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

through a booby-trapped inferno as the army psychological operations teams broadcast their tapes over the mosque loudspeakers. It gets to her after a while, right? So as she moves through the narrow streets, she focuses solely on what lies directly ahead, or just above or around the next corner, sweating almost out loud about what comes next. And when she describes it, your insides scream What a coincidence! because you know exactly what she’s talking about, and you almost feel obliged to bow.

So when Lava farts or Lava pees on somebody’s boot or Lava shreds someone’s only pair of underwear and Anne bends down and scoops him up and tells him how brave he is, we all kind of feel okay thinking so, too.

One of the things that I think worries Anne the most is that she’s not telling her radio audience the real story about us. She complains about it a lot. How can you explain how lethal, how faulty, how fundamentally lousy the whole situation is here in general?

“. . . chaotic . . . ,” she reports, “. . . moments of sheer terror . . .”

She tries, but she always feels she misses the mark by a few inches.

I understand better than anyone that there are no words to adequately describe how the insurgents seem to communicate with one another and coordinate their attacks through a series of underground tunnels that run from mosque to mosque, and how, like some freakish version of a video game, the snipers pop up out of nowhere—on rooftops, in alleyways, from behind mosque walls—and you only stay alive to play another round by shooting them immediately wherever they pop out.

“. . . rarely saw insurgents up close, just outlines through their night-vision scopes; the scurry of feet on rooftops above . . .”

Or how, without a sleeping bag, the cold night air magnifies the convulsive jitters that plague you after a while, so when you wake up one morning to find a Marine’s poncho draped over you with no one claiming responsibility, you think how at this moment, in this place, in this real-time, hellish virtual video game of hide-and-go-seek, a cashmere blanket holds nothing over a dirty Marine poncho.

She doesn’t even bother with that one.

We sit up at night in the compound and talk by the glow of the light sticks used to avoid detection by insurgents. We talk a lot, Anne and me, and usually Lava snuffles around us and plays cute, pretending not to listen, but he’s taking it all in, I can tell, because every once in a while, when the conversation gets tough and I start, like, talking about something I normally don’t and can’t find the right way to describe what I’ve seen or what I’ve done or what somebody else did and just stop talking, Lava looks up at me and cocks his little head as if waiting—I swear—for the rest of it. So I shrug and finish the story.

Like, the light sticks glow on our faces while everything else around us is dark, so we’re on the moon, right?—a million miles away from our gods, our rules, our lives, and I hear my voice plowing through every roadblock and checkpoint without halting, because there’s nothing, no gods, no rules, no lives standing guard to stop it.

“. . . parents hate me being in the military, wanted me to be a doctor . . .”

“. . . the marriage didn’t work out . . .”

“. . . sure, I want to be a dad someday . . .”

Anne listens and smokes and nods and smokes some more while we talk in the dim glow, and I never worry that she’ll turn around and use anything I tell her in one of her radio stories. And I tell her some stuff.

“. . . the first guy I killed . . .”

“. . . found this baby in the rubble . . .”

“. . . his face just exploded . . .”

She seems more focused on the stories of the younger guys anyway, the twenty-year-old grunts just in from basic training who walk around acting tough, like this is no big thing, like they’ve done this all their lives even though freaked out blinks on and off across their foreheads in neon. I think she feels sorry for them. She never says that, but that’s what a lot of her stories home are about in the end.

Like the story she did about the initial bombing of Fallujah, as they waited on the outskirts of the city for the invasion to begin, when she realized how different this assignment was from any she’d been through before. Unlike the initial offensive against Iraq, for example, when aloof bombings killed anonymous enemies in uniform, this assault turned defensive as soon as it began. The enemy wasn’t a soldier hired to shoot back anymore; he was now a civilian who hated you so much he’d down his breakfast, walk out of the house, and then blow himself up in your face.

Most of the Marines in Bravo Company had been in Iraq only two weeks when they convoyed to Fallujah where the new enemy, in a white Suburban van, introduced himself by careening into their seven-ton ammunition-laden truck, taking eight of them with him to wherever young warriors go when they’re burned alive.

A few days later Anne interviewed a Marine psychologist sent in to offer counseling, who said the surviving members of Bravo Company didn’t feel the expected anger or guilt nearly as much as a sense of disgrace.

“They experienced horrible shame of being helpless,” he told her. “Marines hate above everything to be helpless, passive. It’s not the way they see themselves, and it makes it hard for them to get back the feeling of confidence.”

Anne knew the feeling, but none of it compared with the sense of professional disability she felt in Fallujah. How could you possibly report to people thousands of miles away