Crows are carrying straw and twigs off to make nests, house finches are settling in, and robins are singing their territorial ditty, joined by spring peepers.
Spring seems the appropriate time to pick up David Abrams’ Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2010), a. poetic exploration of how humans can open their senses to the world that envelops them. For Abrams, physical, philosophical, and intellectual consciousness merge. There is no dualism: body and mind are integrated. He had previously written about “phenomenology” or the nature of human awareness in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. The earlier book read like a sensitive-guy-does-science; Becoming Animal aspires to an even more transcendent fusion of material and spirit.
But it is not for me to immediately continue down Abrams’ all-feeling path. My senses rebelled at some invader and at the heavy rains and wetness that is suddenly sweeping Minnesota from barren dormancy to a humid impersonation of mid-summer. I can’t smell, hear very well, or see very well in Sinus Hell. (Where do allergies fit into a divine or evolutionary scheme?) And my mind, if not my body, smashed into a deadline for a conference paper on dogs and geography.
So I turned to tales of Dogs at War. I’ve just finished From Baghdad, With Love: A Marine, the War, and a Dog Named Lava by Lt. Col. Jay Kopelman with Melinda Roth. You can skip to the tale’s end by following the link to a CBS News video featuring Kopelman and Lava.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=2069798n&tag=related;photovideo
In essence, the story begins in Fallujah, Iraq, late 2004, after the U.S. Marines have retaken the city. It was in Fallujah the preceding spring that four Blackwater contractors had been dragged from their vehicles to be killed, torched, and displayed. Kopelman is focused on his Marine mission—find and eradicate the enemy—foremost and is training the “pro” U.S. Iraqi soldiers who don’t comprehend his screamed orders and who receive regular death threats from insurgents. After a night of shock-and-awe bombing, a day of being fired at by snipers and avoiding bombs, Kopelman and his Lava Dog platoon are investigating mysterious sounds in a house: “a sudden flash of something rolls toward me out of nowhere, shooting so much adrenaline into my wiring that I jump back and slam into a wall. A ball of fur not much bigger than a grenade skids across the floor [. . .] Like I’m tired and wired and anything quick coming at me jerked at my nerves, so I peel back off the wall and reach for my rifle even though I can see it’s only a puppy.” Shooting the starved puppy isn’t “worth the ammunition” though Kopelman expects euthanasia is in the animal’s future. In a war zone, pets are forbidden: all resources and concentration must be dedicated to survival.
Despite, or maybe because of the training meant to keep Kopelman an efficient killing machine, the pup now named Lava is somehow fed (MREs or Meals Ready to Eat—an unappetizing update on Tang) and dewormed with tobacco. And he develops the habit of sneaking into Kopelman’s sleeping back to snore on the Marine’s feet.
Keeping Lava, and keeping him save, becomes its own mission, an innocent life to save. But From Baghdad, With Love is more complex than a sunny moment of puppy love in a grim war. Kopelman speaks of his fellow Marines with loyalty and pride and identifies with his warrior role. However, his view of his Marine self, like his affection for Lava, does not stand without doubts and questions. Kopelman, without discussing politics, makes it clear that he thinks the war a mess. He also wonders if his dedication to Lava is a saving grace or a neurotic distraction indicating the toll of war, and any distraction could easily push him and his group into harm’s way. Kopelman had been in active duty before 2001, gone back to civilian life, only to find that “it never felt normal. It was like There has to be more than this. What’s the point? What are the objectives? What in the hell are the rules?” After 9/11, Kopelman returned to active duty and was deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom: “My third deployment in two years swept me into Camp Fallujah, where I trained the Iraqi special Forces who are now out here on the streets of this godforsaken ghost town watching stray dogs eat their dead countrymen.” Even more disturbing than confusion of a war where the occupied, terrified of insurgents and of Americans, seem far from free, is the Marine’s initial reaction: “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?” (37)
That last passage refers to one type of dog mentioned in the book: strays who eat the corpses. In a country where resources have vanished before bombs and corruption, these dogs may carry parasites, diseases, even rabies. Even Americans who did not share the Arab attitude that dogs are generally “unclean” would have trouble sympathizing with these animals which were often shot. Also, insurgents sometimes attached bombs to stray dogs, donkeys, and cows, and tried to direct them to Americans. In one case the “mule” to be detonated was an unsuspecting teenager with Down’s Syndrome.
Several other dog-types appear. There are fighting-duty dogs, devoted to their Marine handler, but often euthanized at the end of active service because they may attack anyone—a sibling or delivery person—who makes an unexpected gesture. Becoming more common (and better prepared for retirement) were bomb sniffers trained to be “passive responders” to threats. I’ve seen such a dog on duty (there may be more on him in the future), and these dogs have a Marine-type drive to keep hunting for dangerous materials, but when such materials are found they sit like a stone. The concept is that this gives the handler a clear, safe signal that matter has been found and the dog will not disturb it.
Lava was not so well behaved and his “rooing” at noises was potentially dangerous for the forbidden pup and for the Marines. So Operation get Lava to the States begins, which provides the book’s drama and suspense. Just as Lava seems about to escape, Kopelman hears about abuses at the Abu Ghraib and the use of dogs to terrify prisoners. The stress of war took different groups in different directions—in one case illegal emotionally loaded abuse, in the other the illegal over-weighted rescue of one puppy. With Lava, outsiders helped provide moral clarity and a plan.
Among the many unexpected events and realizations of Kopelman’s tale:
Although relationships between Marines and Iraqis, even the cooperative ones, generally rested on fear and chaos more than trust, all the bodies of the dead the Marines found—U.S., Ally, Insurgent—were treated with respect.
An NPR reporter (yes, the network that some think commie-pinko-liberal ), and a woman reporter at that, Ann Garrels, receives for her bravery and her reporting and her efforts to help Lava enormous respect from the Marines.
Lava’s rescue depended on Iraqi help, and the dog would not have gotten the necessary exit papers without one young Iraqi taking enormous risks. Any help provided an American could mean death, but he found dog biscuits in rubble and help-who-knows where It was not easy getting a dog safely across the border, but as this young man noted, it was much more doable than getting an Iraqi like himself out.
Kopelman, in an indirect response to his helper’s realization, ends the book, “Why wasn’t my time spent helping people instead of a puppy? I don’t know, and I don’t care, but at least I saved something.”
More on recovering life and spring later. . .
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