Witness to War

By Melinda Welsh, Sacramento News & Review. Posted May 16, 2003.

The people had been waiting forever for the bombs to drop.

So, when the first of them fell out of the sky over Baghdad on March 20, Charlie Liteky was as prepared as anyone. Jarred awake just after 4am on the fourth floor of the Andalus hotel in the eastern part of Iraq’s capital city, Liteky soon was patrolling the hotel corridors floor by floor, making sure everybody was awake and ready for what was happening.

The war was finally on.

“You could feel the shock waves,” said Liteky, a former priest and Vietnam War hero. “The explosions were huge; the noise was horrendous,” he said. Every time he heard a blast, he wondered how many more innocent people were dead.

Liteky, who returned just last week to his wife Judy and their San Francisco home, spent five months in Baghdad because he felt compelled to stand in solidarity with Iraqi civilians and be an eyewitness to a war he opposed. He was not embedded, he was free to come and go as he pleased, and he was independent (for the most part) of Iraqi government “minders.” His is the saga of one peace advocate’s experiences at ground zero as the war passed from preparation to invasion to occupation.

Like many watching on TV from America, Liteky expected more firepower to be used at the start of the war. “I was expecting more in the way of shock and awe,” he said. Soon, it became clear to him and others in Voices in the Wilderness (a Chicago peace delegation that has carried out nonviolent vigils in Iraq since 1996 to protest U.N. sanctions) that residential areas of Baghdad mostly were being spared by the U.S. bombing campaign. Still, there were stray hits all around the city. “The people suffered terribly,” said Liteky. Indeed, a group that tracks and verifies casualty rates estimates that between 2,200 and 2,700 civilians were killed in the war, along with about 140 American soldiers and more than 10,000 Iraqi soldiers.

Between bombing raids, Liteky ventured out to visit sites where errant missiles had struck. He walked through demolished neighborhoods and heard horror stories about people who’d been killed or buried alive. He described sorting through the wreckage in one neighborhood where a missile had smashed four dwellings, turning them to rubble. At least three families were killed in that incident. One elderly woman had been trapped, and it took her horrified neighbors five hours to dig her out.

While visiting a hospital, Liteky saw a newly orphaned 12-year-old boy who had just undergone a bilateral amputation on both arms. Thirty percent of his body was burned below the neck. Liteky heard the boy ask the doctor, “Will I always be this way?”

Liteky offered his services to the doctor but was told the hospital didn’t need more help at that time; what it needed was medicine. Indeed, Liteky learned that during the war, surgery routinely was done at the hospital without the benefit of anesthesia.

Vigil at the Tigris

As the bombing campaign continued those first days, Liteky and a handful of others from his group determined to set up a vigil at the Al Wathba water-treatment facility located north and east of downtown Baghdad. The plant -- where flow from the Tigris River pours into various reservoirs for treatment -- supplies safe water for many in the city, with its population of 6 million. Because several treatment plants had been bombed by U.S. forces in the Gulf War of 1991, Liteky and the others decided they should position themselves there. “I felt that if that plant was bombed, that would be a war crime, and somebody had to be there to witness it.”

Within days, the other delegates decided to pursue other actions and returned to the hotel. Liteky -- the quintessential loner -- decided to remain and continue the vigil at the water facility by himself. Camped out in a small tent on a patch of dried-up lawn at the plant near one of its huge, 9-foot-deep treatment ponds, Liteky spent many days roaming the grounds alone on his bike, praying, visiting nearby bombing sites, cooking meals of eggs and squash, and listening to the war (mostly on the BBC and Voice of America) on a shortwave radio.

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