From Baghdad with Love Read online

  Not that there are many rules of the road to obey here in the first place. Traffic lights blink sporadically and there aren’t any cops waiting to catch speeders, so drivers run through intersections and speed across sidewalks and generally avoid anything that might contain a bomb, including cars stopped for pedestrians, cars moving slowly through intersections, and cars stalled in the middle of the street.

  If you’re unfortunate enough to live in the Red Zone and have to actually go somewhere within it, the safest way to travel is as discreetly as possible. Nothing showy. No American flags on the antenna, no SUPPORT OUR TROOPS bumper stickers. Armored sedans are to be avoided because, as William Langewiesche reported in The Atlantic Monthly, they “might get you through a short gunfight, but they can kill you too, particularly through the overpressure that results from the explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade that penetrates to the inside.” Thin-skinned sedans are the way to go, because while they won’t stop bullets, they allow “rocket grenades to pass right through.”

  And here Annie is, transporting a large puppy who can’t keep still and whose face, popping up from one window to another, announces with virtual spotlights and blaring trumpets to every person standing in the streets that an American and her dirty American dog are in the car.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  January 2005

  The Syrian Border

  I DON’T CARE that I haven’t cried since I was a kid. When I read Anne’s e-mail from Baghdad, not even Patton’s presence could keep the tears from coming.

  “Just to confirm that Lava is safely with me . . .”

  Am I a gutless wimp?

  Maybe.

  Have I just embarrassed the entire US Marine Corps?

  Perhaps.

  Do I care?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  February 2005

  Baghdad

  ANNE’S DAYS IN Baghdad start early. Until 5 AM, Lava snuggles up next to her in bed and snores, but at 5 AM sharp the security people in the building rotate in and out, which sends Lava diving off the bed, to the door, to the window, and back to the door in a fanatic frenzy of barking.

  Back in the States, Anne and her husband live with five dogs, so she understands canine instinct well, but she tells me that never ever has she met a dog, especially one as young as Lava, who bounces so wildly back and forth between innocence and sheer ferocity. She thinks maybe it’s his gene pool; there are so many stray and feral dogs in Iraq that anything could be governing his DNA. Maybe the bombs did it or maybe his early diet of MREs, but Anne guesses it has something more to do with being raised by homesick Marines.

  Lava is a toy version of the well-trained, loyal-hearted, loudmouthed grunt. He sits on command. He pees outside. He obeys to the point of mechanization, but threaten the safety of his loved ones—especially at five o’clock in the morning—and nothing holds back the roo-roo-rooing.

  The building, really a compound of small buildings surrounded by a high wall, sits in the Red Zone and houses the NPR crew, other reporters, an Iraqi staff, and the security personnel.

  There aren’t any cinemas, no restaurants, no trivia nights at the local mosque, so the highlight of everyone’s day at the compound is to fawn over Lava’s incredible ability to sit.

  “Watch this,” one of them says to the others for the sixth time that evening, then looks down at Lava and raises a hand ever, ever, ever so slightly.

  “Sit.”

  And the intelligent puppy looks up, wags his tail, and sits. It’s amazing. Everyone, even the Iraqi workers, oohs and aahs as if encouraging the spiritual progress of the next Dalai Lama.

  Anne e-mails me with updates when she can.

  “All is well. Lava is happy . . .”

  “He’s incredibly affectionate. He nips but no more than our Lab puppy back home . . .”

  “He sits beautifully . . .”

  Before the insurgency gained popularity, journalists in Baghdad usually just congregated in the big hotels. After the initial invasion, though, after Saddam Hussein fled and the electricity went out, the reality of being invaded set in, and the big hotels became common targets. Journalists then either left the country or moved into private houses, which were less comfortable but definitely less conspicuous. If your house came under insurgent surveillance, you just moved to another house.

  But after the coalition forces invaded Fallujah and casualty reports filtered through the rest of the country, hatred of Americans grew so strong that private houses no longer protected anyone. Now the safest places were compounds like this, usually former motels, with high walls, grilled doors, and, most importantly, hired security with fully loaded automatic weapons.

  You didn’t go out for anything other than reporting, because journalists made especially functional targets out on the streets, with their deaths reported worldwide. Since the invasion in March two years before, seventy-five journalists and their drivers, interpreters, and guards were killed in Iraq by either insurgents, US forces, or Iraqi troops. In the past year alone thirty journalists had been kidnapped.

  Now that the initial election is over, Anne expects the violence to get worse. As she reports on NPR: “Sunday’s election was the easy part.”

  On the day of the election, hundreds of insurgent attacks were reported in Iraq, but now as the country waits for the ballots to be counted—a process that will take several weeks—violence barrels in with mud on its shoes. The Shiite Muslim majority expects big wins, and the Sunni Muslims aren’t taking the expected loss very well.

  A few days after the election Osama bin Laden’s top deputy calls the election “forged” and issues a renewed call for holy war. Al-Qaeda meanwhile promises to continue killing Americans and any Iraqis who help them, and keeps true to its word.

  Three days after the election two Marines are killed and twelve Iraqi soldiers are executed. Four days after the election a Marine from Camp Fallujah is killed in action and one Task Force Freedom soldier is killed and another wounded when their convoy is hit with a roadside bomb. Five days after the election two Task Force Danger soldiers get whacked and four others get wounded by an improvised explosive device. Seven days after the election twenty-four Iraqi recruits die from a suicide bomber. Eight days after the election another twenty-one join them.

  That same week, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena is seized from her vehicle by armed men near Baghdad University where she’d just interviewed refugees from Fallujah.

  “It’s still tense around here,” Anne reports.

  Anne enlists the help of one of the Iraqis who helps take care of the compound to watch Lava when she goes out during the day. That takes some guts, because she stands a good chance of losing him.

  For one thing, most Iraqis hate dogs. They think they’re unclean.

  For another, there’s an intense hatred of any Iraqi who works for Americans. If you’re Iraqi and work for Americans, you are worse than the Americans. First you receive a written warning addressed on the outside to “Brother of the monkey and the pig.” Then, on the inside, it reads something along the lines of,

  Dear brother of the monkey and the pig:

  We regret to inform you that unless you repent and return to your God and your Country, you will see a similar fate as that of your fellow brother spies who are rats and the afterbirth of rats. We are sorry for any inconvenience our violence may cause you, your wife, or your children.

  Sincerely, the Self-Sacrificers

  The next message is less diplomatic:

  WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! You are the enemy of God and Country. We give you this one last warning before death. Signed, Self-Sacrificers.

  Then they might paint DEATH TO SPIES on your house or leave a dead animal at your door. There’s rarely a third message left—and if there is, a homemade bomb is usually attached.

  While American deaths are meticulously accounted for by the US government—by the end of that January, several thousand and counting—no credit columns are kept on how many Iraqis,
whether insurgents or American-hired civilians, are killed or missing.

  So I can only imagine what’s going through Sam’s mind (I’ll call him Sam, because if he’s still alive, and I really hope he is, his real name can’t ever be associated with what he did) when Anne asks him to keep an eye on the puppy.

  “What, that wild thing? I’d rather sacrifice an eye.”

  “Please?”

  “No. I do not keep eyes on crazy animals. No.”

  “Please.”

  “Why not you ask me to shoot a bullet in my foot instead? Ask me to eat pork. Ask me to jump from airplane . . .”

  “Please.”

  And I can only imagine what goes through Sam’s head as Anne drives off to work that first time, leaving Lava at his feet staring up at him with that innocent look he gets when he needs to get it, that ears-forward, head-cocked, I-didn’t-mean-to-chew-up-the-only-porn-magazine-in-the-barrack look that causes you to bend down and scratch his little ears as you piece the pages back together.

  At first Sam is responsible for only two things: feeding Lava and making sure he doesn’t destroy the compound. After a few days, though, Anne notices that he’s expanding his responsibilities. She’ll come home and find Sam giving Lava a bath, or rolling a soccer ball around trying to teach him how to block.

  One night she finds Lava pawing at a two-inch-wide men’s leather belt hanging around his neck. It’s way too big, but when she looks to Sam for answers, he explains that “that dog” needs a collar.

  Sam is soon out on the streets of Baghdad in search of food and toys, also improvised in the end, because just about everything in the city is in one of two states: chaos or short supply. The price of meat, fruit, and vegetables has risen by at least a third since the US occupation. Electricity, water, and gasoline are also in short supply because of attacks on Iraq’s oil infrastructure by insurgents and because the Coalition Provisional Authority is so corrupt and/or inept, it “lost” at least eight million dollars of its budget within a fourteen-month period.

  But Sam goes out on the streets anyway, and one of his most valuable discoveries—found while dodging insurgents, hired mercenaries, and American convoys that warn in block letters DO NOT COME WITHIN 100 METERS OF THIS VEHICLE! DEADLY FORCE WILL BE USED!—is puppy biscuits.

  In the meantime, Anne reports that as the election results continue to be counted, Sunni clerics claim any winners will be “illegitimate,” President George Bush announces in his State of the Union address that it is still “too soon” to withdraw from Iraq, and soldiers with the army’s First Cavalry Division stationed in Baghdad are allowed two bottles of beer each during a replay of the Super Bowl.

  That same day, claims appear on the Mujahideen Brigade’s Web site that the kidnapped Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena has been executed. Almost immediately another militant group, the Islamic Jihad Organization, states on its Web site that they have the journalist and she is not dead yet. As Anne returns from interviews that morning, an American convoy passes her vehicle, which is being driven by an Iraqi, and turns around and then follows her for a while through the streets. They eventually stop the car, concerned that she has been abducted.

  Anne reports that twenty-one people have been killed by a suicide bomber at an Iraqi army recruiting center. “They are clearly targeting Iraqi Special Forces,” she says. And indeed, the Iraqi Resistance Report announces that an “Iraqi Resistance car bomb exploded near a truck carrying recruits to a puppet troop base in an unused airport in the western part of Baghdad . . . the blast took place near a recruiting center for the puppet troops and killed at least 21 and wounded about 27 more would-be soldiers serving the USA.”

  Anne e-mails me at the end of that first week.

  “He saved my sanity today. I was just so fed up with this whole place, and the whole job and went over and romped with him for awhile.”

  And I imagine it is almost as if Lava’s presence at the compound allows all humans a temporary exit pass from reality and maneuvers them through various checkpoints into the Land of Make-Believe where puppies romp on plush, green grass and it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  February 2005

  The Syrian Border

  TRYING TO COORDINATE Lava’s escape from the Syrian border through e-mail—getting the vaccinations, arranging for the paperwork, keeping him alive one day to the next—feels like being on the moon trying to shoot fish in a barrel on earth. But a mission on the Syrian border and a mission on a distant planet are little different anyway. While a lot of the country’s violence depends on what comes and goes across the border, the vast stretches of sand and horizon make it feel like a lunar outpost.

  My job here includes providing support to the army officers who are training the new Iraqi border police—the Desert Wolves—and to the Marines who man the forward operating base. I travel up and down the desert checking in on the dozens of forts where the new Desert Wolves stare out into the desert, fidget with their weapons, and smoke heavily as they wait for payday and their next vacation.

  The Desert Wolves are supposed to patrol the Iraq–Syria border, which foreign mercenaries, weapons smugglers, and jihadists move across easier than ants through a chain-link fence. During the past year, corruption raged here in Iraq’s “Wild, Wild West,” and the equivalent of fifty dollars bought anyone a one-way ticket through the checkpoints. While the Marines tracked and fought the insurgent sympathizers in the desert at night, the former Iraqi border police made extra cash by waving them through in broad daylight.

  The new guys, the Desert Wolves, seem on the up-and-up so far, but between the constant threats to their lives and the worsening economic conditions in Iraq, I know it’s just a matter of time before the huge amounts of cash coming out of Syria, where many of Saddam Hussein’s high-ranking Ba’athist party members now live, tempt the new guys beyond endurance.

  I understand the instinct to take what you can when you can, especially when your future is locked so deeply within somebody else’s battle plan, but if these guys are going to oversee their country’s security and US troops are ever going to pull out, then they have to sprout more discipline out here in this barren, unfertile grit.

  And the pressure is on. Just this week General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the United States won’t pull out of Iraq until the country’s security forces develop the capacity to police their own country. He then assured the committee that the training process was “moving along.”

  Likewise, in a visit to Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that “They [Iraqi security forces] are developing confidence and skill.”

  In Baghdad the US Army general in charge of training the forces told reporters that while there had been “some setbacks,” the training of the new Iraqi police and military forces was gaining “considerable momentum.”

  But as far as I can see, the only thing gaining considerable momentum is the insurgency’s attacks against the Iraqi recruits. Though they’ve been issued 79,000 pistols, 60,000 assault rifles, 94,000 sets of body armor, 5,900 vehicles, 20,900 radios, 2,400 heavy machine guns, 54,000 Kevlar helmets, and 79 million rounds of ammunition, the new Iraqi forces are being killed faster than Americans. More than thirteen hundred had died since we started training them. During the same week that US commanders extolled their “progress” to the media, twelve Iraqi soldiers died in an ambush near Kirkuk, twelve more were killed in Mosul by a suicide bomber, twenty-one died in an explosion outside an Iraqi Army base in Baghdad, six were killed by a car bomb in Baquba, three were killed and eleven others wounded by gunmen attacking an Iraqi Army convoy, twenty decomposing bodies of Iraqi police and soldiers were found on a road near the town of Suwayrah, six Iraqi National Guardsmen were found dead and dumped on a highway near Mosul, and the Associated Press received a videotape of masked gunmen shooting four Iraqi policemen.

  So we make day trips out to the
forts where the Desert Wolves just watch the border day and night. We go to make sure they’re taking turns on watch, that they have the proper security setup, that the lookout posts are where they’re supposed to be, but mainly we just want to make sure they’re still alive out there.

  The insurgents’ methods of targeting the Iraqi troops evolved as the war raged on. Because the insurgency apparently found it increasingly difficult to recruit suicide bombers, remote-controlled IEDs gained importance as the weapon of choice. When the United States counteracted with electronic jammers, the insurgents adapted by reverting to hard-to-jam signals.

  Now they’ve gone back to basics—the hardest to counteract and the simplest of all to use—strapping bombs to unwitting others, including dogs, cows, donkeys, and human beings with Down syndrome.

  Usually a dog is picked off the streets, rigged with explosives, and then set loose among potential victims. The bomb is then detonated by remote control. In Ramadi insurgents booby-trapped a donkey and then let it loose near a US-run checkpoint, where the donkey exploded. In Al Mashro police “arrested” a cow wandering down a highway dressed in bombs.

  The new method became so popular that the daily Arabic-language newspaper Al Mada published an editorial cartoon showing an insurgent trying to give a pep talk to a terrified dog: “It is such a simple task. All you have to do is to put on this explosives belt, repeat the party’s slogans, and may Allah have mercy on your father’s soul!”

  But the insurgents in Iraq held no corner on using animals as weapons during war. That distinction probably belongs to Americans, who through the years have used dogs to deliver messages and supplies through dangerous areas, cats to kill rats in foxholes, birds to indicate chemical weapons, and dolphins and seals to spot sea mines. During World War II the Soviet and US armies reportedly trained “tank dogs” who were taken away from their mothers as soon as they were born and fed only underneath tanks. When the dogs grew older, they were starved, rigged with bombs, and then sent out onto the battlefield to search for the nearest tank, hopefully a German one. Once there, the bombs were detonated.