FROM TODAY'S NY TIMES
G.I. Who Pulled the Trigger Shares Anguish of 2 Deaths
By JOHN F. BURNS
AGHDAD, Iraq, April 11 — When American tanks opened fire on a car driving up Highway 1 on Baghdad's southern outskirts in the dusk of Monday evening, it was only one of hundreds of such incidents in the war in Iraq that changed the life of an Iraqi family in an instant.
But that moment also changed an American life, that of Cpl. Jeff Mager, 22, of Chicago, a gunner on an Abrams tank that carries the legend "Bush and Co." on its barrel.
Guarding an expressway overpass a few miles from Baghdad's international airport, the tank crew was waiting tensely for an Iraqi counterattack by massed suicide bombers promised by Saddam Hussein's top officials after American troops seized the airport last Friday.
Corporal Mager had fired some of the cannon shells that struck the Toyota sedan and other vehicles running up a slipway toward the overpass. He had seen the two men in the front seat of the silver gray Camry die in an explosion of blood and steel. But until this morning, he could not be sure who had been killed.
Then at about 10 a.m. today, Corporal Mager learned something about what he and the other tank crews had done that many soldiers in faraway wars, shooting at uncertain targets, remain blissfully unaware of. He and the other tank gunners had killed two Iraqi civilians, he was told, brothers who ran a family tannery that sold half-finished leathers to luxury fashion houses in Italy.
He learned, too, that incidents like the one at the overpass, in which hundreds of Iraqi civilians have been killed, however inadvertently, have generated a wave of bitterness that is eroding some of the gratitude that has swept Iraq for the American forces' role in ending 24 years of grimly repressive government by Mr. Hussein. How such confrontations are resolved is critical to how the American presence in this country will be viewed.
On Wednesday, residents from the Saidiya neighborhood that straddles the expressway where the shooting occurred came with shovels and white flags to bury the two brothers hurriedly beside the wreck, along with other Iraqis who were killed in nearby vehicles that were also smashed by tank shells.
Today, as a group of men, mostly from the same neighborhood, returned to retrieve the bodies from their makeshift grave, Corporal Mager dismounted from his tank, and listened as a reporter told him what he had learned, at least as the crowd recounted it: that the victims were Wadhar Handi, 34, and Bashar Handi, 28, and that they were driving to their family home in Harithiya, an upscale neighborhood about three miles north of the overpass, when they were hit by the tanks. The corporal was also told that one surviving brother and a cousin of the two victims were among the men working with the shovels, and that they, and many other men in the crowd, were seething with anger at America.
What the Iraqis were saying was that actions like these were proof of the "lies" told by President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, in saying they intended the war to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. Ordinary Iraqis, the Handi family and the people in the Saidiya neighborhood among them, loathed Saddam Hussein and wanted him overthrown, they said, but not by foreign troops that shoot indiscriminately at civilians.
Ali Rashid Handi, 40, a surviving older brother standing atop the grave, 40 paces from Corporal Mager, had pointed at his dead brothers and said: "We wanted freedom, we wanted democracy, and this is what we got. Is this what you Americans call freedom?"
Corporal Mager had pulled his helmet up to listen, and his face tightened. He appeared to accept the recounting that the two men killed were innocent. No Iraqi made any move to approach him, and nobody shouted any abuse. The men at the grave went on digging, their white flags blowing in the morning breeze.
Corporal Mager watched, and appeared lost in thought. Then he looked up, with a sadness that was beyond affectation, and asked that a message be passed to the Iraqis, a message for himself, and for America. "Tell them the fact that I pulled the trigger that killed some of these people makes me very unhappy," he said. "Tell them that America did not want things to happen this way. Tell them that I wish that Iraqis will live a better life."
Then he clambered back on the tank, and it drove away. |
