GREGORY WARNER, HOST:
You're listening to ROUGH TRANSLATION from NPR.
In April of 2003, a few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Marc Garlasco arrived in Iraq on a mission to investigate war crimes for Human Rights Watch. And kind of as soon as he gets there...
MARC GARLASCO: You know, people kept speaking about this one person. They're saying, oh, you've got to meet Marla. You've got to meet Marla. I can't wait till you meet Marla.
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GARLASCO: And it was funny because, you know, I have no conception who this person is. I don't know if she's, you know, some bigwig or if she's some State Department person or who it is. They keep talking about her in the vein of, you know, oh, civilian casualties and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. She's really important. You need to meet her.
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WARNER: And then one night, he's at a party.
GARLASCO: And all of a sudden, this California blond, incredibly young, just flits across the room - meeting everyone, speaking to everyone. And at some point she comes up to me. And it wasn't, hi, I'm Marla. Hi. Nice to meet you. It was, Marc, how are you? So nice to see you. We've got - I've got work for you. Your skills are so important to us and are really going to come into play. And there's a meeting I need you to go to tomorrow with the U.S. military. And I'll let you know the specifics about it. And it's just great to have you here.
WARNER: You've been recruited.
GARLASCO: It wasn't a request. It was, this is (laughter) what you're going to do. And I went to the meeting the next day.
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WARNER: This is ROUGH TRANSLATION's Home/Front, our series with Quil Lawrence. I'm Gregory Warner.
If you heard last week's episode, you remember that when Marla Ruzicka first showed up in Iraq, and Afghanistan before that, she wasn't exactly the kind of person who anyone thought they had to meet. She had no job, no budget, no apparent role in a war zone. If you didn't hear that episode, it's called Marla's War.
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MARLA RUZICKA: I work for an organization every day...
WARNER: Marla started out as a staunch and vocal antiwar activist.
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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting) No blood for oil.
WARNER: But her experiences in Afghanistan, spending time with the victims of war changed her mind.
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RUZICKA: I think it's actually a luxury to be against war because war happens. And I think we have to change war. We have to change the impact that it has on civilians.
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WARNER: To understand how Marla set out to change war's impact, we have to tell you not just about what she got done but what she got so many people around her to do - people who she enlisted in her mission, sometimes before they'd ever met her, before they'd heard her name, certainly before they realized how they fit into her plan.
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RUZICKA: Like, my mom called me an operator.
ALFONS LUNA: How would you define this term, operator?
RUZICKA: Operator, it's like (snapping fingers) mover, shaker. Hell, yeah, I'm an operator - like, the biggest operator you'll ever meet. But like, I'm proud to be an operator if it's an operator for other people.
WARNER: Today we're going to look at how Marla operated in a war zone. We're going to meet three people who she recruited - a Pentagon weapons expert, an Army lawyer and a general - to rethink the military's balance sheet of war. And we'll hear the toll that that would take on her.
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WARNER: Here's Quil Lawrence.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Marla had an incredibly simple message.
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RUZICKA: Doesn't matter if you were for or against the war - innocent civilians should not be harmed in conflict. And when they are, you must investigate the case. And you must help them reconstruct their lives.
LAWRENCE: She rejected the idea that war is hell. And innocent people get hurt. And there's nothing you can do about it.
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RUZICKA: What they call collateral damage - a word I hate because when you go out door to door, you meet the families. It's not a number. They're people. They're families. And they deserve...
LAWRENCE: In 2002, after Marla got back from Afghanistan, she convinced the Senate to appropriate millions of dollars for Afghan victims of war.
Shall I bring the box over here?
TARA SUTTON: Yeah, sure.
LAWRENCE: OK, cool.
SUTTON: (Sighing).
LAWRENCE: And as soon as the war started in Iraq, she turned her attention to civilians there.
SUTTON: OK.
LAWRENCE: When was last time we went through this box?
SUTTON: I haven't gone through it, to be honest.
LAWRENCE: Tara Sutton was one of Marla's best friends in Iraq. She's now the keeper of Marla's list.
SUTTON: Oh. This is a list of all the cases that she - you remember, she did the survey.
LAWRENCE: Yep.
SUTTON: This is it.
LAWRENCE: Marla needed evidence of civilian casualties in Iraq so she could get them compensation. So she hired a team of Iraqi researchers.
SUTTON: She got all of these people to spread out across the country, go to every single hospital.
LAWRENCE: They collected not only people's names but their number of dependents they had, the cause of injury.
SUTTON: OK. Cause of injury, shrapnel, shrapnel, break, shrapnel, shrapnel, burns, break leg...
LAWRENCE: Yeah.
SUTTON: ...Eye, neck, bullets, missile attack, where it took place.
LAWRENCE: Marla wasn't just documenting the names of Iraqis who were killed or injured.
SUTTON: Abbas Illaoi, age, 56, gender, male, marital status, married, occupation, businessman, supporting 16...
LAWRENCE: Wow.
SUTTON: ...Dead.
LAWRENCE: She was also keeping a detailed account of how she was doing.
Course I remember...
SUTTON: Yes. Look at this. It's like...
LAWRENCE: ...How it's singed.
SUTTON: ...Oh. Thursday, no cigs, like Bridget Jones - she always kept a little tally of, you know, one wine, one cigarette.
LAWRENCE: She kept a diary of her own struggles and her own mental state.
SUTTON: I think that so many people who struggle with mental health have an extra layer of sensitivity.
LAWRENCE: It was only later that she'd be diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
SUTTON: She really felt the pain of everybody because she was in touch with her own pain. She didn't really have skin in a way. When she was in those - whether she was manic or she was depressed, I think that she struggled immensely. And that's why she could feel so much for other people. She was just like, I try. Every day, I try. Every day, I wake up and say, I'm going to be a better Marla.
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RUZICKA: We've worked on a case for three months with the little girl, Iat, 5 years old. A tank ran over her car, killing her mother and father. But when we presented this case to the military, they told her to go to...
LAWRENCE: Marla had told me that the Iraqi civilians she'd met felt like the Americans who were supposed to be liberating Iraq just didn't care about them.
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RUZICKA: So they just kind of feel like, well, do we matter? And that is how many people felt under the former regime. And that's what we're trying to change. We want Iraq to get off to the right start. We want people to feel that nobody operates with impunity.
LAWRENCE: This is from an interview I did with Marla in 2004, and I was joking with her about it.
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LAWRENCE: Honey, you've gotten really good at this.
RUZICKA: (Laughter) Sorry.
LAWRENCE: That was so smooth and solid.
RUZICKA: (Laughter) No...
LAWRENCE: She sounded so different from the anti-war activist who I first met in Afghanistan. I mean, phrases like make sure Iraq gets off to the right start - you can hear that she's been practicing this around Washington. But it was never just a line with Marla. I mean, she believes it. She believes that Americans, civilians and military, wanted to do the right thing in Iraq.
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RUZICKA: The overall impact that this has, the U.S. not going out investigating these cases, is something that comes back to the impunity question. They think that people can get away with anything. When they feel that they're operating like that, we have a major hearts-and-minds issue that's going to be very damaging to rectify. We can start to rectify it and make security for Iraqis and American soldiers much better by setting up a clear system of compensation.
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LAWRENCE: Marla was making this case to the U.S. military. And the U.S. military will tell you they do more than almost any other military on Earth to try to kill just their enemies, just the people they're aiming at. There's informal lingo for this. It's pretty dark. They call it putting warheads on foreheads. And one person whose job it was to put a warhead on the right forehead was the guy we introduced at the top of the show, Marc Garlasco.
Would you object if I described you as a gifted ballistics and munitions nerd? Is that fair?
GARLASCO: I guess that's generous.
LAWRENCE: Before Marc took the job investigating war crimes for Human Rights Watch, he worked at the Pentagon.
GARLASCO: So I was chief of high-value targeting, and my job was to locate, track and kill Saddam Hussein, which we didn't do a very good job at.
LAWRENCE: I've seen Marc go to a bomb site and tell you, based on some scrap of burnt metal, what kind of round was fired and who fired it and from where. And when he was at the Pentagon, part of his job was to look at proposed targets and try to estimate how many civilians might be accidentally killed if you dropped a bomb there.
GARLASCO: And the rule was if, on any target, you had 30 or more anticipated civilians that were going to be killed, that you had to get national command authority. So either President Bush or Secretary Rumsfeld had to personally sign off on those attacks.
LAWRENCE: Marc, like Marla, thought that America should do better than that.
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LAWRENCE: A week after leaving the Pentagon, he was in Iraq in the crater of a bomb that he himself had targeted. When Marc learned that there was an Iraqi village that was surrounded by bits of unexploded ordnance, little bomblets that are just waiting to go off, it was actually Marla who told him exactly where to go and who to talk to in the military to get those bombs cleared up.
GARLASCO: I went in to the demining guys - to the U.S. military's demining guys - and said, hey, I was just out at this site. I've got the GPS coordinates for you for a strike. And the guy's like, who the hell are you? I said, oh, I'm with Human Rights Watch. And he was like, Human what? I explained, look. I've got the coordinates for bomblets that are in a civilian area. And he's just looking at me like, I have no idea what to do with you. And I said to him, Marla sent me. And he said, oh, well, why didn't you tell me Marla sent you? And that was it. You know, she was an opening. She opened doors.
LAWRENCE: So she had schmoozed this guy or...
GARLASCO: Marla schmoozed everybody. Let's face facts. Marla schmoozed everyone.
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LAWRENCE: She would recruit anyone she thought would help her cause, whether it was Marc or the demining guys or really anyone with boots on the ground. One time, Marc is out in Baghdad, and an armored vehicle pulls up, and this soldier shouts down at him, you have to leave. It's too dangerous.
GARLASCO: You got to get out of here. You shouldn't be here. I screamed up. I said, you know, hey, we're here to do interviews. You know, we're here with Marla. And he's like, oh, Marla's here? Like, all right, no problem. You know, we'll create a security cordon for you. And, you know, just let us know when you're done. Marla had an ability to co-opt people and to pull them into her sphere and to explain to them this is the right thing to do, and so we're going to do it.
WARNER: And Marla changed how Marc thought of his job. In fact, when he would meet Iraqi civilians who needed help, he'd sometimes give them Marla's business card along with his own and tell them, look. Human Rights Watch can't really help you.
GARLASCO: I can't do anything for you, but there is this person, and I am going to put you in contact with her, and she is going to be able to help you to meet with the right people in the government so that you can get what you need.
LAWRENCE: By this point, Marla had founded an organization she called CIVIC, which stands for the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict.
GARLASCO: I understood, you know, the humanity of what Marla was doing because even if you couldn't get people help, you were still there for them.
WARNER: But this job that Marla's taken on keeps getting bigger and bigger. Casualties are mounting. She's knocking on more and more doors. Then she's trying to bring in more allies from the military to help her.
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RUZICKA: I mean, I train my locals. I train them how to do it and stuff, but they can't, like, walk up to a military guy and be like, dude (laughter), you know, I'm having a party (laughter).
WARNER: For Marla, parties were where she got people to work together.
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RUZICKA: I wanted everyone to talk to each other, and I wanted everyone to like each other.
WARNER: Where she kept track of what people were working on and how they might help her. And it's also where she recruited people to her side. And that was work.
SUTTON: And I remember I'd rub her head. Like, she'd put her head in my lap in the living room, and I would, like, rub her head and rub her shoulders and, like, just kind of try to get her not to go out. I was just like, Marla, just stay here. Like, just don't - you don't have to go anywhere. Like, just stay here.
WARNER: But Marla had more people to meet and more people to recruit. That's when ROUGH TRANSLATION's Home/Front returns.
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WARNER: We're back with ROUGH TRANSLATION's Home/Front. I'm Gregory Warner. The evidence that Marla gathered of civilian casualties in Iraq and her advocacy on their behalf helped her convince the Senate to establish a fund for Iraqi civilians hurt in war. And that money went to provide people with medical care and to help them start businesses and other things. But distributing that money took time, and she was meeting families who needed more immediate help. The military was there on the ground, and she wanted the military to notice these casualties and do something about them. And then she found someone in the military who was noticing it and who was doing something, which brings us to our second Marla recruit.
JON TRACY: Jon Tracy. I was a captain in the U.S. Army.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I never knew Jon Tracy's name at the time because Marla never used people's names. She always had, like, some descriptor for them. So she used to just call him my JAG.
WARNER: Lawyers in the Army are called JAGS. It stands for judge advocate general.
SUTTON: She met JAG Tracy. I remember her always talking about him (laughter). She'd be like, I'm going jogging with my JAG. And I think they really hit it off - right? - because he had such a humanitarian heart.
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RUZICKA: JAG Tracy.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
RUZICKA: I met him. He's the claims officer for compensation. He's a judge advocate general.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Where is he from?
RUZICKA: He's from Virginia.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Does he have an accent?
RUZICKA: And he's my friend. No, no.
TRACY: Every single time, I would say, you know, my name is Jon. If you really want to be military about it, you can call me Captain Tracy. She was like, no, no, Your title is JAG Tracy.
WARNER: It's funny. You were like, if you really want to be military about it. But she didn't want to be military about it. She was doing her own thing.
TRACY: That's right, yeah.
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WARNER: The JAG Corps was created in 1775 by George Washington. So for as long as the U.S. has had an Army, the Army's had lawyers. But Jon surprised his friends when he enlisted in the Army after law school.
TRACY: I don't like the idea of saluting. I don't like the idea of uniforms. I don't like the idea of being told to make my bed every morning and having it inspected.
WARNER: Jon's brother and father had served, and he found he hated working at law firms. He liked the idea of having an adventure. And besides, surely, the Army would not send lawyers to a combat zone.
TRACY: I don't know what lawyers would do. So what am I going to be worried about?
WARNER: I mean, for basic training, they put him up in an Econo Lodge.
TRACY: The day that we were supposed to do the obstacle course, there was a light sprinkle. So they canceled it, and we all got the day off. It wasn't until near the end of basic course that I was told where I was going.
WARNER: He was going to Baghdad.
TRACY: And then when I finally got there, those first few weeks, it's just people coming to say, hey, a Humvee ran into my car or this or that. Oh, this will be easy. This is not that hard of a job. You know, I just look at the car. He brings me a bill from some mechanic. It says, you know, it was $400 to fix this. And I give him $400, and everybody's happy.
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WARNER: Many JAGs in Iraq were based at Baghdad Airport and not interacting much with ordinary Iraqis, doing things like helping soldiers figure out their taxes or their divorces. But Jon was stationed with a brigade in downtown Baghdad. He discovered that most of his time actually was spent doing something called foreign claims - paying people whose property had been accidentally damaged by the military. Jon found he didn't mind this work. He's handy with a spreadsheet, likes to get things done.
TRACY: I thought, if this is the next 12 months, then how bad can this really be? But slowly, as, you know, time progressed throughout the summer and more and more people were coming with these combat stories, it changed the dynamics.
WARNER: See - the thing about the Foreign Claims Act, which goes back to World War II, it has something called...
TRACY: The combat exclusion, which basically says this statute does not cover anything that is, quote, unquote, "related to combat."
LAWRENCE: So on that first day, you get these 40 cases. And 35 of them are coming in and saying, you ruined my car. And you could say, all right, you know, prove it, and we'll pay for your car. But if they came in and said, you injured me or you killed a member of my family, you couldn't do anything.
TRACY: That's exactly right.
LAWRENCE: Jon hated having to turn people away. And he remembered that there was this other way the military could compensate people. It wasn't as well-known as Foreign Claims. In fact, in his JAG training class, Jon had only heard it mentioned once, in passing.
TRACY: Like, a little sound bite sort of amount of time spent on what the military has called solatia - the solatia program.
LAWRENCE: Solatia is the Latin root of the word solace and console.
TRACY: With solatia, the idea was a particular unit could take some money and offer a nominal amount to the victim of a combat operation as a mere sign of sympathy and nothing more.
LAWRENCE: Solatia had a monetary cap.
TRACY: Twenty-five hundred dollars for a life, $1,500 for property damage and $1,000 for personal injury.
LAWRENCE: Those were the nominal amounts. But the Army hadn't even set aside money to pay them. So Jon got creative. And he ended up leaning on a friend of his in the brigade who managed the budget for reconstruction projects, like rebuilding wells and the Baghdad Zoo. And he asked him how much he had left over each week.
TRACY: And I got the remainder, basically. He would look at me and say, well, this week, I can give you $8,000. And the next week, it would be, I can give you $11,000.
LAWRENCE: And what was your demand each week? How many...
TRACY: Growing.
LAWRENCE: ...Thousand dollars' worth of - did you need each week?
TRACY: Way more than that.
LAWRENCE: Jon didn't just find a way to get the money. Two days a week, he would go to an Iraqi government building with his translator, Zeynab, to hear people's stories. In fact, just like Marla was keeping her list, Jon was entering these names in his spreadsheet - the woman whose husband was killed in his own store by stray bullets or the couple whose three children were killed in the back seat when they didn't stop their car at a checkpoint.
TRACY: We would show up and start seeing people at 9 a.m. But we'd be out of money by 10:15. The most difficult part of the job was - between my translator and I, we'd have to prioritize about what we felt most deserved the money and pay those people and then keep telling the people on the lower list, try to come back early the next week. Try to come back early, you know, the next day I'm out here. And we'll see what we can do. But that list just kept growing and growing.
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LAWRENCE: Jon felt like the cleanup crew for a war that was getting deadlier every day.
TRACY: I mean, when you open the door to your office and you see a line of 80 people sitting in the hallway, there is a certain level of frustration that overcomes you where you do wish - like, I would much prefer to be at Baghdad airport, you know, working on somebody 1040. That seems like an infinitely better life.
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SHEILA MCVICKER: These are boxes of misery - file after file documenting death and injury.
LAWRENCE: So when CNN called and asked to film him doing his work, he did not call his boss or the media relations office and ask for permission to speak to the media.
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TRACY: How much is he looking for?
MCVICKER: Twice a week, Captain Jonathan Tracy, a military lawyer, meets with those seeking money for damages, including deaths caused by U.S. troops.
LAWRENCE: And was that a small act of rebellion on your part?
TRACY: I mean, I viewed it somewhat like that.
WARNER: The way that Jon tells himself this whole story, that he decided to take this small risk, it's missing one crucial detail, which is that the person who told CNN about him and gave CNN his cellphone number was Marla, who Jon had not yet met, though she'd heard about him. And maybe she'd intuited that any military lawyer who was patient enough to spend two days a week sorting through combat stories to pay condolences might also be frustrated enough to break press protocols.
The day after CNN came to film him, Marla showed up in person.
TRACY: I was near the stairs. And she was jumping up it - I mean, you know, taking three at a time and had this big, huge smile on her face and just didn't look like anybody else looked inside the convention center or inside Iraq, for that matter.
LAWRENCE: Marla's been collecting her list of claims - this big bag of file folders.
TRACY: I said, why don't you just come into the office? And we can talk right now and see what you have.
LAWRENCE: But then she sees this line of Iraqis waiting to tell their stories to Jon.
TRACY: And so when she turned and she saw all those people, I believe she said something like, holy s***. I'm not cutting. So let's meet some other time. And I said, well, OK. But it's perfectly fine for you to cut. I mean, I'm going to get to all these people one way or the other. But she refused to cut in the line.
WARNER: When Jon and Marla finally sit down together, he realizes that she's listening to stories like he is. But while he can only help people who find a way to come in to his office, Marla and her team are going out, to hospitals and bomb sites around the country. And they're starting to compile a much fuller account of civilian casualties.
TRACY: Meeting with all of these people in their living rooms and talking to them - I was definitely inspired by what she was doing and what she was putting herself through. And I wanted to provide any kind of support that I could.
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LAWRENCE: Once she's teamed up with Jon Tracy, Marla's not just making a list. She's actually getting those people money from the military.
TRACY: Eventually, I got to the point where I trusted them. And I would give the money to Faiz. And then he would go down and give it to the family.
LAWRENCE: Faiz Ali Salim is Marla's right-hand man. He's managing her organization, CIVIC, in Baghdad. And he's also her driver and her translator. And Jon Tracy kind of ends up deputizing both Marla and Faiz.
TRACY: I think what surprised her the most is when I explained to her, this is what I do, and this is why I'm allowed to do it. And the shock that she had was - is, well, then why aren't they all doing that? Why is it that - you know, at the time there was 27 brigades in Iraq, approximately. So why are there not 27 lawyers who are paying every cent that they have?
WARNER: Did your bosses or your colleagues - did anyone ever say to you, hey, this is great work that you're doing, you know, listening to all these stories and...
TRACY: I mean, not too much. A number of them knew what I was doing and figured, oh, yeah, that's good. You're out there winning hearts and minds. But I don't - there's no threat of negative ramifications if you did less than what I did. In a lot of ways, you're sort of on your own. You make your own job.
WARNER: Marla needed Jon Tracy to make good on the promises she'd made to people to get them help. But Jon realized he also needed Marla.
TRACY: There was definitely a level of darkness that surrounded what I was doing and where I was doing it and how I was doing it.
WARNER: But Marla would tell him, you're not the cleanup crew. You're doing important work.
TRACY: She was constantly calling Zeynab and I angels. I tried to disavow her of that.
LAWRENCE: Marla would greet you with a barrage of compliments about how amazing you were all the time.
SUTTON: I just remember her coming to me, and she would sort of go, like, you're so amazing. You're so beautiful. You're the prettiest girl in Baghdad.
LAWRENCE: You're incredible. You sound wonderful. You're so handsome and smart. I know that you're doing this great work. I'm doing this cool work, too. You know how you can help me? And suddenly, you were just doing whatever it was that she needed.
TRACY: And she made you feel a lot better after she was around.
WARNER: Marla gave Jon Tracy a sense of mission he wasn't getting from the Army.
Did you ever feel like you needed to give her that encouragement?
TRACY: I mean, it's probably selfish to say, but no because I knew one dimension of her, this super confident, super positive and super loving person, and I just absorbed it. But I never really thought to give it back to her because it looked like she was overbrimming with that.
SUTTON: These were her appointments. Appointments for Thursday, 24 of March - please confirm. Like, this is just - this is just a diary of tragedy. Eleven-year-old kid - leg amputated and shrapnel all over body. This one says teenager, around 18, was injured at a checkpoint by U.S. Army. She was severely injured in the skull. She needs plastic surgery. What made her so depressed was, like, every single one of these stories was then, like, I have to solve this problem, you know? I mean, no wonder she'd drink.
GARLASCO: There was always kind of this concern about, have you guys seen Marla? Did she look OK today? Did she have breakfast? You know, just simple things like that.
LAWRENCE: It became clear to even people who were as kind of oblivious to this sort of thing as I am that she had an eating disorder, as well. She never ate anything but salad. And then, like, I would wake up in the suite that we were sharing at that time, for example, and I'd come out of my bedroom and she was, you know, still sound asleep in hers. And I would go to the kitchen and I'd find, like, a pack of cold cuts with, like, a giant bite through the whole thing, like an enormous mouse had nibbled on - like, through all 10 slices of salami or whatever it was.
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CAT PHILP: I mean, you know that eating disorders are really, really common in, like, high-achieving young women who put a lot of pressure on themselves.
LAWRENCE: Cat Philp, who had met Marla in Afghanistan - when she sees her in Iraq, she's just surprised to see how much weight Marla has lost.
PHILP: She'd said to me that anorexia was her only friend...
LAWRENCE: Whoa.
PHILP: ...Which is a really hard thing to understand when you've never had anorexia, the idea of a disorder being your friend.
LAWRENCE: Why do you - do you have any idea what she meant?
PHILP: I suppose it was kind of a comfort thing because - so the thing was, like, there was no friend that was there all the time. And even though she would, like, call me and email every day and stuff, I wasn't there.
SUTTON: And it was sort of amazing to watch her, you know, fall apart every night and then rebuilding herself every morning and then fall apart again, you know? Like, she'd go through the day holding on to the idea of, like, I'm not going to, like, get so drunk I pass out. I'm not going to, you know - and then she would do it. And then she'd wake up again and try all over again.
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RUZICKA: It took my toll on me. You saw me when I wasn't healthy. You saw me when I just was so obsessed with work. I was in the care of myself.
LAWRENCE: But Iraq keeps tugging at her.
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RUZICKA: You know, part of it is my priority and my relationship I have with the families. And there's just nothing like being in the field. You just can't do what you can do in the field anywhere else. And you are depressed. You feel worthless when you're not there, you know? Just - because you just can't do the same stuff there.
WARNER: Marla also worried that she wasn't getting the traction with the military that she'd hoped for, not just in compensating people that were hurt but in keeping a full record.
SUTTON: They were just, like, we don't count. We don't count.
WARNER: Despite all of Marla's appeals to the Pentagon, the U.S. military was still publicly saying that it did not count civilian casualties.
SUTTON: Well, why don't you count? Why don't you count? You count everything else. That's what she said. You keep track of every bullet, you know? Every bullet, every missile is accounted for. But yet, oh, we shot somebody at a roadblock or we destroyed their house. We don't count that.
WARNER: But was it true that they were not counting? That question brings Marla back to Baghdad one last time, when ROUGH TRANSLATION's Home/Front returns.
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LAWRENCE: We're back with ROUGH TRANSLATION's Home/Front. I'm Quil Lawrence. A few of Marla's friends did a kind of intervention. We asked her to stay out of war zones and to take care of herself. Her friend, Cat Philp, a journalist with the Times of London, traveled with her, almost like a chaperone, back to Marla's home in California, where Marla got diagnosed with bipolar disorder and started taking medication. Then Cat got sent out on an assignment. But then they meet back up at Cat's apartment in New Delhi. It's late January 2005. And Cat remembers the two of them having this really leisurely morning, sitting around, drinking coffee and catching up, reading old newspapers and feeling far away from the war in Iraq. And then Cat turns the page to a photograph.
PHILP: One particularly striking photo of a little girl covered in the blood of her parents, both of whom were killed, and crying.
LAWRENCE: It's a story about another Iraqi family killed at an American checkpoint.
PHILP: And then Marla got up. And she looked at it, and she went, oh, my God, have you seen this? And I went, I know. It's horrible. The parents were killed, and that little girl - it's unbearable. And she went, no, no, no. And she'd read the text.
LAWRENCE: The caption of the photo said that the troops, after this tragic accident, had written down the names in what's called a spot report.
PHILP: They'd filled out a form with the casualties. And I still didn't get it. I was like, yeah, OK. And she went, that means they keep a record. There's a form. There's an actual form. And she went, but this is what they've always denied they've done. And that was kind of the kernel of an idea that she carried back to Baghdad with her, that after all this time that she spent looking into the casualties and the records of the casualties, that the military were keeping the numbers all along, which they'd always denied.
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LUNA: So you’re going to Baghdad now?
RUZICKA: In, like, 12 hours.
LUNA: In, like, 12 hours.
RUZICKA: Twenty-four hours - I'll be at Baghdad. I'll be on my way to Baghdad. Got to prep for my Bag (ph) debut. I have to, you know, get the clothes right.
LAWRENCE: She says she's got a plan in Baghdad. She doesn't say much about it, but she tells Cat she's going to try to get the numbers of civilian casualties.
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RUZICKA: I'm going to try to do this checkpoint stuff. I'm going to try to see if they give me the documents, do the best I can.
WARNER: Which brings us to Baghdad in 2005 and our third Marla recruit.
KARL HORST: My name is Karl Horst. I retired from the Army in 2013 at the rank of major general.
LAWRENCE: General Horst was a brigadier in charge of security for all of Baghdad in 2005. This is a time when the violence is staggering.
HORST: It's just a damn dangerous place.
LAWRENCE: So the general was surprised, to say the least, when he got an alert over the radio from one of his troops at a checkpoint.
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HORST: They said there's a civilian at the checkpoint, wants to talk about civilian casualties.
LAWRENCE: He goes down there, and he finds...
HORST: A young, Caucasian female, blonde hair, which you don't really see a lot of those in Baghdad.
LAWRENCE: It's Marla, who proceeds to tell him about her organization, CIVIC. But she's not just talking about her work. She also wants to hear about his.
HORST: She was very much in transmit. But she was also polite enough to switch the transmitter off and go to receive mode. It was a dialogue about this situation. And what struck me about her was her sincerity about what she was doing. And let's be honest, she was an American. She was from our tribe.
LAWRENCE: He felt, as so many people did when they were talking with Marla, he wanted to continue the conversation.
HORST: I gave her my cell phone number. I said, look, if you get in trouble, I want you to call me.
LAWRENCE: She does call him. And he invites her to the dining hall on base, where she asks him point blank...
HORST: She says, well, you know, how many civilians have you killed? I said, I don't know. That's not a data point that's important to me on a day-to-day basis. I said, you know, I can go back and look in the logs.
WARNER: He's going to check the logs - the logs of the spot reports, the form that Marla realized existed when she saw that caption on that photograph in the newspaper...
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WARNER: ...Which means that Marla's hunch was right. The military was compiling civilian casualty data. This data was not being widely shared, even within the military. So, for instance, while Jon Tracy could request a particular spot report to verify a claim that he was investigating, General Horst had the rank to be able to walk into his office and get a complete tally of the casualty report numbers for his region.
HORST: Yeah, we tracked every action that happened, particularly when people would blow through a checkpoint or something like that. You know, that was a major report.
WARNER: Had anybody, anybody in the military or any journalist asked you for those numbers before Marla did?
HORST: No, she was the only one. Yeah, and I showed her the numbers because I thought it was important to the dialogue. She kind of took solace in that when she said, oh, so you guys are paying attention.
WARNER: What do you mean she took solace?
HORST: Well, I mean, the first meeting with her was, you know, you guys are out of control, killing civilians. She realizes we were not the 10-foot-tall bad guys slaughtering civilians in town.
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WARNER: The way the general sees it, he used this opportunity to show this civilian and humanitarian and former anti-war protester that the military had good people in it. He hoped to show her that he was one of those good people. And in that spirit of hope, he showed her his notepad with that number written on it - the number that was not public from a military that said it was not counting. So it's at least possible that what showed on Marla's face was not solace, but pride - pride in her own influence and in her own power as an operator who not only could transmit and receive, but also co-opt and get things done.
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RUZICKA: So I'm adaptable. I'm still an activist. I'm a lobbyist. I'm a humanitarian. I'm an ist (ph). I'm whatever I have to be because my responsibility, when I get up in the morning, is to help Iraqi and Afghan families who've been harmed as a result of U.S. military action. One day, I want to be somebody who's able to help victims of war in general.
LUNA: Yeah.
WARNER: In this interview with the Spanish journalist Alfons Luna, Marla talks about her goals beyond this war.
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RUZICKA: So, you know, I have goals. Like, I want one day there to be a civilian casualty desk at the Pentagon, talks about minimizing civilian harm and...
LUNA: There's going to be much more in the future.
RUZICKA: Yeah. But I'm going to focus on right now...
WARNER: After seeing General Horst that third time, Marla planned to leave Baghdad. But she had a few more things to do. She took the number he gave her and wrote it up in an Op-Ed for USA Today. She did not mention General Horst's name. She kept it private. In fact, he's never talk publicly about it until this program. She also visited the family of a girl who was badly burned and who she'd helped to get compensation for. She texted a journalist she knew saying that she had a document to show him when she saw him that night at a party she'd made time to plan. And then that afternoon, April 16, there was a huge explosion on the airport road.
HORST: It took us probably five minutes to get there.
LAWRENCE: General Horst and his convoy are so close that they're the first on the scene.
HORST: I dispatched the medic to go check on people that were hurt. And the medic called to me and said, hey, sir, I think this is that lady we were talking to. And he was trying to save her. And...
LAWRENCE: He's talking to you on the radio, and you're back...
HORST: No.
LAWRENCE: ...In the truck. No, you're there.
HORST: No, we're on the ground.
LAWRENCE: So what do you see? Do you see her car? And...
HORST: Her car's destroyed.
LAWRENCE: Right.
HORST: And she's - they had got her out of the car. And that's when he said, hey, sir, I think this is that lady. And, in fact, it was. And he was with her trying to help her. And, you know, she said, I'm alive. And then...
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HORST: ...She expired.
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PATRICK LEAHY: Mr. President, I would ask consent to speak about the tragic death this weekend of Marla Ruzicka.
TED STEVENS: No objection. So ruled.
LEAHY: I thank the Chair.
LAWRENCE: Senator Patrick Leahy gives a speech on the Senate floor.
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LEAHY: ...A remarkable young woman from Lakeport.
LAWRENCE: He will rename the money she got from the Senate for Iraqi civilians as the Marla Ruzicka Fund.
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LEAHY: ...That's devoted to helping the families of Afghan and Iraqi citizens...
LAWRENCE: Marla's legacy - tens of millions of dollars for Iraq and Afghan civilians - that continues to this day.
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LEAHY: In my 31 years as a United States senator, I've met a lot of interesting and accomplished people from all over the world. All of us do - Nobel Prize recipients, heads of state, people who have achieved remarkable and even heroic things in their lives. I've never met anyone like Marla. She made sure we knew what she was doing and how we could help.
LAWRENCE: It wasn't only Marla who died in the explosion. Her right-hand man, her head of operations in Iraq, Faiz Ali Salim - he was driving the car. And he left behind a wife and a 2-month-old daughter. And losing both of them - CIVIC, that organization that she'd built up since 2002 - it could have died with them. But it turned out Marla had made plans for CIVIC. Tara got a call from her just before she left for that last trip to Baghdad.
SUTTON: She called me, and she said, dude, I'm going back to Baggers (ph). And I just - I want to ask you, if anything happens to me, that you'll take care of CIVIC. That's how she put it - you'll take care of CIVIC. And I said of course I will, but nothing's going to happen to you. And that was the last time I talked to her.
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LAWRENCE: Tara didn't tell anybody about that conversation, even at the funeral.
SUTTON: And then her lawyer (laughter) forwarded me an email with the subject line FYI. So I'm like, hmm. And I open it up, and it's forwarded from Marla. I, Marla Ruzicka, leave this as my final will and testament. If anything happens to me, Tara Sutton will take control of CIVIC and appoint a new executive director.
LAWRENCE: You know, she left CIVIC to Tara in her will, her one-line last will and testament. She picked Tara. And she had plenty of - you know, Tara and she had a special relationship, but she had plenty of friends. I mean, all these people that she'd recruited along the way - I mean, the bond that she still had after she died was strong.
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FREDERICO BORELLO: Madam President, Mr. Secretary General, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen - I am honored to address the council on behalf of my colleagues at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, especially as this council marks...
WARNER: CIVIC, now renamed the Center for Civilians in Conflict, has offices on four continents. They've done training for the U.S. military and militaries around the world. No one who works at CIVIC now ever met Marla, so it's outlived her and her force of personality. And the movement she helped spark continues to this day. The Pentagon just this year announced they are creating a civilian casualty desk, one of Marla's goals.
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BORELLO: With committed leadership at the global level by the United Nations...
WARNER: And CIVIC has also helped train future military lawyers, future JAG Tracys. Jon Tracy spent a few years after Marla's death helping CIVIC prepare these trainings, and he says if he had not met Marla...
TRACY: I wouldn't have done anything. I was too angry. I think I would have stayed in Europe, run out of money and come back and gotten a job and just been irritated. It takes people like Marla and organizations like CIVIC to egg people like me on to helping when they can.
WARNER: Do you think that - does it surprise you that a civilian had this impact?
TRACY: It's surprising, but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense because a civilian running around Iraq, doing what she was doing, was as if the sky turned green. It didn't make sense to somebody in the military. Everybody turned to look at her because, you know, it was so shocking that she was there.
WARNER: That's interesting 'cause you said that she called attention to herself because she just did not seem like she belonged, but did she belong?
TRACY: She belonged because it took that sort of shock to the system in order for people to realize that there was something going on.
WARNER: Because what Marla realized is that what we call the military is just made up of thousands and thousands of people just doing their job.
TRACY: I'm doing this job. This is 12 months, and then after 12 months, I get to go home. But then when you see somebody like her pop up and point out, no, this is meaningful because this is, you know, people's lives that you're talking about, and this is real help that you can get for them, it sort of knocks you out of that stupor that you were in.
LAWRENCE: I think Marla's lesson was that the civ-mil divide, maybe it's real, but it's entirely in your head. What Marla did was, really, very simple. She was saying, well, we're this nation with great ideals, and we're at war, and we've done some things at war that we didn't mean to, and we know they're terrible, so aren't we going to do something about it?
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WARNER: So this is the last episode of our "Home/Front" series. I want to thank Quil Lawrence for trusting us with these stories, which come from his 20 years of experience in Afghanistan and Iraq and covering the veterans beat for NPR. Thanks to Jess Jiang, who co-reported this series with Quil and I. Jess was also our lead producer. Thanks for her late nights and patient remixes and for deepening that reporting with her many follow-up interviews. Thanks to our trusted editor, my friend Lu Olkowski, who oversaw this whole series. We are very sorry to see her go but hope to work with her again in the near future.
And finally, thanks to all of you who sent in your stories. And please, if you have another story about the civ-mil divide, send it our way. We will definitely be returning to this topic in the future.
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WARNER: Today's show was produced and co-reported by Jess Jiang. Alicia Qian helped with production. Our editor is Lu Olkowski. The ROUGH TRANSLATION team includes Luis Trelles and Justine Yan. Liana Simstrom and Devin Mellor were the project managers for the "Home/Front" series. Thanks to Robert Krulwich, Jenny Lawton, Sana Krasikov and Bruce Auster for your critical editorial input. Thanks also to Leila Fadel, Phil Klay, Karen Hanrahan and Kristen Rouse. Thanks to Alfons Luna, whose cassette tape interview allowed us to bring you Marla's voice throughout this piece. And special thanks to Marla's family - her mom Nancy, her brother Marc and her late father Cliff.
LAWRENCE: And thank you to everyone who helped us try to understand the civ-mil divide, including Elliot Ackerman, Ken Tovo, Jason Dempsey, Ken Robbins, Phillip Carter, Eli Williamson, David Carlson, Heidi Urben, Kenric Kato, Jim Golby and Perfecto Sanchez.
WARNER: The ROUGH TRANSLATION executive high council is Neal Carruth, Didi Schanche and Anya Grundmann. Special thanks to Chris Turpin and Vickie Walton-James. Nicole Beemsterboer is our senior supervising producer. This episode was mastered by Isaac Rodrigues. Retired Army Captain Kimo Williams composed Home/Front's theme song.
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WARNER: Additional music from John Ellis and Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Gregory Warner. We're going to take a summer break, but we will be back in the fall with more ROUGH TRANSLATION.
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