I was paddling about the ocean-view pool at the Ritz Carlton Bali last Sunday, the most important decision on my mind being the flavor of the next cold beer I'd order and whether late check-out could be extended till the evening, when bikini-ed J beckoned from the deck, waving my cell and looking concerned.
We're talking a well deserved break from a month of consecutive 14-hour work days in Banda Aceh and luxuriating in the wake of a friend's heart-warming Bali wedding so I'm not handling 'concerned' very well.
"It's Joe. He says its important."
If Big Joe is calling from Bangkok to drag me out of the pool he's gotta have a good reason. I hate these moments.
"Dude, I hate to interrupt you on your holiday but m'afraid I've got bad news. Marla Ruzicka is dead. Looks like a suicide bomber on the road out to Baghdad airport."
For a moment I'm dead silent. The name I know but I'm struggling for a face.
"Sorry, Big Joe. Help me out."
"Marla," he says. "Marla."
Damn. I'm not sure I ever knew her family name.
Lovely, focused, irritating, bubbly, Bay-area surfer-girl, Marla. Marla of Kabul, lately of Baghdad. And a hundred other places none of us will ever go. Marla the shit-disturber. Marla the befriender of bitter South African mercenaries, inebriated war-hardened journalists, or orphaned children, widowed mothers.
Sofa-surfing, satellite-phone borrowing, impecunious, slightly pigeon-toed, Marla. Kaftan-wearing, big-toothed, joint-rolling, cocktail pouring, "let's wander down Chicken Street and... ohmygod is that old Arani under that ratty old burkha begging outside the Mustapha hotel.... AIRRAAAANNIII"... Marla. That Marla.
Marla who single-handedly, through sheer force of character and go-gettum gumption drove the US government to distraction with her quiet demands for an accounting of the civilian dead in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Who - it is not an overstatement - alone developed the political savy of the beltway boys and the tongue of a career diplomat to extract millions of dollars in compensation for the victims of American bombs.
Marla, who despite her noteriety by that time sailed past the concertina wire, security checks and leashed German Shepards into a press conference at the US embassy in Kabul in early 2002 to nail down the oily special representative from DC in the $1,500.00 suit on the issue of compensation. And in the process, did a clinic on "conforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" that shamed the assembled A-list of journos.
And now some evil sonofabitch has gone and killed her.
One report a couple of days ago quoted a US soldier at the scene saying she survived the initial blast with severe burns to 90 per cent of her body. He told a reporter that she said, "I'm still alive."

Marla's being buried today in California and I'm going to go home and read Annie Proulx till sleep comes.

(Here's a couple of recent pieces; Pam from the WashPost knew her better than most.)


A Disarming Presence In a Dangerous World
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 19, 2005; Page C01
It was an especially bleak moment on a frozen night in Afghanistan, just before Thanksgiving in 2001. An assortment of grizzled correspondents was crammed into a filthy hotel. That week four of our colleagues had been ambushed and killed by gunmen on the highway to Kabul, and we were all in shock. One evening several of us were lingering over coffee in the dining room, too depressed to head back to our rooms to work.
Out of nowhere, a perky blond apparition materialized at the table. She looked about 16, and she was wearing pajamas with cartoon animals under an Afghan robe. She introduced herself as Marla and started chirping about how she had just come from California to work on human rights issues.
We all stared at each other in disbelief. She seemed so young and vulnerable that we were seized with the identical, protective thought: Marla, go home.
But Marla Ruzicka stayed on, working to bring public awareness and official help to the plight of war victims in Afghanistan. Later she moved her one-woman human rights crusade to Iraq, where she was killed Saturday in a suicide bombing at age 28.
In Kabul, she flitted like a cheerful sprite through our hard-bitten war correspondents' world, alighting on our couches for the night and floating off with a backpack in the morning. She never had any money, but she had an amazing knack for organizing parties, procuring hidden vodka and making foreigners in a war-ruined Muslim capital feel at home.
Everyone stationed in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban knew her. The men fell in love with her and the women were reminded of themselves, a decade or two younger. At first, Ruzicka seemed too much of a flower child to be taken seriously. Ivan Watson of National Public Radio recalled her kick-boxing with the Afghan cook in the back yard of his house; another correspondent described her giving everyone back rubs after long days.
I remember her scribbling little thank-you notes and invitations with smiley faces on them, and yet another correspondent recalled that when she was leaving Kabul, Ruzicka came to her house early that morning with a gift and a long goodbye note. Over each letter "i" was a heart instead of a dot.
Ruzicka was far from a simpering sandalista. There was a determined agenda behind her ditsy persona, an earnest sense of purpose that enabled her to charm her way through military checkpoints and wring pledges of aid for war victims from congressional offices. While no one was paying much attention, she began systematically compiling data on casualties and damages that resulted from the U.S.-led attack on Kabul. In the spring of 2002, she led a group of Afghan families to the gates of the heavily guarded American embassy to demand compensation for the victims.
After that, we all viewed her with new respect.
"Marla had no guile. There was a complete lack of cynicism, a total selflessness in what she did," said Catherine Philp, a foreign correspondent for the Times of London and one of Ruzicka's closest friends, speaking from New Delhi. "We live in such a jaded community, and she alone seemed untouched. She was like an angel of life, but an angel with a broken wing. It made her seem so fragile that everyone wanted to help her."
After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Ruzicka shifted her efforts to Iraq. By then she had founded a Washington-based organization called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. She shifted from handwritten notes to a barrage of e-mails to friends, journalists and congressional offices. She was still broke, but by the time she arrived in Iraq, many Kabul correspondents had also shifted to Baghdad, so she found a plethora of couches to crash on.
Her mission was the same: to document the damage done to Iraqi civilians and their homes by the war. Baghdad was a far more dangerous place to work than Kabul, with foreigners exposed to far greater risks from suicide bombings, sniper fire and kidnappings. Major news organizations acquired armored cars and armed guards, and many Western journalists were confined to their homes or hotels much of the time.
Once again, Ruzicka took on the role of hostess and hovering angel for the exhausted and stressed-out Baghdad press corps. Richard Leiby of The Washington Post recalled her throwing a party called "Baghdad Needs Some Love." I saw her only a few times during my brief visits to Iraq, but she forged close friendships with full-time correspondents, and her e-mails mixed breezy, Valley Girl jargon with emotional appeals for her project to document and seek compensation for victims of wartime violence.
"She happily reminded me of many of the Greenpeace kids I worked with in the 1980s . . . a bulldog of energy with absolutely no constituency or power," said William Arkin, a peace activist and military affairs writer who worked with Ruzicka in Iraq. Even hardened generals and policymakers, he wrote in an e-mail to a friend Sunday, were disarmed by a beautiful "spitfire of disorganization" who badgered and begged for their help.
Despite her youth, Ruzicka, a native of Lakeport, Calif., had spent much of the last decade as a volunteer for political causes, visiting Cuba and Israel while attending Long Island University, and later joining Global Exchange, a nonprofit group that promotes concern for world poverty and suffering.
While in Iraq, the diminutive Ruzicka ventured out to places few other foreigners dared go, visiting families who had lost relatives or homes in military or terrorist attacks. She took limited precautions, traveling with a single Iraqi assistant and driver, Faiz Ali Salim, who was also killed Saturday by the suicide bombing on a road near the Baghdad airport. Her only protection was the thin disguise of a traditional black abaya, from which wisps of telltale blond hair constantly strayed.
Peter Baker, a Post reporter, first met her in Afghanistan in 2001. "She looked like a high school girl. I remember thinking she was going to get herself killed," he said.
But over time, she became such a familiar presence in war-torn settings, and exuded such an ethereal quality, that she seemed somehow impervious to the evils of war.
"There are so few truly good souls anywhere, but especially in that part of the world," Baker said. "It never occurred to me to think she would be in danger."
For all her moxie, Ruzicka confided to friends that she endured periods of deep self-doubt and anxiety. Despite her nurturing nature, she sometimes seemed to hint at the realization of her own vulnerability. In one recent e-mail to a journalist friend, she signed off with a casual "good vibes to you," but she also added this darker sentence: "I need angels in my life."


Angel of Mercy Marla Ruzicka was one of a kind. The Baghdad death of the unorthodox young aid worker has devastated those who knew her.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Christopher Dickey
Paris Bureau Chief, Middle East Regional Editor
Newsweek
Updated: 2:48 p.m. ET April 19, 2005

April 19 - The last e-mail Marla Ruzicka sent me was in January, when I’d just gotten out of Iraq after a brief visit, and she was getting ready to go in for a long one. She said she’d had a rough few months, since the last time we’d seen each other there, and I asked her what she meant, and how she was doing. Marla, 28, was unforgettably energetic and excited and committed and funny, a quintessential ultra-blonde California girl as goofy at first glance as a young Goldie Hawn, but as genuinely committed to helping people as, well, as anybody I ever met in my life, and more effective than most. Her cause was support for the victims of war; her specialty was cajoling and compelling the United States military to compensate the innocent people it injured and the families of those that it killed. But work in Iraq had gotten so risky that even Marla thought it prudent to stay away for a while.
How had she been feeling? Her note on Jan. 12, so frank and so trusting, was very, very Marla: “You are soooo sweet—yes I had a hard time getting used to not living in the action and some depression—which I want to be open about. I am fine now, in fact I just got out of Nepal where I was doing human rights work and now I am in Kabul—the city has changed so much and I am sooooo emotional about every building etc… I think when you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all—I am working on that—with time, I will get better. X, Marla”
But now there’s no time left. Last weekend, Marla and the Iraqi who worked with her, Faiz al Salaam, were killed along with two other people when a suicide bomber struck on the short, nasty, brutal road to Baghdad airport. And now those of us who knew Marla—the journalists she befriended, the politicians and soldiers she lobbied, the families she helped support—all of us are quite simply devastated.
Joe Cochrane, one of NEWSWEEK’s correspondents in Afghanistan during the post-9/11 war, remembers that Marla “took over Kabul almost as fast as the Northern Alliance seized it from the Taliban.” She’d been a passionate do-gooder since she was in high school. She’d flirted with different leftist organizations and causes, and she’d gotten one to pay her way to the war zone. But once she was there, she started operating on her own, and in her own special way.
“Within weeks after the city fell in 2001,” Joe recalls, “Marla was arguably the most well-known person there. It didn’t matter who you were: U.N. official, diplomat, American soldier, journalist. If you didn’t know Marla, you didn’t know s---. Dressed in a fuzzy winter coat and boots, she was a tornado, spinning into the inner circles of every cliché there to pitch the cause of civilian casualties. Then, when the work was done, you always knew Marla, a regular at the NEWSWEEK house, would have something fun to do that night. She organized dinners, barbeques, parties—even a St. Valentine’s Day dance where she played matchmaker. She was fun, she was cute, she was vibrant. She was, well, Marla.”
We keep saying that, don’t we? She was “Marla.” She was that unique.
“One of her most legendary ideas was to open a bar to raise money for her project,” Joe recalls, “and I did my part by being the guest bartender. Opening night at ‘Club Kabul’ was a smash hit, with more than 125 people ranging from aid workers to journalists to the ambassador of Italy turning out for some much needed drinks and conversation. Marla dressed in a dark lavender dress, played hostess, single-handedly allowing us to forget that we were in a conflict zone thousands of miles from home.” As if she were some Washington hostess with the mostest, she was always networking and lobbying, albeit on a shoestring and in the middle of enormous danger.
Marla asked herself wisely, and perhaps too brutally, if there was not something about war that she loved. She knew the sorrow and the fear, certainly, but she also knew there were adrenaline highs to be had, and she understood there could be something ennobling about the most horrible events. Such conflicting emotions are not uncommon in combat zones, but they are never easy to reconcile inside yourself. “When you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all.”
It’s not surprising that soldiers, always suspicious of Marla at first, often grew to revere her energy, determination and bravery. It’s also not surprising that some fellow aid workers remained hostile. Marla didn’t play by their rules, in fact. “Marla was alienated from much of the human rights community because she chose to work with the military instead of always against it,” says Scott Johnson, NEWSWEEK’s new Baghdad bureau chief, who got to know Marla in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When reporters discovered, soon after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, that the Baghdad neighborhood of Dhoura was littered with little grenade-like munitions from American cluster bombs—some of them hanging from trees, others on the hoods and roofs of cars—the journalists wrote their stories but despaired of actually getting anything done to help the people, even after three in the neighborhood were killed. One reporter told Marla. Two days later the military was in Dhoura cleaning up the bomblets and giving assistance to the families.
“In Afghanistan, she staged protests outside the U.S. embassy and a few weeks later she had won a multi-million-dollar compensation package for Afghan civilian victims,” Scott remembers. Since then, she has won more than $10 million in appropriations for Iraqi victims. Yet the last time Scott saw Marla, in Brooklyn earlier this year, he was still surprised, as one always was, by the way her wide-eyed naïveté would become cold-eyed focus whenever she talked about civilian casualties and what had to be done for them. “She went through the litany of protagonists, talking about [Sen. Bill] Frist and [Sen. Patrick] Leahy and God knows how many other senators, and what bill was coming up in what Senate appropriations committee and when, and who was going to vote for it, and who not, and if not, why not. And so on.” And then, Marla would stop herself, and laugh ebulliently, and reminisce about the bar in Afghanistan or some other adventure. And you would see how sad she was.
Marla was never naïve about the risks she ran in Iraq, and an entry on her Web site last summer was horribly prescient:
“A good friend of mine advised me to keep my movements minimal in the coming days, saying ‘Just think of all the work you will be able to do in three months when the situation is better because you were not killed by a bomb.’” But there was a job to be done, and nobody else to do it. “We have been working on submitting more compensation cases and encouraging the military to pay them out. In order to submit a case we have to drive out to the airport. The ride is not pleasant, military convoys passing every moment. Faiz and I hold our breath—such convoys in that area are the target of rockets and fire from the resistance….” It was while she and Faiz were passing a convoy last Saturday that the bomber struck.
What did Marla Ruzicka achieve? A great deal, but never quite enough to satisfy her. She worked with different organizations and eventually founded her own: The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), http://www.civicworldwide.org/, staffed mainly by volunteers. Over the last couple of days, glowing obituaries and tributes to Marla have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the war zones themselves. (Even the New York Daily News, which might once have seen Marla as an unregenerate leftist, called her “an all-American angel of mercy.”) But whether CIVIC can go on without her, and who actually will help those individuals and families she helped, is an open question.
As flighty as Marla sometimes seemed, and as complicated as she actually was, she drove home one simple and powerful point she never let any of us forget—a terrible, plain truth that too many politicians, soldiers and journalists tend to ignore when they dare to talk about the dead and wounded in war as statistics for history books. “Each number,” she’d say, “is a story of someone who left a family behind.”