Angel Of Mercy

[NATO AIR]

I posted this because I just talked to a corpsman onboard this ship who served in Afghanistan during Enduring Freedom. He remembers her fondly, a woman who truly cared for Afghans and respected the military folks who she worked with, rather than worked against. From his words and that of other military folks posted in Stars & Stripes, I think she is worthy of our praise and our condolences.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7561275/site/newsweek/

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.
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