From Baghdad with Love Read online

  FROM BAGHDAD, WITH LOVE

  FROM BAGHDAD, WITH LOVE

  A MARINE, THE WAR, AND A DOG NAMED LAVA

  LTCOL JAY KOPELMAN WITH MELINDA ROTH

  THE LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of The Globe Pequot Press

  Copyright © 2006 by Jay Kopelman and Melinda Roth

  First Lyons Press paperback edition, 2008

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to The Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  The Lyons Press is an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press

  E-ISBN 978-0-7627-9610-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available on file.

  To “Sam”

  May you have freedom and peace.

  PROLOGUE

  “So he sent the man out; and at the east of the Garden of Eden he put winged ones and a flaming sword turning every way to keep the way to the tree of life.”

  Genesis 3:24

  NOVEMBER 2004

  First week of the US invasion of Fallujah, Iraq

  IN AN ABANDONED house in the northeast section of Fallujah, members of the First Battalion, Third Marines—known as the Lava Dogs—froze when they heard a series of clicks coming from the one remaining room of the compound.

  Grenade pins?

  Most of the military deaths in Fallujah during that first week of the US invasion happened inside buildings like this, where insurgents hid in upper rooms and threw grenades down at the Marines as they moved upward. There were a lot of head and face injuries, and while the Lava Dogs considered themselves some of the toughest Marines around—they named themselves out of respect for the jagged pumice they trained on back in Hawaii—just being a Lava Dog didn’t shield you from a grenade’s fancy special effects. Being careful did. Being focused did. Having your weapon locked and loaded when you inched around every corner did.

  Click. Click. Click . . . Click.

  If a grenade did detach your face from your skull, at least you would check out in the GPS coordinate closest to Heaven. Iraq was considered by most biblical archaeologists to be the location of the Garden of Eden—God’s only hard copy of Heaven, his Paradise on earth. Not that you’d have adequate excuses prepared once you got there, because lines between good and evil here in the battle zone required more than reading glasses to see. But whether Abraham, Muhammad, or Jesus called your cadence, it’s where it officially all started and where it officially all went bad.

  Good marketing potential for the region at first, though, because it trademarked the birthplace of Abraham, the Tower of Babel, and the construction of Babylon in addition to agriculture, writing, the wheel, the zodiac, legal theory, bureaucracy, and urbanization. From the beginning, everyone wanted a piece of the place that went from the Mesopotamians to the Sumerians to the Akkadians to the Empire of Ur to the Babylonians to the Assyrians to the Persians to the Greeks to the Arabs to the Mongols to the Turks to the British.

  None of these were polite handovers, either. By the time Saddam Hussein got to the land of milk and honey, it had been captured, pillaged, beaten, and raped by so many cultures over such a long period of time, there was little left except a whole lot of desert covering a whole lot of oil. That, and claims by locals living near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that the Garden of Eden and its Tree of Life stood in the middle of their very town. They built a wall around the area, constructed the Garden of Eden Hotel, and tourism flourished for a short while. Then the Americans came, and because the folks living in the area supported the newest invasion, Hussein drained all their water. Soon the Tree of Life died, members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq took over the Garden of Eden Hotel, and DOWN WITH AMERICANS was painted all over the walls of Paradise.

  Clickclickclickclick.

  Maybe timed explosives.

  If this country was Paradise, then the Marines weren’t taking any bets on Hell. Outside the building they searched, gunships prowled the skies looking for hiding insurgents as pockmarked Humvees patrolled what was left of the streets. Every driving car in the city was targeted because of bomb risks. Every loose wire was suspect. Every building was searched, and JIHAD, JIHAD, JIHAD plastered every wall.

  Throughout the first days of the invasion of Fallujah, the Marines discovered weapons caches, suicide vests, and large amounts of heroin, speed, and cocaine apparently used to bolster suicide bombers’ courage. They found dead bodies of fighters from Chechnya, Syria, Libya, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. They walked into human slaughterhouses with hooks hanging from the ceilings, black masks, knives, bloody straw mats, and videos of beheadings. They freed emaciated prisoners shackled and insane with fear.

  Fallujah, near the center of where it all began, was now a city cordoned off from the rest of the world, inhabited only by invisible snipers and stray dogs feasting on the dead.

  Click. Snuffle. Snuffle. Click.

  The Lava Dogs tightened their jaws and clenched their weapons as they ran through the rules in their heads: Cover danger areas, stay low, move stealthily, be prepared to adapt, and eliminate threats.

  Snuffle. Clickclickclick. Snufflesnuffle.

  An insurgent strapping a bomb to his chest?

  They should have prepped the room first with a grenade—tossed it in and just let it do all the dirty work. Instead, for reasons still obscured by war and fear and things just destined to be, they backed up to the walls on either side of the doorway and positioned their weapons to fire.

  Then they thrust their rifles around the corner, squared off, and zeroed in on the clicks as their target rushed to the other side of the room.

  “Holy shit.”

  The puppy turned at the sound of their voices and stared at them.

  “What the hell?”

  He cocked his head, trying to interpret their intent rather than their words.

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  Then he yipped, wagged his tail, and clicked his toenails on the floor as he pranced up and down in place, happy it seemed someone had found him at last.

  PART I

  “In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.”

  Genesis 3:17

  CHAPTER ONE

  November 2004

  Fallujah

  I DON’T REMEMBER exactly when I got to the house that served as our command post in the northwest sector of Fallujah, and I don’t remember exactly how I got there. It was a couple of days after the Lava Dogs arrived and took over the compound, I do know that much, and I remember that after four days of dodging sniper fire, sleeping on the ground, and patrolling Fallujah with wide-eyed Iraqi soldiers in training who shot at anything that moved, including their own boots, I walked up to the building with a sense of having escaped an abstract rendition of the wrong hereafter.

  I remember being exhausted, the tiredness weighing more heavily on me than the sixty-pound rucksack I lugged around, and as I walked through the front door and shrugged what I could off my back, all I could think about was sleep.

  That’s when I saw Lava for the first time. Only it’s not as if I walked in and saw a chubby puppy cuddled up on a blanket undefiled by the world like an overstuffed lamb. There were no squeaky toys, no baby yips, no eyes looking up at me with an artless blue-gray innocence.

  Instead a sudden flash of something rolls toward me out of nowhere, shooting so much adrenaline into my wiring that I jump bac
k and slam into a wall. A ball of fur not much bigger than a grenade skids across the floor, screeches to a halt at my boots, and then whirls in circles around me with the torque of a windup toy. It scares me, right? Like I’m tired and wired and anything quick coming at me jerked at my nerves, so I peel back off the wall and reach for my rifle even though I can see it’s only a puppy.

  Now, before you get all out of whack about me aiming a weapon at cute baby mammals, keep in mind that I just walked in from the streets. Out there, things were spooky, like a plague or a flood or dust from an atomic bomb had just rolled through. Most of the city fled before the US-led attack, and the quiet rang so loud after the bombardment, even windblown newspaper sent your nerves screaming for solid cover.

  The day before the offensive started, we dropped leaflets over the city warning the few remaining citizens that we were on our way in, but insurgents inside spit back that they had hundreds of car bombs rigged, booby traps set, and suicide bombers with jittery fingers waiting to go. They’d already dug trenches in the city’s cemeteries for the expected martyrs.

  In the days prior to our march into the city, our warplanes pounded Fallujah with cannon fire, rockets, and bombs. Because the skies were so crowded, attack jets had only a three-minute window to unload their cargo and clear out before another jet swooped in. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of 105mm shells, 25mm rounds, and 40mm rounds blasted into Fallujah that night with the impact of meteors from several galaxies away. The aerial bombardment was so spectacular, I—along with ten thousand other Marines waiting to advance on the outskirts of the city—doubted anyone inside would live through it. But plenty managed, and now that we were here, sniper fire came at us from nowhere like the screams from ghosts.

  So when this unexpected thing, this puppy, comes barreling toward me in this unexpected place, I reach for my gun. I must have yelled or something, because at the sound of my voice, the puppy looks up at me, raises his tail, and starts growling this baby-dog version of I am about to kick your ass.

  The fur gets all puffy around his neck like he’s trying to make himself look big, and then he lets loose these wienie war cries—roo-roo-roo-rooo—as he bounces up and down on stiff legs.

  I stomp my boot his way to quiet him down, but he doesn’t budge and intensifies the roo-roo-roo-roooos shooting in staccato from his lungs.

  “Hey.”

  I shove the rifle to my back and bend down. The puppy bounces backward in time to the roo-roo-roo-roooos but doesn’t take his eyes from my face.

  “Hey. Calm down.”

  He looks like a bloated panda bear, and when he howls the last rooooo of the roo-roo-rooooo, his snout stretches skyward until his fat front paws lift off the floor.

  There’s fear in his eyes despite the bravado. He’s only a puppy, too young to know how to mask it, so I can see how bravery and terror trap him on all sides while testosterone and adrenaline compete in the meantime for every ounce of his attention. Recognize it right away.

  I reach into my pocket, roo-roo-roo, pull out a bullet, roo-roo-roo-roo, and hold it out toward him in hopes he’ll think it’s food. The puppy stops barking and cocks his head, which makes me feel manipulative but wise.

  “Thatta boy.”

  He sniffs the air above his head, finds nothing, and then directs his nose toward the bullet. It interests him, and he leans forward for a better whiff of the metal, which surprises me until I notice how filthy my hands are, almost black from a week without washing, and I realize he’s smelling accumulated dirt and death on my skin.

  I lean forward, but fear gets the better of him and he tears off down the hall.

  “Hey, come back.”

  I stand there and watch him careen into a wall. I wince, that’s got to hurt, but he gets up, shakes his head, and takes off again.

  “Hey, come here.”

  The puppy stops and looks back at me, ears high, tiny tail rotating wildly, pink tongue hanging out sideways from his mouth like he’s crazy. I realize he wants me to chase him, like he figured out he was bamboozled only he’s too proud to admit it and now covers up with this I-was-never-afraid-of-you routine. I recognize that one, too.

  He leaps in a circle on paws as big as his face, hits the wall again, and repels into a puddle of daze. I’m, like, mesmerized by the little guy. Wipes my windshield clean just watching him, so I scoop him up off the ground with one hand and pretend I didn’t notice his wall slam.

  “Tough guy, huh?”

  He smells like kerosene.

  “What’s that aftershave you’re wearing?”

  He feels lighter than a pint of bottled water as he squirms and laps at my face, blackened from explosive residue, soot from bombed-out buildings, and dust from hitting the ground so many times.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  I have a pretty good idea where he came from and a pretty good idea where he’s going, too. I’ve seen it before, Marines letting their guards down and getting too friendly with the locals—pretty girls, little kids, cute furry mammals, doesn’t matter; it’s not allowed. So as I’m holding the little tough guy and he’s acting like he just jumped out of a box under the Christmas tree, I call my cool to attention.

  It’s not allowed, Kopelman.

  But he keeps licking and squirming and wiggling around, and I remember this part pretty well, because I liked the way he felt in my hands, I liked that he forgave me for scaring him, I liked not caring about getting home or staying alive or feeling warped as a human being—just him wiggling around in my hands, wiping all the grime off my face.

  CHAPTER TWO

  November 2004

  Fallujah

  THE LAVA DOGS told me they’d found the little outlaw here at the compound when they stormed the place, and the reason he was still here was that they didn’t know what else to do with him. Since they’d decided to use the compound as the command post, and since this starving five-week-old puppy was already there, the choices were either to put him out on the street, execute him, or ignore him as he slowly died in the corner. The excuses they gave me were as follows:

  “Not me, man, no way.”

  “Not worth the ammo.”

  “I ain’t some kind of sicko, man.”

  In other words, they had enough pictures already from Fallujah to torture them slowly for the rest of their lives; they didn’t need any more. Warriors, yes—puppy killers, no.

  The puppy is named Lava, and while I’d like to say my comrades are creative enough to name him for symbolic reasons—like, you know, if they save him, they save themselves—I’m fairly sure they just couldn’t come up with anything else.

  Lava is the newest grunt, de-flea’d with kerosene, de-wormed with chewing tobacco, and pumped full of MREs.

  Just so you understand how tough Lava really is: MREs, officially called “Meals Ready to Eat” but unofficially called “Meals Rejected by Everyone,” are trilaminate retort pouches containing exactly twelve hundred calories of food, a plastic spoon, and a flameless heater that mixes magnesium and iron dust with salt to provide enough heat to warm the entrée. On the package, the meals state that “Restriction of food and nutrients leads to rapid weight loss, which leads to: Loss of strength, Decreased endurance, Loss of motivation, Decreased mental alertness,” which supposedly coaxes us into at least opening the pouch to see what’s inside.

  Lava can’t get enough of them, though, and learns real quick how to tear open pouches designed with three-year shelf lives that can withstand parachute drops of 1,250 feet or more.

  Still, the best part is how these Marines, these elite, well-oiled machines of war who in theory can kill another human being in a hundred unique ways, become mere mortals in the presence of a tiny mammal. I’m shocked to hear a weird, misty tone in my fellow Marines’ voices, a weird, misty look in their eyes, and weird, misty words that end in ee.

  “You had yuckee little buggees all over you when we found you, huh? Now you’re a brave little toughee. Are you our brave little toughee
? You’re a brave, little toughee, yessiree.”

  And the whole time Lava knows I’ve got him pegged, and he’s stealing glances at me to make sure I see how he’s soaking it all up.

  The Marines brag about how the puppy attacks their boots and sleeps in their helmets and gnaws nonstop on the wires from journalists’ satellite phones up on the roof. They tell me he can almost pick up an ammo belt. They tell me he loves M&M’s.

  “Did anyone feed Lava this morning?” someone yells out as “I did” comes back from every guy in the room.

  He’s like a cartoon character on fast-forward, always chasing something, chewing something, spinning head-on into something. He stalks shadows and dust balls and pieces of balled-up paper. He can eat an entire cigar in less than two minutes and drag a flak jacket all the way across the floor. I mean, the little shit never stops. If you aren’t dragging him along after you as he hangs on to your bootlaces with his teeth, he’s up on the roof tangled in wires or lost and wailing in the bowels of somebody’s backpack.

  You can’t yell at him, either, because even though you are an elite, well-oiled machine of war who in theory can kill another human being in a hundred unique ways, you’d still be considered a freak if you yelled at a puppy. He’s completely pampered, kept warm, his sticks never thrown out of his sight range so his ego isn’t damaged when he can’t find them. I find it all pathetic. At first.

  But the newest recruit already knows the two most important rules of boot camp by the time I come around: You don’t chew on bullets and you only pee outside.

  It’s like Lava is everyone’s kid. It gives them something to be responsible for above and beyond protecting their country and one another, and getting their brains blown out or worse in the process. He gives them a routine. And somehow, I become part of it.