War Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page A

passing right between Lulofs’s knees, striking the steering wheel column and then ricocheting up, exploding the dashboard and spraying little blackened bits of shrapnel everywhere, breaking the skin along his hands, legs, chest, and arms.
    Lulofs barely had time to react when Farnsworth shouted, “RPG!” Lulofs flinched and slammed the break, keeping the rocket-propelled grenade from hitting the driver’s side door. The barrage continued; Farnsworth was so pissed that he climbed out his side of the vehicle while it was still moving to position himself so he could return fire over the back end of the truck. He wasn’t there for very long—within a few minutes’ time they’d almost made it out of the danger zone. The guys in the vehicle behind theirs watched as Lulofs’s and Farnsworth’s Humvee got slammed and counted at least six RPGs that sailed past or hit the vehicle. Each time, they missed or hit without detonating, clanking against the armor at an angle and flying back up into the air. It had been a relentless, nonstop hail of bullets and mortars that lasted the full stretch of a mile.
    When they finally were able to pull over, the first thing they did was check on their dogs, who were still in their kennels in the back. While Aaslan had weathered the barrage, Eesau had not; he refused to get out of his kennel. Even after Farnsworth managed to coax him out, Eesau still wouldn’t work. The stress was so great, the dog just shut down. The dogs had protection against bullets, yes, but it had been modest at best. And as each round hit the side of their vehicle close to where the dogs were riding, Lulofs couldn’t help but think that they’d been killed or at least wounded. Amazingly, they weren’t even scratched. But they had come close. On the outside of the vehicle, right by the dogs’ kennels, was a compartment where they kept their MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, the prepackaged field rations. Later, when they opened up an MRE, they found a bullet lodged inside.
    It was after that August ambush that Lulofs began to change. He’d been deployed for nearly six months, and the devout man he’d been when he arrived in Iraq was seeing things differently. Where before he’d have shaken his head in offense at the sound of swearing, profanity now spouted freelyfrom his mouth. Farnsworth noticed the difference in his friend and tried to talk to Lulofs about it; he reasoned that if a guy who wouldn’t even utter a curse word put his Bible in a bag and never touched it again, it meant something wasn’t right.
    But it was more than that. Lulofs had grown complacent. It wasn’t laziness but a kind of mania that gripped him. When they went out on missions, Lulofs stopped carrying his rifle, taking only his sidearm. He started to think himself invincible, believing that bullets and bombs couldn’t touch him. He’d already faced them all and survived. God wasn’t going to let him die, not here. Not in Fallujah.
    The nearer he came to the end of his deployment, the more the thought of going home began to consume Lulofs. He began to approach each mission with a ravenous sense of purpose, working his handlers and their dogs to the breaking point. On one mission during those last weeks, he worked his team with such belligerent intent that he didn’t even realize they had pushed their way past the front line—putting his dog teams between the Marines and the enemy. When he finally noticed they were in the kill zone, Lulofs simply told his handlers to keep moving even as they were getting shot at, telling them to ignore it. They were less than 100 yards from artillery shells. He knew how dangerous it was but he didn’t care.
    Lulofs rationalized away the risks he was taking. The sooner they were done with this mission, the sooner they could begin the next and then, only then, could they leave this godforsaken place and go home.
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