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IRAQ VET SEEKS ATONEMENT FOR EARLY WAR TRAGEDY
National Public Radio NPR
Oct 23 2012
On April 8, 2003, in the early days of the Iraq War, the Kachadoorian
family found themselves in the middle of a firefight at a major
intersection in Baghdad.
They had approached the intersection in three cars, and didn't respond
to Marines' warnings to stop and turnaround, so the Marines opened
fire, killing three men and shooting a young woman in the shoulder,
not realizing the people in the car were civilians.
Lu Lobello was one of those Marines. He didn't know if his bullets
were responsible for the Kachadoorians' deaths and injuries, and he
maintains that the Marines did exactly what they were trained to do
in that situation.
But years later, still haunted by the experience and dealing with
post-traumatic stress disorder, Lobello started researching the
incident, looking for everything he could find about that day. That's
when he stumbled across Dexter Filkins' 2003 account of the tragedy
in The New York Times. Lobello says the article helped answer his
questions about why the family drove towards the gunfight.
"My reasoning was they were driving toward us, of course they're an
enemy. Why would anyone drive towards the sound of a battle?" Lobello
tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And when I read from their point of
view, [which] Dexter talked about in his article, it just shook me
because it all seemed so plausible."
Filkins tells Gross that, in the early years of the Iraq War, Iraqis
driving into American checkpoints led to many casualties. In this
instance, the Kachadoorians were just trying to get home, which was
just around the corner from the firefight.
According to Filkins, the family was confused and too frightened
to turn around, because the house they had been staying at had just
been bombed, so they decided to try and make it through, with tragic
consequences.
"And then if you flip that around, you're like a 20-year-old American
soldier; you're scared to death; you don't know what is coming at you,"
Filkins says.
Lobello used Filkins' article to track down Nora and Margaret
Kachadoorian, two surviving family members who were there that day,
and send them a video apology.
"It wasn't all just about my guilt from this one day," Lobello says.
"It was about feeling as though there was somebody out there who was
greatly affected by our actions as a unit, and that we had a duty to
them, to reach out to them, to find out how they were doing and if
I could do that I knew I'd feel better."
Lobello also reached out to Filkins, and together they went to
Glendale, Calif., to meet the Kachadoorians - with the help of Filkins'
New York Times article, the family had come to the U.S. as refugees.
Filkins says at first, the meeting was unbearably tense and filled
with long pauses. "Lu kind of lost it right away and they didn't,
and at one point Margaret said to Lu, 'You're crying, but I don't
have any tears left.'"
The tension broke only after Lu and Nora's husband, Asaad Salim,
went outside for a cigarette.
"I think it was akin to two guys sharing a drink - it was just
something that was universal, international," Lobello says. "I think
that having a couple minutes alone with him and the family seeing
that me and him were able to talk and be comfortable with each other,
it kind of set the tone for the rest."
For Lobello, there wasn't a clear moment when Margaret and Nora said
they forgave him and he suddenly felt better. "The whole process
of going up there, the whole journey to find the Kachadoorians and
the whole experience was all part of it. Just letting me into their
home and feeding me and meeting with me - the whole thing was [as]
if they were saying we forgive you and we understand."
Since then, Lobello has maintained a relationship with the
Kachadoorians through Facebook, phone calls and even a visit to help
the family with a legal matter.
As for Filkins, he says American forces did learn something from that
2003 tragedy. At the beginning of the war, he says, "Iraqis got caught
in the wrong place at the wrong time, often in cars driving towards
checkpoints and getting killed." Eventually, Americans made changes in
their procedures at checkpoints and started yelling or having signs
in Arabic, and shooting at engine blocks rather than drivers to stop
cars. "It's just good to know that there was a learning curve dealing
with this stuff, because it probably spared a lot of lives. Obviously,
you just wish that we'd known all of this ahead of time."
Filkins writes about Lobello's meeting with the Kachadoorians in the
Oct. 29 issue of The New Yorker.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interview Highlights
On finding the Kachadoorians' story
Filkins: "It was a week after Saddam [Hussein] fell, his government
fell, and Baghdad was just total chaos. There was looting everywhere.
There were people being killed in the streets. There were buildings
on fire - it was just total anarchy.
"So I was just driving around trying to figure things out and I saw
this crazy scene in front of a hospital, and this was happening at
all the hospitals: There was a giant crowd of people trying to get
inside so they could just tear everything apart and basically carry
away anything of value... And I watched a doctor come out, you know,
a guy in a white lab coat with an automatic rifle and shoot it over
the heads of the crowd to kind of scare them back. And what a scene. So
I just pulled over and I went inside the hospital to see what I could
see, not knowing what I would find.
"And it was a scene inside the hospital, which was very much like
the outside - total pandemonium. Most of the hospital had been looted.
There was no electricity. The water was gone. There were people
walking around carrying, holding their bleeding limbs. It was
extraordinary. And a doctor walked up to me, an Iraqi doctor. I had
been there for a while looking around and he just pulled me aside
and said, 'There's something I want to show you.' And I said, 'OK.'
"And I followed him into this ward in the back of the hospital, and
there was this woman who turned out to be Nora Kachadoorian, a young
woman probably 21-years-old at the time. Her mother and her aunt were
standing over her in a hospital bed and her shoulder had been really,
really badly wounded.
"So I just kind of sat down and talked to them about what had happened
and she, Nora, and her mom, Margaret, they kind of reconstructed this
event, what had happened and how it came that she had been shot in
the shoulder and Nora's two brothers and her father had been killed
just a couple days before and so it was quite a story.
"So this was one really sad traumatic event in this gigantic scene
that was happening, this gigantic historical event, so I focused on
that for a while and I somehow managed to find the Marines camped out
in the field a couple miles away. And I can't remember how I managed
to get lucky like that, but I found them and they were all very upset
and they told me what happened from their perspective.
"And so I was able to piece together what had happened at this terrible
moment at this intersection... And that was April 2003 and I wrote
that story and it stayed with me because the Kachadoorians, they were
very sweet people and what had happened to them was terribly sad and
years went by. I spent almost four years in Baghdad and I used to
ask about them and I used to look around for them every now and then.
I saw a lot of death, but I never found them again and never heard
from them again until a couple of months ago and got a Facebook
message from Lu."
On the video apology Lobello sent the Kachadoorians
Lobello: "By sending a video I felt that I could encapsulate more of
the emotions I was feeling. I tried to write out something to send to
them. I probably made 25 drafts and deleted them all. It just seemed
so odd to put on paper. I just didn't know what to say really, and
every time I would read what I just wrote, I thought that it sounded
like something I would hate to read if I was them. So eventually I
tried to video myself in hopes that it would better show them what
I was feeling...
"I introduced myself. I told them of the night that we met and I told
them I was sorry and that I had to speak to them if I could. I told
them that they lived so close to me that I had to reach out. It was
just too odd to me not to say hello and not to find out how they were
doing to see if I could help them really. I wanted to know if there
was something I could do to make their life easier."
On the Kachadoorians forgiving Lobello
Filkins: "When Lu was outside with Asaad [Salim] smoking a cigarette
and I was inside with the two Kachadoorian women, Nora, who's now
about 30 - she'd been sitting quietly, for the most part, the whole
time - didn't really say anything, just a couple of words here and
there. And finally when Lu was outside, she spoke and she said,
'We want to help them.' And it was very nice.
"One of the oddities of the story, and there are so many, and I'm not
sure what it means, but they're Christian, for one thing, which makes
them a minority in Iraq, some 2 percent of the population ... And
they're Jehovah's Witnesses and they're very religious - certainly
as anyone would be after something like this.
"So every time I asked them about forgiving Lu, or what had happened,
or how did they feel about it, or why are they not bitter, because
they're not, they would just default immediately to the Bible or they
would start talking about religion, of God and forgiveness. And it
was amazing. You could just see the power of religion at a really
micro level. They believed deeply in their religion and she said,
and they said, over and over again, 'We have to forgive them. This
is what God commands us: He's forgiven us; we must [as well]. And
there was no doubt in their mind about it. And the conviction with
which they did it was very moving."
On the importance of telling these kinds of stories
Lobello: "A lot of the times, these stories don't get told. What gets
told is the other side and the heroism. And what you miss out on is
that this is a part of any war. No matter the training, no matter
the terrain, you will always have innocent civilians killed. And if
more stories are told about these innocent civilians, maybe we will
start to think twice the next time we decide to go somewhere and have
these battles or maybe at least we'll come up with some programs to
take better care of these people that are caught in the crossfire."
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/23/163472609/iraq-vet-seeks-atonement-for-early-war-tragedy
From: A. Papazian
National Public Radio NPR
Oct 23 2012
On April 8, 2003, in the early days of the Iraq War, the Kachadoorian
family found themselves in the middle of a firefight at a major
intersection in Baghdad.
They had approached the intersection in three cars, and didn't respond
to Marines' warnings to stop and turnaround, so the Marines opened
fire, killing three men and shooting a young woman in the shoulder,
not realizing the people in the car were civilians.
Lu Lobello was one of those Marines. He didn't know if his bullets
were responsible for the Kachadoorians' deaths and injuries, and he
maintains that the Marines did exactly what they were trained to do
in that situation.
But years later, still haunted by the experience and dealing with
post-traumatic stress disorder, Lobello started researching the
incident, looking for everything he could find about that day. That's
when he stumbled across Dexter Filkins' 2003 account of the tragedy
in The New York Times. Lobello says the article helped answer his
questions about why the family drove towards the gunfight.
"My reasoning was they were driving toward us, of course they're an
enemy. Why would anyone drive towards the sound of a battle?" Lobello
tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And when I read from their point of
view, [which] Dexter talked about in his article, it just shook me
because it all seemed so plausible."
Filkins tells Gross that, in the early years of the Iraq War, Iraqis
driving into American checkpoints led to many casualties. In this
instance, the Kachadoorians were just trying to get home, which was
just around the corner from the firefight.
According to Filkins, the family was confused and too frightened
to turn around, because the house they had been staying at had just
been bombed, so they decided to try and make it through, with tragic
consequences.
"And then if you flip that around, you're like a 20-year-old American
soldier; you're scared to death; you don't know what is coming at you,"
Filkins says.
Lobello used Filkins' article to track down Nora and Margaret
Kachadoorian, two surviving family members who were there that day,
and send them a video apology.
"It wasn't all just about my guilt from this one day," Lobello says.
"It was about feeling as though there was somebody out there who was
greatly affected by our actions as a unit, and that we had a duty to
them, to reach out to them, to find out how they were doing and if
I could do that I knew I'd feel better."
Lobello also reached out to Filkins, and together they went to
Glendale, Calif., to meet the Kachadoorians - with the help of Filkins'
New York Times article, the family had come to the U.S. as refugees.
Filkins says at first, the meeting was unbearably tense and filled
with long pauses. "Lu kind of lost it right away and they didn't,
and at one point Margaret said to Lu, 'You're crying, but I don't
have any tears left.'"
The tension broke only after Lu and Nora's husband, Asaad Salim,
went outside for a cigarette.
"I think it was akin to two guys sharing a drink - it was just
something that was universal, international," Lobello says. "I think
that having a couple minutes alone with him and the family seeing
that me and him were able to talk and be comfortable with each other,
it kind of set the tone for the rest."
For Lobello, there wasn't a clear moment when Margaret and Nora said
they forgave him and he suddenly felt better. "The whole process
of going up there, the whole journey to find the Kachadoorians and
the whole experience was all part of it. Just letting me into their
home and feeding me and meeting with me - the whole thing was [as]
if they were saying we forgive you and we understand."
Since then, Lobello has maintained a relationship with the
Kachadoorians through Facebook, phone calls and even a visit to help
the family with a legal matter.
As for Filkins, he says American forces did learn something from that
2003 tragedy. At the beginning of the war, he says, "Iraqis got caught
in the wrong place at the wrong time, often in cars driving towards
checkpoints and getting killed." Eventually, Americans made changes in
their procedures at checkpoints and started yelling or having signs
in Arabic, and shooting at engine blocks rather than drivers to stop
cars. "It's just good to know that there was a learning curve dealing
with this stuff, because it probably spared a lot of lives. Obviously,
you just wish that we'd known all of this ahead of time."
Filkins writes about Lobello's meeting with the Kachadoorians in the
Oct. 29 issue of The New Yorker.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interview Highlights
On finding the Kachadoorians' story
Filkins: "It was a week after Saddam [Hussein] fell, his government
fell, and Baghdad was just total chaos. There was looting everywhere.
There were people being killed in the streets. There were buildings
on fire - it was just total anarchy.
"So I was just driving around trying to figure things out and I saw
this crazy scene in front of a hospital, and this was happening at
all the hospitals: There was a giant crowd of people trying to get
inside so they could just tear everything apart and basically carry
away anything of value... And I watched a doctor come out, you know,
a guy in a white lab coat with an automatic rifle and shoot it over
the heads of the crowd to kind of scare them back. And what a scene. So
I just pulled over and I went inside the hospital to see what I could
see, not knowing what I would find.
"And it was a scene inside the hospital, which was very much like
the outside - total pandemonium. Most of the hospital had been looted.
There was no electricity. The water was gone. There were people
walking around carrying, holding their bleeding limbs. It was
extraordinary. And a doctor walked up to me, an Iraqi doctor. I had
been there for a while looking around and he just pulled me aside
and said, 'There's something I want to show you.' And I said, 'OK.'
"And I followed him into this ward in the back of the hospital, and
there was this woman who turned out to be Nora Kachadoorian, a young
woman probably 21-years-old at the time. Her mother and her aunt were
standing over her in a hospital bed and her shoulder had been really,
really badly wounded.
"So I just kind of sat down and talked to them about what had happened
and she, Nora, and her mom, Margaret, they kind of reconstructed this
event, what had happened and how it came that she had been shot in
the shoulder and Nora's two brothers and her father had been killed
just a couple days before and so it was quite a story.
"So this was one really sad traumatic event in this gigantic scene
that was happening, this gigantic historical event, so I focused on
that for a while and I somehow managed to find the Marines camped out
in the field a couple miles away. And I can't remember how I managed
to get lucky like that, but I found them and they were all very upset
and they told me what happened from their perspective.
"And so I was able to piece together what had happened at this terrible
moment at this intersection... And that was April 2003 and I wrote
that story and it stayed with me because the Kachadoorians, they were
very sweet people and what had happened to them was terribly sad and
years went by. I spent almost four years in Baghdad and I used to
ask about them and I used to look around for them every now and then.
I saw a lot of death, but I never found them again and never heard
from them again until a couple of months ago and got a Facebook
message from Lu."
On the video apology Lobello sent the Kachadoorians
Lobello: "By sending a video I felt that I could encapsulate more of
the emotions I was feeling. I tried to write out something to send to
them. I probably made 25 drafts and deleted them all. It just seemed
so odd to put on paper. I just didn't know what to say really, and
every time I would read what I just wrote, I thought that it sounded
like something I would hate to read if I was them. So eventually I
tried to video myself in hopes that it would better show them what
I was feeling...
"I introduced myself. I told them of the night that we met and I told
them I was sorry and that I had to speak to them if I could. I told
them that they lived so close to me that I had to reach out. It was
just too odd to me not to say hello and not to find out how they were
doing to see if I could help them really. I wanted to know if there
was something I could do to make their life easier."
On the Kachadoorians forgiving Lobello
Filkins: "When Lu was outside with Asaad [Salim] smoking a cigarette
and I was inside with the two Kachadoorian women, Nora, who's now
about 30 - she'd been sitting quietly, for the most part, the whole
time - didn't really say anything, just a couple of words here and
there. And finally when Lu was outside, she spoke and she said,
'We want to help them.' And it was very nice.
"One of the oddities of the story, and there are so many, and I'm not
sure what it means, but they're Christian, for one thing, which makes
them a minority in Iraq, some 2 percent of the population ... And
they're Jehovah's Witnesses and they're very religious - certainly
as anyone would be after something like this.
"So every time I asked them about forgiving Lu, or what had happened,
or how did they feel about it, or why are they not bitter, because
they're not, they would just default immediately to the Bible or they
would start talking about religion, of God and forgiveness. And it
was amazing. You could just see the power of religion at a really
micro level. They believed deeply in their religion and she said,
and they said, over and over again, 'We have to forgive them. This
is what God commands us: He's forgiven us; we must [as well]. And
there was no doubt in their mind about it. And the conviction with
which they did it was very moving."
On the importance of telling these kinds of stories
Lobello: "A lot of the times, these stories don't get told. What gets
told is the other side and the heroism. And what you miss out on is
that this is a part of any war. No matter the training, no matter
the terrain, you will always have innocent civilians killed. And if
more stories are told about these innocent civilians, maybe we will
start to think twice the next time we decide to go somewhere and have
these battles or maybe at least we'll come up with some programs to
take better care of these people that are caught in the crossfire."
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/23/163472609/iraq-vet-seeks-atonement-for-early-war-tragedy
From: A. Papazian