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

so when I see them from the corner of my eye crouched numb between two overturned vehicles, I realize we’re on our own.

I abandon my M16A2 for a more powerful squad automatic weapon, then run in front of the Humvee and fire away to the south. This apparently inspires one of the Iraqi soldiers to stick his head out, fire two rounds quickly—using me as his cover—and then duck back in. It’s the last I see of the Iraqis for the rest of the thirty-minute fight.

At night we all gather back at the compound, where we cover the windows with blankets and sandbags, clean our weapons, and make sure Lava has something for dinner that he didn’t have the night before.

Then the time comes when you have to put back on all your gear, ready your weapon, and sneak out to the portable toilets down the block. We call them porta-shitters. One of my greatest fears during the weeks I stay at the compound is the possibility of being blasted by an RPG in a porta-shitter.

If you survive that, then you bed down and smoke cigars and review the day’s events with everyone else who made it.

“We found a weapons cache in that old UN food-for-oil place . . .”

“Yeah, well, we got caught in an alley . . .”

“Yeah, well, we had to transport wounded and they actually fell out of the Humvee onto the street when we got hit with an RPG or something we never saw coming.”

They have nothing on me, though.

“Yeah, well, my Iraqi guys decided to take their naps during a firefight . . .”

As we talk, Lava climbs up and over our boots, destroys packages of M&M’s, and paws through our blankets for prey.

“They don’t have a clue out there . . .”

Then the puppy finds my lap and sits between my crossed legs staring out at the other Marines.

“I mean, how do DC brass ever expect to get these guys to secure their country if we’re doing it all for them?”

I untie my boots, and Lava bites at the laces.

“I swear I am going to accidentally shoot the whole group of them if they don’t shape up.”

As I pull a boot off, the puppy grabs hold of the lace and tugs. I tug back. The puppy growls. I growl back.

“Hey, what’s with this puppy anyway?” I ask. “What are you guys planning on doing with him?”

No one answers. Then one of the Marines stretches and yawns and says he’s turning in. Others grunt. Lava crawls out of my lap and turns a few circles, flops down, and falls asleep with his nose buried in my empty boot.

Meanwhile, outside on the streets, psychological operations teams blast AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix through loudspeakers, with the additional sound effects of crying babies, screaming women, screeching cats, and howling dogs, in hopes of turning the insurgents’ nerves to shreds. They broadcast insults in Arabic, including “You shoot like goatherders” and “May all the ambulances in Fallujah have enough fuel to pick up the bodies of the mujahideen,” which, along with the mortar, grenades, ceaseless rumbling of Humvees, and twenty different kinds of aircraft flying in precise layers over the city including helicopters, attack jets, and small, pneumatically launched spy drones that roam the skies beaming back images to base from automatic video cameras, create a kind of white noise that allows us all to sleep pretty soundly through the night.

I guess they didn’t want to answer my question about Lava that night, because like everything else in Fallujah during the invasion, nothing but the immediate was worth thinking about. Really, there wasn’t room in your head for anything but what was right in front of you or right behind you or right around the next corner. The future spanned one city block at most. Your dreams consisted of RPGs that missed; lifelong goals were met if you made it back to the compound at night.

So the guys probably weren’t avoiding the subject of what would happen to Lava so much as they were ignoring it. There just wasn’t any room. But jeez, when a puppy picks your boots to fall asleep in, you do start to wonder how he’ll die.

See, I’ve been a Marine since 1992 when I transferred from the navy, and I know that the little guy is going to die. I knew it right away when I saw him in the hall—this one won’t make it—just like you could look at some of the other guys and think This one won’t make it, because his one eye twitches or This one won’t make it, because he parts his hair on the right instead of the left—superstitious stuff like that, which you know doesn’t make sense but oils your engine anyway. I was thinking This one won’t make it, because he’s too damned cute.

I’m also a lieutenant colonel, which means I know military rules as well as anyone, and every time I picked Lava up, they darted across my brain like flares: Prohibited activities for service members under General Order 1-A include adopting as pets or mascots, caring for or feeding any type of domestic or wild animals.

CHAPTER THREE

May 2005

Denver, Indiana

Ken Licklider threw some more clothes into his suitcase and checked his watch. Right place, right time. Be there. That was the trick. Had been all his life.

The war raged and business was good—so good in fact that Ken, who’d been in Iraq and Afghanistan five times during the past two years, had trouble finding enough good people to work for him. He hoped the ad on his Web site—“Opportunities for Explosive Detector Dog handlers—overseas deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan—excellent pay”—would do the trick, but the added disclaimer “Must be able to obtain security clearance” would weed out a bunch.

It wasn’t even the disclaimer that worried Ken so much. Plenty of people applied and plenty could probably get clearance, but you couldn’t just let