 MSNBC.com |
April 19 - The last e-mail Marla Ruzicka sent me was in January, when I’d just gotten out of Iraq after a brief visit, and she was getting ready to go in for a long one. She said she’d had a rough few months, since the last time we’d seen each other there, and I asked her what she meant, and how she was doing. Marla, 28, was unforgettably energetic and excited and committed and funny, a quintessential ultra-blonde California girl as goofy at first glance as a young Goldie Hawn, but as genuinely committed to helping people as, well, as anybody I ever met in my life, and more effective than most. Her cause was support for the victims of war; her specialty was cajoling and compelling the United States military to compensate the innocent people it injured and the families of those that it killed. But work in Iraq had gotten so risky that even Marla (whose e-mail address was marlainbaghdad@yahoo.com) thought it prudent to stay away for a while.
How had she been feeling? Her note on Jan. 12, so frank and so trusting, was very, very Marla: “You are soooo sweet—yes I had a hard time getting used to not living in the action and some depression—which I want to be open about. I am fine now, in fact I just got out of Nepal where I was doing human rights work and now I am in Kabul—the city has changed so much and I am sooooo emotional about every building etc… I think when you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all—I am working on that—with time, I will get better. X, Marla”
But now there’s no time left. Last weekend, Marla and the Iraqi who worked with her, Faiz al Salaam, were killed along with two other people when a suicide bomber struck on the short, nasty, brutal road to Baghdad airport. And now those of us who knew Marla—the journalists she befriended, the politicians and soldiers she lobbied, the families she helped support—all of us are quite simply devastated.
Joe Cochrane, one of NEWSWEEK’s correspondents in Afghanistan during the post-9/11 war, remembers that Marla “took over Kabul almost as fast as the Northern Alliance seized it from the Taliban.” She’d been a passionate do-gooder since she was in high school. She’d flirted with different leftist organizations and causes, and she’d gotten one to pay her way to the war zone. But once she was there, she started operating on her own, and in her own special way.
“Within weeks after the city fell in 2001,” Joe recalls, “Marla was arguably the most well-known person there. It didn’t matter who you were: U.N. official, diplomat, American soldier, journalist. If you didn’t know Marla, you didn’t know s---. Dressed in a fuzzy winter coat and boots, she was a tornado, spinning into the inner circles of every cliché there to pitch the cause of civilian casualties. Then, when the work was done, you always knew Marla, a regular at the NEWSWEEK house, would have something fun to do that night. She organized dinners, barbeques, parties—even a St. Valentine’s Day dance where she played matchmaker. She was fun, she was cute, she was vibrant. She was, well, Marla.”
We keep saying that, don’t we? She was “Marla.” She was that unique.
“One of her most legendary ideas was to open a bar to raise money for her project,” Joe recalls, “and I did my part by being the guest bartender. Opening night at ‘Club Kabul’ was a smash hit, with more than 125 people ranging from aid workers to journalists to the ambassador of Italy turning out for some much needed drinks and conversation. Marla dressed in a dark lavender dress, played hostess, single-handedly allowing us to forget that we were in a conflict zone thousands of miles from home.” As if she were some Washington hostess with the mostest, she was always networking and lobbying, albeit on a shoestring and in the middle of enormous danger.
Marla asked herself wisely, and perhaps too brutally, if there was not something about war that she loved. She knew the sorrow and the fear, certainly, but she also knew there were adrenaline highs to be had, and she understood there could be something ennobling about the most horrible events. Such conflicting emotions are not uncommon in combat zones, but they are never easy to reconcile inside yourself. “When you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all.”
It’s not surprising that soldiers, always suspicious of Marla at first, often grew to revere her energy, determination and bravery. It’s also not surprising that some fellow aid workers remained hostile. Marla didn’t play by their rules, in fact. “Marla was alienated from much of the human rights community because she chose to work with the military instead of always against it,” says Scott Johnson, NEWSWEEK’s new Baghdad bureau chief, who got to know Marla in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When reporters discovered, soon after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, that the Baghdad neighborhood of Dhoura was littered with little grenade-like munitions from American cluster bombs—some of them hanging from trees, others on the hoods and roofs of cars—the journalists wrote their stories but despaired of actually getting anything done to help the people, even after three in the neighborhood were killed. One reporter told Marla. Two days later the military was in Dhoura cleaning up the bomblets and giving assistance to the families.
“In Afghanistan, she staged protests outside the U.S. embassy and a few weeks later she had won a multi-million-dollar compensation package for Afghan civilian victims,” Scott remembers. Since then, she has won more than $10 million in appropriations for Iraqi victims. Yet the last time Scott saw Marla, in Brooklyn earlier this year, he was still surprised, as one always was, by the way her wide-eyed naïveté would become cold-eyed focus whenever she talked about civilian casualties and what had to be done for them. “She went through the litany of protagonists, talking about [Sen. Bill] Frist and [Sen. Patrick] Leahy and God knows how many other senators, and what bill was coming up in what Senate appropriations committee and when, and who was going to vote for it, and who not, and if not, why not. And so on.” And then, Marla would stop herself, and laugh ebulliently, and reminisce about the bar in Afghanistan or some other adventure. And you would see how sad she was.
Marla was never naïve about the risks she ran in Iraq, and an entry on her Web site last summer was horribly prescient:
“A good friend of mine advised me to keep my movements minimal in the coming days, saying ‘Just think of all the work you will be able to do in three months when the situation is better because you were not killed by a bomb.’” But there was a job to be done, and nobody else to do it. “We have been working on submitting more compensation cases and encouraging the military to pay them out. In order to submit a case we have to drive out to the airport. The ride is not pleasant, military convoys passing every moment. Faiz and I hold our breath—such convoys in that area are the target of rockets and fire from the resistance….” It was while she and Faiz were passing a convoy last Saturday that the bomber struck.
What did Marla Ruzicka achieve? A great deal, but never quite enough to satisfy her. She worked with different organizations and eventually founded her own: The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), www.civicworldwide.org, staffed mainly by volunteers. Over the last couple of days, glowing obituaries and tributes to Marla have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the war zones themselves. (Even the New York Daily News, which might once have seen Marla as an unregenerate leftist, called her “an all-American angel of mercy.”) But whether CIVIC can go on without her, and who actually will help those individuals and families she helped, is an open question.
As flighty as Marla sometimes seemed, and as complicated as she actually was, she drove home one simple and powerful point she never let any of us forget—a terrible, plain truth that too many politicians, soldiers and journalists tend to ignore when they dare to talk about the dead and wounded in war as statistics for history books. “Each number,” she’d say, “is a story of someone who left a family behind.”
As Marla Ruzicka has done. Marla, who was one of a kind.