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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONMalkin: I am curious to hear about your encounter with U.S. soldiers arriving in Baghdad.
Kelly: It was an unusual day. There had been a lot of confusion that morning as to how close U.S. troops were to Baghdad. Then, when the soldiers appeared, a group of them positioned themselves immediately outside our hotel. We wanted to go out and greet them with our banners that said, COURAGE FOR PEACE, NOT FOR WAR, and WAR = TERROR, but the hotel owners feared they would be persecuted if we did. So we hung the banners from a second-floor balcony instead. When the soldiers saw us, they looked around for our spaceship! How had these Americans turned up right in the middle of Baghdad? They called up to us, “Who are you?” and we told them we were a peace team.
“Where are you from?” they asked, and we answered: Chicago, New York, Boston.
Then one of them called up, “Are you a Red Sox fan?” That kind of broke the ice. It was clear that these men were hot, tired, and thirsty, and we had many six-packs of bottled water lined up in my room. So three of us — a seventy-two-year-old woman from Verona, New York; a young South Korean woman; and I — took some water down to the troops and mingled with them. I went back up to fetch a box of Iraqi dates. The soldiers were quite grateful for the dates. They hadn’t had anything but military rations for some time, and most of them had never seen fresh dates before.
I had many conversations with soldiers over the next several days. Some expressed remorse for the killing and the bloodshed they’d been involved in. Quite a few said that as soon as they got home, they were getting out of the military. One young man came up and asked, “Will you pray with me?” Another wanted to sit down with us and hear our side of the story. Soldiers would come to our hotel late at night to watch the BBC, and they’d tell us about their trip from Basra to Baghdad. There had been times when they’d feared for their lives, and also times when they weren’t sure if they were shooting at civilian or military targets. As one GI put it, “We just had to shoot everybody.” He added, “I sure hope that everything I saw won’t register in here,” and he pointed to his head.
Overhearing our conversation, an officer told us not to blame the enlisted men for what had happened. He was in charge, he said, and had made hasty decisions, and he would have many sleepless nights over the civilians who’d been killed.
One soldier said he purposefully jammed his gun so that he wouldn’t have to shoot. Another said he was glad that his job was to bring up prisoners at the rear, because he didn’t want to kill anybody. He had seen some of his fellow marines shoot a mother and father who didn’t stop their car at a checkpoint, killing them and leaving the young boy in the back seat orphaned. The soldier said they could have just shot out the tires.
We also heard from some of them that they hadn’t joined the marines to go to war. They were just looking for respect, or a way to meet financial responsibilities and get a decent education. So any sense I’d had of the marines as a sort of swaggering, self-satisfied group quickly disappeared. Maybe they behaved like victors in front of the media, but they didn’t do it with us.
Malkin: What kind of involvement did you have with journalists in Baghdad?
Kelly: It was very different from the first Gulf War. The only journalists who remained in Baghdad during that war were Peter Arnett and his CNN crew and a handful of Canadian Palestinians. In 2003 there were 750 journalists housed in the Palestine Hotel, immediately across the street from ours.
One night Robert Fisk, the Middle Eastern correspondent for the British newspaper the Independent, was having dinner with his wife at my hotel. There was no electricity, so we were all sitting around by candlelight. The bombing outside was fierce. Fisk would poke his head out now and then to assess the situation. Everyone was wondering: would he really risk walking back to his hotel in this intense bombardment? Finally he came back and told his wife that it was time to make a run for it. And she said, in a dignified manner, “Well, all right, Robert, but you’ll have to hold my hand.” And off they went.
The journalists didn’t have any inclination to report on us, and that was fine. I don’t think that we were the story. Quite a few of them did ask us where we thought the stories were, but in general the journalists didn’t like to fraternize with peace teams, because they needed to preserve the appearance of objectivity.
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