean, the little shit never stops. If you aren’t dragging him along after you as he hangs on to your bootlaces with his teeth, he’s up on the roof tangled in wires or lost and wailing in the bowels of somebody’s backpack.

You can’t yell at him, either, because even though you are an elite, well-oiled machine of war who in theory can kill another human being in a hundred unique ways, you’d still be considered a freak if you yelled at a puppy. He’s completely pampered, kept warm, his sticks never thrown out of his sight range so his ego isn’t damaged when he can’t find them. I find it all pathetic. At first.

But the newest recruit already knows the two most important rules of boot camp by the time I come around: You don’t