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

every alpha wannabe into the fold no matter how desperate you were to find employees. He’d learned that the hard way. Since opening Vohne Liche Kennels in 1993, he’d seen and rejected more than his share of yahoos.

While part of his success came from knowing how to find good dogs—he used German shepherds, Dutch shepherds, Belgian Malinois, and Labradors from all over the world—the biggest part of his success came from knowing how to find the right handlers. Most of his guys were former military police, security specialists and civilian police officers, tough guys—one of them used to manage a prison, and another was an undercover cop who specialized in outlaw motorcycle gangs—but in order to work for him, they had to have level heads. Had to get through the training. Had to find the discipline to handle his dogs, who weren’t trained to attack on instinct but on focused, well-reasoned commands.

He trained his bomb-sniffing dogs in Iraq, for instance, to be “passive responders,” which meant that when they detected the odor, landed the lottery, found what they’d been looking for all their lives, they didn’t go wild and foam at the mouth; they just sat down and stared. Couldn’t even wiggle their butts.

His handlers also had to have enough control of themselves to give control over to their dogs. That was a tough one, because a lot of these guys were control freaks out of professional necessity. Learning how to give that away was like learning how to shoot all over again.

But most importantly, Ken’s handlers had to love dogs as much as he did. Like David Mack, his overseas program coordinator in Baghdad. Or Brad Ridenour, a former student who worked in Iraq for Triple Canopy Security. Now, there were two guys who understood the meaning of violence: Study it; avoid it when possible; then get back to taking care of your dog.

You were lucky if you knew that much, lucky if you took care of your dog before you took care of the bad guys, lucky if you understood that the dog would end up saving your life in more ways than one.

Ken was lucky. Hell, he was charmed. He’d started in dogs back in ’77 with the air force as a police service trainer and handler and realized right away that the dogs watched over your sanity. At first he figured it was the focus being a good trainer and handler required that kept your mind from veering, but through the years—through the Secret Service work, through protecting presidents, foreign dignitaries, the Pan Am Games, and the pope with his dogs and handlers—Ken learned it was more than that. When you spent your entire career on the fringes of violence, the dogs helped remind you that you were still human.

He checked his watch one more time.

CHAPTER FOUR

November 2004

Fallujah

Anne Garrels tells me she sleeps pretty well at the command post. At least there’s a roof over her head and a place to set up her satellite equipment, even though keeping Lava from chewing on the wires is just one of this war’s pop quizzes for which she hasn’t adequately prepared.

I say this war because she’s attended several. Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, the former Soviet Union, Central America, Tiananmen Square, Pakistan . . . you name it, she was there.

Anne’s a trip. She can smoke, drink, and swear as well as any of us, knows more about war than any of us, and cares less about consequences than any of us, but here’s the weird part: Put Lava in front of her, and she kind of falls apart at the seams.

“He’s adorable,” she says as the puppy gnaws away at thousands of dollars’ worth of her radio broadcast equipment, “just adorable,” and all the while she’s transforming into a soft, feminine girl-next-door type whom you suddenly wish wasn’t married.

But Anne is tougher than she looks. When she first entered the city as an embedded journalist for National Public Radio with Bravo Company, First Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, she didn’t have a sleeping bag because it was just one more thing to lug around—her broadcast equipment alone weighed fifty pounds. So she slept on the ground for minutes at a time, until bombs or falling bricks or blasts from sniper fire jolted her awake again. I mean, sleeping on the ground in the cold comes in a close second to sitting in full uniform on a porta-shitter worrying about death in terms of lousy ways to spend your time as far as I’m concerned, and she just shrugged it off with something like “Yeah, I’m a little tired.”

But then in the compound she finds one of Lava’s turds on her socks, and her eyes get misty like she’s about to weep, and she says, “Isn’t that adorable?” and is suddenly the girl next door again.

Anne isn’t like the other reporters—who are usually guys and thus prone to all sorts of issues, not the least of which is preserving their masculinity as they piss in their pants. I mean, I do have to give them credit. They didn’t come to Iraq in uniform and yet day after day they hump along after us, dodge the same RPGs as us, eat the same MREs as us, and all the while scribble their notes and whisper into their recorders and try like hell to seem nonchalant.

But not Anne. She flat-out admits that Fallujah scares the hell out of her. If one of the guys said that, we’d probably smirk and spit and examine our tattoos while saying some tough bullshit thing or another, but when Anne says it, it kind of eases some of the tension the rest of us are feeling. Because if all this fazes her, then at least we aren’t the closet cowards we all secretly worry we are.

It’s like she deserves to say it. She spends her days moving behind Bravo Company block by block, house by house,