From Baghdad with Love

by Jay Kopelman

  His reward for being the first to go in is that he gets to eat before the others. While I know they’re all starving, they let him eat first. If one of them can’t stand the wait and gets too close to the food while he’s still eating, all he has to do is give them a look, and they back off. No bullying. No gnashing of teeth. Just this calm stare.

  And without exception, every single time, the black male eats a little bit and then walks off as if bored with the whole business even though you know he hasn’t had his fill. Then and only then do the others attack the food until every scrap is gone. It’s like they know they can trust him to face the danger first, and then they know they can trust him to let them all eat. The pack, as a result, survives.

  And as I’m watching this, I start thinking about the Iraqi soldiers who cringe and avoid eye contact when I yell at them for breaking the rules. They drive me crazy, because no matter how much I scream about how breaking the rules hurts the strength of the unit, they’ll still steal candy when they think they can get away with it.

  Then it dawns on me: I don’t want submission; I want loyalty. But to gain their loyalty, I have to gain their trust, and I don’t gain their trust, because I’m always flying off the handle and losing control.

  This black male dog, though, he’s got it figured out. All he has to do is stare, and the others do what he wants. I start calling him Jacki the Iraqi and decide I want to pet him someday.

  I just can’t figure out where they came from. Same thing with all the stray dogs back at Camp Fallujah. Where were they born, and how did they end up in the middle of nowhere?

  The puppies that Matt Hammond and Lava found in the sewer were probably born to a stray who got caught in one of the animal control traps, but where did the mother come from and where did her mother come from?

  Her puppies lucked out big time when the Marines found them, I guess; they got fed for a little while longer anyway. Then one day the sewer was filled up with dirt, like someone was told to kill the puppies but couldn’t make himself do it, so he just covered the whole situation over and walked away.

  When Matt found the sewer like that, he could hear the puppies still whimpering through the dirt, so he and six other Marines started digging to get them out. They scratched and clawed with their hands, pickaxes, and shovels as dirt and sand flew from one Marine into the face of another until it started to get dark and some of the guys had to hold flashlights so the others could see what they were doing. Then someone yelled “Found one,” and the flashlight beams all fixed on something still alive, and it was the closest they’d ever come to giving birth.

  They brought the puppies back to the building and took care of them there for a while, but one day when the whole team had to leave for a couple of hours, someone under orders snuck into the building and took them all away. Later they were told it was for “health reasons.”

  At least they didn’t die buried alive.

  I don’t know what’s going to happen to these strays here at the border once I leave for the States in a couple of weeks. I suppose they’ll survive somehow. But jeez, what a way to live, always starving, always afraid, always heading toward death no matter how hard they try, like slowly suffocating, like being buried alive.

  And what about the Iraqis, what’s going to happen when we leave? It’s still too hard to tell if they’ll dig themselves out of the dirt we’ve buried them in, but if they don’t, it won’t be because the Iraqi soldiers in US cammies weren’t yelled at enough; it will be because they never trusted us in the first place.

  As for Lava, he’s been well fed and well trained, but he can’t make it on his own. He’s tough but not that tough.

  It’s pretty late at night when I write Annie an e-mail:

  “Try not to let this frustrate you too much. You’ve done all that you can and then some to help Lava and me. I appreciate it more than you know.”

  Then I tell her that maybe the best solution is to have the little guy euthanized. It’s better than being buried alive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  February 2005

  The Syrian Border

  MISERY LOVES COMPANY, but during the whole time we tried to get Lava out of Iraq, I don’t think it ever paid a visit to John Van Zante. While the failure at the Jordanian border explodes in my face and causes all kinds of internal injuries from which I doubt I will ever recover, it blows right past John in a thin layer of dust.

  Despite the fact that we cannot find an exit route for Lava, that Anne is leaving Baghdad in twenty-four hours, that I’m stuck here at the Syrian border until I leave for the States in several weeks, and that Lava has no place to go, John sends me an e-mail full of enthusiasm and exclamation points.

  “We’re waiting to hear back today from the folks at Vohne Liche Kennels . . .”

  The who? The what?

  “I don’t want to give false hope, but on Thursday they just seemed to think it was no big deal . . .”

  I vaguely remember John mentioning a kennel in Indiana or something, but in the chaos surrounding the Kuwait and Jordan escape plans I didn’t pay much attention. At the time it was just another of John’s shots in the dark aimed in the same general direction as his letters to Governor Schwarzenegger and President Bush.

  “In our last contact with them on Thursday, they said that Kenneth Licklider, the owner, was very excited about helping out.”

  I’m scrounging my gray matter for whatever it was John told me earlier about this kennel, because I want the pieces to fit, but all I can remember is reading something about how Iams worked with this kennel or knew someone at this kennel and contacted them for information about smuggling a dog out of Iraq, only I can’t remember exactly and wonder what a kennel owner in Indiana could do to help out, and more importantly, why?

  Turns out, Ken Licklider, the guy who owns Vohne Liche Kennels, is a former US Air Force police dog handler who trains police dogs for tracking, apprehension, search, and seizure work. He specializes in explosives passive response work, and many of his dogs are used by the US military to sniff out bombs in Iraq.

  His kennel in Indiana trains four hundred dogs and 150 handlers from twenty different countries every year. Like, the guy’s famous for what he can do with dogs. He provided security for President Reagan, three presidential candidates, the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the pope’s visit to LA, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Internal Revenue Service.

  I guess the US State Department figured that if a guy can provide security for the pope and the IRS, he’s probably pretty good, so they hired him to provide protection for Afghanistan’s President Karzai, and as testament to how good Ken is, the president continues to live.

  So when Ken gets a call from Iams and hears about how these Marines found this puppy in Fallujah and how this lieutenant colonel snuck him back to the base camp and how the camp general’s personal security detail and some navy Seabees hid him and how an American journalist now has him stashed in Baghdad and how we seem to fail at every turn to get him out—the political failure and the military-flight failure, the Kuwait failure, and the Jordanian failure—the guy doesn’t even blink.

  “Sure I can do it. I can get a dog out.”

  He and his crew and their dogs fly in and out of Iraq all the time.

  “It just means putting Lava on a transport with their dogs and handlers and flying him back,” John tells me.

  Ken also tells John that it’s probably better that Lava didn’t make it through Jordan, because most of their guys fly in and out of Baghdad anyway. All we have to do, it seems, is get Lava from the Red Zone to the military base in the Green Zone, and they’ll take it from there.

  Sounds too simple.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  February 2005

  Baghdad

  ANNE IS IN Baghdad getting ready to leave for Egypt and feeling as worried about Lava as I am and reporting one of her last stories about how out of the eighteen billion dollars set aside by the United States for Iraqi reco
nstruction, only three billion has been paid out so far.

  “. . . a group of twelve US soldiers prepares to venture past the concrete blast wall, sandbags, and guard posts that separate them from the Red Zone—the rest of Baghdad,” she reports, adding that standing with them is a US civilian contractor whom the military convoy is assigned to protect.

  The contractor, in a Kevlar helmet and flak jacket, has until October to hand out eleven million in US aid to help small businesses in Baghdad get back on their feet. But in the three months that he’s been here, he’s only gotten paperwork done for about five thousand dollars in grants, because every time he steps out of the Green Zone, someone tries to kill him.

  Every day, the contractor climbs into an up-armored Humvee with a machine-gun turret on top and travels through the Red Zone trying to hand out money. If he finds a likely candidate, he figures he has about ten minutes to make his pitch before someone sees the candidate talking to a westerner and opens fire.

  Before the convoy takes off, Anne records the commander’s briefing to his twelve soldiers: “When we’re out on the road, action on contact. We engage in small-arms fire when gunner can positively identify the source, then go ahead and engage . . .”

  Anyway, I don’t know what she said, I don’t know what she threatened or promised during her last days in Baghdad, but she e-mails me at the last minute that her replacement, Anthony Kuhn, has agreed to watch Lava at the NPR compound for the next several weeks until he leaves in the middle of March.

  Two weeks. We have two more weeks. I’m beginning to feel lucky. And fully bipolar.

  I contact John and tell him the news and then write a note to Ken Licklider, the owner of Vohne Liche Kennels, to introduce myself and tell him Lava is ready to leave Iraq.

  “Sir,” he responds, “we have people rotating back at the end of the month that may be able to help you. I am contacting my on-site supervisor there in the Green Zone, a Mr. David Mack, and asking him to do what he can . . . Just make sure the dog has a health certificate.”

  That makes me cringe, because I don’t know exactly how legitimate Lava’s paperwork is, so when I first hear from David Mack, who’s worked for Vohne Liche for three years in Afghanistan and Iraq and manages the kennel’s dog teams in overseas missions, I forget to mention anything about it.

  Meanwhile, Anne reports her last story from Baghdad, about how the US-funded, state-run television station is airing a series of confessions by insurgents who claim they were financed and trained by the Syrian government.

  They say they were trained in explosives and beheadings. They say they were ordered to cause chaos in Iraq. They say they had to kill at least ten Iraqi soldiers each, and an additional ten dollars was thrown in for each one they beheaded as long as they caught it on film.

  I don’t know if she’d admit it, but Annie needs to get out of this place for a while. You can only struggle in quicksand for so long before you get sucked under. I’m happy for her. I’m glad she’s getting out, but I’m still worried about Lava, because Annie’s known him as long as I have, and I never worried she’d do anything but her best.

  Thank you, Annie. I know how hard it was for you to leave the little guy behind, and thank you.

  John Van Zante, David Mack, Anthony Kuhn, and I begin a round of e-mails to figure out how to get Lava from one set of hands to the other.

  David: “We will try to move Lava out at the end of the month. We have several dog guys going back on or around the 30th, so we will try to arrange for those guys to escort Lava at that time.”

  Anthony: “I’m heading back to London on Friday the 18th. My colleague Lourdes ‘Lulu’ Garcia-Navarro will be here as of Thursday the 17th. Our producer, Ben Gilbert, is here, too. Lava’s in fine shape and we’ll do whatever is needed to get him to the Green Zone safe and sound.”

  John: “. . . will it be possible for someone from Vohne Liche to reach Jay or the NPR people on cell phone in the event that they can arrange to transport Lava into the Green Zone or the [military] base in the Green Zone? We realize that cell phone time is valuable, and we do not want to jeopardize anyone’s safety or security, but we’re thinking ahead. Don’t want to be in a situation where Lava can get on a plane, but can’t get on base.”

  Me: “John, I am 99.9% certain that the NPR folks won’t be able to get Lava to the base in the Green Zone without a pass. The most likely scenario would be to have the NPR folks meet the Vohne Liche folks at the entrance to the Green Zone.”

  David: “I will contact you again when I will need to have Lava brought to me in the Green Zone . . . I will let you know more in a couple of days.”

  Ben Gilbert, the NPR producer at the compound, chimes in at one point: “There’s been a ton of e-mail traffic on this, so I’m a bit unclear on who is who . . .”

  John: “If I understand this all correctly, here’s what’s happening: NPR’s Lourdes ‘Lulu’ Garcia-Navarro gets to Baghdad on the 17th; NPR’s Anthony Kuhn leaves on the 18th and Lava stays in the Red Zone; Vohne Liche’s David Mack would like to have Lava delivered to him in the Green Zone by the 29th; On or about the 30th, David will get Lava moved to Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) where he will link up with the Vohne Liche guys going home; Once he’s on the plane he’ll fly from BIAP to Chicago; When he lands in Chicago, Lava can be picked up by someone from the Vohne Liche staff or one of us.”

  Me: “Thanks, John.”

  John: “We’ve been close so many times. This one seems like it’s as near as we’ve come to actually putting Lava on a plane and getting his furry little butt out of Iraq . . . I hope this is it!!!!”

  But then the final kick comes.

  David: “Can you confirm that Lava has all his health & shot papers in order? Recently we ran into a vaccination problem with one of our dogs & the military vet would not allow the dog to leave the country for an extra 30 days.

  “I don’t want to see that happen to Lava.”

  And it hits in the solar plexus, because everyone, including me, is leaving soon, and Lava doesn’t have thirty days.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  March 2005

  Shannon, Ireland

  IT’S FIVE THIRTY in the morning in a Shannon pub where a bunch of Marines around me punch each other in the arms, sing Irish folk songs, and make the bartender nervous as hell while I sit and gaze at the empty bottom of, like, my third or fourth pint of Guinness, which has to be the most bitter thing I’ve ever put in my body. I’m pretty sure it’s just a mixture of refined gasoline and molasses, but it takes a full twelve minutes of pulling and settling, pulling and settling before the bartender even serves it to you, and by that time you’re so thirsty and worried about your guys causing trouble, you all but get on your knees and give thanks when it arrives.

  “And the band played Waltzing Matilda as the ship pulled away from the quay . . .” I’d really like to tell the guys to shut up, but I don’t, because I’m fairly impressed that they even know the words.

  So I order another pint and carve grit out from under my fingernails with my teeth while I wait. It’s about the only thing I have with me from Iraq, the grit, only it’s probably not even grit from Iraq but from Kuwait, which is where we stayed for three days in a tent before we flew here to Shannon.

  “And the band played Waltzing Matilda as we stopped to bury our slain . . .”

  We’re on our way home, and we’ve just spent a year or more inhaling sand, and we fly into this country that’s as moist and green as an ocean and everyone’s all strung out from lack of sleep, wired about eating real food, wired about having sex again, and this unfortunate bartender is serving us our first alcohol as free men and listening to foreigners butcher Matilda. Jeez, we’ve got balls, don’t we? I wonder what these guys would do if they were standing behind a bar listening to a bunch of drunk Iraqis sing “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

  I don’t know how long it’s been since I flew from the Syrian border back to Camp Fallujah and then on to Kuwait and then
here. Days? Weeks? I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want to get drunk and sleep for a while. I feel tired and itchy and dirty, like you do when you get back from patrolling the desert and the dust and the sand and the dirt fornicate with sweat under your collar and you’d do just about anything to get under a shower to wash it away. All you want is a shower. All I want right now is a shower.

  By the time I got to Camp Fallujah from the Syrian border, Matt Hammond is already back in the States undergoing multiple surgeries for his wounds, thirty-one of the Lava Dogs are dead from the helicopter crash, hundreds of other Marines are on their way home in flag-wrapped boxes, and a whole new group of young Iraqi guys is being fitted with US cammies.

  “For to hang tents and pegs a man needs two legs, no more Waltzing Matilda for me . . .”

  If this had been a year ago, I would have arrived at Camp Fallujah feeling like I’d returned to a party at 4 AM to find the music down and everyone passed out. One year ago I would have felt the “best” of the fighting had turned from Fallujah to Baghdad and would have done just about anything to get transferred there. But I’m one year older now, and it all seems like the funeral just about to begin, and the only reason I want to go to Baghdad is to see Lava one more time. Other than that, I’d just as soon go home.

  I don’t plan on Lava making it back to California. I don’t think about where he’s going to sleep or which beaches allows dogs or what veterinarian I’m going to take him to. I just fill out my paperwork, make sure I ingest the proper number of calories, and take, like, one million showers.

  See, the plan to fly him out with the Vohne Liche folks is too simple. It’s too easy to make sense. Too many people love him, and no one, not even a Lava Dog, can be so lucky.

  Luck—you hope for it, you pray for it, you break laws to find it, because unlike drilling and practicing and following all the rules, it allows you for one fraction of one fraction of a second to strut along the sidelines like the Ref and control the uncontrollable events in your life.