Marla Ruzicka always knew how to get people's attention, Lieutenant Lars Ewing told the hundreds of people crammed into Room 325 of the Russell Senate Office Building for her memorial service on May 14. Plainly struggling to retain his composure, Ewing -- after turning his head to the side, scrunching up his face, and uttering an audible, “Whew” -- told the gathering a story about his childhood friend, a 28-year-old human-rights worker who was killed in Iraq by a terrorist's bomb on April 16. In particular, he recalled one instance when Ruzicka pulled up in front of Ewing's house with a newly bought car and tried out the thunderous horn. “I didn't care how the car drove,” Ewing recalled her saying. “I just wanted something with a loud horn.”
Ruzicka did more than get people's attention. Through her organization, Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, she got them to support her cause. In April 2003, Senator Patrick Leahy, after prompting from Ruzicka, introduced a bill that allocated funds for civilian victims of the war in Afghanistan. Eventually, he won appropriations totaling about $30 million for programs for civilians affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This May, Congress voted to rename one of those programs, the Civilian Assistance Program, the “Marla Ruzicka Iraqi War Victims Fund.”
In Iraq, Ruzicka won wide admiration for the way she reached out to people who'd been injured in the war -- and the families of civilian casualties -- and helped them file claims for restitution from the U.S. government. Of course, not everybody was impressed; nine days after her death, conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel -- a self-styled ombudsperson of the Arab-terrorism nexus and its presumed collaborators -- contended in a piece for David Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine.com that Ruzicka's work had detracted from the efforts of the U.S. military. Her death from a suicide car bomb that also killed her colleague Faiz Ali Salim, wrote Schlussel, was “poetic justice.”
Schlussel's opinion was definitely not shared by those in attendance at the memorial. The group included many usual suspects, like Senators Leahy and Dianne Feinstein, Bobby Muller of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, author Peter Bergen, Ralph Nader; and any number of scruffy-looking war photographers and foreign correspondents. But it also included some unusual ones, with several military officers in attendance. Jonathan Tracy, a former captain who processed claims for Iraqi civilians, said he used to go jogging at dawn with Ruzicka on a path that led to the Tigris River. He said he thought that she did excellent work. “Her agenda was very clear and honest. Marla was not a glory hound. Nor did Marla have any anti-military agenda. Her only agenda was to get assistance,” he wrote in a letter that was read aloud by Captain Keith Bracey at the memorial service.
At a reception afterward in Adams Morgan, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a Pentagon public-affairs officer, drank a gin and tonic and talked about Ruzicka. “Her death really affected me,” he said. “It was the first time since the start of the war that I cried.”
Tara McKelvey is a Prospect senior editor.
