Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (84 page)

BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

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Inside the shaft von Zehle had turned himself into a human beam. Halfway down the vertical tunnel, he had wedged his head up against one side of the passage and jammed his butt up against the other.This shielded Loescher and Valentine from any rubble that fell from above. Serving as a middleman on a slow assembly line of rubble removal, he continued to hope that engineering equipment would arrive. Large machinery was always cumbersome to work with and usually proved more useful for recovery of the deceased than for rescue of the living. But in this instance, since slabs of the roof and floor had fallen virtually intact, von Zehle thought holes could conceivably be drilled into the top slab, bolts could be inserted, and a crane might be able to pull an entire slab upward. Von Zehle knew the risks of using such equipment. While removing a large slab could free a person pinned below, doing so might also cause debris to shift, endangering both the survivors and the rescuers, who would need to remain in the shaft so as to stabilize the two injured men.Von Zehle also knew that sometimes collapse victims stayed alive only
because
the weight of the rubble on top of them slowed internal bleeding. He worried that rapidly removing the concrete around Loescher and Vieira de Mello might counterintuitively expedite their demise. In the United States during building collapse emergencies, rescuers would weigh these risks, relying heavily upon building plans and on structural engineers who by glancing at a site could determine which maneuvers would minimize the risk of further collapse. Here, von Zehle knew, no such layouts or building specialists were available. Nonetheless, as he helped inch the woman’s handbag up to the third floor, he hoped the assembly line would soon begin moving in the opposite direction, supplying at least the light materials and tools that would be indispensable for rescue.

But it didn’t. What Valentine and von Zehle most needed, the 1457th Engineering Battalion did not bring to Iraq: lumber.With just a few four-by-four planks or even simple plywood, they could have stabilized the shaft and become more aggressive in their removal of the rubble beneath and above the two injured men. As it was, with nothing to shore up the walls, they had to proceed gingerly. Because the U.S. Army had never responded to a car bombing of this scale nor attempted excavation in a collapsed building, it had not made stockpiling wood a priority. In Iraq, where there were almost no forests and where builders relied on cement and concrete for construction, wood was almost impossible to come by. Only as it got dark, around 7 p.m., did Major Hansen, the head of operations for the 1457th, dispatch a small quantity of the scarce lumber from Baghdad airport to the Canal.“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” says Hansen.“Rescue and recovery from a crumbled building is its own specialty. It is not something we had ever done. We did everything we could think of to help, but at the end of the day we were combat engineers, not EMTs or firefighters.” The two American medics had trouble fathoming that even basic lumber was beyond their reach.

The other items that the men needed, but which they did not really expect to receive, were the spreaders and cutters that would have allowed them to saw through rebar and I-beams inside the shaft. But while this equipment is standard issue with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and many fire departments in the United States, the army did not issue it to units in Iraq. The closest substitutes in the army stocks were gas torches, but these torches, which did not arrive at the Canal until long after dark, relied on external gas sources.Their extension cords would not have reached the base of the shaft. As a result, while the U.S. military possessed state-of-the-art war-fighting equipment, from the time of the blast at 4:28 p.m. to the time the rescue effort was terminated after dark, the most powerful military in the history of mankind was forced to rely for rescue on brute force, a curtain rope, and a woman’s handbag.

Valentine knew he was running out of time and that the cavalry was not coming. He had stabilized Loescher but needed to extract him from the hole in order to get him medical care. He was afraid that even if he managed to move the wall covering Loescher’s legs, the whole building would collapse on top of them. He decided he had no choice but to cut Loescher out of the rubble.“Gil, I have a question for you, and I want you to consider it carefully,” he said. “Are you prepared to allow me to amputate your legs?” Loescher, who was still conscious, did not hesitate. “Just get me out of here,” he said. “I want to see my family.”

Valentine had the consent of his patient, but he did not have a surgical instrument. He called up the shaft, and the GIs went scavenging around the Canal Hotel. In a few minutes they returned with a rusty carpenter’s saw and passed it down the shaft in the handbag. Valentine shrugged. This would have to do. A U.S. Army surgeon appeared at the top of the shaft, and Valentine asked his permission to begin cutting. “Do what you have to do to get him out,” the surgeon said. Valentine injected Loescher with ten milligrams of morphine, tied two bandages like tourniquets below his knees, and began using his scissors and saw to remove what was left of Loescher’s lower legs, above the ankles. Loescher fell into such a state of shock that he did not cry out in pain. After Valentine removed Loescher’s two feet, he worked with von Zehle to pry the injured man free.

Jeff Davie and Gaby Pichon were unaware that rescuers inside were so close to their boss. They continued to take turns from the right outside rear of the building, trying to dig a crevice large enough to reach Vieira de Mello. The heat was dangerous. Around ninety minutes into the attempted rescue Davie had fainted, and Pichon had pulled him out of the gap and taken over. Pichon worked furiously in the hole, but the heat quickly got to him as well, and a U.S. soldier replaced him. Davie went to get water, and when he returned ten minutes later, he asked the soldier if he was still able to speak with Vieira de Mello, and the soldier said no. It was close to 7 p.m.

The gap that Davie and Pichon had attempted to widen had seemed promising. Yet more than two hours after the explosion, they had little to show for themselves but false starts. The final demoralizing blow came when they began digging into a corner of the collapsed roof, only to realize that the “hole” that they had worked to expose at the bottom of the collapsed corner was nothing more than a hole in the insulation of one of the ceiling walls. A further four inches of concrete lay below it. They were exhausted and had run out of ideas. Davie turned to Pichon and said what neither man had been willing to admit before: “There is no way to reach Sergio from outside without lifting the roof.”
²²

Inside the shaft, Valentine had not given up. As the minutes ticked by, Vieira de Mello was growing less responsive. “I need you to work with me, Sergio. I need you to stay awake,” Valentine said, nudging him and pinching him back to consciousness. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” Vieira de Mello asked.Valentine didn’t have a good answer. For all the digging, the UN head of mission remained in the identical position he had landed in after the blast. Around 7 p.m.Vieira de Mello stopped initiating conversations but was still able to answer lucidly when spoken to. When Valentine asked, “Sergio, Sergio, are you okay?” he answered yes or no. But by around 7:30 p.m.,Vieira de Mello was responding only to painful stimuli, and his breathing was growing more labored. “You could tell he was going into shock,” von Zehle recalls.

Since Annie, Laurent, and Adrien returned to their home in Mossongy, the telephone had been ringing constantly. Annie answered hoping for news, but each time it was close friends and relatives rather than somebody in Iraq who knew something. When she telephoned UN Headquarters in New York, the officials she spoke with were watching the same broadcast on CNN and offered no additional information or grounds for hope.

Xanana Gusmão, East Timor’s president and Vieira de Mello’s close friend, turned on CNN just before he and his wife, Kirsty, went to bed in Dili. The UN blast was the top story. Initially the reports had been encouraging. The special representative had been injured, they were told, but he was being given water. He would be rescued. But as Gusmão sat transfixed by the CNN coverage over the next three hours, he grew agitated. He spotted Larriera on the television screen attempting to evade U.S. soldiers. “It’s Carolina!” Gusmão exclaimed. He began screaming at the television screen, “Let her through!” He saw a handful of men digging with their hands in the rubble. “Where are the goddamn bulldozers? Where are the saws?” he asked as he paced in front of the television. His wife was similarly flabbergasted by the primitive rescue effort. The pair stayed up watching, hoping. Gusmão continued yelling, but his anger turned to desperation. “Where are the Americans? Why aren’t they coming?!” he pleaded. He watched a muscular bald man motioning helplessly for extra help. It was Pichon. But as the minutes ticked by, Gusmão began to weep.“They’re not going to save him,” he said. “They’re going to let Sergio die.”

In fact, the rescuers in the shaft were making progress. Having amputated Loescher’s feet and wrestled him free,Valentine and von Zehle loaded him onto the curtain stretcher that Embro had devised. As the men at the top of the shaft pulled, he and von Zehle pushed from below. After 8 p.m. Loescher reached the third floor, with Valentine behind him. Valentine pulled himself out and lay down next to the stretcher, exhausted. He had been in the hole for almost three hours. “We’re up, Gil,” he said. Somehow Loescher retained partial consciousness. “Thank you,” he said. None of the medics placed high odds on Loescher’s survival, but they knew that if he could reach the U.S. Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, he would receive top-of-the-line medical care.

Embro helped carry Loescher on a litter to an ambulance, which drove around the rear of the building, where it met up with a Black Hawk helicopter. It was only then that Embro saw the site of the explosion. “Holy shit,” he said out loud. After placing Loescher in the care of others, he headed back toward the entrance of the Canal Hotel to assist in Vieira de Mello’s rescue. But as he entered, he bumped into Valentine, who was carrying his medical bag, dripping with sweat and covered in blood. “The other person didn’t make it,” he said.

Larriera had spent the first hour after the bomb scrambling between the third floor and the rubble pile at the rear of the building. She had then rushed to Tent City and unsuccessfully tried to persuade senior UN officials to assert themselves in the rescue effort. Since U.S. soldiers had blocked her attempt to get back to the Canal, she had sat down on the ground as close as she could get, beside a telephone on a plastic lawn chair. Someone told her to man the phone.

A stream of medics, U.S. soldiers, and UN officials walked past Larriera, but none paid her any attention. At around 8 p.m. an American officer passed her en route to the rear of the building. Larriera blocked his passage, and he promised he would find out how Vieira de Mello was faring. Soon after he left, a Red Cross ambulance blared by her and past the inner cordon to the Canal building. The American returned. “I have good news,” he said. “Your man has been rescued.” He pointed upward. “You see that helicopter,” he said. Larriera’s heart leaped as she eyed the Black Hawk medical helicopter in the sky. “He’s in there.” But the man said he also had bad news. “We had to amputate his legs,” he said. She sighed in relief.“As long as he is alive,” she said,“I don’t care about his legs.” But something in her gut told her the man was not credible. “How do you know that was Sergio?” she asked. “I was told by the rescuers,” he said.

Jeff Davie had refused to give up. Having exhausted all options from the outside rear of the building, he decided at last to head back to the third floor. He expected to find it cluttered with rescue personnel but instead found it vacated. A flashlight was lying at the entrance to the shaft, and Davie picked it up and shone it down upon the spot where the man who had identified himself as “Gil” had been lying. Loescher was gone, but Davie saw that the back of another person had become visible. He crawled into the shaft and quickly discerned it was Vieira de Mello.The removal of rubble and the extraction of Loescher had exposed a small pocket adjacent to the shaft where Loescher had lain.

Davie faced the back of Vieira de Mello’s head. He lay close to the concrete roof, which was what Davie had not been able to penetrate from the outside. A triangle had formed between the roof, the floor of Vieira de Mello’s office, and the black leather sofa, which had partly cushioned his fall and stopped the sliding rubble from crushing his back and head. “Sergio!” Davie shouted. “Sergio!!” There was no answer.

A group of U.S. soldiers called out from above and shone their flashlights down. One of them, a U.S. Army engineer lieutenant colonel, scaled downward and joined Davie’s effort to remove rubble. It was this U.S. engineer who first reached around Vieira de Mello’s neck, where he found no pulse. Davie, who had been working nonstop for four hours to rescue his boss, slumped in despair. He suddenly felt very tired.

Every day for the previous week General Michael Rose, the controversial British general who had commanded UNPROFOR in Bosnia, had been meaning to send Vieira de Mello an e-mail commending his recent outspokenness against the occupation. Finally, during the evening of August 19, he headed up to his study to write the note he’d been formulating in his head. “You’re taking the absolutely correct position,” he remembers writing. “If the Coalition continues to overuse force, they’ll cause more and more Iraqis to join the resistance. Hang on in there.” As Rose wrapped up the e-mail, his wife, Angela, called up the stairs. “Did you send that e-mail to Sergio?” she asked. “No, I’m just typing it up now,” he answered. “Don’t bother,” she said.

BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

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