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Prologue“So he sent the man out; and at the east of the Garden of Eden he put winged ones and a flaming sword turning every way to keep the way to the tree of life.”Genesis 3:24In an abandoned house in the northeast section of Fallujah, members of the 1st Battalion, 3d Marines called the “Lava Dogs” froze when they heard a series of clicks coming from the last un-checked room of the compound. Grenade pins? Most of the military deaths in Fallujah during the first week of the U.S. invasion happened inside buildings like this where insurgents hid in upper rooms and threw grenades down at the Marines as they moved upwards. There were a lot of head and face injuries, and while the Lava Dogs considered themselves some of the toughest Marines around — they named themselves out of respect for the jagged pumice they trained on back in Hawaii — just being a Lava Dog didn't shield you from a grenade’s fancy special effects. Being careful did. Being focused did. Having your weapon locked and loaded when you inched around every corner did.Click. Click. Click….Click If a grenade did detach your face from your skull, at least you checked out in the GPS coordinate closest to Heaven, not that you'd have adequate excuses prepared once you got there, because lines between good and evil here in the battle zone required more than reading glasses to see. But Iraq was considered by most biblical archeologists to be the location of the Garden of Eden — God’s only hard copy of Heaven, his Paradise on Earth – and whether Abraham, Mohammad or Jesus called your cadence, it’s where it officially all started and where it officially all went bad.Good marketing potential for the region at first though, because it trademarked the birthplace of Abraham, the Tower of Babel and the construction of Babylon in addition to agriculture, writing, the wheel, the zodiac, legal theory, bureaucracy and urbanization. From the beginning, everyone wanted a piece of the place which went from the Mesopotamians to the Sumerians to the Akkadians to the Empire of Ur to the Babylonians to the Assyrians to the Persians to the Greeks to the Arabs to the Mongols to the Turks to the British. None of these were polite handovers either. By the time Saddam Hussein got to the land of milk and honey, it had been captured, pillaged, beaten and raped by so many cultures over such a long period of time, there was little left except a whole lot of desert covering a whole lot of oil. That, and claims by locals living near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that the Garden of Eden and its Tree of Life stood in the middle of their very town. They built a wall around the area, constructed the Garden of Eden Hotel and tourism flourished for a short while. Then the Americans came, and because the folks living in the area supported the newest invasion, Hussein drained all of their water. Soon the Tree of Life died, members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq took over the Garden of Eden Hotel and “Down With Americans” was painted all over the walls of Paradise.Clickclickclickclick.Maybe timed explosives.If this country was Paradise, then the Marines weren't taking any bets on Hell. Outside the building they searched, gun ships prowled the skies looking for hiding insurgents as pockmarked Humvees patrolled what was left of the streets. Every car in the city was targeted because of bomb risks. Every loose wire was suspect. Every building was searched, and “Jihad, Jihad, Jihad” plastered every wall. Throughout the first days of the invasion of Fallujah, the Marines discovered weapons caches, suicide vests and large amounts of heroin, speed, and cocaine apparently used to bolster suicide bombers’ courage. They found dead bodies of fighters from Chechnya, Syria, Libya, Jordan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. They walked into human slaughterhouses with hooks hanging from the ceilings, black masks, knives, bloody straw mats and videos of beheadings. They freed emaciated prisoners shackled and insane with fear.Fallujah, near the center of where it all began, was now a city cordoned off from the rest of the world, inhabited only by invisible snipers and stray dogs feasting on the dead.Click. Snuffle. Snuffle. Click.The Lava Dogs tightened their jaws and clenched their weapons as they ran through the rules in their heads: cover danger areas, stay low, move stealthily, be prepared to adapt and eliminate threats.Snuffle. Clickclickclick. Snufflesnuffle.An insurgent strapping a bomb to his chest? They should have prepped the room first with a grenade, tossed it in and just let it do all the dirty work. Instead they backed up to the walls on either side of the doorway and positioned their weapons to fire. They thrust the guns around the corner, squared off and zeroed in on the clicks as their target rushed to the other side of the room. “Holy shit.”He turned at the sound of their voices and stared at them. “What the hell? ”He cocked his head trying to interpret their intent rather than their words.“You gotta be kidding.”Then he yipped, wagged his tail and clicked his toenails on the floor as he pranced up and down in place, happy it seemed someone found him at last. ***Part I “In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.”Genesis 3:17 Chapter OneI heard someone say once that guilty people live violent lives. At the time, I didn't really get it, but if what they meant was the way guilt waits in ambush, traps your well-trained sense of control and then tortures you into confessions you'd just as soon not make, I now understand.I mean, I guess it’s guilt. That’s one part of my confession. Maybe it’s just what the therapist calls post-traumatic stress, even though I've only been home for a week, or maybe some chemical imbalance brought on recently by any number of issues or maybe just residue from the sleeping pills still floating through my blood stream, but hell, what else besides guilt has the capacity to beach land so much fear? Anxiety, maybe. Anxiety assumes less culpability, implies less of an offense, offers more of an excuse. Or compulsiveness. Along with nightmares, flashbacks, moodiness, alcoholism and depression, they said something about a compulsive disorder that could send your brain cells scurrying into all sorts of witless directions, and between checking incoming email, praying for the phone to ring and counting the paces between one wall and the next, it seems entirely plausible. But then, so did getting Lava out of Iraq in the first place, and how impeachable was that offense after Allah, Jehovah, Jesus, Lady Luck and Santa Clause made it pretty clear it wasn't on their list of things to do this year? I check the email again. Nothing. It’s the middle of the day there in Baghdad, the middle of the night here in California and no time in particular everywhere else in between. Something must have gone wrong.I mean, what else besides guilt would drive a man to do what I did back there? Obsession, perhaps, but that implies a lifetime of prescription slips from the therapist and besides, not everyone involved in the rescue – the Marines, the journalists, the Iraqis, the personal security guys — could be crazy. Maybe they could. Nothing seems right-side-up anymore and hasn't for some time now. I think the pacing is what’s getting to me. The back-and-forth unearths all kinds of radioactive crap I don't want hanging around. Like a lot of faces. Weird, dreamy faces. Faces of stray dogs I fed at the Syrian border. Faces of embedded journalists in Fallujah with terror dripping down them like sweat. Faces of Iraqis smashed into the street like ripe banana meat under your boot and the question of whether a face is really a face if there’s no one home behind it. Mostly, though, faces of people who risked their lives to try and help save Lava. They bother me the most, and that’s the second part of the confession. I think we all let the mangy, little flea-bitten refugee get to us – as if compassion was some sinister germ intent on infection – and now that we've all been bitten by the contagion, now that it comes down to the end, now that all other roads of escape are closed for good, I feel responsible to them to make sure Lava gets out alive. Maybe the little shit is dead already. Or maybe they didn't make it through and he’s now lost on the streets of Baghdad wondering where everybody went. There were so many times when I figured the best thing for the little guy was to just shoot him in the head – yeah, yeah, I know how that sounds – but really, I mean I couldn't stand the thought of him joining the other stray dogs who hobbled around on three legs looking for bodies to eat. I remember after the initial bombing in Fallujah, there were dead Iraqis all over the place and seeing dogs feasting on the remains and thinking this must be the only place on Earth where the dead nourished the living and how screwed up that seemed. Now I pray that if Lava doesn't make it through, he'll find a body somewhere in Baghdad to keep him alive for just one more day.Which brings me to the third part of the confession: No matter how bad things get, it’s still better to be alive. And I want Lava to stay alive. I want to know he’s breathing and leaping after dust balls and chasing imaginary enemies in his sleep. I want him to be alive, because then there’s still hope that he'll make it here to California and get to be an American dog who runs on the beach and chases the mailman instead of strangers with guns. I want him to be alive almost more than anything I can think of.The fourth part of the confession is that when the phone finally rings, I don't want to answer it. I sit there and stare at the thing as if it’s a live RPG that just landed in the room. So this is fear.The last part of the confession is that when I do pick up the receiver and listen to the news, I break down and cry for the second time in my adult life.
