Bob Zangas improved lives and saved others in two visits to Iraq

On March 9, three civilians were killed in Iraq, shot on the road between Karbala and Hilla. US-trained Iraqi policemen are in custody. It is unclear whether the officers were working for insurgents or acting on their own. The victims were Robert J. Zangas and Fern Holland, both Americans, and Salwa Ourmashi, an Iraqi. They had touched the lives of two Globe reporters. Here are their stories.

Robert J. Zangas didn't want credit for saving my life.

Zangas, a Marine lieutenant colonel, had just rescued me and four others from being attacked by the Iraqi mob that had already set our cars on fire and looted the house we'd come to visit.

Not only was Zangas modest, but he tried to see the best in the rioters who'd kept us under siege for three hours in the belief that we'd come to town to make friends with the remnants of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party.

"The colonel thinks if we didn't get there, next time we saw you you'd be hanging from your feet," Zangas told us with a mischievous smile. "But I don't think so. They are very passionate, but I don't think they commit crimes except against property."

It was April 28, 2003, just weeks after the fall of Baghdad, before the insurgency let everyone know that more than a few Iraqis are eager to spill American blood.

Zangas, 44, finished his reserve duty six months later and came home to his wife and children in Pittsburgh. Then, feeling he had more work to do, he accepted a job with the Coalition Provisional Authority and returned to Iraq.

With Bob Zangas's death, the US lost one of its best emissaries in Iraq -- a man both savvy and hopeful, tough but also brimming with a desire to help the Iraqi people.

Zangas had more important tasks than saving random Americans in peril. On his two trips to Iraq, he was essentially doing the work of nation-building -- attending to basic human needs, getting government and local media up and running, spreading goodwill.

But that harrowing day was my window onto Bob Zangas, and it made me eternally grateful to him.

That day almost a year ago, my translator and I went to Aziziyah -- a small town south of Baghdad -- with two Army majors and their Iraqi guide. They were foreign area officers assigned to work for the US governing authority in a civilian capacity. They carried only handguns, rode in a civilian truck, and got in way over their heads.

Their task that day was to meet with local leaders and learn about the needs of the community -- electricity, school repairs, that kind of thing.

My task was to write about their work. They set up the meeting at the home of Sheik Jamal Ali al-Bateekh, a local tribal leader. But they'd failed to discover that Sheik Jamal was a Ba'athist, someone who grew rich and powerful under Hussein's regime.

Nor did they face up to the truth when we walked into Sheik Jamal's living room, two stories high and furnished with marble-topped coffee tables. Nor when protesters showed up chanting, "No to the Ba'athists!" "The whole country is former Ba'athists," one of the majors whispered to me. "You are either a Ba'athist or you're dead."

I wondered to myself, nervously: Isn't there a difference between the kind of Ba'athist who joins the party to survive and the kind who attracts angry protesters?

The meeting broke up. Some of the Iraqis explained that the protesters heard that American government representatives were in town, and wanted to know what we were doing at Sheik Jamal's.

The protest turned into a riot, with rocks crashing through the windows and lots of angry chanting. We escaped first to a second house, then to a third, but we were trapped there for a couple of hours, waiting for help. News reached us that the crowd set our two SUVs on fire.

Meanwhile, another drama unfolded outside. While I didn't see it with my own eyes, it just so happened that Zangas was being shadowed by a French TV crew, who later sent me their report.

Zangas headed a Marine Corps civil affairs unit that did similar work to that of the majors -- only Zangas seemed to be doing a better job. That morning, he was meeting with schoolteachers and engineers and checking out the impact of recent looting.

Then, alerted by the plumes of smoke rising from our SUVs on the outskirts of town, he and some of his men headed for the riot.

The first thing Zangas did was try to calm the crowd. When he heard rumors that Hussein or his sons were in the houses, Zangas raised his arms to quiet hundreds of men around him -- as many as 1,200, the Marines later told me. "Listen to me now," he exhorted, a translator by his side. "We know that Saddam Hussein is gone! We know that!"

The crowd cheered, a bald man kissed his cheek, and men lifted him up on their shoulders for an instant, in jubilation. "No, no, Saddam!" they chanted.

Then Zangas set about trying to find out if there really were Ba'athists and Americans hiding inside. But he couldn't find us in the maze of houses, and he couldn't get straight answers.

Zangas feared an ambush, and the crowd grew angrier when they saw the Marines failing to collar any Ba'athists. So Zangas and his men left, and returned later with more men and more firepower. After scouring the neighborhood, they found us, led us back over walls and through houses, and finally to a waiting Humvee.

Zangas was just visiting Aziziyah that day from his base in Kut. But he'd already figured out the lay of the land. "That guy Jamal is bad news. I'm talking to the infrastructure council, and these guys are telling me Jamal is in tight with the Ba'athists."

The majors, who weren't exactly contrite, exchanged some words with Zangas about how to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Zangas admitted it can be hard to know. But he had instincts.

"The people we're talking to are not from the upper crust; they're not driving nice cars," he told us. "Ba'athists start to talk about leadership and power. The people we deal with talk about schools and water and electricity."

Zangas was sober about the prospects for Iraq, yet had hope.

"I don't know if a country can come in and impose its 200-year plan . . . on a country that's been around for 5,000 years," he told the French correspondent. "If you look at the history books for Iraq, it's been overthrown time and time again with . . . people using it for whatever they want. . . . If democracy works, that will be great. I think it will be. Because I think these people are ready for it."

Only seeing the good Last week I called Bob's wife, Brenda, to find out a little more about him. She told me how Bob's father and brother were also Marines, how he grew up a military brat all over the United States, and even graduated from high school in Tehran.

He spent several years in the Marines on active duty before joining the reserves. He also served in the Gulf War. As a civilian, he made a living as a salesman, Brenda said.

Brenda told me how much her husband loved to help his kids with school projects or just goof off in the backyard. "Even though he was trained as a Marine, he was one of the most gentle people I have ever known," she said.

For a military man to leave his family for a while to do his job didn't seem like such a big deal -- especially when he saw how privileged his own kids, ages 10, 5, and 3, were compared with the ones he encountered in Iraq, Brenda said.

"As much as he had done -- which is a lot -- I think he still felt it wasn't enough," she said.

Zangas was doing similar work his second time in Iraq, from getting Iraqi TV and newspapers up and running to putting sandals on children's feet and handing out soccer balls. He was based in Hillah, near the ruins of Babylon.

He would have come home in June. He had e-mailed his daughter, the 10-year-old, telling her he'd soon be back to take her to the mall for sugar-coated pretzels.

Zangas was keeping an online journal, full of jokes and photos. He told of his adventures, and sometimes vented frustrations.

"There are wonderful people, interesting things to see, great work to be done, . . . all closely monitored by terrorists," he wrote in January. "This is a hard concept for me to realize because I only see the good over here."

Zangas then explained that security rules prohibited him from going out without two vehicles and at least two people with weapons. But only four guards were authorized for the job, while 10 civilian teams were trying to get out and work every day.

"I say, let me go in an un-marked car with a `koufeeyeh' (the head dress for men) on my head and I'd be safer. The terrorists are looking for two-car [convoys] anyway. They won't be looking for a skinny kid from Pittsburgh."

Zangas and his companions -- Fern Holland and Salwa Ourmashi -- may have violated that security protocol the day they died, when they were driving by themselves in an unaccompanied, unarmored car. It's easy to see why Zangas would do that -- he was trying to get things done.

". . . This is a society that is in desperate need of everything," he wrote in his last entry, dated March 1 to March 6. "It is like pouring a cup of water out in a dry desert. The water disappears and you are left with the feeling of `did it do any good?' Sometimes the answer is `yes.' Sometimes the answer is `no.' Sometimes you wait for the flower to grow. I don't mean to sound depressed because I am not. I am enjoying this work immensely. It is very gratifying -- as long as the flowers grow eventually. I have hope that they will."

Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe .com.