Seven weeks before she was killed, Marla Ruzicka promised me she wouldn't leave the hotel in Baghdad.
She had called me about an article on female detainees at Abu Ghraib I'd written for The American Prospect. As the founder of an organization called Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, she was eager to help the women file military claims with the U.S. government. I knew the women would be nervous if an American -- even a well-intentioned one like Marla -- got in touch with them. I said I couldn't just hand over their phone numbers.
Within days, Marla had called again and said she was going to Baghdad. Would I help her get in touch with the female detainees?
“You're crazy,” I said. “You'll end up in an orange jumpsuit.”
“I'm going to have a hotel room, and the women will come and see me,” she explained. “I won't go anywhere.”
I put her in touch with my translator and eventually, with the permission of the detainees, handed everything over to her -- my electronic files, documents, and contacts in Damascus, Amman, and Baghdad. We talked on the phone frequently and e-mailed, gossiping about people we knew and talking about her upcoming trip.
“I am getting some good things set up with ministries, etc,” she'd e-mail. “But the visa stuff is going to be a nightmare! x, marla.”
Marla, who had previously worked with a San Francisco-based human-rights organization called Global Exchange, had blond hair and a sweet laugh. She was also the fastest e-mailer I'd ever met; she'd shoot me the transcript of a Senate hearing while we talked, fire off a CNN correspondent's e-mail, or send me the phone number of a claims processor at the Defense Department. She was always telling me about people I should get in touch with, as though she had taken to heart EM Forster's dictate, “Only connect!”
“A human switchboard,” one journalist said about her.
She is so charming, I told people. Watch out.
In early March, Marla told me she'd found a woman who'd been held at Abu Ghraib and was willing to speak openly about the abuse she'd suffered. I asked if Marla could get me an exclusive interview. Like all journalists, I wanted to be the first one to publish the story.
“I don't do exclusives with human-rights stories,” Marla told me.
How admirable, I thought, not to care who gets the story first. And annoying.
Days later, she was on the phone again, telling me she'd gotten a call from a network producer and was giving them the story of the female detainee. I knew the network would bring the issue to millions of Americans. I was both peeved that Marla was working with the network and in awe of her. She made things happen.
Marla had a special talent: She never heard a compliment she didn't pass on. In her e-mails, she'd write, “You are a sister!” In different ways, big and small, she made people feel good about themselves and showed them how they could reach out to others. It was easy to see how she could win the trust of someone like Patrick Leahy, the U.S. senator who helped appropriate $2.5 million for Afghan civilian victims of war -- and, later, $10 million for Iraqi victims -- after meeting with her. In the end, you knew Marla was looking out for those who seemed to have no one else in the world.
On Monday, April 18, I sat in a café and opened up The New York Times and saw that she was dead. By the time, I got back to my car, I had a cell-phone message from a lawyer working on a case for Iraqi detainees, her voice shaky from crying. A Democratic staffer left a teary message on my machine at work. I got an e-mail from a Pentagon official who'd spoken with Marla in Baghdad. For the first time since the war began, he said, he had wept. Even a computer programmer in an Apple store wiped away tears as she looked at Marla's photo in the newspaper.
Once Marla asked me if I wanted to go to Baghdad. I said I couldn't because I have children and wouldn't want anyone to have to explain why I'd gotten killed. We talked several times about me going to Iraq and each time she'd say, “You can't. You have kids.” Without dependents, she went to Baghdad, and on Saturday afternoon left her hotel to visit some Iraqis who were grieving over lost family members.
After the bomb exploded on the airport road, her car was covered in flames and she had burns on 90 percent of her body, according to Robert F. Worth in the Times. A medic who treated her on the scene heard her last words: “I'm alive.” It was just like Marla to say something hopeful at that moment. She was right, of course. She will always be alive -- in my heart and in the hearts of my children and in those of the people she met in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places of the world. In her last e-mail to me, eight days before her death, she wrote, “see you in dc in june x, marla.”
Tara McKelvey is a Prospect senior editor.