Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  A second woman emerged from the Mercedes, bleeding from the scalp, holding up a crimson baby. Lobello stopped firing, but the Iraqis kept on. A group of marines ran into the intersection. Lobello remembered seeing a third woman in the blue Mercedes, struggling to get out of the back seat. She was bleeding from the shoulder.

  Most of Fox Company returned from Iraq in May 2003. The firefight on Baladiyat Street was the most intense combat the men saw there. They had been deployed a long time—more than seventeen months—and their commanders were eager to get them back to real life. Less than a week after leaving Iraq, they were with their families. They didn’t get any lectures about the challenges of reintegrating into civilian life, nothing about post–traumatic stress disorder. “They wanted us off the clock so bad,” one of the marines said.

  At first, Lobello didn’t think much about what he had done in Iraq, but soon he started to slip. In less than a year, he tested positive for marijuana and was demoted a rank. He tried to go straight and mostly did, but he was embittered by his demotion and began to quarrel with his commanding officers. “My rank was my life,” he said.

  In 2006, Lobello tested positive for painkillers and was stripped of the command of his squad. He snapped: he denounced his commanders, walked off his base, in Las Vegas, and never went back. “I completely broke down,” he said. The marines took the opportunity to get rid of him, handing him a discharge that was “other than honorable.”

  Lobello is reluctant to blame his experiences in Iraq for his departure from the Marines, or for his drug use. “I was a wild guy before I joined the marines, and I was still a wild guy when I was with them,” he said. But others traced his problems to Baladiyat Street. “Lobello was a good marine,” Liles, now a gunnery sergeant, said. “The trouble he got into was completely and utterly due to post–traumatic stress. It’s not a normal thing for a human being to take a rifle and kill another human being.”

  After Lobello left the marines, he enrolled in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and worked off anxiety by boxing at a gym outside the city. In December 2009, he was called to substitute for an instructor there, and he got in the ring with a woman in the class: Margaret Gryczon, a tall thirty-three-year-old brunette. She was impressed by him—“He’s very good at boxing,” she told me—and they started dating. Within a year, they had married, taken a honeymoon trip to visit Margaret’s family in Poland, and moved to San Diego. Lobello told Margaret early on that he’d been in Iraq. “He told me something happened,” she said. “He kind of told me it was something I would have to deal with. He would share bits and pieces with me.”

  Lobello told me, “She doesn’t understand—how could she? No one who hasn’t been in a war can understand what it’s like. For men, it’s like childbirth. We have no idea.”

  From the moment he returned from Iraq, Lobello found that he couldn’t sleep, and he became more aggressive and erratic. Over time, he got worse. Margaret told me, “He loses it pretty bad. He punches walls, breaks things.” She said that she didn’t feel at risk, though: “He is such a loving and caring and compassionate person. I know the pain he suffers.” One time, Lobello ran into the parking lot of his apartment building in his underwear, clutching his AR-15, preparing to shoot a man he believed had been following him. A few months later, he was detained by the police inside a veterans’ clinic: he’d lain down on the floor and refused to leave until a doctor examined him. He was given a diagnosis of severe post–traumatic stress disorder. The Marines gave him a disability payment of a thousand dollars a month, and he started receiving treatment, mostly in the form of antidepressants. “I was a functioning fucking crazy person,” he said.

  Without the marines, Lobello found himself cut off from the main source of his identity. “The Marine Corps is like a church, and I felt excommunicated,” he told me. His buddies who stayed in appeared far better adjusted than those who got out—not because of the counseling or medical services they were offered but because the other marines could understand what they had been through. “You’re only as crazy as the people around you,” Lobello said. Like the police or the FBI, the Marine Corps represented its own moral universe, an institution that gave you license to kill and absolved you of your sins. Without it, Lobello had to figure things out on his own.

  A few weeks after he left, Lobello began searching the Web for stories about what his unit had done in Iraq. He imagined that he’d find a newspaper or magazine article memorializing Fox Company’s deeds. Despite all that had gone wrong, he was proud of the time he had spent in Iraq, proud of his role in helping to remove Saddam. Instead, on the Web one night, he found the story I had written about the Kachadoorians. He was aghast: here were the dead and the survivors, with faces and names. “What was so weird was that the story wasn’t about us,” Lobello said. “It was about them—the Iraqis. It just kind of hit me: Oh, my God, these are the people we killed.”

  Lobello wondered about the Kachadoorians. What had become of them? What would they think of him, or of the other men in his unit? Lobello’s father died when he was eight, and he imagined that he could feel at least some of Nora’s pain. As time went on, he began to harbor deeper suspicions about the war. How was it that he and his buddies, all good and patriotic young men, had been thrust into a situation where they were almost certain to kill innocent people? He felt guilty, and also powerless.

  One night, lying in bed, Lobello decided there was something he could do. He and his buddies may have killed a bunch of innocent Iraqis, but, now that he had the name of one of the families, he could find them. “I thought it would do them as much good as it would do me,” he said.

  Lobello set up a website, called Finding the Kachadoorians. He established a group page on Facebook, so that former members of Fox Company could recall the details of the day. The project made him feel part of something larger than himself again. “Finding the Kachadoorians wasn’t just simply about physically finding them,” he said. “It allowed me to give meaning to this experience that all of us had shared and none of us understood.”

  By the summer of 2011, he had found some significant clues. Among them was a story in the Los Angeles Daily News that quoted a relative of the Kachadoorians, who was living in Glendale, California. As it happened, Lobello had graduated from college and was headed to law school in San Diego, a few hours’ drive away. A cousin of his turned up a Facebook page of a woman named Nora Nicola. The last name was different—but it was similar to Nicolas, one of the Kachadoorians who was killed. She was the right age. And Nora Nicola was a Facebook friend of the relative who had been quoted in the Daily News. Though it was only a guess, Lobello said, “I figured it was her.”

  For weeks, Lobello tried to compose a letter to Nora, but he couldn’t find the words. Finally, one night, unable to sleep, he decided to make the video instead. A week later, an answer came back. Lobello was terrified: maybe the message would be withering, a condemnation. He waited for his wife to come home from work, and he also asked a grade-school friend and fellow veteran, Richard Shehane, to come over. They opened the message together. “hi lu,” the note said, “me & my mother we both forgive you, we know we will see them in the kingdom of Jesus.” Then Nora quoted a passage from the Bible: “Do not marvel at this, because the hour is coming in which all those who are in their memorial tombs will hear his voice and come out.”

  Lobello ran to the bathroom and wept with relief. “He was so excited—I can’t even explain the excitement,” his wife said. But the feeling lasted only a moment. “It didn’t lighten the load,” he said. There was something that troubled him about Nora’s note. She had left off the second part of the Bible verse, the part that consigned “those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.”

  Lobello still didn’t know where the Kachadoorians lived, and he was afraid to ask. He thought about driving to Glendale to look. The city had the largest population of Armenians in the United States; if she was living there, he could ask an Armenian prie
st to make the introduction. But he was worried that an unannounced visit would upset the family. “I wanted to be respectful, so I wasn’t going to just knock on their door,” Lobello said. “I thought there was the possibility that they would not welcome my visit. “Instead, he decided to get in touch with me and ask if I would arrange a meeting.

  In July, I flew to Los Angeles and drove down the coast to La Jolla, where Lobello lived in a densely packed apartment complex called Verano, just off Interstate 5. I recognized the man in the video: a square-faced marine with intelligent, searching eyes framed by big glasses. He and Margaret had laid out sandwiches and fruit and set up a video camera to record our conversation.

  Lobello might have said “I’m sorry” in the video, but it quickly became clear that his views of his culpability were tangled. “I want to apologize, but not for my actions,” he told me, between cigarettes. Under the circumstances—in a gun battle, in an urban area, fighting an unseen enemy—he and his fellow marines had done the only thing they could have done. “Our numer-one priority is to make sure—you go see your friend’s mom before you ship out, and she looks at you and says, ‘Don’t let my son die.’ You always care about the people you know the most.” While he acknowledged that he had helped kill the Kachadoorian men, he did not acknowledge that he had done anything wrong: “It’s not an apology for my actions. I just want to show them that I recognize the sacrifice that they put up. They gave up far more in that couple of hours than any one of us did. Whether or not one of the marines got shot that day, none of us lost our father, none of us lost our two brothers. We just decimated the whole male population of their family.”

  Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who has advised the military on psychological trauma, told me that some of the most severely affected soldiers suffer “moral injury.” “It occurs when you’ve done something in the moment that you were told by your superiors that you had to do, and believed, truthfully and honorably, that you had to do, but which nonetheless violated your own ethical commitments,” he said. “It’s bad moral luck. Unfortunately, war is filled with that.” Typical soldiers, Shay told me, do not regard themselves as murderers. “There is a bright line between murder and legitimate killing that means everything to them,” he said. “Any civilian who says that in war there are no rules—that’s bullshit.” The rules of engagement are central to soldiers’ well-being. “They hate it when they have killed somebody they didn’t need to kill,” he said. “It’s a scar on their soul.”

  The marines on Baladiyat appear to have followed the rules they were given. But at one point Lobello suggested that the rules were far too loose. “What bothers me is that, by the time we got set up and consolidated, the understanding was: if they drive down the street, that’s it—it doesn’t matter, just fucking shoot them,” Lobello said. “But we didn’t have one single suicide bomber. And these guys that were running at our position—were they? Were they really? Or did we just shoot them while they were driving toward us?”

  Lobello had only the vaguest idea how many Iraqis they had killed and wounded; he could remember only the frenzy of it, the terrifying thrill, the streams of bullets going in. “A lot of times, I think what happened was, somebody would realize, Fuck, dude, we’re not shooting the right people. But it was like the beast was already going. You can’t say hold on, stop, wait—no way. No way. You can say, ‘Cease fire. Cease fucking fire!’ Well, fuck, all right, man, but let me get off a couple more rounds. It’s like having sex with a woman, and she’s saying, ‘Let’s stop right now.’ You can’t. You’re in it.”

  Lobello might not have felt that he needed to apologize, but he was haunted by what had happened, traumatized, maybe even ruined. He wanted to know that the survivors understood why he had done what he had, even if it was not entirely defensible. And he wanted them to know that he felt their suffering in his own. Lobello did not quite say it, but when I left his apartment I felt that what he was really looking for was absolution.

  Driving into Glendale off Interstate 5, I started seeing signs, at restaurants and shops, in Armenian script. I turned on Glenoaks Boulevard, and it seemed like a picture of the immigrant’s California dream: a wide boulevard lined with small apartment houses with big lawns and tall, thin palms. When I pulled up to the Kachadoorians’ house, the front door was open. Two small children were playing in the yard, and Nora and Margaret stood in the doorway.

  Nora was just as I remembered her, with her blond hair and her husky voice, except that now she spoke a little English. She was wearing a tank top, and her shoulder, but for a few scars, had healed completely. “No problems!” she said. Margaret seemed much older, her face lined and sad, but she was as gregarious as before. “Of course I remember you,” she told me. The Kachadoorians lived on the bottom floor of a two-story stucco building, downstairs from another Armenian family. Nora was married to a man named Asaad Salim. The children were theirs; Asaad sat on the stoop and watched them.

  The Kachadoorians’ journey to Glendale had been marked by disasters and miracles, the first of which was Asaad. He’d been a cameraman for Reuters at the time of the American invasion. The day that the Kachadoorians were shot, an American tank on the other side of Baghdad had fired at the Palestine Hotel. The tank crew apparently believed they were shooting at enemy soldiers, but instead they killed two cameramen working for Western news agencies and wounded three Reuters employees. Asaad, who had been on a lower floor, took one of the wounded, a British technician, to Al Wasati hospital. After the doctors operated on Nora, they brought her to a bed in the technician’s ward, where Asaad was visiting. By then, her wounds had become infected, and she moaned and cried. “It broke my heart listening to her—I couldn’t take it,” Asaad said. He found a nurse, gave her some money, and told her to find some painkillers and antibiotics. Asaad and Nora started to talk. A year and a half later, they were married.

  The two of them, along with Margaret, stayed in Baghdad until 2006. By then, the rest of the Kachadoorian family, like many of Iraq’s Christians, had scattered, moving to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada. Asaad continued to work for Reuters, until, one day, he received an e-mail from someone in the Badr Brigade, the Shiite militia, threatening to kill him if he continued. It was the height of the civil war, and death squads were roaming Baghdad. Asaad took Nora and Joseph, the couple’s newborn son, to Damascus, and eventually Margaret joined them.

  For three years, the family lived among the hundreds of thousands of other Iraqi refugees, waiting for a Western country to take them in. Then, in 2009, Asaad and Nora gave staff members at the United Nations a copy of the article I had written about the Kachadoorians, six years before. (Nora’s aunt in Canada had mailed it to them.) “Before that, we had no proof that our family had been killed by the Americans,” Nora said. Now their application moved immediately. In November 2009, Margaret, Nora, Asaad, and their two sons—the second, Sam, was born in Syria—arrived in San Diego. Within a couple of months, the five of them were sharing the apartment on Glenoaks Boulevard.

  Asaad began working as the manager for a valet-parking service, living the reduced life of the immigrant who comes to America in middle age. Margaret took antidepressants, and she spent a couple of nights a week with a Jehovah’s Witnesses prayer group at the local Kingdom Hall. When I visited, her memory was flawless. Every time I asked a tricky question, she smiled and said, “You asked me that in Baghdad.”

  Nora brought out a tray of tea and lahmajun, the same Armenian dish that Margaret had served me nine years before. A framed photo of the Kachadoorian men—Nicolas, James, and Edmund—stood on a table next to the couch. “Every day when I put my head on my pillow, I remember this sight,” Margaret said, “how my eldest son, Nicky, fell in the street.”

  When the talk turned to Lu Lobello, Margaret wondered if she had met him that day. After the Kachadoorians were shot, the marines carried the women from the street. Then they dropped off Nora, Margaret, and Sam, the baby, at the home of an Iraqi family n
earby. Holding the baby, Margaret approached one of the marines, she remembered: “I said to him, ‘Why did you kill my husband and my two sons? We are Christian people. We read the Bible. We do not do anything.’ And his eyes just make to the ground.”

  It seemed possible that they would refuse to talk to Lobello. After he sent the video, he followed up with a Facebook friend request, and Nora accepted it, but a few days later she deleted him. “I think he want to kill me and kill my mother,” Nora said, with a small laugh. “He want to kill the rest of the family.” One of Lobello’s buddies had jokingly asked him the same thing: “What are you going to do when you meet them? Finish them off?”

  But when I asked the Kachadoorians if they would see Lobello, they did not hesitate. “If he is asking for forgiveness, then we will give him forgiveness,” Margaret said. “God ordered us to forgive. He forgives us, so we must forgive others. Even people who killed our dears.”

  “I want him to come,” Nora said.

  As I rose to leave, Asaad pulled me aside. “They need this,” he said. “They cry all the time. Every night.” His face hardened. “But me, as an Iraqi? If someone do that to my family”—he made a pistol with his fingers—“I would kill him.”

  The marines in Fox Company had wounds of their own. When I called Kenneth Toone, a former lance corporal, he started sobbing the moment I mentioned the Kachadoorians, and he cried for several minutes. “I’m haunted,” Toone said. “I am so glad we found them. I think a lot of us want to see them and say we are sorry. We don’t get that chance. There was a different mindset back there: we deal with it when we come back. But wait a second: what were we doing over there? They gave us this power to shoot anyone we wanted and face no consequences. Well, you have to live with yourself. It destroyed me. I’m a wreck.”