When Toone went to Iraq, he was nineteen, a member in good standing of the Mormon Church. He was one of the marines who fired into the intersection, and he broke his spine carrying a wounded comrade to safety. When Toone got home, he married his girlfriend, who was seventeen and still in high school. (“Kind of a Utah thing,” he said.) They had two children. Right away, he started having nightmares and flashbacks. Military doctors declared him 100 percent disabled and gave him a medical retirement. They also prescribed the painkiller Oxycontin, and Toone found that it helped soothe the ache in his back and keep the memories at bay. He became addicted, and then he left the Church. Three years ago, his wife took the children and walked out. “She told me I wasn’t the same anymore. I wasn’t. It wasn’t fair to her,” he said. “There’s something about killing.”
According to Toone and others, half the men of Fox Company face severe psychological problems. Some are divorced; some are addicts; some are homeless; many are unemployed. The best known of Toone’s disintegrating friends is Lance Corporal Walter Smith, who also shot people in Baghdad that day. Like Toone, Smith left the church after he came back from Iraq, and turned to alcohol and drugs. One night in 2006, he drowned the mother of his two children in a bathtub. He received a sentence of one to fifteen years.
Toone was trying to get his life back together. He had completed a treatment program to get off Oxycontin, and when we spoke he was packing for a drive to Sheridan, Wyoming, to begin a six-week in-patient program for soldiers with severe psychological trauma. But he had not found a way back to the Mormon faith. “I don’t believe any of it anymore,” he said. “We are atheists now, several of us, because of what happened. I can’t deal with the thought. Basically, it was—I think we murdered those people. We murdered them. I don’t understand God—whatever, if there is a God. You don’t understand how terrible it really is.”
It is difficult to know exactly what happened on April 8, 2003. But, as I talked to the Kachadoorians and Lobello and half a dozen other members of Fox Company, it became clear that things were far worse than anyone had acknowledged at first. As Toone told me, “Very many people were killed and hurt that day who were innocent.” DiGaetano, the navy corpsman, said that he treated twenty wounded Iraqis, and none were evacuated to receive treatment. Like the Kachadoorians, they were patched up and sent into the streets.
The marines’ accounts were irregular, unprocessed, conflicting. They agreed mainly that the fight had been confusing and chaotic. Their greatest fear was that the cars coming into the intersection were filled with Iraqi soldiers. Nelson Wong, a lance corporal, told me, “We were just hearing all these things. People jacking cars. There was no way to validate anything—IEDs or suicide bombers or people stealing taxis.” The entire company, facing its first real battle, was on edge. “Especially after Vidania”—the radio operator—“was shot, we were very angry and very pissed off,” Toone said. The men’s recollections of the shooting are a reel of hideous images: a dead teenage boy splayed out in the back seat of a car; the mother with a mangled arm holding up a baby who was red with blood.
When I asked Bruno Moya, a lance corporal, whether the rules of engagement had been adequate, he said, “Rules of engagement? I don’t think I’ve ever thought about that.” He went on, “We got a couple of briefs. They were brief. Generally, we were told that the enemy had no uniforms. Anyone could be hostile.” He thought of the killings every day, and, like Lobello, he seemed to be wrestling with questions of culpability. “Of course our force was excessive—but that is how we are trained,” he said. “We use maximum force. We didn’t train for civilians coming out of houses.”
Nick Lopez, a first sergeant who was manning a casualty-collection point near the intersection, remembered that the marines fired at a series of cars, one after another. “There was a car driving right at us,” he said. “Two adult males, father and son—we killed them.” During the firefight, Lopez said, Fox Company had an unexpected visitor, Brigadier General John Kelly, the deputy commander of the First Marine Division. Lopez remembered Kelly yelling at the top of his lungs, nearly hysterical with anger. “You’re shooting civilians,” he said. But they didn’t stop. “We see another car, a four-door American sedan, and it drove right through the wire at us,” Lopez said. “Everyone was thinking, This is part of the attack. We lit the car up. I put in twenty rounds.”
A rear door opened, and a teenage boy fell into the street. “All I remember is this kid rolling out. Bright-red blood, lying in the road. These two corpsmen ran out to get him, they jump up and clamp his two arteries that are bleeding. There is a woman. She’s screaming, and she’s got this black eye makeup. Crying in Arabic, both hands out. She’s pointing at her son, pointing at me. I can’t communicate with her.” Another woman, perhaps eighteen years old, was slumped over, dead, in the center seat. A third was on the ground behind the car, cradled by young marines. “She’s shot up so bad, the whole side of her body peeled away, still alive. What do I do?” Lopez said. “I lost my marriage over this. Wonderful lady. You are not the same person when you come back.”
I asked John Liles if his men had used too much force. Couldn’t they have just shot the engines of the cars? “That’s not a fair question,” he said. “Thousands and thousands of rounds are being shot; marines are getting shot; there are vehicles literally coming at us. We had to shoot the vehicles. We thought we were going to die.”
Liles acknowledged the harm that he and his men had done to the Kachadoorians: “We killed their family. What do you say to someone like that?” But he told me that his conscience was clear—the marines didn’t know who was in the oncoming cars, so they had to assume that they were hostile. “I don’t have a problem with what we did that day,” he said. “I am not going to cry about what happened. That’s what we need for closure. It’s best to leave it.”
And yet many of the marines said that memories of the killing dogged them. When I told Toone that Nora was married and had kids, and was living in the United States, he said, “That’s really good to know. I remember that girl was shot. You think about that stuff, and you don’t know that they’re OK. I’m so glad. I’m so glad. You don’t humanize things over there, but you do when you get back here. You realize what you did. You just destroyed so many things. They were just innocent families that day. The cars were piled up like in a junk yard.”
Lobello, though, was alone in trying to find his victims. “Lu is just, like, really friendly,” Wong said. “The things we do affect him more. I don’t want to say I don’t care. Lu connects to things more emotionally. Generally, he’s more sensitive. He just dwells on it.”
Lobello and I arrived at the Kachadoorians’ home on a Saturday morning in July. When the front door opened, Asaad came out first, with Nora and Margaret behind him. Lobello embraced them and tried to say something, then began to sob. “Don’t cry,” Margaret said, and patted him on the back. They led us in, and we sat in a small, unadorned living room, Lobello on a couch against a wall, Nora and Asaad at a table by the window. Margaret walked heavily to another couch and settled into the cushions. On a table across from her sat the framed photograph of the dead Kachadoorian men.
“It’s been almost ten years,” Lobello said. “I just wanted to know how you were doing. You have kids. Two boys? What are their names?”
“Joseph and Sam,” Asaad said.
“My dad’s name is Joseph,” Lobello said.
“It’s an old name from the Bible,” Margaret said. “You read the Bible?”
“I used to,” Lobello said. “A lot more than I do now. Maybe I should start again.”
As they talked, the conversation kept stalling, with everyone quiet for minutes at a time. Asaad sat impatiently, tapping his foot, answering for Nora. She sat in silence, but it was easy to see that she was as haunted as the others. Later, in an interview with a female Iraqi translator, she told her story with a sad exactitude, explaining that she had even refused to have a wedding party. “I didn’t have
any brothers,” she said.
The Kachadoorians had always put faith before war. Nora’s father, James, refused to pick up a gun when he was pressed into serving in Saddam’s army; he was imprisoned twice for being a Jehovah’s Witness. The same stubborn belief compelled Nora and Margaret to absolve Lobello; Corinthians says that, when someone has caused pain, “forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.” Yet excessive sorrow had overwhelmed the Kachadoorians, too, and Margaret seemed determined to make sure that Lobello didn’t forget it.
“You saw us,” Margaret said, from her place on the couch. “You are better now?”
“I want to make sure you guys have everything you need,” Lobello said. “If there is anything I can do, I am here for you.” He cleared his throat.
“You are crying,” Margaret said. “You know, I cannot cry. My eyes have no tears left.”
Nora stood and left the room, and I could hear her weeping in the kitchen. When she returned, she carried a tray with cakes, Iraqi candy, and glasses for tea. She set the tray between Margaret and Lobello, who were looking at each other.
“You said you are suffering,” Margaret said.
“I never sleep,” Lobello said.
“I, too, not sleep, every day, you know? Yesterday it was four o’clock, I not sleep. I take the Bible and go to the kitchen and began to read,” Margaret said. “I have the same, this depression, you know. I think this is because you are sensitive. We are sensitive person.”
“There is not a day or a week that goes by that I don’t think about what we went through,” Lobello said. He seemed to be posing a kind of equivalence between him and his victims. If this was self-serving, there was also an undeniable truth to it: of all the people in the world, no one else could better understand what had happened.
“When you were in Iraq, and they said the Americans were maybe going to invade, did you guys want us to?” Lobello asked. “Is it worth it? Is it worth your family?”
“Where is the freedom?” Margaret said. “It’s worse over there now. More worse.”
Lobello turned in his chair and straightened. He had told me that he wasn’t coming to apologize—that, however much carnage he and his fellow marines had caused in Baghdad that day, they had had no choice. Now, sitting with the Kachadoorians, he seemed to waver. “We thought that any vehicle, you know, was going to try to hurt us,” he said. “I don’t know if it was your vehicle or one before that almost ran over one of our guys. So, once that happened, we just figured—it was just what we ended up doing.”
Margaret wasn’t listening. She was talking about the marine she had confronted after the shooting in Baghdad. “When I look at him, his eyes go to the ground,” she said.
Lobello persisted. “We just had no idea that there were families out there,” he said. “What we thought at first was, Why are they driving here? We didn’t understand.”
Margaret’s eyes were unfocused, somewhere else. The family had been just a few feet from home when the firing started. “Our house,” she said.
Lobello leaned forward, struggling to find words. For nearly a decade, he had grappled with that moment when he looked down the barrel of his M-249 and into the blue Mercedes and pulled the trigger. “We just thought you could hear the guns—that you couldn’t be friendly people,” he said. “It just got so confusing. When we realized what happened, everyone shut down. As soon as we realized, Look, man, what did we do? people started crying.”
Lobello sank into the couch and exhaled. The cakes sat on the tray, untouched. Nora, her back to the window, looked at him and said nothing.
“Now you are comfortable that we gave you forgiveness?” Margaret said.
“I feel very good meeting you,” Lobello said.
“But, you know, forgiveness is something strong—I think not everyone would say, ‘I forgive you,’” Margaret said. “We forgive you, but don’t think we forget our dears.”
“Yeah,” Lobello said. His eyes turned to the floor.
“But we want you not to be hurt,” Margaret said. “It’s not your fault. I am right?”
Lobello began to cry. “Asaad, I need a cigarette.” He sounded as though he had come up for air.
“Let’s go,” Asaad said, standing up, and the two men walked together into the front yard.
In the Bible, Numbers 31 prescribes a purifying ritual for soldiers returned from war: a cleanse of fire and water. American culture has no such rituals. Instead, it has legal constructs, like the rules of engagement—printed on cards to fit in your wallet—that allow soldiers like the men in Lobello’s unit to feel that they have merely done what they should. They are absolved even before they come home.
In Iraq, a tribal society, guilt is traditionally expunged by fasil, the payment of blood money. A man is killed, the tribes meet, a price is agreed on, and the act is, if not forgotten, then at least set aside. Life goes on. When the war began, the Americans acted without regard for Iraq’s traditions and in so doing took a tiny insurgency and helped make it enormous—multiplying their enemies by obliging entire families and tribes to take revenge. Eventually, they caught on, and began making payments to the families of those they had wrongly killed. It worked. I saw Iraqis who had sworn eternal hostility put away their anger in an instant.
But in a war that killed 4,000 people on one side and 100,000 on the other, neither system—of legal delineation or of paid recompense—can suffice. What Lobello was doing was more personal: he had come before the Kachadoorians, whose sons he had killed, to beg for their forgiveness. Jonathan Shay, the psychiatrist, told me that Lobello was a supplicant, making the only plea he could: “I don’t have money to give you. I am not going to take my life. I can’t give my blood. All I can give you is my anguish.”
Out the window, I saw Asaad and Lobello chatting as they smoked, looking like neighbors. For a moment, the two women sat quietly. I unwrapped a piece of candy. Finally, Nora spoke. “We want to help him,” she said.
“Some people say, ‘No, we must revenge’—they say, ‘Eye for an eye,’” Margaret said. “We aren’t like those people.”
When the men came back in, they seemed relaxed, almost buoyant. Everyone sat for a while longer, talking about their families. The hard work, it seemed, was done.
At last, Lobello said, “Well, I guess it’s time.”
“I appreciate that you came,” Nora said. “You are like my brother. We are brother and sister.”
Margaret looked exhausted but serene. “You have done as best you can to come here and say I did it,” she said. “I appreciate this.”
“We have more in common, and we understand each other, more than anyone I meet,” Lobello said.
Margaret looked toward the family photograph, and said, “You remind me of my older son, Nicolas”—one of the men who had died on Baladiyat Street. “Even your behavior. Your looking. Everything. Everything. Believe me.”
Lobello nodded, with his hands clasped, seeming relieved.
“Everything is OK now,” Margaret said. “You are welcome to our house. I thank you very much. This is good behavior, you know.”
“Can I have a hug now?” Lobello asked.
Margaret pulled herself up from the couch. Lobello was waiting for her. “All us are not perfect,” Margaret said, and they embraced.
When Lobello got back to San Diego, he told his buddies what he had done. Most of them were happy, he said, and some, like Mike DiGaetano, said that they wanted to go to Glendale, too. Lobello started to make plans—to introduce the Kachadoorians to his wife, even to speak to lawmakers about compensating Iraqis like them. “He was so happy that he met them,” his wife, Margaret, said. “He seemed at peace. I can just see the relief he feels for being forgiven.” He still couldn’t sleep, he said, but the meeting in Glendale had helped ease his anguish, and especially because it had helped the Kachadoorians, too. Asaad sometimes calls him for advice on adapting to American life, Lobello told me. “This is just the beginning,” h
e said.
A few days after the meeting, he got a Facebook message from Nora. It was written in the same carefree, unpunctuated English as the one she had sent a year before: “when you came i feel so happy & i feel doing grate on my life & with my family, i really changed … & the same time i feel i get a third brother & the third son to my mom … thanks to you for every thing.”
Reading the message, Lobello noticed that Nora had confirmed him as a friend.
Esquire
FINALIST—MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR
Once a month, all year round, Esquire delivers a tutorial on magazine making. Whether it’s the front-of-the-book section “Man at His Best,” service packages like “Fatherhood for Men” (track down the June–July 2012 issue), or the award-winning tablet edition, Esquire is, in the words of the National Magazine Awards judges, “riotous and energetic … edgy yet accessible.” But few would argue with the notion that the best of Esquire is its long-form journalism—the work of writers like Tom Junod, Luke Dittrich, and, of course, Chris Jones, whose stories have won Esquire National Magazine Awards twice in the last decade. In “The Big Book,” we get the rare opportunity to see two formidable reporters at work—Jones and his subject, the Pulitzer-winning biographer of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro.
Chris Jones
The Big Book
I. The Fisk Building
On the twenty-second floor of the Fisk Building in New York—an elegant brick giant built in 1921, stretching an entire block of West Fifty-seventh Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue—the hallways are lined with doors bearing gold plaques. The plaques reveal the professions of the people at work behind them: lawyers, accountants, financial advisors. But one plaque displays only a name, with no mention of the man’s business: ROBERT A. CARO.
Best American Magazine Writing 2013 Page 31
