www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7371965
She'd had a "great" r ound of meetings in the Green Zone, she told McMahon, and was just leavi ng the fortified compound in the hopes of squeezing in one last meeting before the end of the day. The Green Zone, which sits on the west bank o f the Tigris River, used to be the heart of Saddam's empire, and now hou ses the US Embassy, the Iraqi Parliament and other offices of the new Iraqi government. Outside of the Green Zone, in Baghdad itself, the secu rity situation changes hourly. A route that was safe at noon could be un safe at 1 pm A neighborhood that was peaceful at dawn could be in flam es by lunchtime. A petite, blond, twenty-eight-year-old humanitarian-aid worker from North ern California, Ruzicka knew the volatility of Baghdad as well as anyone . She was virtually the only American aid worker in the Iraqi capital. S he was the founder of a small nongovernmental organization called CIVIC -- the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict -- which assisted famil ies whose lives had been ripped apart in the wars in Iraq and Afghanista n Passionate and driven, Ruzicka worked seven days a week, eighteen hou rs a day, driving around the city with her Iraqi colleague Faiz Ali Sali m The two spent most of their days compiling data on the number of civi lian casualties in Iraq, which Ruzicka then used to lobby American offic ials to compensate the victims' families, often arranging for wounded ch ildren to be evacuated in order to receive medical treatment in the Unit ed States. It was revolutionary work -- virtually no other aid group or worker has negotiated with the US government on behalf of civilians in jured in American military actions -- but it was exhausting. Ruzicka, wh o had begun to demonstrate some of the classic symptoms of post-traumati c stress disorder, was preparing to leave Baghdad the next day for a vac ation in Thailand and then a long rest back in the United States. "This place continues to break my heart," she wrote to a friend in London earlier in the month. Now, talking on the phone with McMahon, Ruzicka sounded upbeat. In the pa st few days, she had obtained a document that was her holy grail: a deta iled report showing that the US military keeps its own civilian-casual ty records, something the Pentagon has repeatedly denied. Ruzicka's methodology, on behalf of Iraq's war victims, often involved a lot of cajoling of high-level brass at Camp Victory, the military headqu arters near the Baghdad International Airport. To get there, she had to drive on the notorious airport road, one of the most dangerous thoroughf ares in the world. It is a frequent site of suicide bombings, ambushes a nd other insurgent attacks. It's also an efficient route, connecting cen tral Baghdad to points west. The airport road is banked on both sides by housing complexes, heavily po pulated by people with military training and access to weapons. Ironical ly, it was once the most secure road in Iraq, as Saddam's particular bra nd of paranoia forced him to place guards at every overpass and exit. To day, it is the key military and contractors' supply route, which makes i t one of the most high-value targets in Iraq, despite several US milit ary checkpoints. There are rules for driving on the airport road, the mo st important one being: Never get stuck behind a US convoy, which is a suicide bomber's prime target. But this can be difficult, as security c ontractors, who drive in convoys of armored SUVs, fly down the highway a t 90 mph. McMahon assumed Ruzicka was meeting with some Iraqi victims in Baghdad. But he never asked where she was going, and Ruzicka didn't off er any information. "I think it'll be fine," she told him breezily at th e end of their brief phone call. The Tribune office was at the Al Hamra hotel, where Ruzicka lived. The Ha mra is the major journalist hangout in Baghdad and has an otherworldline ss about it that gives some people a false sense of safety. A white, two -tower complex, it has a sweeping outdoor patio and a beautiful pool: lo ng, cerulean blue and clean. On warm nights, journalists ranging from th e most senior correspondents of Time to the lowliest stringer can be fou nd doing laps in the pool, or having drinks or dinner on the patio. Ever y so often, a few tracer bullets from an AK-47 fly overhead like miniatu re bottle rockets, with clean, arcing trajectories, a piercing reminder of the danger and chaos so close at hand. Marla Ruzicka was planning to host a party at the Hamra that night. Her a ll-night bacchanals of salsa dancing and heavy drinking were famous amon g the overworked, underexcited journalists in Baghdad. The party she'd p lanned for the night of April 16th promised to be "totally Marla," as on e of her friends told me. Several people might hook up, quite a few would jump in the pool and a lot might pass out -- the first one being Marla herself. It was after eight o'clock when McMahon, still working, saw his colleague James Janega at the Tribune's office at the Hamra. Janega had been down on the patio, waiting for the party. "It's pretty boring, just about te n guys sitting around by the pool," he told McMahon. In the next few hours, there would be frantic phone calls to sources and friends all over Baghdad, but no one had heard from Ruzicka. "The w orst fear was that she'd been kidnapped," says McMahon. He imagined the pretty aid worker pleading for her life in front of insurgent cameras. What happened to Marla Ruzicka was no less tragic but far more mundane. A t approximately three o'clock in the afternoon, Ruzicka and Faiz were he ading east on the airport road, toward Baghdad. Also on the road were a US military convoy and a convoy of private security contractors. From a nearby on-ramp, a suicide bomber merged into the traffic, most likely gunning for the military convoy, which he missed. Instead, he detonated beside his next best choice, the security convoy. The first time I met Marla -- like a lot of people, I never knew her last name until after she died -- was in Baghdad in April 2004. It was a war m night, and I was having drinks with some friends on the patio of the H amra, when all of a sudden a pretty girl dressed in hip-huggers and a ga uzy shirt bopped up and started massaging the shoulders of one of the me n at my table. "That's Marla," one of them said in my ear, a hint of condescension in his voice. Just five-foot-three and weighing no more than 100 pounds, Marla looked o nly a few years out of college and completely out of place in a war zone . But she also seemed thoroughly comfortable in the Hamra scene, as if i t were her home, which it had been for the better part of two years. Whi le we drank, Marla pounded the shoulders of a British reporter with tiny little fists, gradually making her way around the table until she'd giv en shoulder rubs to every guy in the room. She talked in surf-girl lingo -- she called everyone, even the most auste re US officials, "dude." "When she was happy, she clapped and did a little jump," recalls her best friend, Catherine Philp, a rep orter for the London Times. She was girlish -- she used to dot her i's w ith little hearts -- and a little outlandish: She stood up in the middle of one press conference and told the stern US general giving the brie fing that he looked as if he "needed a hug." Quil Lawrence, a reporter f or BBC Radio, once described her as a "love bomb." In the days and weeks after Ruzicka's and her colleague Faiz Ali Salim's death, virtually every reporter who'd met Ruzicka wrote a story about he r -- making her death headline news on four continents. Senate, calling her "as close to a living saint as they come." Mary's Catholic Church in the tiny community of Lakeport, California, about three hours north of S an Francisco. There were memorial services in New York, Washington, Bagh dad, Kabul, San Francisco and cities across the country. Ruzicka is perhaps the most famous American aid worker to die in any conf lict of the past ten or twenty years. Though a novice in life -- she had less than four years of professional humanitarian experience -- her dea th resonated far beyond the tightly knit group of war junkies and polic...
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