ATONEMENT troubled Iraq veteran seeks out the family he harmed

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/29/121029fa_fact_filkins


Left: Margaret Kachadoorian and her only surviving child, Nora, in Glendale, California. Margaret’s husband and two sons were killed by U.S. marines in Iraq in 2003. Right: Lu Lobello, a former marine in the company that opened fire on the family. Photographs by Andrea Bruce.

IIn the early hours one morning last September, Lu Lobello rose from his bed, switched on a light, and stared into the video camera on his computer. It was two-thirty. The light cast a yellow pall on Lobello’s unshaven face. Almost every night was like this. Lobello couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop thinking about his time in Iraq. Around San Diego, he’d see a baby—in a grocery store, in a parking lot—and the image would come back to him: the blood-soaked Iraqi infant, his mother holding him aloft by one foot. “Why did you shoot us?’’ the woman demanded over and over. Other times, Lobello would see a Mercedes—a blue or white one, especially—and he’d recall the bullet-riddled sedan in the Baghdad intersection, the dead man alongside it in the street, the elderly woman crying in broken English, “We are the peace people! We are the peace people!” He’d remember that the barrel of his machine gun was hot to the touch.

Once a wild teen-ager in Las Vegas—“I was a crazy bastard!”—Lobello had become, at thirty-one, a tormented veteran. When he came home from Iraq, he bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the weapon most like the one he had in combat, and two pistols, and kept them close at night. “You lay them on the bed, like it’s your girlfriend, and go to sleep,” he said. That had helped a little, but then he moved to California, where the gun laws were stricter, and he’d left them behind.

The marines had shot a terrible number of Iraqis that day—maybe two dozen in all. At times, as Lobello lay awake, he wondered, Whom had he killed? Who had survived? He combed the Internet for names, dates, and addresses; he pestered the members of his Marine company for details and consulted a cousin who had travelled in the region. He piled up documents. At last, the clues led him to the Facebook page of a young woman named Nora: maybe, he thought, it was the young woman he’d seen in the back seat of the Mercedes, with the bloody shoulder. And so, at two-thirty that morning, eight years after he had sprayed bullets into cars filled with Iraqi civilians, Lobello turned on his video recorder.

“It’s very hard for me to say this, Nora, but we met on April 8, 2003,’’ Lobello said. “I was with Fox Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-third Marine Regiment, and our fate crossed that night. I’m not sure if you remember, because it was so long ago now. Almost a decade.”


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