From Baghdad with Love Read online

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  January 2005

  Camp Fallujah

  TURNS OUT, THE Lava Dogs are thinking hard to find the last place on camp anyone would look for contraband and about the last person anyone would suspect of harboring it. They determined that Sergeant Matt Hammond with the personal security detachment for the commanding general fit the bill.

  Matt Hammond is a good Marine, dedicated beyond belief, a patriotic kind of guy who grew up an army brat and worshiped the Marines from the time he was a kid, who always knew he’d sign up, who to this day says the Marines were his childhood heroes, which makes the rest of us feel like imposters, because we grew up worshiping the Beaver’s big brother and Cap’n Crunch.

  This is how loyal Matt Hammond is:

  He’s in Fallujah, right? Patrolling or whatever, and it’s bad there now, right? Like, there’s no electricity, water, or sewage in the city, and because dead bodies rot everywhere—under the rubble, inside the houses, out on the streets—the air is as alien as gas on another planet. In all at least twelve hundred insurgents and an unknown number of noncombatants have been killed and forty-four Marines have already been processed through the Mortuary Affairs Unit at the camp.

  Matt gets wounded one night in an alley, and the guys load him into a Humvee and rush to a nearby aid station. But on the way a grenade hits the Humvee and the door’s locking mechanism dislodges, sending Matt out onto the street. They have to turn around to pick him up, and while they’re looking for him in the dark, another firefight erupts. Matt is conscious during all of this, lying there on the street, and to hear him tell the rest of the story almost kills your throttle:

  “I didn’t know what happened. They came back for me, but it was so dark, they couldn’t see me and there was another firefight. I remember I couldn’t breathe and I was trying to crawl toward them. All I remember after that is hearing them yell, ‘We found him! We found him!’

  “After that, I was transported to a hospital in Baghdad, but when they told me I would have to go to a hospital in Germany, I snuck out and called my buddies back at Camp Fallujah and told them I didn’t want to leave. I told them to come and get me.

  “I was on a lot of morphine, and one day I was just lying in bed in the hospital half asleep and I hear this voice that sounds like the commanding general. I could hear him saying, ‘Put on your boots. You’ve got a war to fight.’ I thought I was dreaming but it was him. He’d come to Baghdad to take me back.”

  When the chopper landed at Camp Fallujah later that day, Matt’s team sat in Humvees waiting for him in the landing area.

  “It felt like I’d just hit a grand slam and was coming into home base with everyone there waiting to cheer me on.”

  Matt is, like, dedicated. Loyal as a cliché. And he loves dogs.

  So while he’s recouping at the camp in his team’s building and the Lava Dogs sneak the puppy to him, he looks at it like a mission. See, he can’t stand the fact that the guys in his team are going out to work every day while he’s stuck in the building trying to learn how to walk again, so taking care of Lava gives him something to do.

  Only he learns right away what a little beast Lava is and starts wondering if the puppy has coyote blood in him or something. He’s smaller than a sandbag but acts like a wild animal. That’s a direct quote: “. . . acts like a wild animal.”

  Lava chews on anything that belongs to anybody—pillows, blankets, clothes, plastic gun butts—and when he discovers the guy’s rubber shower shoes, he goes on his own little search-and-destroy mission. Then he singles out one Marine’s boots and pees on them—and only them—night after night. And then there’s his compulsive need to protect the guys from noise and shadow, any noise or shadow, and his incessant roo-rooing starts getting on their combat-sawed nerves.

  Matt finally decides that in order to save his life, especially from the Marine with the squishy boots, he’d better get Lava his own barracks. So he commandeers the navy Seabees on base to build Lava a little plywood hooch, which they hide in back of the building.

  And eventually Matt and Lava fall into a nice little routine. In the mornings, Matt and Lava water the makeshift garden grown from seeds Matt’s mom sent from Arizona. Then they sit behind the building and play with toys sent by the team’s family members back home when they heard they had a puppy. Then they amble down to a bombed-out sewer at the edge of the camp to feed a litter of puppies the guys found one day.

  But everyone knows it’s just a matter of time before the wrong people find out about Lava. For one thing, he’s growing bigger and getting louder every day. For another, a week or so after Matt starts feeding the stray puppies, someone following orders covers the sewer with the puppies in it over with dirt.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  January 2005

  The Syrian Border

  BY THE TIME the elections are one week away, Annie is in flight to Baghdad, Lava is still at Camp Fallujah, and I’m at the Syrian border. I’m back to babysitting Iraqi soldiers, who in this part of the country call themselves the Desert Wolves.

  I’m worried about Lava, whom I haven’t seen in more than a month. I’m also worried about Matt and his guys, who are arranging a special convoy they’re calling a “chow run” to get him to Baghdad. Marines are prime targets these days, and the insurgents and everyone related to them hate our guts for what we did in Fallujah. But I’m most worried about Anne, who’s going to have to pick him up somewhere in the city the Ref seems to be pissing on these days.

  The election is scheduled for January 30; Iraqis will vote for a national assembly to write a new constitution and for council members to represent each of the eighteen provinces in the country. The problem is that the Shiites and ethnic Kurds make up about 80 percent of the country’s population and are expected to win by a landslide, and because Sunnis, who know they will lose, are threatening to boycott the election in protest of our destruction of Fallujah, so civil war is rolling in like an enemy tank so poorly oiled you can hear it coming a mile away.

  I’m all keyed up about Lava going to Baghdad, because it’s, like, tense there right now. The country hasn’t seen open voting since before the reign of Saddam Hussein. For Iraqis starved of political power, the ballot represents an all-you-can-eat buffet, and the diners are hungry, and a lot of them have guns.

  I mean, get this. A total of 196 political parties and 33 coalitions representing more than 18,900 candidates rush to get on the ballot. The ballot provides voters a heaping helping of hastily formed parties such as the United Iraqi Coalition, the Iraqi Islamic Party, and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, each providing lists of candidates, including “the Iraqi List,” “the Security and Stability List,” and “the Security and Justice List.”

  The election authorities try to keep order—you can’t be funded by a militia, for example—and each registrant has to provide a logo or symbol so illiterate voters can identify them. When logos of Kalashnikov rifles, mass graves, and Korans with halos around them start showing up, everyone knows it’s going to get messy.

  But as quickly as candidates register, they receive death threats or, as in the case of at least ten of them, well-placed bullets to the head. Candidates are afraid to leave their homes, and unless a party has its own militia, its people can’t run for office and stay alive at the same time. Campaigning, therefore, is done Iraqi-style: Candidates hire people to run out on the streets, post a few signs, and then run back inside before they’re seen.

  Slogans on the signs are straightforward and simple: FREE HOMELAND—HAPPY PEOPLE! or WE WILL RESTORE ELECTRICITY! A few candidates, including interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, pay for television airtime: “We will strive to reduce unemployment by using oil investments to create 250,000 new jobs in the public and private sectors . . .” But even the prime minister isn’t immune from threats. Soon after his television ad is aired, an al-Qaeda affiliate posts a videotape on the Internet showing a candidate from Allawi’s party being murdered. The t
ape includes a warning to the prime minister: “You traitor, wait for the angel of death.” So most candidates avoid public appearances and just hide in their homes and pray.

  Right before the election, the government, such as it is, plans to close the borders, cut all mobile and satellite phone service, and ban travel between provinces. It also announces that it has stockpiled hospital beds and medical supplies in anticipation of democracy.

  So, yeah, I’m worried about Lava and Matt and Anne.

  I mean, reading the headlines in the week leading up to the election turns monotonous:

  AT LEAST 21 PEOPLE KILLED BY SUICIDE BOMBERS

  BAGHDAD GOVERNOR ALI AL-HAYDARI ASSASSINATED

  AT LEAST 20 PEOPLE KILLED IN INSURGENT ATTACKS

  MILITANTS BEHEAD IRAQI WHO WORKED FOR THE COALITION AND KILL AT LEAST FOUR OTHERS

  MILITANTS KILL EIGHT IRAQI NATIONAL GUARD SOLDIERS

  ELEVEN PEOPLE DIE IN SUICIDE BOMBINGS

  AT LEAST 14 PEOPLE KILLED AND 40 WOUNDED BY CAR BOMB NEAR SHI’A MUSLIM MOSQUE

  BOMB DETONATES NEAR IRAQI PREMIER’S OFFICES

  IRAQI JUDGE ASSASSINATED IN BAGHDAD

  CAR BOMB AT A PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT HEADQUARTERS KILLS FIVE PEOPLE

  20 PEOPLE KILLED IN SERIES OF ATTACKS INVOLVING ROCKETS, ROADSIDE EXPLOSIVES, AND SUICIDE CAR BOMBS

  After a while it’s like reading something from Dr. Seuss: They behead them in Baghdad, yes they do, so make sure your hotel has a room with a view.

  People stationed or stuck in Baghdad are starting to unravel as all these contractors and civilians and Iraqi soldiers get killed. As for the US forces, we don’t fare much better. During the month of January, 641 of our troops are killed or wounded.

  This includes thirty-one Lava Dogs who go down in a helicopter during a sandstorm four days before the election.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  January 2005

  The Syrian Border

  I CHECK MY e-mail one more time before going to bed. When I see Anne’s name in the inbox, worry surrenders with hands up to a sense of panic I hadn’t felt during even the worst of the fighting in Fallujah.

  Earlier in the week the guys at Camp Fallujah created an excuse to convoy to Baghdad where they’re supposed to hand Lava over to Anne, but the wait for the exchange—the trip to Baghdad and then the actual handover—turns into this foxhole of hours, because I have no way of knowing what’s going on. I could play handball with an undetonated grenade and feel calmer.

  One of the guys e-mailed that morning, needing the PIN of my cell so he could call Anne and arrange the drop-off. I haven’t heard anything since, so I don’t know if he got hold of Anne or if Anne answered the call or if the guys got off base or if the convoy made it to Baghdad or if Anne got into the Green Zone or if the Marines, Anne, and Lava are even still alive.

  I know better. I know I know better. My trust in my fellow Marines is bulletproof. Whether directing an E2C Hawkeye onto a carrier or covering my back in a Fallujah alley, I know they’ll perform as trained. But rescuing Lava is something different. Waiting like this requires an alien faith. If Lava jumps out of the Humvee on the way to Baghdad, will they jump out, too, and go after him? If an officer discovers the puppy in the convoy and orders him shot, will they do it? If they can’t get off base in Baghdad, if they can’t find Annie, if they get a call from home and miss the handoff, will they figure out another way or will they leave him on the streets?

  You never ask your men to do anything you won’t do yourself. You parachute first, you help clear the way, you count inventory alongside them so they trust you. But would I have done any of those things for anyone else’s puppy if he’d asked me to? To this day I’m not sure.

  I should have just walked away from Lava the day I left Fallujah. Sure, it would have been tough, but guilt only annoys you if you pay attention to it, like a crook in your neck, and then I wouldn’t have had all these nights of worry about who was caring for Lava, what would happen if the wrong people discovered him, and how they would kill him if they found him. I wouldn’t have had to spend time playing with him and feeding him and finding a way to get him vaccinations and food from the military working dog handlers.

  But all the things I did for him, I did for myself. They helped me forget all the crap over here, and I spend all day and night waiting to hear anything, anything at all, even that he hasn’t made it.

  Now Anne’s e-mail sits before me with the potential of an IED.

  You normally couldn’t worry like this, about how expensive life was here, about how you budgeted each breath and horded each heartbeat because it might be the last. Thinking about it is unauthorized, off limits, quarantined until notice, because if you obsess about death or search for stronger gods or stare too long at the navel of your own future, you lose focus and get shot in the head.

  You have to be tougher than this, stronger than this, smarter than this. But when I finally work up the courage to open Anne’s e-mail, I break down and cry.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  January 2005

  Baghdad

  ANNE ALWAYS TOLD me that most Americans don’t understand how two different countries exist within the boundaries of Baghdad. Even the Marines from Camp Fallujah who contacted her about handing Lava over didn’t quite get it. Her e-mail explains all of it, but what really gets me is how it ends.

  Anne stays in a compound in the city’s Red Zone. It’s a far cry from the hotel she reported from in 2003, when she was one of only sixteen American journalists who stayed in Baghdad during the initial invasion of Iraq by US and British forces. While during the siege she faced constant censorship from the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein—she reported from her hotel room naked in case the Iraqi police barged in—at least she could go out on the streets and buy kebabs for lunch.

  But now, two years after the first onslaught of Operation Iraqi Freedom, two distinct zones divide Baghdad—the heavily guarded Green Zone, where if clothed in a flak jacket you can still safely buy kebabs on the street, and the unprotected Red Zone, where captive Americans bring twenty-five thousand dollars apiece and flak jackets only weigh you down when you need to run.

  At first the Fallujah Marines want Anne to meet them at the airport to pick Lava up, but that’s too dangerous, because she doesn’t have an armored car in which to travel the strip of highway between Baghdad and the airport known as “IED Alley.” When the Marines finally comprehend the impracticality of that plan, they think it’s simply a matter of meeting her somewhere in the Green Zone. But Anne lives in the Red Zone, which is an area of free-for-all violence consisting of bombed-out schools, bombed-out restaurants, and bombed-out office buildings that receive no clean water and only a few hours of electricity on good days. She wants to be there, in the real Iraq.

  The Red Zone is governed for the most part by insurgents and private security contractors—hired protection specialists who, unsupervised by military law, drive down sidewalks in armored SUVs waving automatic weapons to clear their way.

  No one leaves the Green Zone without an armed convoy. No one enters the Green Zone without credentials, and even those with the credentials have to pass through several checkpoints of heavy metal gates, coiled concertina wire, metal road spikes, blast barriers, and sandbagged isolation bays used for searches.

  While some consider Fallujah the most dangerous place on earth, others believe waiting in line to pass into Baghdad’s Green Zone is worse. Stopped vehicles make easy targets for snipers, and car bombs explode here by the dozens, so US and Iraqi guards divide incoming traffic into two lanes, one for VIPs that moves fairly quickly and one for everyone else. The process of getting in is so time consuming that in January, Iraq’s minister of state resigned in anger over how he was treated when he tried to enter the Green Zone for a cabinet meeting.

  In order to get into the Green Zone to pick up Lava, Anne has to wait in line with everyone else. Once inside, she can’t just travel wherever she wants. No one but the Marines can do that, so w
hen they suggest meeting at one of the military bases on the inside, she informs them that she can’t go anywhere in the Green Zone but the former convention center.

  The handoff grows even more complicated when the Fallujah Marines can’t find the convention center. They try calling Anne by cell, but the city’s only service, provided by Iraqna, has its daily four-hour siesta at that point. Iraqna, handed an exclusive two-year contract by the Coalition Provisional Authority, blames its blackouts on chaos—no fuel, no electricity, no banking system, no generators, no landlines—and sabotage and the US military, which regularly shuts down the network to keep insurgents from communicating with one another and from setting off bombs.

  So Anne has to just sit tight and wait until she finally sees the whole group of them wandering around down the street carrying Lava in their arms.

  When they finally connect, Matt hands Lava over to Anne. It’s kind of an ordeal for him, because, you know, he’s a Marine standing in front of a bunch of other Marines who don’t want to see one of their own all wimped out over a puppy, only they’re all a little wimped out over the puppy, and Anne, who doesn’t want to be seen in the company of wimpy Marines, grabs Lava and leaves as fast as she can.

  He doesn’t have a collar or leash, so Anne has to carry him all the way back to the car. Luckily her Iraqi driver doesn’t object. Most Iraqis don’t like dogs.

  But getting from the Green Zone back to the NPR compound in the Red Zone is no joyride, either; it requires a certain amount of grit and heavy-duty sedatives if available.

  If you’re fortunate enough to live in the Green Zone, but unfortunate enough to have to go into the Red Zone, you travel the streets escorted either by a military convoy or, more likely, by a private security detail driving custom-built SUVs with steel-plated doors, three-inch bulletproof windows, and machine guns pointing out every available crack. Local traffic swerves out of the way for these guys, even onto the sidewalks or into oncoming traffic in the opposite lane.