From Baghdad with Love Read online

  The beauty of using animals to kill is that they don’t know any better. Soldiers, Marines, insurgents all had to be trained to kill, which took up time and resources, whereas donkeys and dogs just wanted someone to pet or feed them. The problem with this method, however, is that it is fairly imprecise. After all, you can’t direct a cow to “go up to the corner, turn left, walk north for two blocks, and then moo loudly when you get to the line of guys standing outside the police recruiting station.”

  So they reverted to something even better—people like nineteen-year-old Amar, who had Down syndrome. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Amar’s parents went out to vote and then went to a relative’s house for a celebratory party. While they were gone, insurgents kidnapped Amar, strapped a bomb to him, and told him to walk toward a polling site.

  At least one eyewitness said that Amar “was so scared when ordered to walk to the searching point, he began to walk back to the terrorists.”

  In response, they blew him up.

  Amar’s parents heard the blast from their party, and when word spread that a “mongoli” was the bomber, they raced home to find Amar gone. Amar’s cousin told the Sydney Morning Herald: “They got neighbors to search and one of them identified Amar’s head where it lay on the pavement. His body was broken into pieces. I have heard of them using dead people and donkeys and dogs to hide their bombs, but how could they do this to a boy like Amar?”

  I don’t care how long you’ve been in Iraq, that sort of thing kicks your ass to the curb and back.

  It hits me suddenly, like a slap on the back in a crowded room—a major in the army had gotten puppies out of the country some time back. I can’t remember the details, because at the time it was just something I heard about, like you’d hear about someone’s wife back home having a baby, a nice story in passing but something you think about for a few minutes and then forget. All I remember now is that someone in the State Department had helped her.

  I e-mail the major and explain Lava’s story.

  “Did you actually get your pooches vaccinated?” I write:

  More importantly, if I could hook up Anne Garrels with your friend at State, do you think he’d help one more time? It would be such a huge favor to ask, I know, but I’m leaving in less than two months—Annie leaves at the end of this month—and I’m running out of ideas. We’ve even considered asking the Marine C-130 crews to take him with them. I’d have to put him in a kit bag, get on a helo to Al Asad, then give him to them to take home . . .

  The problem is that I still don’t have permission to transport Lava on a military plane, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to. In addition, Lava still doesn’t have his vaccinations or paperwork and I haven’t heard back from Dr. Murrani.

  Anyway, if you think you could ask your friend to help once more, I’d appreciate it tremendously.

  I’m banking on the fact that the major has been in Iraq for a while and hopefully understands the need for mutual rowing.

  She does. She writes back immediately telling me first that she heard a car bomb went off in front of the ISAW in Baghdad, which is probably why I haven’t heard back from Dr. Murrani yet; she likely has other issues to deal with.

  I got the dogs vaccinated by a military vet. He was very paranoid about it though, and had me meet him in a parking lot in civilian clothes to hand off the records.

  [My friend] at State Department claimed [the puppies] as his and had them shipped to Kuwait. From there, Bonnie Buckley at Military Mascots had a very nice lady pick them up and ship them to Atlanta via Amsterdam.

  I found the key is to get an Iraqi vet to get them all the shots—rabies most importantly, or get a friend to convoy them to Kuwait and get one of Bonnie’s contacts to help from there.

  So I Google “Military Mascots” and find out it’s a group of volunteers who help service members get their pets out of Iraq and to the United States. It’s perfect. It seems like all I’ll have to do is contact them and make sure Lava gets his vaccinations and paperwork.

  That and get Lava from Baghdad to Kuwait.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  February 2005

  Massachusetts

  THE MARINE’S LETTER to Bonnie Buckley wasn’t that much different from the dozens and dozens of others she’d received during the past two years. At least it wasn’t another hate letter accusing her of being a threat to national security. For every e-mail she got requesting help with a mascot, she received another accusing her of aiding and abetting Iraqi spies or bringing foreign diseases into the country: “Foreign dogs carry the plague!”

  Bonnie also received messages suggesting she find more worthwhile causes to support, even though she couldn’t imagine a better way to spend her time. And besides, this wasn’t about saving homeless dogs and cats in a foreign country; as a former animal control officer, Bonnie knew there were plenty of those in the United States already, millions and millions of them. Rather, Military Mascots, the volunteer group she ran from her home in Massachusetts, was about supporting the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by supplying a patriotic missing link.

  She’d created the group in 2003 when she heard about a soldier who’d found a puppy in an oil field in Iraq and wanted to bring him home. She helped raise twelve hundred dollars and since then hadn’t stopped helping. She now had nine ports of entry at her disposal along with military parents and spouses, active and retired military members, civilians, and veterinarians across the world organizing everything from flight arrangements to vaccinations to border crossings to help get the animals to the States.

  At first Bonnie had no clue how to cut through the international red tape to get an animal across the border. But the never-ending stream of requests drove her to make repeated phone calls to foreign embassies, spend enormous amounts of time on the Internet, and devote even more time to networking with animal rescue organizations, military personnel, and veterinarians across the world.

  The organization now ran an underground railroad from Iraq and Afghanistan through Jordan and Kuwait. “Nothing illegal,” she would tell anyone who wondered, though some things hovered near the edge. Like, she used to try to smuggle dogs out on military flights by having them drugged, so they wouldn’t be noticed. But she didn’t do that anymore. Everything was on the up-and-up, all the paperwork, everything.

  While she knew that in every war there were cases of service members finding and adopting pets in foreign lands, she sensed that those now deployed in the Middle East were especially in need of the morale boost the animals seemed to give. She received so many pleas for help.

  “I have a dog here in Iraq that I am trying to get home to the US . . . I don’t want [him] to get shot like the rest of the dogs around here . . . I was hoping maybe you could find a way to get him home before he becomes too big or disappears.”

  Or: “. . . she was crying and stuck in the barbed wire . . . I didn’t see her mother anywhere and I couldn’t leave her there to die.”

  Or: “My Company and I found a furry friend that has been with us through both the best of times and the very worst of times here in Iraq . . .”

  Or: “If you would help me I would be forever in your debt.”

  What really got to Bonnie, though, was that for every service member Military Mascots helped, dozens more had to leave their pets behind. The service members had witnessed a lot of stuff. Bad stuff. Then they found these animals and couldn’t bear to leave them behind. They became almost desperate to get them out.

  One soldier in Baghdad contacted Bonnie and said he’d found three puppies who were orphaned after their mother was shot. Despite his best efforts during the following six months, all of the puppies died except one, who ended up being promoted by his troops to the rank of PFC after he survived being run over, electrocuted, and witness to 189 mortar rounds.

  “We cannot leave him behind,” the soldier wrote Bonnie.

  But when the puppy’s soldier redeployed, he could not find a safe ride for him from Baghdad to
any border where Military Mascots could pick him up. The puppy remained behind in Baghdad at the base and hadn’t been heard from since.

  Then there was the pup found by a soldier in a garbage dump. The puppy slept with him, ate with him, patrolled with him wherever he went. The soldier’s family sent food and toys for the puppy, and his nephew’s school prayed daily for the puppy’s safe return.

  The soldier had big plans for the little guy when they got home. First he would take him to his nephew’s school for a thank-you visit, then he would turn him loose in a big fenced yard, then he would let the pup have his choice of beds to sleep on in his new home.

  But GO 1-A came down harder than hail that month and the soldier could no longer keep the puppy from being killed before he left for the United States. With no other options, the soldier took the puppy back to where he’d found him and left him there with promises from his comrades to feed him when they could.

  Bonnie looked at the letter from Lieutenant Colonel Kopelman, though, and figured there was hope for this one. If he could get his puppy to Kuwait, she had a volunteer who could pick him up and put him on a plane to the States.

  Still, she made it clear to the lieutenant colonel that Military Mascots did not support the movement of animals into the United States unless they were guaranteed a home with the service member’s family.

  “We realize that having your companion with you all these months has provided you with a ‘touch of home’ that you may have longed for,” she wrote. “The sad fact is that the US is already filled with thousands of homeless animals and not enough good homes for them, therefore we want to know that your effort to bring your companion into the States has been an entirely thought out one and a lifetime commitment to your friend.”

  She also made it clear that getting the mascots home was a costly, time-consuming venture. A commercial flight and export fees into the States, for example, cost as much as fifteen hundred dollars from Iraq and twenty-five hundred from Afghanistan. The animal also needed an import/export permit, a health certificate, rabies and distemper vaccinations, and a shipping kennel.

  She told Kopelman to give her volunteer a few days’ notice of the puppy’s arrival and work out a location for the pickup. She closed her e-mail message with the following quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

  She hoped this one worked out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  February 2005

  Baghdad

  ONCE A POSSIBLE exit route through Kuwait with Military Mascots is found, Sam makes it his mission to get Lava vaccinations and paperwork.

  But in Baghdad, everything goes up for grabs. When the election results are finally announced in mid-February, Anne reports that Shiites and Kurds turned out the big winners, which means the Sunnis, who will be underrepresented in the new government, are more pissed off than hornets doused with water. Violence flares, and getting “proper documentation” for anything, let alone a puppy, beds down next to impossibility.

  This is in part because in our rush to hand out private contracts for Iraq’s reconstruction, oversight was shoveled away with just about everything else including sanity. The United States secretly awarded reconstruction projects, and US contractors earned excessive profits in part by subcontracting work to cheaper Iraqi companies, inflating charges, jimmying invoices, and welcoming kickbacks with bear hugs. They created shell companies in the Cayman Islands that falsely billed the US government. They paid ghost employees. They overpriced furniture contracts with kickbacks built right in and billed the government for products that were never delivered.

  Embezzlement, payoffs, robberies. Later, a former senior adviser to the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority would say that Iraq was a “free fraud zone” as a result of the US government’s refusal to prosecute contractors and companies accused of corruption. With no Iraqi law and no US law, the official said Baghdad was like the “Wild West.” He told Congress that once he delivered two million dollars to a US contractor with bricks of cash in a bag.

  On the Iraqis’ side, public servants supplied salesmen and consumers with stolen medicine and medical equipment. Iraqi ministry officials pocketed millions in reconstruction money. Housing officials took bribes to allocate homes.

  So, like I said, getting proper documentation for Lava is going to be tough.

  First Sam finds someone who has the vaccine but won’t sign the certificate of health because he doesn’t want his name associated with helping Americans.

  Then Sam finds someone who’s willing to sign a certificate of health but doesn’t have any vaccine.

  Finally Sam locates a veterinarian who has the vaccine and is willing to sign the certificate, but he lives eight hours away from Baghdad and can’t get there safely without a military escort, which even Sam, who can find puppy biscuits in Baghdad, cannot provide.

  Anne is scheduled to leave for Cairo on February 26. She tells me she’s trying to find a driver to take Lava to Kuwait.

  I’m worried, though, because we just got word that Iraq’s borders will be closed until February 23 for Ashura, a Shiite religious festival when tens of thousands of Muslims go on pilgrimage to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

  Sam does it somehow, though. He turns up one day at the NPR compound waving Lava’s documentation papers—which, while wildly suspect, are proper documentation nonetheless, and that’s good enough for Anne and me.

  I don’t ask for details, and all Sam says about it is: “I wish it was as easy to get a person out of Iraq.”

  Anne e-mails Bonnie and me:

  I am working on getting Lava by car to Kuwait. I am just trying to confirm exactly what documents I need to get across the border, though I’m assured a $50 bill would probably be enough. I will know in a couple of days and then will let you know when to expect him in Amman and what documents he will be traveling with . . . I will miss him but am anxious to make sure he has a good home before I am no longer here to take care of him.

  Then I get an e-mail from John Van Zante confirming that Iams will make arrangements to get Lava on a flight out of Kuwait once they know the details of the handoff. John tells me he will meet Lava at the airport himself.

  So I’m sitting at the Syrian border thinking everything’s going to work out just fine, right? I’m already planning my own trip home in one month and thinking about how the first thing I’m going to do when I get there is take Lava to the beach.

  I e-mail John: “It looks like Annie will get Lava to Kuwait where he will be picked up by one of the people from Military Mascots and put on a plane, most likely LAX. I’ll provide the itinerary when I know it. I should be home about a month after Lava if all goes well for us both.”

  I e-mail Bonnie: “. . . John will be the one picking up Lava . . .”

  I e-mail Annie: “Everything is good to go . . .”

  Then Anne e-mails me back with news I should have learned to expect by now.

  “I am somewhat at my wit’s end. This is a great deal more complicated than we all anticipated . . .”

  Those are the kind of words that make you think luck is tightening barbed wire around your balls just for shits and grins.

  Apparently, Military Mascots usually receives animals from Iraq via a military convoy. When Bonnie realizes Lava will be coming with a private citizen in a private car, she writes Annie that the driver won’t be allowed to cross into Kuwait and Bonnie’s volunteer in Kuwait won’t be allowed to cross over into Iraq.

  In other words, the plan sucks. It won’t work. Without a military escort, Lava can’t get across the border.

  I sit there and stare at the computer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  February 2005

  The Syrian Border

  MAYBE THIS SOUNDS selfish, but I don’t want to die. Wanting to live is just one of those quirks of human nature tha
t gets in the way of being a really good Marine, and besides, what else is there to do?

  I want to live for various reasons: because I don’t like pain, and getting killed will probably hurt; because I’m a little concerned that Hell might actually exist; and, at the risk of sounding like a complete martyr, because I’m worried about what will happen to Lava.

  Once, back at Camp Fallujah, I went to see Lava at the Lava Dogs’ building and passed by the Mortuary Affairs tent, the one with the DO NOT ENTER sign in front, and saw bodies being brought in and thought whoever was in that bag—they call them “human remains pouches”—was wearing the same uniform I had on. I wondered what they went through before they died and felt sorry they had to go through it but was glad it wasn’t me.

  It’s not like they don’t treat you well once you’re dead or anything; you actually get quite a bit of respect and attention. They bring you in, put you on a concrete floor, and one guy checks for unexploded weapons and shrapnel with a metal detector, another guy sorts through your personal belongings, and two more look for identifying details—scars, tattoos, dog tags—and record things like how badly you were burned or how wide the puncture wound was or how well your bulletproof vest worked.

  Meanwhile two other guys are writing it all down into a logbook. Then you’re given an “evacuation number,” put back into a human remains pouch, and sent to a camouflage refrigerator. It all takes about fifteen minutes.