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

don’t gain their trust, because I’m always flying off the handle and losing control.

This black male dog, though, he’s got it figured out. All he has to do is stare, and the others do what he wants. I start calling him Jacki the Iraqi and decide I want to pet him someday.

I just can’t figure out where they came from. Same thing with all the stray dogs back at Camp Fallujah. Where were they born, and how did they end up in the middle of nowhere?

The puppies that Matt Hammond and Lava found in the sewer were probably born to a stray who got caught in one of the animal control traps, but where did the mother come from and where did her mother come from?

Her puppies lucked out big time when the Marines found them, I guess; they got fed for a little while longer anyway. Then one day the sewer was filled up with dirt, like someone was told to kill the puppies but couldn’t make himself do it, so he just covered the whole situation over and walked away.

When Matt found the sewer like that, he could hear the puppies still whimpering through the dirt, so he and six other Marines started digging to get them out. They scratched and clawed with their hands, pickaxes, and shovels as dirt and sand flew from one Marine into the face of another until it started to get dark and some of the guys had to hold flashlights so the others could see what they were doing. Then someone yelled “Found one,” and the flashlight beams all fixed on something still alive, and it was the closest they’d ever come to giving birth.

They brought the puppies back to the building and took care of them there for a while, but one day when the whole team had to leave for a couple of hours, someone under orders snuck into the building and took them all away. Later they were told it was for “health reasons.”

At least they didn’t die buried alive.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to these strays here at the border once I leave for the States in a couple of weeks. I suppose they’ll survive somehow. But jeez, what a way to live, always starving, always afraid, always heading toward death no matter how hard they try, like slowly suffocating, like being buried alive.

And what about the Iraqis, what’s going to happen when we leave? It’s still too hard to tell if they’ll dig themselves out of the dirt we’ve buried them in, but if they don’t, it won’t be because the Iraqi soldiers in US cammies weren’t yelled at enough; it will be because they never trusted us in the first place.

As for Lava, he’s been well fed and well trained, but he can’t make it on his own. He’s tough but not that tough.

It’s pretty late at night when I write Annie an e-mail:

“Try not to let this frustrate you too much. You’ve done all that you can and then some to help Lava and me. I appreciate it more than you know.”

Then I tell her that maybe the best solution is to have the little guy euthanized. It’s better than being buried alive.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

February 2005

The Syrian Border

Misery loves company, but during the whole time we tried to get Lava out of Iraq, I don’t think it ever paid a visit to John Van Zante. While the failure at the Jordanian border explodes in my face and causes all kinds of internal injuries from which I doubt I will ever recover, it blows right past John in a thin layer of dust.

Despite the fact that we cannot find an exit route for Lava, that Anne is leaving Baghdad in twenty-four hours, that I’m stuck here at the Syrian border until I leave for the States in several weeks, and that Lava has no place to go, John sends me an e-mail full of enthusiasm and exclamation points.

“We’re waiting to hear back today from the folks at Vohne Liche Kennels . . .”

The who? The what?

“I don’t want to give false hope, but on Thursday they just seemed to think it was no big deal . . .”

I vaguely remember John mentioning a kennel in Indiana or something, but in the chaos surrounding the Kuwait and Jordan escape plans I didn’t pay much attention. At the time it was just another of John’s shots in the dark aimed in the same general direction as his letters to Governor Schwarzenegger and President Bush.

“In our last contact with them on Thursday, they said that Kenneth Licklider, the owner, was very excited about helping out.”

I’m scrounging my gray matter for whatever it was John told me earlier about this kennel, because I want the pieces to fit, but all I can remember is reading something about how Iams worked with this kennel or knew someone at this kennel and contacted them for information about smuggling a dog out of Iraq, only I can’t remember exactly and wonder what a kennel owner in Indiana could do to help out, and more importantly, why?

Turns out, Ken Licklider, the guy who owns Vohne Liche Kennels, is a former US Air Force police dog handler who trains police dogs for tracking, apprehension, search, and seizure work. He specializes in explosives passive response work, and many of his dogs are used by the US military to sniff out bombs in Iraq.

His kennel in Indiana trains four hundred dogs and 150 handlers from twenty different countries every year. Like, the guy’s famous for what he can do with dogs. He provided security for President Reagan, three presidential candidates, the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the pope’s visit to LA, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Internal Revenue Service.

I guess the US State Department figured that if a guy can provide security for the pope and the IRS, he’s probably pretty good, so they hired him