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

anything to get transferred there. But I’m one year older now, and it all seems like the funeral just about to begin, and the only reason I want to go to Baghdad is to see Lava one more time. Other than that, I’d just as soon go home.

I don’t plan on Lava making it back to California. I don’t think about where he’s going to sleep or which beaches allows dogs or what veterinarian I’m going to take him to. I just fill out my paperwork, make sure I ingest the proper number of calories, and take, like, one million showers.

See, the plan to fly him out with the Vohne Liche folks is too simple. It’s too easy to make sense. Too many people love him, and no one, not even a Lava Dog, can be so lucky.

Luck—you hope for it, you pray for it, you break laws to find it, because unlike drilling and practicing and following all the rules, it allows you for one fraction of one fraction of a second to strut along the sidelines like the Ref and control the uncontrollable events in your life.

“And the band plays Waltzing Matilda, and the old men still answer the call. Year after year, their numbers get fewer, someday no one will march there at all.”

But you only get so much luck, that’s my theory these days, and the fact that I’m still alive, the fact that I’m just about to get my fifth pint of Guinness in a pub in Ireland at five forty-five in the morning while my comrades get louder and the bartender gets sterner and I get drunker, means I’m probably scraping the bottom of the barrel.

CHAPTER THIRTY

March 2005

Baghdad

At his compound in the Green Zone, David Mack looks over the list of Lava’s paperwork Ben e-mailed him this morning. It can’t be legitimate, can it?

He scans Lava’s documentation from the perspective of the checkpoint patrols who will decide the puppy’s fate by either letting him cross into the Green Zone or turning him away. It includes an International Health Veterinary Certificate for Live Animals from the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Iraq—a translated document, signed and certified, with the original in Arabic attached—and an International Certificate of Vaccination and Health for Dogs.

“This is all I have,” Ben wrote.

While it looks pretty good, David wonders how they managed to get it.

At the NPR compound in the Red Zone, Sam teaches Lava some of the finer points of soccer so that when he emigrates to the United States, he will represent Iraq well.

Lava still hasn’t grown into the leather belt that overwhelms his neck, but Sam tells him it makes him different from the other dogs wandering around Baghdad and that he should wear it like a uniform and be proud.

“Lava is happy,” Ben Gilbert writes.

If Ben Gilbert can get Lava through the first checkpoint between the Red Zone and the Green Zone on March 29, he’ll meet David Mack on Saddam Hussein’s parade grounds near the Hands of Victory Monument. From there David will get Lava on a private convoy to the airport and into the hands of a Triple Canopy dog handler, Brad Ridenour, who’s scheduled to fly with some of Vohne Liche’s dogs back to the States where they will get a long-deserved rest from sniffing out bombs.

While getting Lava across the checkpoint between the Red Zone and the Green Zone will prove the most technically difficult part of the rescue, the trip to the airport will be the most physically dangerous by far. An entire Marine battalion patrols the four-lane, six-mile road leading from the Green Zone to Baghdad International Airport, but because the highway is one of the most vital supply routes in Iraq for the US military and private contractors and is traversed daily by convoys of Marines, businessmen, and journalists, it’s considered “target-rich” by the insurgency.

In the past two months alone, dozens of people have been killed on the highway by roadside bombs, sniper bullets, suicide bombers, private security contractors, and the US military itself. It is called the Road of Death.

At the NPR compound, Anne’s replacement, Anthony Kuhn, files one of his last stories before he leaves Baghdad. It’s about the release of Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist who was abducted by insurgents just before Anne left, and about how speeding on her way to the Baghdad International Airport with the two men who negotiated her release, their Toyota Corolla was targeted and hit.

Sgrena, who’d just spent one month in a dark room courtesy of the Islamic Jihad Organization, was hit in the shoulder by shrapnel. One of the mediators who sat next to her in the backseat, Nicola Calipari, was shot in the head and killed.

Only it wasn’t the insurgency this time. It was a US tank posted on the road to protect a convoy transporting US ambassador John Negroponte to the airport.

“Late Friday, President Bush spoke by phone from Air Force One with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi,” Kuhn reports, adding that the president expressed “regret” at the incident and pledged a full investigation.

“Italian politicians criticized the incident and Sgrena’s newspaper, Il Manifesto, announced that instead of celebrating her return, an antiwar rally is now planned.”

Ben Gilbert tells us that a journalist stationed in Baghdad by ABC heard about Lava and wants to do a story about his escape. The journalist, who has credentials to get through the Green Zone checkpoint, offered to escort Lava from the NPR compound to David Mack at Saddam Hussein’s parade grounds if his station got an exclusive story from it.

Sam gets Lava ready and gives him another bath.

Meanwhile I’m stuck in the States at Camp Pendleton wondering when things changed so much that I now consider the United States of America a place in which to be stuck.

But stuck I am, and I’m reading all these e-mails and have no control over what’s