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

ABC’s Good Morning America, which would later show footage of Ken, John, and Kris greeting Brad Ridenour at the gate, then of the three guys waiting in the baggage area, and then of John’s face kind of scrunching up as Lava’s crate rolled through. Later, John would explain: “He comes up on this conveyer belt along with all of the other baggage, and that’s when the dam just broke, when we saw that crate.”

I’m thankful they didn’t get some of the rest on film or at least thought best not to air it. Like John trying to find out if Lava spoke English or Arabic; like John rushing Lava outside and then exclaiming, “His first pee on American soil!”; like Lava’s behavior once he got to the hotel room, which was described by John and confirmed by Kris as “Running and running and running around the room. In circles. Bouncing off the walls. Wow.”; or like my face when John finally called me in California and said: “He’s here, buddy. He’s safe now. He’s an American dog.”

I should have applied for an Academy Award for my performance the next day when John and Lava flew into San Diego and yours truly, surrounded by several dozen reporters, photographers, and camera operators, waited at the Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe for them to arrive.

Personally, I didn’t like the media there. I felt awkward, like I was supposed to be saying and doing things that were beyond me. But John Van Zante and the center deserved this for all they’d done for Lava and me, and if the story brought more attention to their mission, then it was the rock-bottom least I could do.

As we waited for the van from the airport to arrive, reporters stood around me in a semicircle asking questions:

“Colonel, when is the last time you saw your dog?”

“About two months ago, I guess.”

“Were you ever in any danger as you tried to rescue Lava?”

“Me? No. Others, though . . .”

“Can you describe what you’re feeling right now?”

“Feeling? Uh . . .”

“What would you tell people who might suggest your time would have been better spent saving people instead of a dog?”

I stayed cool. I smiled. My face, as blank as Oscar’s, betrayed nothing. There was really nothing to betray, because during the entire time I was in Iraq, I tried like hell not to think too much about it, and now at the crucial moment, when it all had to come together in front of the public and mean something that wouldn’t embarrass John Van Zante and the center, I had nothing to say.

I stared off into middle distance and tried to look like I was fashioning my profound answer in some profound way, but the only thing I could come up with for those who might question my time management in Iraq was that we’re not supposed to save anybody, it’s not our job, and if it was, we’d be shipping peace activists by the boatload over there to try to talk the insurgents into liking us.

But you can’t say that out loud and receive applause.

Besides, Lava wasn’t a little Iraqi kid the guys found alone when they stormed the compound, and I mean, come on, does anyone really think we would have just left a little kid there to die? If Lava had been a child, he would have been scooped up, given desserts from a dozen MREs, handed off to some nice person in the Red Cross, and bang, the Lava Dogs would have been instant, just-add-hot-water heroes, exactly the way we Americans like them.

Instead he was a mangy little mutt, and I have to explain that while we Americans want heroes with clean underwear and want swelling music to accompany the word war! as it rises up on the screen with our boys whistling the national anthem in the background as they march through grain fields in France, it’s not that way. It never was, and it never will be.

Luckily, before I have to answer the question, the van from the airport with Lava pulls up.

I can see his face through the window and see how big he’s gotten in the last two months, but it’s the same face, the same goofy look in his eyes, the same crazy tongue hanging out sideways, and I hear cameras click behind me and wonder how I’m supposed to act at a time like this.

I sure as hell am not going to get choked up, so when Lava hops out of the van, stops and stares at the reporters, then turns his gaze toward me, I look a little above his head so I don’t see the recognition cross his face, don’t see past and future connect in his eyes, don’t see Annie, don’t see Matt, don’t see the little wienie asleep with his nose in my boot, because if I do, if I see any of it, I’ll lose it then and there, and none of my comrades in the United States Marine Corps will ever speak to me again.

The next thing I do see is Lava headed my way. Fast. In that run of his he has trouble breaking. I bend down to deflect the crash, and that’s when I see it, the look in his eye that no one else sees, only it’s not a look that results from missing me or being lonely or being scared.

The look in Lava’s eyes as he bounds toward me as fast as his legs will carry him is an older version of the look he gave me when I first stomped my boot at him in the compound; an evolution of the look he gave me when I entered the Lava Dogs’ building and he peed in submission; Part II of the pathetic, pleading, please-don’t-do-this look he gave me when I betrayed him at the Jordanian border by shoving him back into the mean driver’s crate.

And what’s it saying that nobody but me