Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (83 page)
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Authors: Samantha Power
BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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Having failed to get help in Tent City, Larriera attempted to make her way once again to the rear of the Canal. But by this time the army had established an inner cordon of soldiers, sandbags, and trucks, preventing UN officials and nonspecialist U.S. soldiers from reaching the back of the building. Larriera paced the length of the inner cordon, pleading with U.S. soldiers to let her pass, but she was blocked. Although she had promised Vieira de Mello she would return, she could not do so.
Bremer might have helped streamline the multiple lines of command, but he did not arrive at the Canal Hotel until dusk. Since Eckhard had taken a swipe at the security provided by the United States, Bremer asked Kennedy and Sabal to find out what protection U.S. forces had offered. Sabal wrote Bremer’s query in his notebook: “How do we answer the question of why we were unable to provide security?” Sabal scribbled next to it: “Lack of troops.” While at the Canal, Bremer spoke to the media. “My dear friend Sergio is somewhere back there,” he said. “It may well be that he was the target of this attack.” From Bremer’s remarks, it was clear he believed that pro-Saddam loyalists were responsible. “These people are not content with having killed thousands of people before,” he said. “They just want to keep killing and killing and killing. And they won’t have their way.”
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He was sure that, despite the attack, the UN would stay. "I’m absolutely certain that the United Nations, instead of cutting and running, will stand and stay firm, as indeed the Coalition will.”
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He was sure that, despite the attack, the UN would stay. "I’m absolutely certain that the United Nations, instead of cutting and running, will stand and stay firm, as indeed the Coalition will.”
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Back in the United States, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. So many journalists were away that New York
Newsday
columnist Jimmy Breslin called August 19 a day when “a congressman could commit homicide and not make the news.”
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Bush received word of the attack while playing golf. Initially he kept playing, but after an hour he returned to his ranch and issued a statement at 7:05 p.m. Baghdad time. “The Iraqi people face a challenge, and they face a choice,” the president said. “The terrorists want to return to the days of torture chambers and mass graves. The Iraqis who want peace and freedom must reject them and fight terror.”
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Newsday
columnist Jimmy Breslin called August 19 a day when “a congressman could commit homicide and not make the news.”
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Bush received word of the attack while playing golf. Initially he kept playing, but after an hour he returned to his ranch and issued a statement at 7:05 p.m. Baghdad time. “The Iraqi people face a challenge, and they face a choice,” the president said. “The terrorists want to return to the days of torture chambers and mass graves. The Iraqis who want peace and freedom must reject them and fight terror.”
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The UN lacked any in-house capacity to determine who had carried out the attack or to bring the plotters to justice. But the FBI response in the immediate aftermath of the attack was impressive.When the bomber struck, Thomas Fuentes, who ran the FBI unit in Iraq, was at Baghdad airport, and he used GPS to guide him and a team of agents to the blast.Within an hour of the explosion nearly two dozen agents had descended on the crime scene to begin sifting through the rubble to gather evidence. This was the first attack in which U.S. civilians had been among those targeted, so the FBI’s jurisdiction was uncontested.
When Fuentes arrived, Iraqis were crowding around the army’s outer cordon rope, calling out the names of loved ones who worked in the building. Iraqi teenagers had come with coolers to sell Pepsis to the crowd.
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The spinal hospital, which was on the opposite side of the access road from the Canal, had also been badly damaged by the blast. Ten of its patients had been injured, and the others, many of whom were survivors of Iraq’s three wars, were petrified. Some were trapped for more than an hour under the collapsed roof, while others, who were barely dressed, were rolled outside in their wheelchairs and left sitting, carrying their catheter bags, in the scorching sun.
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The spinal hospital, which was on the opposite side of the access road from the Canal, had also been badly damaged by the blast. Ten of its patients had been injured, and the others, many of whom were survivors of Iraq’s three wars, were petrified. Some were trapped for more than an hour under the collapsed roof, while others, who were barely dressed, were rolled outside in their wheelchairs and left sitting, carrying their catheter bags, in the scorching sun.
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On the day and evening of the nineteenth, the FBI analysts avoided the rear of the Canal, where rescue efforts were proceeding, and instead fanned out in a lot beside the spinal hospital. Three hundred feet from the point of impact, the lot was layered with a wide variety of debris: shards of metal from the bomber’s truck, rubble from the cement walls, and multiple body parts belonging to the driver himself. Fuentes’s team included one experienced bomb-blast expert, who was in the country to help investigate the Jordanian embassy attack, and he offered on-site training to the others so they could efficiently assemble the forensic clues. The explosion had sent pieces of evidence in hundreds of directions, and they would eventually be retrieved from a five-square-mile area. In but one testament to the scale of the strike, the crater from the explosion, which was around three and a half feet in diameter and around five feet deep, could have easily fit a Volkswagen.
Valentine, the New York medic, had an even bigger crater to navigate. “Keep your eyes closed, folks,” he said as he rappelled downward into the shaft. He was worried about the cascading debris.“I’m coming down!” Loescher answered him, saying, “Good, I need your help.” But Vieira de Mello was silent. In his twenty-eight-year career the American EMT had dealt with multiple collapsed buildings and had once extricated a woman trapped under a crane in New York City. But although he had already served eleven months in Afghanistan and four months in Iraq, this was his first wartime civilian rescue effort.
EMTs are trained to follow their ABCs—they focus on Airways, Breathing, and Circulation—and to stop massive bleeding. They consider themselves only the first line of defense in medical rescue: They deal with these basics and move on.“I know my job,” Valentine says. “I am supposed to do meatball surgery on the casualties and wait for the cavalry to come in behind me with the real equipment and the real specialists.” As he made his way down this Baghdad shaft, though, Valentine knew nobody was pulling up his rear.
Valentine reached Loescher around 5:45 p.m. He was lying at a 45-degree angle with his head lower than his feet, which had helped to maintain his circulation. Valentine used IV fluid to wipe away the plaster dust from Loescher’s face and tried to keep his patient conscious by asking about his family. "Are you married, Gil?” he asked. “How many kids?” Loescher said he had two daughters, and Valentine said he had six children. “We’ll get you out of here so you can dance with your wife very soon,” the EMT said. “But I’ll be in a cast,” Loescher said. “You’ve never danced on crutches before?” Valentine asked.
When Ralf Embro returned to the triage area outside the Canal Hotel entrance after loading casualties onto trucks and helicopters, he entered the building and shouted, “Are there any eight-twelve medics up here?” When he reached the third floor, one U.S. soldier screamed back, “Yeah, there’s a medic here, but he’s down the shaft.” Embro peered into the hole, and Valentine shouted up, “I need to get the rubble off the casualties. We need to get a pulley system going.”
Embro was at a loss. He had neither pulleys nor anything in which to put the rubble. He scrambled around the dark offices of the third floor and returned carrying a curtain, a curtain drawstring, and a woman’s large straw handbag. “This is all we got,” he said. He tied the curtain rope around the handbag and lowered it down past von Zehle, who was perched halfway down the shaft, to Valentine. Using his bare hands, Valentine cleared loose rubble and deposited no more than half a dozen chunks of concrete at once into the handbag, which Embro and two U.S. army privates hauled upward.The curtain, a makeshift stretcher, would prove useful only if Loescher or Vieira de Mello could be dislodged. As Embro and the others hauled the rocks upward, they held on to beams that quaked. Embro worried that Valentine and von Zehle would end up trapped like those they were aiming to save.
Loescher’s legs appeared to have been crushed below the knees by the ceiling of Vieira de Mello’s office.Valentine reached into Loescher’s pocket and took out a passport. He placed it inside the handbag with the rubble. From that point on the assembly line of U.S. soldiers knew the name of the man they were attempting to help.They also knew he was an American. “Gil, stay awake,” Valentine said repeatedly. "We’re going to get you out of there.”
Vieira de Mello was four feet to the right of Loescher but trapped in a separate pocket. His right leg remained buried in rubble, along with his right arm, which was extended downward into the debris. Whereas Valentine was able to squat to treat Loescher, he could access Vieira de Mello only if he lay on his stomach and stretched his left arm into the tight space above Vieira de Mello’s head. By lying on his belly, the medic was able to shine a flashlight down to Vieira de Mello’s legs, which were partially submerged and bleeding. He was also able to tie a bandage around his left arm and find a vein for an IV on the first try. He inserted the IV and hung a bag of fluid on a steel rebar rod that was poking out of a piece of hanging concrete. “Get me out of here,” Vieira de Mello said in a clipped tone.
The attempted extraction was torturously slow. Valentine was the only soldier who was compact enough to fit at the bottom of the shaft. He crawled between the two men, trying to keep both of them talking, offering morphine or fluid where he could, but mainly stalling while he attempted to dig the rubble out from under and on top of them. Valentine spent most of his time working on Loescher. He was pessimistic about Vieira de Mello, whose right arm was lodged in such thick debris that he didn’t see how he could extricate it. He began thinking about severing the arm, but he wouldn’t have the space to do that, or to move Vieira de Mello into the base of the shaft, until he had removed Loescher, who lay in his path. When Valentine removed rubble around Vieira de Mello, the only place he could put it was in the cavity where Loescher was lying. “I had a plan. I had to get Gil out first, then I would have someplace to put the rubble, and I could try to move Sergio to where Gil was,” Valentine says.
In their brief interactions, though,Vieira de Mello grew irritated by Valentine. “Are you a Christian?” the medic asked. Vieira de Mello said he was not. “Do you believe in the Lord Our Savior?” Valentine continued. He again grunted no.“We’re in a tough situation here,” Valentine said. “We should pray to God together.”
Vieira de Mello was having none of it. “I don’t want to pray,” he said. “If God was who you say he is, he wouldn’t have left me here.”
“God has reasons for everything he does,” Valentine insisted.
“Fuck God,” Vieira de Mello said. “Please just get me out.”
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While Valentine, von Zehle, and Embro manned their own minirescue from the inside, their efforts were hampered by the efforts of well-meaning rescuers on the outside of the building. Because nobody had taken overall command of the rescue effort, good Samaritans in the U.S. military and the UN were largely free to make up rescue tactics as they went along.Valentine and von Zehle were grateful to the medics on the outside who passed IV bags, bandages, morphine, and bottled water through the external cracks to the two rescuers. But they wished the others would clear out. They had almost managed to remove the rubble from Loescher’s torso when somebody working from outside removed a slab that sent broken cement tumbling down on top of Loescher. The unburial would have to begin again. “The army was doing what to it seemed logical,” recalls von Zehle. “Common sense would tell you, if somebody is underneath a pile of stuff, you start pulling that stuff off the pile.” But what was logical wasn’t helpful. Valentine, who was short-tempered on the best of days, was furious. “Tell them to stop messing around,” he bellowed up the shaft. “Are they morons?” He needed professional equipment, not amateur assistance. “We knew we had a time problem. Every rescue has a golden hour,” recalls von Zehle. “And we were getting well beyond the golden hour.”
The FBI agents outside also had a golden hour. They had to gather forensic evidence before the crime scene became contaminated. And unlike Valentine and von Zehle, the FBI officials were making terrific progress. At 6 p.m., half an hour after the FBI team arrived on the crime scene, the bomb-blast specialist approached lead agent Fuentes, holding a ten-inch-long, three-inch-wide, and two-inch-thick shard of twisted metal in the shape of a banana peel. “I know what kind of bomb it was,” the analyst said. Fuentes stared at the slender strip of metal incredulously. He was not a forensic expert and was amazed that such a small piece of metal could yield such a sizable clue. “It was a 1970s Soviet-made aerial bomb,” the analyst said.
The evidentiary bounty would only grow. Within minutes another FBI agent approached Fuentes. This one was holding the axle of the truck and part of the door, which was engraved with the vehicle identification number. The next morning a CNN journalist would phone to say that a large hunk of metal the size of a desk had landed at a military checkpoint across Canal Road, nearly a mile from the scene of the explosion. It took three agents and a pickup truck to retrieve the metal, which contained the license plate of the truck. Rounding out the clues, an FBI analyst would present Fuentes with the left hand of the bomber. The hand, which had been severed at the wrist, was still clutching part of the truck’s steering wheel and had been found on the roof of the U.S. civil-military operations building where von Zehle worked.
Fuentes thought the investigation was in unusually good shape: He had a range of witnesses who had seen the truck turn onto the service road; he had the make of the bomb and the vehicle identification number; and he had the means to fingerprint the bomber. He used a volunteer team of some one hundred soldiers to gather the grenades, mortars, and smaller explosive devices that had been strapped to the aerial bomb. The plotters had attached hundreds of munitions, but they had failed to add the necessary fuses, and almost all of the ordnance ended up in the FBI’s six-foot-high pile.
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