Jeff Davie had done what those who worked closest to Vieira de Mello had done: gone looking for his boss.When the traffic on Canal Road stalled, he had leaped out of the vehicle, ran to the building, and sprinted up the stairs to the third floor. He found Stokes and Buddy Tillett, a supply officer, inspecting the offices to see who had been wounded. In one third-floor office Davie found Henrik Kolstrup, a fifty-two-year-old Dane who was in charge of the UN Development Program in Iraq. Kolstrup was alive but covered in glass wounds. As he writhed in pain on the floor, he was cutting himself further on the broken glass. Davie hastily wrapped Kolstrup’s wounded upper body. Stokes and Tillett arrived with a stretcher and carried Kolstrup down the stairs to the wounded area. Davie continued on toward Vieira de Mello’s office. Kolstrup was contorting so badly that he almost fell off the stretcher and down the gap in the stairwell.8
When Davie made his way to Vieira de Mello’s office, he looked down through a collapsed part of the office wall and spotted below the same person Larriera, Pichon, and Salamé had seen lying faceup in the rubble and covered in dust. The man, who Davie did not think was his boss, appeared to be lying on a portion of Vieira de Mello’s office floor, which had now become the ground floor. Davie noted that while the damage caused by the attack was colossal, many of the floors and ceilings, including the flat roof of the building, had at least fallen in large slabs, pancake style, creating voids. A narrow tunnel, no wider than three feet in diameter at the top and at least thirty feet deep, separated Davie from the man below. Davie assumed Vieira de Mello was lying in the heap somewhere near this man, and he hurried down the stairs to try to find another point of entry.
Normally, in order to reach the rear of the Canal Hotel, Davie would have needed to exit through the front entrance and walk the entire width and depth of the building. But this time, at the base of the Canal Hotel staircase, he tried to turn right into those offices that had stood beneath Vieira de Mello’s. He was able to enter a cavity the size of a small room. But as he tried to move through the room, he was stopped by what appeared to be the roof of the first floor. He exited the cavity, which was pitch dark, and found a better path through the rubble of two partially intact offices.The walls and windows of these offices had been so thoroughly vaporized by the attack that he was able to walk through them to the outside rear of the building, where the truck had detonated. He was staggered by the destruction before him.
After leaving Rishmawi, Larriera had headed back upstairs to the third floor, but she felt helpless. She had watched UN staffers Stokes and Tillett open up a supply closet and remove what appeared to be the building’s only two stretchers. She went back down the stairs and caught up with Rishmawi again at the entrance to the Canal. “Have you seen him?!” she asked desperately. An Iraqi security guard approached them and said that he had seen the UN head of mission walking out of the building. Even though Larriera had left Vieira de Mello’s office ten minutes before the blast and spoken with him just two minutes before it, and though it would not have been like him to walk away from such mayhem, the Iraqi sounded so authoritative that she clung to the hope, imagining that perhaps he had taken charge of the rescue from outside the building. An American soldier trying to clear the scene approached Larriera with authority. "Ma’am,” he told her mechanically, “you’ve got to take care of yourself.We’ll take care of the rescue.”
Standing at the building entrance, she spotted a bulldozer moving across the parking lot, past the burned-out armored car that she and Vieira de Mello had driven to work in that morning, and toward the back of the building. She ran toward the bulldozer. As she did so, she spotted Stokes, who had carried Kolstrup downstairs and was standing at the entrance to the building. “Where is Sergio?” she cried out to him as she ran. “He is alive,” he shouted back. “He has been found.” “But where is he?” she yelled. Stokes pointed to the enormous pile of rubble at the corner of the building. “Over there,” Stokes said. “He is trapped in the rubble.”
Andre Valentine, the New York firefighter and EMT, had been one of the first U.S. medics to arrive at the scene, reaching the Canal around fifteen minutes after he heard the explosion. U.S. soldiers were already beginning to establish a security perimeter, but Valentine recalls, “We didn’t know who was involved or if the bad guys were still inside.” Accustomed to responding to emergencies in the United States, where a command post is established rapidly, Valentine was frustrated by the chaos. A few cool-headed U.S. personnel and UN officials had set up a treatment triage area in a grassy patch at the Canal entrance, but most UN staffers were milling about unhelpfully. “Don’t worry about calling the United Nations in New York City to tell them you got blown up,”Valentine said, infuriated by UN officials on their cell phones who were getting in his way. “It’s pretty obvious by now. Put the damn phone in your pocket. Stop smoking. I could use your help.” He grew so enraged that he instructed the U.S. soldiers around him to forbid anybody who wasn’t a medic from entering the three-hundred-foot perimeter treatment area. “I want you to shoot to kill anybody other than a four-star general who comes through here,” said Valentine. The other medics looked at him, unsure if he was serious.
Lyn Manuel had not moved. She lay propped up outside the building entrance, as dozens of her hysterical colleagues streamed past her. She tried to get the attention of someone with a cell phone so she could call her husband in Queens, New York. That year her brother had been killed in a hunting accident, and her father had died of a heart attack, and Manuel worried that her mother’s aging heart would not withstand the news of an attack on UN headquarters. But no matter how hard she tried, Manuel was unable to get the attention of those around her. People who looked at her quickly turned their heads away. “I am not good,” she cried out to Shawbo Taher, the Iraqi Kurd who was Salamé’s assistant. “I am not good,” she repeated. Taher tried to reassure her: “No, Lyn, you are good. Nothing is wrong with you. It’s just small injuries.” But as Taher recalls, “Her face was a piece of meat, a piece of bloody red meat.” The Americans were ordering anybody who could move of their own accord to evacuate the area. There was still a chance that the building would collapse. Manuel, who was still losing blood, began to lose consciousness. As she did, she took note of the scene around her. She was surrounded by bodies, beige and lifeless.
Lieutenant Colonel John Curran, who oversaw the medical evacuation, did a remarkable job. He had put his men through elaborate planning drills, rehearsing an evacuation from the Canal and scoping the neighborhood for locations where helicopters could land in the event of an emergency. Thanks to his foresight and the performance of his regiment support squadron, the injured (including Manuel) were rushed from the staging area to trucks and helicopters, then flown to U.S. medical facilities. Although many would die that day, nobody would die because of the tardiness of evacuation.
Ralf Embro, an EMT colleague of Valentine’s in the 812th Military Police unit, helped manage the shuttling of bodies between the treatment area and the helicopter landing area. Embro helped load the injured onto military trucks and helicopters. Over the next three hours, the trucks and helicopters shuttled some 150 wounded to more than a dozen U.S. military and Iraqi hospitals around the Baghdad area, then onward to more sophisticated facilities in Amman and Kuwait City.
Jeff Davie, Ghassam Salamé, and Gaby Pichon had each taken a different route to the rear of the building, where the bomber had struck. They had each stood up on the third floor and stared into the pit of human and material debris and concluded that, if their boss was alive, he would have to be reached from below and not from above.
Davie began prying at the rubble from the spot in the rear of the
Canal that he thought approximated where Vieira de Mello would have been holding his meeting. Almost as soon as he pulled some of the lighter concrete away and created a slight gap, he heard a voice that sounded like the one he was looking for. Davie squeezed up to his waist between what appeared to be a slab of the roof and a sla
b of the third floor, and he shouted out to the person who had made noise. Miraculously, Vieira de Mello answered, this time clearly. "Jeff, my legs,” he said. More than half an hour had elapsed since Davie arrived at the hotel.
Vieira de Mello, whom Davie couldn’t see but could now hear, was conscious and lucid. But while he knew his legs had been injured, he could not describe his physical predicament. Pinned beneath the rubble, he could neither see nor feel his legs. After a minute or two Davie removed himself from the gap and shouted out to Pichon, who was digging through the rubble some thirty feet away. "Sergio is alive!” Davie said. “But he’s trapped between the floors.”
Davie climbed on the rubble and spotted a twenty-inch gap between two slabs of concrete. From here, he saw the same man who had waved at him when he had been up on the third floor. Davie reached through the debris to hold his hand and spoke with him through the gap. The man said he had lost at least part of one of his legs. He said his name was Gil. It was Gil Loescher, the refugee expert who had flown in from Amman that morning. Davie told Loescher that he would go and find help.
As he raced around the Canal Hotel, Davie grabbed the first U.S. soldier he could find. It was William von Zehle, the Connecticut fireman, who was helping Valentine, Embro, and the others with medical triage in the staging area. “We’ve got people trapped,” Davie said. He escorted von Zehle around the building to the mound of rubble where Loescher was buried. Davie told the soldier that the only way to reach Loescher was likely from the shaft on the third floor. He did not think the same was true of Vieira de Mello, who sounded far enough away—at least ten feet—to require his own separate rescue effort. After taking Loescher’s pulse, von Zehle quickly left the rubble pile and made his way from the rear to the front entrance of the building, where he hoped to reach Loescher.
Annie Vieira de Mello and her two sons, Laurent and Adrien, had not yet received word of the attack.They had spent a hot afternoon at the Personnaz family lake home in France, where she and Vieira de Mello had vacationed so often when their sons were young. As they returned to shore and moored the boat, Annie saw her sister-in-law’s mother rushing toward the dock.“There’s been an attack!” she screamed. “Something has happened to Sergio!” Annie rushed past her and raced in her car to Massongy. Laurent and Adrien followed in the car behind. They frantically turned the radio dial in the hopes of receiving news but could confirm only that the UN headquarters in Baghdad had been attacked. When they reached their home, they turned on the television and saw the monstrous pile of rubble under which their father was buried. The crawl at the bottom of the screen gave them hope. It said their father was injured in the explosion, but that he had been given water.
After leaving Loescher in von Zehle’s care, Davie hustled back to the gap where he had spoken to Vieira de Mello. But in the short time he had been away, the opening he had cleared had half-filled with mud. Mud was not something Davie expected to find in parched Baghdad, but he saw that Iraqi concrete was made of cement on the outside and clay on the inside.The bomb blast had shredded the concrete and caused the water pipes to burst, so the clay and the water were blending together, forcing the survivors and rescuers to worry about mud slides and suffocation as well as further structural collapses. Vieira de Mello’s voice had grown faint. “Jeff, I can’t breathe,” he said. Davie, slowed by the narrowness of the space, began removing the mud and rubble from the hole. After around ten minutes,Vieira de Mello’s voice became clearer. “I can breathe,” he said. “I can see light.”
Davie emerged again from the gap.The Americans brought small shovels, around a foot long, which were almost useless in prying away slabs of the wall and ceiling. But most soldiers were preoccupied with security, which, unlike rescue, was what they had been trained for. Colonel Mark Calvert, a squadron commander in the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment, put in place an impenetrable cordon around the building. The security he established around the site, using 450 men, was airtight. What was missing were professional rescue workers and equipment, which were what Vieira de Mello and others trapped needed. “We came to the fight with what we had,” recalls Calvert. “But were the tools adequate for the fight? No way. We just weren’t trained or equipped to rescue people after that kind of attack.”
For around an hour Pichon joined Davie in attempting to clear rubble from the gap. Davie continued to speak with Vieira de Mello, mainly to keep him conscious and to try to pinpoint his location. “I am facing a large flat object,” Vieira de Mello said. “It’s dark,” he said. “My head and one arm are free.” He asked for water, but Davie could not reach him to provide it. Vieira de Mello repeated, “Jeff, my legs,” many times. He also asked constantly about the members of his team. "Jeff, the others . . . where are they . . . who is treating them?” he asked. “Where is Carolina? . . . Where are Gaby and the others? Please look for them. Please don’t leave them . . . don’t pull out.”9
William von Zehle had been an EMT since 1975. He knew from past rescue missions that the best way, and often the only way, to extract trapped people from collapsed buildings was from the inside. After briefly speaking with Loescher at the rear of the building, he had gone inside and arrived at the edge of the collapse on the third floor. Overlooking the pit of rubble, he felt as though he were standing on a balcony of a motel. He had a radio, but it didn’t get reception, so he used his cell phone to telephone Scott Hill, his commander. “Tell my wife and kids I love them because I might not be coming back,” he said. Hill was taken aback.“Roger that,” he said. Von Zehle took off his flak jacket and prepared to enter the shaft.
He used the rebar rods poking out of the shattered concrete as hand grips to lower himself down. The rubble was so unstable that as he leaned against the debris, it frequently gave way beneath or beside him. He knew that one of the gravest risks to those trapped below was that, in his attempt to reach them, he would unleash a mini-avalanche, killing them all.
After von Zehle had ventured down around fifteen feet, the hole widened slightly. When he reached Loescher at the base of the shaft, he saw another man to Loescher’s right and his own left. This man had his back to the center of the shaft. He was lying on his right side. His right arm seemed to be pointing downward, as if he had been attempting to break his fall. His legs were buried in debris, and he seemed to be boxed in between two slabs of concrete. One slab faced him, while another slab lay several inches above him. Are you okay?” von Zehle shouted. “I’m alive,” the man said. “I’m Bill,” von Zehle said. “What’s your name?” “I’m Sergio,” he said.
Although Vieira de Mello had not been visible from the top of the shaft on the third floor, he was so close to Loescher that the two men could nearly have touched hands.Vieira de Mello had been carrying on scattered conversations with his rescuers on the outside, but it had taken a tremendous strain to be heard. Now able to speak more easily to von Zehle, he asked if anybody had been killed.Von Zehle said yes but did not know who or how many.“I’m not going to get out of here, am I?” Vieira de Mello asked. “Don’t worry,” the rescuer assured him. “You have my word:We’ll get you guys both out.”
Von Zehle knew the predicament of both men was dire, but he had managed more severe rescues in the past. He telephoned his superior officer on his cell phone again. “I need rope, lighting, morphine, reinforcing rods and four-by-fours to hold the debris up, and screw jacks,” he said. In his four months in Baghdad he had tried to help get the fire department up and running. He knew firsthand that the department did not have the supplies he needed. “I hope the army engineering folks have them,” he said to himself.
The attack had occurred in the sector of Baghdad under the control of the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR). But the ACR consisted mainly of war fighters and had only one company of light engineers. As a result, after the attack it turned to the First Armored Division’s engineering battalions, based out at Baghdad International Airport, which operated heavy engineering equipment. These combat engineers were in Iraq to
build base camps, bunkers, roads, airfields, and bridges. But the equipment they used for construction could also be used for rescue and recovery operations. The 1457th Engineering Battalion, based out of Utah, which had wheeled rather than tracked engineering equipment and which prided itself in serving as the army’s 9-1-1 unit, had been designated as emergency first responder in Iraq.
True to form, when the attack on the UN occurred, Major John Hansen, the operations officer with the 1457th Engineering Battalion, dispatched two separate contingents to the scene. One group, with the 671st Bridge Company, had spent the day bolting and extending a portable Maybe Johnson bridge across a river that was a ten-minute drive from the Canal Hotel. Hansen directed half of the men at the bridge, around fifteen soldiers, to UN headquarters to assist with the rescue. He told them to bring with them the heavy equipment they had been using to push the bridge across the river. The bridge company arrived around an hour after the explosion, but they were directed toward securing and clearing the outer perimeter of the Canal complex, not toward assisting the ongoing rescue efforts. They used a backhoe (a tractor with a large bucket on the front) to clear out the UN’s SUVs, which were burning and smoldering and which had been scattered widely by the blast.
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Page 59
