From Baghdad with Love Read online

  Every morning we feed Lava his rehydrated Country Captain Chicken with Buttered Noodles and then pile out of the house to various posts across the city. Some Marines patrol the streets, some clear buildings looking for weapons, and some get killed and don’t do much of anything after that.

  Me, I have to patrol the streets with three wide-eyed Iraqi soldiers who, in their brand-new, US-issued, chocolate-chip cammies, wave their rifles around as if clearing the way of spiderwebs. Most still haven’t figured out how to keep their rifles safely locked.

  They are untrained, out of shape, and terrified. They’re members of the Iraqi Armed Forces (IAF)—stouthearted doublespeak for “conquered and unemployed”—who were coaxed by the United States to help root out insurgents in Fallujah before the upcoming national elections.

  Several days before we bombed the city, the new Iraqi recruits reported to Camp Fallujah, a few miles southeast of the city, with plenty of promising bravado. When Prime Minister Iyad Allawi made a surprise visit to the camp and urged them to be brave, to go forth and “arrest the killers” in Fallujah, the young Iraqi soldiers cried back with newly developed devil-dog gusto, “May they go to Hell!”

  Things deteriorated quickly, though. First we built a tent camp for them just outside the walled safety of the main camp. We called it the East Fallujah Iraqi Camp and hoped the name and the handful of American advisers and liaison officers who also stayed there would boost their courage. The Iraqi soldiers endured both regular mortar shelling of their tents by insurgents and verbal bombardments from the Americans who only had one week to prepare them for their first-ever combat experience. So they were prone to the jitters and often woke up in the middle of the night shooting their un-safed rifles wildly. Thank God they didn’t know how to aim.

  It didn’t help that influential Iraqi clerics publicly threatened the IAF soldiers with banishment to Hell, and the insurgent council that controlled Fallujah promised to behead any one of them who entered the city to “fight their own people.” In a statement issued by the council just before we attacked, the insurgents stated: “We swear by God that we will stand against you in the streets, we will enter your houses and we will slaughter you just like sheep.”

  More than two hundred Iraqi troops quickly “resigned,” and another two hundred were “on leave.” My job now is to babysit some of the few who remain.

  One afternoon about a week after I arrived at the compound, a few other Marines and I are patrolling one of the main streets with them. We’re in front of a mosque, right? And they’re all bug-eyed and waving their guns around and I’m a little strung out myself about what’s going on around us only I can’t let on, because I’m their example of what they’re supposed to do and feel and be. But they’re so freaked out, they’re clearly about to shoot me or one of the other Marines by accident, so I figure the best thing is to make them more afraid of me than they are of the streets—you know, take their minds off it for a little while—so I start yelling.

  “Knock that shit off.”

  And I keep yelling.

  “Safe your weapons.”

  And they keep jerking their eyes one way and their rifles another way.

  “I said knock that shit off!”

  Until I see they’ve gone into another zone of fear that even I don’t have access to, and one of the other Marines, I don’t remember who, Tim O’Brien, Dan Doyle, or Mark Lombard, says to me, “Take it easy on them, man, they don’t understand English,” which kind of ruins my whole show.

  “Yeah, well, they better learn fast.” But I stop yelling and give them a look instead.

  Then something rips past us in the air and we freeze. Just like that. It comes from nowhere but explodes a few yards away. Now we’re moving fast. Fast.

  A second rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) comes screaming our way, and I assess the situation in staccato—taking fire from two directions; small arms, medium machine gun, and rocket-propelled grenades; two men wounded; Iraqi soldiers running for cover; outnumbered in more ways than one.

  I maneuver behind the hood of the Humvee to direct the men as Tim O’Brien, up in the turret, opens up with the MK-19 turret gun laying down a base of covering fire so the rest of us can position to fight.

  Dan Doyle picks up a squad automatic weapon and fires toward the southwest.

  Tim’s a primary target in the turret, especially when his MK-19 jams and he has to fight with his M4—a shortened version of the M16A4 assault rifle—while he’s trying to clear the MK-19 and make it ready to fire again. But it’s Dan who gets hit. Blood runs down the inside of his left leg.

  “Dan, get into that mosque,” I order, but he ignores me and takes off running to get the Humvees positioned so we can evacuate the rest of the wounded, including Mark Lombard, who’s bleeding all over the place but is on the radio calling in our situation report anyway.

  Bullets and shrapnel ricochet from the hood of the Humvee inches to my right. Blood soaks Dan’s pant leg.

  “Get your ass into that mosque,” I yell again, but he, get this, looks over at me and grins.

  “Just a flesh wound.”

  Two armor-piercing rounds hit the vehicle and tear through its quarter-inch steel plate easier than needles through skin. I fire my M16A2 and yell for the Iraqi soldiers to direct their fire to the south.

  Only I don’t see them. Where the hell are they? I have to get the wounded to safety, 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 lo
udspeakers, 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 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, 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.