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

By the time she grabs Lava and shoves him into the crate, the driver’s sweating, lobbing insults in Arabic, and trying to equate “easy money” and “vicious animal.”

Lava’s in the crate, foaming at the mouth.

Annie, who’s apologizing and explaining that the puppy will have to be let out several times during the trip, looks through her pockets for more money.

I manage to work my way from the Syrian border to the Jordanian border on the day Lava is supposed to pass through. Annie describes the vehicle to me in an e-mail, so I figure I’ll be there when they arrive and help whisk them through.

Only when I get there, I realize that there are two checkpoints they’ll have to cross: one between Iraq and no-man’s-land, which is a several-mile strip of desert that belongs to neither country, and then another checkpoint from no-man’s-land into Jordan. While I think I can probably get them through the first, I have no control over what happens at the second.

On top of that, the borders have been closed for the previous four days because of the holiday, so the line of vehicles waiting to cross stretches back into the Iraqi desert for several miles. I know the vehicle I’m looking for is a black-and-white Chevy Suburban, but as I scan the line, there are black-and-white Suburbans as far as I can see.

The Chevy Suburban is a popular vehicle here. It’s easily armored, so they sell like crazy these days. You can order them off the Internet, where the ads say things like “Optional Run-Flat tires increase survivability in case of an ambush” and “Floor of passenger compartment is armored to shield against fragmentation from 2 DM-51 German ordnance hand grenades or equivalent” and “Armor Level B6 with DM-51 hand grenade protected floors standard.” They even show before-and-after photos of their shot-up products with slogans like “No casualties!” and “Let us bite the bullet—not you!”

So I start walking the line of Suburbans, and I look inside every one of them, and when I do, the people inside look back at me and none of them, not one, says a word. No one complains. No one glares. They’re as afraid of me as they are of getting blown up, and you know they’re seething inside and thinking Who do these people think they are coming into our country and searching our cars and telling us where we can and cannot go? Only they can’t say it out loud, can’t even look like the words are going through their heads, and that makes me feel like an asshole with a great big star-spangled a on my chest, which, unlike theirs, is fully armored.

I walk up and down the line three times and start sweating about it, because I don’t see them. Maybe the driver didn’t make it or maybe he dropped Lava off in the desert and ran with the money or maybe he’s got Lava stashed in a trunk and because he doesn’t know who I am, he isn’t letting on, and while I’m pushing my head through windows saying, yelling after a while, “Dog? Do you have a dog?” the little guy is suffocating because the drivers are afraid of me, and I’m making them more afraid of me as I storm up and down yelling Dog? into their faces, making them targets and losing my cool.

Then I see a cluster of Suburbans I hadn’t seen before, and even before I reach them I see a crate in the back of one of them and start running. I see the driver twitch, wipe the back of his neck, and look the other way, because like I said he doesn’t have a clue who I am. All he knows is that this US Marine is running toward him yelling something and the American lady’s dog in the backseat is going crazy and every person in line is now looking his way.

Lava tries ripping through the crate when he sees me, and the first thing I notice is that he’s crapped all over the place. I yank the back of the Suburban open and let him out while I yell up at the driver for not taking proper care of my dog. But the guy doesn’t understand what’s going on. He thinks he’s in trouble, and the more I yell at him, the more he starts to sweat, and the more he starts to sweat, the more I yell, until I think he’s about to cry.

My nerves are fried, so I try to calm down, because I can see he’s about to flee for his life.

“Just back the vehicle up, and pull around,” I tell him, but he just keeps sweating and looking in his rearview mirror and mumbling stuff in Arabic to himself or God as Lava pees all over the Suburban’s optional run-flat tires.

I tell him again and add sign language: “Back the vehicle up and pull a-round.”

I want him to back up and then pull around to get to the front of the line, right? But he’s panicking and not following my English very well and starts to pull forward instead. That’s when I lose it, because if he draws attention to himself, he’s likely to get himself, Lava, and me killed.

See, I’ve been drilled my entire adult life to switch from fifth to automatic when fear tries to grab you and the tires start spinning. If it screams, you scream back louder. If it fires, you fire back and don’t miss. You can’t let fear kidnap you, can’t let that black bag anywhere near your head or it gets cut off, and if you don’t fight back, the black bag slips down over your eyes, and you start to panic and you start to pray, because you know you’ve just seen the last thing besides the inside of a black bag that you are ever going to see.

We make it to the front of the line eventually. I manage