Book 3 - From Baghdad with Love.

From Baghdad with Love by Lt Col. Jay Copelman and Melinda Roth has the tagline "A marine, the War, and a Dog Named Lava". On the surface it looks like a nice animal story, but it actually paints a confronting image of an American soldier's experience of war. The premise is quite simple - some marines rescue a puppy while on patrol in Fallujah and one in particular takes it upon himself to get it out of Iraq despite the strict rules against it.

"General Order 1 -A is taken pretty seriously by the military. No pets allowed. That's because they've invested a lot of time and money into trashing your moral clarity, and they don't want anything like compassion messing things up. Your job is to shoot the enemy, period, and if anything close to compassion rears its ugly head, you better shoot that down too, or you're in some deep scary shit."

(p 31)

It's the "deep scary shit" that makes this memoir so interesting - the ethical and moral dilemmas that Kopelman and no doubt many other soldiers struggle with while serving in the mess that has become the Iraq war. Here is someone who believed in the cause of the invasion, but has also seen the death, destruction and civil war that it unleashed on the men, women and children of Iraq first-hand.

Frankly, as a pacifist Aussie I can't even begin to grasp what goes through the heads of the people who live and serve in Iraq, or any of the other hotspots in this world. But this book offers a glimps. I pray that one day no one will ever have to live with the consequences with being ordered to shoot another person - or even a puppy.

PS Lava makes it.