December 5, 2007

"I returned to Istanbul last Tuesday through Sunday to interview and draw the portraits of victims and survivors of the Blackwater shootings last September 16 and September 9, It was very very sad that trip.  The most heart wrenching interview came when we spoke with a man who lost his wife and son.  He spoke in English and was extremely articulate, at times even poetic, and listening to his descriptions of his love for his wife and son, and their love for their family, their hopes and accomplishments was heart breaking and leaves a wound that every American should try to feel as we glibly say of such violence, "Well, bad things happen in a war."  At one point in his testimony, he told of an American bureaucrat who he spoke with after the shootings, who insisted that he fix a monetary price for his loss, and after refusing several times, he turned on his interviewer and said, "What kind of price could you imagine putting on your wife and child?"
 
This man, in his 40's, is a doctor; his wife was a doctor (they met in med. school) and their son was in med school.  He was their oldest child; there are two surviving children.  The son and mother were driving home from having dropped the father off at his hospital when the son was shot by a Blackwater gunman, the gunman apparently simply shooting "warning shots" across a traffic square.  His body slumped forward, and the car, an automatic, rolled forward, the mother screaming "m\My son, my son."  The Blackwater gunmen from the four car envoy and a couple of helicopters then opened their machine guns and for 15 minutes showered the square with bullets, killing 16 people and wounding many others.  The mother and son's car exploded, and only pieces of their burned and shattered bodies were later found.  Among others, we interviewed the father, (who went to the morgue and identified the remains of his wife and son -- a piece of jaw in which he recognized his wife's dental work, a detached piece of foot in a sneaker he asked his second son to identify as his dead son's -- can you imagine that?), and the traffic cop that had attempted to pull the mother from the car when the son was first shot.  
 
That was the worst story, but we heard others as well.  War is unjust and evil in all ways, and this story of how the violence effects the civilian population is just one illustration."

Daniel Heyman