From Baghdad with Love Read online

  But it feels normal. Despite the bombs and the insurgents and the rubble, it feels like I belong here. And how screwed up is that?

  I reach down into the sleeping bag and pull Lava up under my chin. He snorts and snuffles around, and I start scratching his ears.

  “What’s going to happen to you once we leave, little guy?”

  The puppy opens one eye and stares up at me, and I start thinking the stuff we’re not supposed to think—about how we’re either going to have to shoot him or abandon him on the streets here in Fallujah where for dogs, eating human flesh is normal.

  Lava’s eyes lower to half-mast as his head drops slowly backward. I blow lightly on his face, because I don’t want to be awake alone. His eyes pop open. He looks annoyed.

  “What, am I invading your personal space?”

  He thumps his tail on my chest.

  “Well, you are invading mine.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  May 2005

  In flight from Kirkuk to Baghdad

  BRAD RIDENOUR FIGURED he owed Ken Licklider this favor. Helping Ken help a Marine wasn’t the only reason he was flying from the US/British embassy in Kirkuk to Baghdad International Airport, but it was up at the top of the list. That and going home.

  After four months in Iraq working as a dog handler for Triple Canopy Security, Brad was ready for the break—all the guys were—and while any of them would have helped Ken out on this, Brad was the obvious volunteer. After all, this was only his first tour of Iraq, so he didn’t need to get home as much as the guys who’d been at this for a while.

  But he did need a break. Home seemed like another story, where once upon a time he’d been a police officer in the small town of Portland, Indiana, and where, before he became the department’s K9 handler after training under Ken at Vohne Liche Kennels, the plot sat as stagnant as a Midwest slough. But it wasn’t the need for more drama that cornered Brad into going to Iraq. And it wasn’t Ken’s last-minute call asking him if he wanted the job with Triple Canopy. It was the fact that once he’d teamed up with his dog, Vischa, at Vohne Liche Kennels and spent several months learning to communicate with another species, he’d decided that not even communicating with extraterrestrials could offer more reward. He loved working with dogs. Ken’s contract with Triple Canopy Security, which had a contract with the US State Department to guard high-risk embassies in Iraq, provided Brad the chance to do it for a living.

  But it was a hell of a way to make a living. He’d lost fifty pounds in the past four months. The first ten came off from just getting into the country, when he’d learned how fidgety Iraqi customs officers could be. He traveled with another dog handler, and while Brad got Vischa through without a hitch, when the customs officials looked at the other handler’s papers and then at his dog’s health certificate, they demanded that the dog’s photograph be taken. The other handler had to pick up the ninety-pound German shepherd and hold him eye level with the camera. Brad didn’t understand what security measures were sealed by having the dog’s picture taken and didn’t ask, but it served notice of things to come.

  The next ten pounds came off during his first month at Triple Canopy’s fortified compound at the edge between the Green and Red Zones of Baghdad.

  Because the US military was stretched to its breaking point, the private company won government contracts in 2004 to protect the thirteen headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which governed Iraq during the US-led occupation. The company, newly formed by two retired members of the US Army’s Delta Force, shipped armored vehicles, weapons, and rucksacks full of cash to Iraq, where its employees used them to protect American dignitaries. Most of Triple Canopy’s recruits came from Latin America, mostly from Peru, Chile, Colombia, and El Salvador, and while they didn’t like to be called mercenaries, they probably could have pasted the word into their résumés if necessary.

  Brad and Vischa’s first job for Triple Canopy was to protect the company’s compound in the Green Zone by checking incoming vehicles for explosives. Only one bomb went off while he was there—an improvised explosive device detonated at the entrance of the Iraqi National Guard camp across a field from the Triple Canopy camp, but it was close enough to blind Brad when its shock wave sent a fine layer of dust his way.

  The last thirty pounds came off one month at a time during the twelve weeks he spent searching for explosives at the entrance to the US/British Embassy in Kirkuk. It didn’t seem like a long time when looking back, but wearing Kevlar 24/7, moving only in armored vehicles at high rates of speed, and holding your breath in every time a vehicle approached the embassy went a long way toward inciting homesickness. He’d held his breath so many times during the past four months, going home felt like gulping air.

  But he had to do this one last thing for Ken.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  November 2004

  Fallujah

  AFTER THREE WEEKS in Fallujah, I return to the main base with Lava on Thanksgiving Day in a Humvee—which, after serial bombardments, firefights, and crashes, looks more like a secondhand stock car than a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle that costs slightly less to assemble than the average American mansion.

  I have no idea what I’m going to do with Lava, but he loves the loud, rumbling trip, and as I drive and he perches on my lap and drools all over the window and roos at the thousands of Fallujah evacuees we pass by, I enter yet another excuse to the catalog of why I’m breaking military rules: I can’t help it.

  I don’t remember exactly when the excuses started, but it was sometime between the afternoon I saw the dogs eating dead bodies and the time I found Lava rolled up in my sleeping bag. After that, the excuses flowed: because the Iraqi soldiers were failing; because I was tired; because so many children hadn’t been evacuated by their parents when they’d been warned; because I was out of cigars; because I couldn’t sleep at night anymore unless some little fur ball was nestled up against me and breathing on my feet. By the time I’m scheduled to leave Fallujah, I have so many excuses scattered around, I just roll them all up into one big ball of hazy justification and plop Lava in the Humvee.

  I call friends and family back in the States and tell them about Lava and ask for help. I call on a cell phone, so I think at first that the silences on the other end are the usual international lag, but I realize, as the silences stretch out, that my friends are trying to place the word puppy within the context of words they have concerning me.

  See, they’re all scared that if I don’t get killed, I’ll lose my mind in Iraq and end up eating raw meat, collecting weapons, and sending anonymous scary letters to people I don’t know. So when I tell them I have a puppy and then there’s this long silence, I can sense them connecting the dots between who I was when I left and who they’re terrified I’ll be when I get back.

  Like, when I call one of my best buddies back in San Diego, Eric Luna, and ask him if he knows how to get a dog out of Iraq, I hear nothing for a long time but some static.

  “Hey, Easy E, you still there?”

  “Yeah, man, I’m here. What did you just say?”

  Talking between Iraq and California is expensive and often disrupted, so you have to say everything as quickly as you can. It’s an art, and fashioning my explanation into an understandable form that begins with stolen candy and ends with stray dogs eating dead bodies only fuels Eric’s worst fears.

  “What?” he keeps saying, like he can’t hear me.

  “RPGs . . . MREs . . . M&M’s . . .”

  “What?”

  “. . . bloated bodies . . . bootlaces . . . satellite wires . . . psychological operations . . . we’re not normal . . .”

  “What?”

  “. . . and, see, there are these dangerous portable toilets . . .”

  “What?”

  “Pup-py. I have this pup-py. Can you help me figure a way to help me get him out of the country?”

  Eric collects his wits and decides that in order to avoid future repercussions
, the best thing to do is to agree.

  “Sure, man. Yeah, anything you want.”

  The trip between the city and camp is only about twelve miles, but it’s a pretty tricky stretch, and targeting a military convoy is easier than picking lice off a bald dog.

  Contrary to sensible belief, the twenty thousand Humvees they have us driving around Iraq are not all armored vehicles. While their characteristics look cool on paper—weight: 5,200 pounds; engine: V8, 6.2-liter displacement, fuel-injected diesel, liquid-cooled, compression ignition; horsepower: 150 at 3,600 rpm—without armor, they are just big tin cans. We dress them up ourselves with sandbags, metal, and plywood, but that only weighs down the suspension and drivetrain components and creates more shrapnel when we’re hit with an RPG or by a roadside bomb.

  As a result, convoys make great targets, and in just one easy attack the insurgents can disrupt supply runs, mangle equipment, and butcher troops all at the same time. No suicide required. In fact, they’re getting so good at setting off bombs from far away—igniting them with garage door openers, remote controls for toy cars, and beepers requiring only a cell phone call to set them off—using suicide bombers has almost become yesterday’s fashion.

  The enemy dangles soda cans from trees and packs explosives into roadkill. They hide bombs in girders, vegetated highway dividers, guardrails, trash cans, and manholes. They bury bombs in underground tunnels. They drop bombs from bridges. The convoy drivers keep a specific distance between their vehicles, usually fifty to a hundred meters depending on the dust factor, so the entire herd won’t be taken down at once by a land mine.

  When the convoy halts for equipment inspection or refueling, every driver stays in his vehicle with the motor running while every other eye scans the horizon 360 degrees and back again. Sometimes one of us will venture out to take a leak, but peeing on the side of the road in the middle of the Sunni Triangle isn’t very safe; your chances of being hit are about as high as those for the fat boy in dodgeball.

  If you are hit while peeing, the following advice is given in our Lessons Learned handbook: “RETURN FIRE—Extremely Effective; Continue to move; Do Not Stop!! They want you to do this; Do not be afraid to shoot; . . . anyone not stopping enemy activity is enabling the activity—This makes return fire morally right.”

  Usually before a convoy moves out, we gather at a staging site where the commander logs us in, the vehicles are inspected, personal items including clothes, food, and water are loaded, and heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and other weapons are mounted, dusted, lubed, and readied to fire. The commander usually briefs us about new intelligence, the convoy route, radio call signs, and road-safety precautions, and follows with immediate action drills if the convoy gets hammered anyway. In our case we left the danger of Fallujah for the danger of the road by just piling things into the Humvees as fast as we could and exchanging good-luck salutes with the commander.

  So we’re driving along to the camp on a tricky road past all these Fallujah evacuees who now live in US-erected tents out in the cold and are pissed off about it. Like, they hate our guts.

  The four of us in the Humvee make jokes about the old men in dresses and the fat women behind veils and egg on Lava when he barks.

  “Kill,” we say and fall out laughing, because we think it’s so damned funny. “Kill, Lava, kill.” We’re nervous. It helps pass the time.

  At first, as the convoy rolls past and the evacuees see this little puppy barking wildly at them through the Humvee’s window, I expect them to give us the finger and shout nasty predictions about what will happen to us after we die. I expect any second to see one of the old guys pull a machine gun out of his robe and blast away as he’s smiling. I expect burning effigies and hordes of shouting clerics with fists high in the air.

  It’s all a game really. Monopoly with bombs. Capture the Flag with grenades. See, there’s this line that’s drawn that’s just meant to be crossed, and you stand on one side with your goods and they stand on the other with their goods, and the teams lob insults back and forth—“My stuff’s better than yours!” “No, my stuff’s better than yours!” “Well, I know the Referee!” “Oh, yeah? I’m related to the Referee”—until someone finally steps over the line and play officially begins.

  I guess the Ref is the only one who really knows who crossed first and under what duress, but at this point everyone’s so balled up in the name-calling—“Insurgents . . . murderers . . . terrorists . . . fanatics”; “Imperialists . . . infidels . . . invaders”—it doesn’t matter anymore who did what or when.

  Imagine the old Ref up there in the North Pole being all nonpartisan and looking down on this. It’s embarrassing. No wonder he doesn’t show his face anymore.

  And here we are driving by in our convoy past these people, and I can’t stop thinking about the dogs. After a couple of days walking around the bodies in Fallujah, you got good at telling which ones the dogs had gotten to—the skin was shredded off the fattiest parts of their bodies, mostly the stomachs, butt cheeks, and soles of the feet—and that, my friend, is some gut-wrenching shit.

  But they just stare at us. No rocks. No mutilated American flags. No calls to jihad with weapons raised in the air. Just stares, like they don’t have energy to do anything else, mile after mile of them. After a while I start feeling like I’ve pulled off a brilliant practical joke that went too far and Lava’s rooing starts getting to me.

  “Come on, buddy, cut it out.”

  But he tears from one window to the other, and one of the other guys tells him to stop, and these faces stare at us through the dirty glass, but it’s not funny anymore, and Lava just keeps roo-roo-rooooing, mile after mile, face after face, until I think my head is about to explode, “Knock that shit off,” and I slam on the brakes.

  Lava stares at me. The guys stare at me. The faces, the people outside, stare at me. And they’ve got that look, all of them, that look that says Caught your cool off guard, did we? so I shrug it off, you know, recompose and grin and peel off real fast, leaving the Iraqis in a plume of dust and dirt.

  Except as the mood in the Humvee gets back to normal, I can still feel Lava staring at me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  November 2004

  Camp Fallujah

  AS WE PULL through the gates of Camp Fallujah, the holiday scenery provides what you’d expect from an abandoned Iraqi military installation and former Iranian terrorist training camp taken over by US forces located midway between Baghdad and Fallujah, about eight thousand miles away from Plymouth Rock. Congested landing pads. Humvee graveyards. Rows of portable toilets making some civilian contractor lots and lots of money.

  What I don’t expect is all the activity at the Mortuary Affairs building with DO NOT ENTER posted at its doors. That’s something new. It makes me think of Anne Garrels’s stories. I hope she got out of the country okay.

  At least the weather is cool, and after stuffing Lava in my backpack and sneaking him into my room in the officers’ building, I turn on the heater to keep him warm.

  “You okay in here, little guy?”

  Lava looks up at me and cocks his head. As I stare down at this cute but fairly drastic breach of military law, I wonder if I’ve done the right thing. Lava will be vulnerable here at the camp, which under regulations can’t harbor any dogs other than the military’s working canines. As it is, stray dogs and cats swarm the camp looking for food, and rumor has it that they’re being drowned in a nearby pond.

  The officers’ building is the worst place on base to hide a bouncing ball with vocal chords, but the need to decompress from the last three weeks drains me of incentive to do anything but sleep, so I pull Lava up on the cot next to me, where neither of us moves for the next nine hours.

  I dream, though. Only I dream reality, can’t get away from it, even in sleep.

  I’m patrolling one of the main streets of Fallujah in front of a mosque and the Iraqi soldiers are waving their guns around and I’m yelling at them to safety their weap
ons and Tim O’Brien is telling me to take it easy on them, because they don’t understand English.

  And I turn on Tim and say “Well, they better learn fast,” and he starts grinning and saying something, only suddenly his head isn’t there anymore, it’s on the ground, and grenades explode around us, and I grab up his head and try to jam it back onto the neck of his body, try to make it work again so I can hear what he has to say, only it’s not sticking, so I try connecting the tendons from his neck to the tendons in his head only they’re all tangled up and sticky and I can’t put two and two together, and the grenades keep exploding, and then the eyes in the head in my hands start swiveling back and forth and the mouth starts spewing blood, but it’s grinning, it’s working, it’s spewing and grinning and working and saying “It’s only a flesh wound, man. It’s only a flesh wound.”

  In the morning the bed is soaked, and Lava shivers under the covers drenched in his own pee. It’s the first time this has happened since he started sleeping in my bag in Fallujah.

  “Humiliated?”

  He whimpers.

  “Nightmares?”

  Lava pushes his nose and then most of his body under the pillow. I hum the Marine anthem to him. His tail starts patting the bed.

  “Me too.”

  I decide I’ll risk talking to the dog handlers at the other end of the base where they actually grow green grass for the dogs to walk on. They treat the military working dogs well.