Fearsome as Blackhawks may have been, however, they were at that very moment getting shot down by insurgents at a truly alarming rate, and not only Blackhawks but ultra-swift and stealthy armored Apache gunships too were being popped out of the air by teams of Iraqi insurgents armed with 35 year old Russian and Chinese RPG’s firing grenade warheads that could be picked up out behind a vegetable booth at the main street market in Baghdad’s Sadr City for about $5 American or 130 dinars illustrated with Saddam’s glowering mug, paper money still accepted in trade in banks as well as on the street at that time.  $25 million dollar attack helicopters getting shot out of the air using $25 RPG launchers and $5 warheads, you say?  As lopsided as that?  Yep, and if that’s not enough to reduce you to a shuddering heap of sweating man-flesh, everybody walking around the dusty base camps and lurking in Pentagon hallways and White House cubby-holes and right-wing think tank coffee-klatches was puffing up their chests and barking sheer horseshit to anyone who would listen – meaning you media whores first and foremost – that we own the skies.  We own the skies, you bloodsucking bottom feeding Brooks Brothers be-gowned human carp?  Who did these lying fuckers think they were fooling, anyway?

            Well, pretty much everyone as it turned out, but the chopper drivers, the warrant officers and lieutenants and occasional captains who had to climb into those deathtraps and start them up and fly them over the razor-wire into the badlands where the guys with the cheap pea-shooters lurked in groves of trees and dusty waddies just waiting for the whap-whap-whap of rotor blades of their surprisingly easy prey.  The drivers and door-gunners who manned black helicopters of all stripes were awed shitless by the insurgents and their RPGs is what they were, and willing to tell anyone who would listen why, which was nobody but each other apparently.  Certainly the mighty Rumsfeld didn’t have his ear trained on the frightened chatter in helicopter squadron ready-rooms, nor did that Westmoreland of the Twenty-First Century, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Meyers, nor did any of the billionaires comprising a good percentage of the world’s greatest deliberative body, our fucking do-nothing-but-wallow-in-our-bucks-and-go-golfing-with-pencil-neck-lobbyists Senate, or the millionaires fucking their own secretaries and each other’s wives willy bloody nilly in the cloakrooms of our see, hear, and speak no evil fuckwad Lower House. 

            And yet there they were that night, circling and circling in the dark skies, all happy and whappy-whappy and symbolic of skies-owning muscle-flexing blinder-wearing blinkered American power  because of course the skies they were circling were those immediately above the heavily defended Baghdad International Airport where even as extremely paranoid and frightened a figure as General Bongo felt utterly and completely at ease if not relaxed, exactly, if you get what I mean.  For all intents and purposes, the age of American air-mobile combat greatness as represented by the hundreds and hundreds of black helicopters deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan was over, done and gone, but you’d never know it back home or in either distant combat zone unless you grabbed a helicopter driver, any helicopter driver, and asked him or her for a daylight joy ride tour of the surrounding countryside and received a rapid turn down that was sure to come your way. 

            As foreboding as the situation was with our combat squadrons of black helicopters, however, what really scared the shit out of me was what I saw the next morning from the window of my room on the eighth floor of the Hotel California, as the troops called the tallest of Saddam’s airport management buildings which stood just about exactly in the middle of BIAP, towering over everything around it for miles.  It had been pitch black dark when we had flown in the night before, and BIAP was pretty much but not entirely in black-out combat mode, so you couldn’t see much on the ground and not a damn thing from our eighth floor luxurious gutted and looted digs at the Hotel California.  But when I rubbed my eyes and crawled out of my sleeping bag and looked out the window just after dawn, as far into the distance as I could see, what lay before me  was Vietnam.  I mean, out there was a base camp that was the kissing cousin of any photograph or footage from an evening news broadcast or description by such war correspondent demi-gods as David Halberstam or Michael Herr.  Rows of heavy equipment like bulldozers and front loaders and cranes and mongo-bondo-combo armored tracked hunter-killers like Bradleys and M-1 Abrams tanks and even longer avenues of tents quartering thousands of troops and mobile latrines processing tons of their poopy and quadrillions of gallons of their tooth brushing and shower water and gigantic mobile waste treatment facilities and down there across from the entrance to Hotel California was the sad and entirely predictable sight of several fast food restaurants which had been cobbled together with military-supplied plywood and sandbags topped with gigantic signs reading “Pizza Hut” and “Burger King” and “Taco Bell.”  I thought for a brief instant I was going to faint, or puke, or in a kind of Hentrixian balletetic death-spiral do both at once, but then I heard this eerie scratch-scratch-scratch somewhere behind me and turned to find the First Lieutenant with whom I had flown in the night before from Kuwait peering into a tiny mirror on his toilet kit, dry-shaving. 

            I asked, that’s Vietnam out there, isn’t it?  Yep, he replied as he wiped a few stray dry whiskers from his cheek with his uniform sleeve.  Then we’re fucked, I croaked.

He said, yep, we’re fucked.  He zipped up his toilet kit and tossed it in his backpack and grinned.  The colonel told me I should keep an eye on you, sir, he said.  Colonel’s a smart man.

             We both laughed nervously and stood there for a moment staring down at what was doubtlessly the largest base camp the American military had occupied since we hi-tailed it out of Tan Son Nhut in 1975.  Then I unzipped my kit and started dry-shaving my own two-day growth so I’d be looking strack when we headed down eight flights to face the day. But what the hell was I laughing about?  I had been on the ground in Iraq for less than five hours and already the story I had pitched as a 20,000 word opus that would make sense of a senseless war if it was the last thing I ever wrote in my life had been reduced to two words on a single, otherwise blank page: we’re fucked.  I knew instinctively that this would turn out to be deadly for my pocketbook, but as depressed as I felt at this bit of news, it was nothing compared to the tenuous grip on sanity to which I clung one night about a month or so later. 

            Whoops, I see that I’m getting ahead of my story here, but what the hell.  Where are the rules written down, anyway?  I’m not sending these pages off to one of those goofs peering down at me from the black helicopters, am I?  Nope. In fact, when I’m finished pounding on this bloody keyboard I’m going to tap a little button and pop it up on the web and burrow even deeper into my writing room and do it again, so I don’t give half a shit if I’m getting ahead of myself, because I can always catch up later.

            I was seated at a makeshift desk in the writing room of my personal residence   within the 15 foot high walls of a mud-brick compound in the deep boonies near Iraq’s border defended by my own militia, which I had recently learned was referred to behind the closed doors of secret black-ops offices far away as General Bongo’s Army.  Suddenly the wooden door banged of my writing room banged open and Aziz, my translator and Chief of Staff, flew into the room waving his arms.  General Bongo!  General Bongo!  She has her babies!  Come!  Babies?  Whose babies? I asked.  What in the name of Allah are you talking about, Aziz?  He pointed to the door, screaming:  Lucy, General Bongo!  The dog has her babies! Come quick!

            Iraqis have a very different attitude about dogs than Americans and other westerners do.  They are tolerated in Iraq for purposes of labor, such as herding sheep, and when they are judged as no longer proficient at their tasks, they are usually abandoned to fend for themselves on the streets.  Pregnancy can cause a female sheep dog to suffer this fate if she is suspected of carrying a genetically deficient litter from mating with a cur, and this was apparently Lucy’s fate at the time I scooped her off the streets of Mosul.  For quite a while Aziz and the rest of the swinging dicks strutting around the compound were put-off by Lucy’s presence in our midst.  She was ridden with fleas and so skinny her ribs showed, and I and was counseled by Aziz and others to get rid of her lest she bring us bad luck.  I refused and began feeding her and giving her baths and spraying her with Army-issue permethrin intended for use on camouflage battle uniforms to get rid of her fleas.  With the fleas under control, she began eating more and her coat thickened and became silky and she began gaining weight, but still Aziz  persisted, warning me again and again that Lucy would bring bad luck and General Bongo’s legend would be diminished and along with it the fearsome reputation of our militia. 

            I ignored his admonitions, and apparently I had failed to notice the amount of weight Lucy had gained as well, because when I walked into the next room, there on my sagging rope bed lay Lucy snuggled in my sleeping bag with a litter of five pups happily suckling at her teats, and standing over them like a proud father was a bliss-out looking Aziz.  So the worm has turned, I said to Aziz, who was either ignoring me or had failed to comprehend the profundity of my comment, which I had dredged from as deep into my well of wisdom as I could reach at the moment.  I was about to hurl another bolt of brilliance at Aziz when I became aware that my bedroom had filled up with young men wearing counterfeit Nike jogging pants and camouflage jackets carrying AK-47s, and behind me I could hear them ooohing-and-aaahing softly as they gazed upon Lucy and her fat little pups. 

            I felt Aziz’s hand on my shoulder and he said, General Bongo, you must name Lucy’s babies quickly or you will suffer bad luck.  I had had my fill of Aziz and his superstitious predictions of doom if this was done or that wasn’t, but as I looked around at the squads of my AK-toting volunteers and their smiling faces, I decided that when it came to the religious beliefs or superstitions of Iraqis, it was best to act like it all made perfect sense and go along.  So I sat down on the edge of the rope bed and as I took a quick look at each of Lucy’s pups to see if they were male or female, I began to feel like I was awakening from a nightmare, or maybe I was lapsing into one.  I was overwhelmed by the rightness and the wrongness of it all, everything at once:  these little puff-balls being born at all was a miracle and yet the world they were born into was so shitty and held so little promise for them that maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t happened along and Lucy had made her own way on the streets of Mosul, for better or for worse.  I was sitting there on the edge of my sagging rope bed when suddenly it came to me that Lucy was all the evidence I needed that I had bought wholly and completely into the Big American Lie:  I was just trying to help the Iraqi people, see, like I was just helping Lucy when I took her off the streets.  I wasn’t occupying their country, me with my heavily armed militia and my compound surrounded by dozens of hectares of wheat and row upon row of radishes and tomatoes and cucumbers and our businesses down in Mosul,   not me, not General Bongo.  I was one of the good guys, right?

            I tried to stand but my knees buckled, so I sat down back down on the rope bed next to Lucy.  My forehead had broken out in a cold sweat, and my lips felt dry.  I tried to wet them, but all that did was fill my ears with the strange sound of my dry tongue scratching back and forth across my dry lips.  Aziz handed me a bottle of water and I took a sip and I heard the sound of my own voice echoing from somewhere in the distance:  What kind of army is this, Aziz?  First you don’t want Lucy around here, and now I’ve got to name her puppies or I’ll end up stuck in the perpetual bad luck zone you’re always warning me to watch out for?

            My vision was swimming and I started to fall backward and Aziz reached for my arm but I shoved him away.   Names?  You want names, goddamnit?  All right, I’ll give you names.  I grabbed the first pup and held her up and said, I’m calling you Bernadine Dohrn, and then I picked up the rest of the puppies, naming them in turn:  Your name is Mark Rudd, and yours is Kathy Boudin, and yours is Bill Ayers, and yours is Diana Oughton.  As I placed the last of them against Lucy’s belly, I felt Aziz’s hand on one arm and someone else’s on the other.  Come General Bongo, said Aziz.  We will sit down and drink chai and you will feel better.  As we passed into the next room, I could smell wood smoke seeping from the mud brick stove, and one of the house boys was pouring tea.  Aziz helped me onto a cushion against the wall and my vision began to clear. 

            I like these names you have for Lucy’s babies, said Aziz.  They are the names of your friends, yes?  Not friends, I answered thickly.  They were the good guys a long time ago, only nobody knew it, including them.  I remember hearing Aziz say, you are feverish, General Bongo, I will bring you a damp cloth.  Then, nothing. 

            It was all uphill until that moment, and it was all downhill afterwards, or maybe it was the other way around.  All I remember is, when I awoke the next morning I was lying on my sagging rope bed next to Lucy and her pups, and a black helicopter was circling overhead.