Iraq Vet Seeks Atonement For Early War Tragedy
On April 8, 2003, in the early days of the Iraq War, the Kachadoorian family found themselves in the middle of a firefight at a major intersection in Baghdad.
They had approached the intersection in three cars and didn't respond to Marines' warnings to stop and turn around; so the Marines opened fire, killing three men and shooting a young woman in the shoulder, not realizing that the people in the car were civilians.
Lu Lobello was one of those Marines. He doesn't know if his bullets were responsible for the Kachadoorians' deaths and injuries, and he maintains that the Marines did exactly what they were trained to do in that situation.
But years later, still haunted by the experience and dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, Lobello started researching the incident, looking for everything he could find about that day. That's when he stumbled across Dexter Filkins' 2003 account of the tragedy in The New York Times. Lobello says the article helped answer his questions about why the family drove toward the gunfight.
"My reasoning was they were driving toward us, of course they're an enemy. Why would anyone drive towards the sound of a battle?" Lobello tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And when I read from their point of view, [which] Dexter talked about in his article, it just shook me because it all seemed so plausible."
Filkins tells Gross that, in the early years of the Iraq War, Iraqis driving into American checkpoints led to many casualties. In this instance, the Kachadoorians were trying to get home, which was just around the corner from the firefight.
According to Filkins, the family was confused and too frightened to turn around, because the house they had been staying at had just been bombed. So they decided to try to make it through, with tragic consequences.
"And then if you flip that around, you're like a 20-year-old American soldier; you're scared to death; you don't know what is coming at you," Filkins says.
Enlarge James Hill/Courtesy of The New Yorker
Dexter Filkins earned a George Polk award in 2004 for his coverage of Fallujah. His book, The Forever War, is about his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.