Angel of Mercy

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 (whose e-mail address was marlainbaghdad@yahoo.com) 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 cliche 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.