‘Atonement’: A Veteran’S Journey From Haunting To Reconciliation

‘ATONEMENT’: A VETERAN’S JOURNEY FROM HAUNTING TO RECONCILIATION

Huffington Post
Oct 29 2012

Joseph Bobrow. Founder and president, Coming Home Project

There is a powerful article in this week’s New Yorker by reporter
Dexter Filkins tracing the intersections, tragic and redemptive,
among the lives of Filkins, Lu Lobello, a marine who served in Iraq,
and the Kachadoorian family, Armenian Christians living in Iraq after
the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Also check out the interview
of Filkins and Lobello on Fresh Air.

Lobello’s unit, Fox Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-third Marine
Regiment, became caught up in a chaotic and confusing street battle
and fired on the three Kachadoorian cars that were carrying the
family back to safety after the fail-safe home they had fled to was
destroyed by bombings. The marines killed all the males in the family,
two husbands and one son. The article vividly describes the impacts
of the killings on Lobello and his fellow marines, Lobello’s search
for Nora and Margaret Kachadoorian, the surviving daughter and mother,
and their meeting, set up by Filkins years later in the family’s home
in Glendale, California.

It is a finely hewn, graphic, and potent account of the emotional,
moral and spiritual impacts of war, and one marine’s passionate search
for meaning and forgiveness. The story also poignantly conveys the
anguish of the family and the farther reaches of human forgiveness.

Their in-person meeting is not a conflict-free love fest, however;
rather, we see everyone struggling with the powerful nuanced emotions
and conflicts reignited, as they stretch their hearts and minds
toward healing.

Read and listen, weep, feel how war is hell, and understand the arduous
journey to true “reintegration,” as it passes through unspeakable
anguish, through compassion for others and for oneself.

This draws on the redemptive human alchemy that can transform ghosts
into ancestors.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress