Personally I think he was just there trying to get work fixing towers, and it seems that he was what we would call an adrenalin junkie, he was ther because it was dangerous and challenging.
Posted on Sun, May. 16, 2004
R E L A T E D L I N K S
• Peace is the answer, Berg's father says
• U.S. kills 18 loyalists of radical cleric Sadr
• Rumsfeld OKd prison plan, report says
• More on Iraq
A life lived fearlessly, but lost too soon
Idealistic, trusting, brash, Nick Berg went to Iraq to help. It cost his life.
By Sandy Bauers
Inquirer Staff Writer
He was 26 years old.
He introduced himself in Arabic as bogdne - "tower guy."
He traveled the Iraqi countryside, climbing 1,000 feet into the air to inspect and repair communications towers.
In chatty, quirky e-mails to family and friends, he sounded upbeat, even happy.
He came across as someone who felt safe, someone on a mission that was worthwhile. With a bit of adventure tossed in.
But by the time Nick Berg was released after 13 days in an Iraqi prison, hostilities had escalated dramatically.
By then, getting from his Baghdad hotel to the airport and a flight home was the equivalent of "crossing a pit of fire to get to the golden oasis," said a friend, Tom Clardy.
Berg checked out of his Baghdad hotel about 7 a.m. on April 10 and told the receptionist, "Inshallah [God willing], I will be back in a few days."
A porter put his bags on a cart and they walked toward busy Saadoun Street. But the U.S. Army had blocked it. A soldier motioned for them to turn around.
The porter dropped the bags and turned back. Berg picked them up and kept walking.
His decapitated body was found 28 days later, on May 8, at a Baghdad highway overpass.
•
Prometheus Methods Tower Service Inc. was the whimsical name Nick Berg cooked up for his West Chester company.
According to Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from heaven and gave it to man.
Maybe Berg had a little of that brashness in him, too.
At the base of a radio tower taller than One Liberty Place, he'd grab hold and begin climbing. Sometimes it would take two hours to get to the top.
On the way, he'd inspect the structure, the guy wires, electrical cables. He'd repair things.
He'd done it in Texas and across the Mid-Atlantic. On Dec. 21, he left to do the same thing in Iraq.
After a conference about business opportunities in Iraq, he hooked up with Aziz Taee, Philadelphia director of the American-Iraqi Council, who agreed to give him Baghdad office space.
Berg's family said he was an idealist who had traveled to Third World countries on other projects. He wanted to help.
He quit several colleges. A hands-on guy, he disdained "the kind of job where the engineers are afraid to get their Jaguars dirty," his father said.
"The game plan was to make the towers in Iraq serviceable again," said Berg's U.S. foreman, Scott Hollinger.
In the north, Berg inspected a tower at a broadcast site near Kurdish-controlled territory.
It was kind of un-nerving to inspect this thing with so many incongruities... . Still, it was beautiful, a really superb piece of engineering nestled on a beautiful riverside... .
Before visiting a country, Berg would immerse himself in its culture, history and language, Hollinger said. He read Livingstone before he went to Africa. When he went to Iraq, he was reading A.J. Barker's Arab-Israeli Wars.
He always carried a copy of the Torah, Hollinger said. "He was a glutton for information. It wouldn't surprise me that he had the Koran with him, too."
The night before he went home from that first trip, Berg was mugged, Taee said. "I was always pressuring him to keep a low profile, but he ignored all my caution and advice." He was out late at night and took public transport.
When Berg got home on Feb. 1, "we breathed a sigh of relief," his father said.
His parents hadn't wanted him to go. They'd been afraid for him. They had even done their best to talk him out of it. At least now he was home safe.
Then he shocked them again.
He said he was going back.
•
Nick Berg infuriated his family sometimes.
He was so trusting, he'd leave his apartment door unlocked.
He believed in people.
He didn't believe, Michael Berg said, "that people would" - he paused - "do things."
Back in high school, he was the energetic one, the one who was outgoing, funny, inquisitive. The one who was always rigging up a zany device to demonstrate a physics principle.
They should have known he'd go to high places, his family and friends joked. On a family trip to the Grand Canyon, he went to the edge. When the 2000 Republican National Convention came to town, he went to the ceiling to rig wires.
He was fearless.
•
Nick Berg left the second time for Iraq on March 14.
He invited Taee to go to Mosul with him, but Taee said it was too dangerous.
By now, lots of tower companies were in Iraq. Hollinger said Berg looked to be more of a service broker.
He was compiling a database of all the towers in Iraq and what they needed. He had a likely customer: Harris Corp., a company with a $96 million contract.
"He climbed every tower in Iraq," Hollinger said. "He didn't care if he had to climb them in the dark. That was his nature."
The game plan was to score a contract, Hollinger said. Berg wanted to cover his costs.
But he also had a wedding to go to. A friend, Doug Strickland, was getting married April 3.
Berg was to be on a March 30 flight from Jordan to New York.
Michael Berg met the plane, but Nick wasn't on it.
•
April 2 was Nick Berg's birthday, and he spent it in an Iraqi prison, doing push-ups.
He was placed in an Iraqi police cell block with 70 criminals. He found humor in it, comparing it to the song "Alice's Restaurant": "I felt... like Arlo Guthrie walking into a cell full of mother-rapers and father-stabbers as an accused litterbug."
By April 2, he had already been in prison nine days. Just two days earlier, the FBI had come to the Bergs' home to ask them about Nick; the Bergs felt they had verified who he was.
But still, Nick wasn't released.
On April 5, they filed a federal suit, claiming he was being held illegally by the U.S. military.
But the question that rankled and escalated last week was: Who was really holding Nick Berg?
The U.S. government said the Iraqi military kept him. A Mosul police official said they didn't.
Michael Berg produced an April 1 e-mail from a U.S. consular officer in Iraq: "I have confirmed that your son, Nick, is being detained by the U.S. military in Mosul. He is safe... ."
A government official later said the e-mail was in error.
U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter has vowed to sort out the truth. "The inquiries will be very intense," the Pennsylvania Republican said.
Meanwhile, various news events swirled around the vortex that had become Nick Berg.
It turned out that the FBI had questioned him a few years ago over a possible connection to accused 9/11 coconspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. Michael Berg said Nick had simply shared his computer with a fellow student at the University of Oklahoma. It was a coincidence.
But apparently, when Berg revealed that to FBI officials in Iraq, it delayed his release.
Michael Berg has contended that if his son had been released earlier, he would be home safe today. The "terrorist" connection enraged him.
"In the '50s, if you called someone a communist, you didn't have to prove it; just calling him a communist relieved him of all his rights," he said. "And that's what the word terrorist means today."
•
After he got out of prison, was Nick Berg scared?
"It's kind of difficult to say," Michael Berg said. "You're talking about a 26-year-old male who would like the world to believe he's not scared of anything. But... reading between the lines, I'd have to say yes."
The government says he refused its offer to "facilitate safe passage" out of the country.
Hollinger thinks he knows why Berg might have been reluctant to leave: "He was close to getting some... contracts."
The days after his release are murky territory. One guest at Berg's hotel told a reporter they had had beers together and Berg had told him he intended to go sailing in Turkey.
Hollinger can't believe it. "Nick never had a beer in his life. He was absolutely vice-free."
Berg told his parents he was looking for a way out. He might go through Kuwait. Or get to Turkey. He felt it was too dangerous to try to get to the airport on the other side of Baghdad.
Michael Berg told him on April 9: "Use your judgment. Get home as fast as you can. But don't take any chances."
They never heard from him again.
Aziz Taee did, however. He said Berg called him April 10 "to say he found some friend to travel with to Jordan... . I told him to have a nice trip."
Now, amid the outpouring of concern and compassion, some have wondered why Nick Berg was there in the first place.
He was an anomaly: alone, unauthorized, a guy trying to find work. Was his idealism misplaced or naive?
On April 14, four days after Berg disappeared, the U.S. Commerce Department held a conference in Philadelphia to promote working and investing in Iraq.
William H. Lash 3d, chairman of the department's Iraq and Afghanistan Reconstruction Task Force, said: "Don't think of it as an economic opportunity; think of it as a moral obligation."
•
Last week, a militant group released a video of Nick Berg in an orange jumpsuit, his hands and ankles bound, as five masked men stood behind him and read a statement.
Then one of them pulled out a very large knife.
The Defense Department confirmed that the voice on the gruesome video was that of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The confirmation "is highly significant," Specter said. "That makes it squarely an al-Qaeda operation... . There now appears to be clear-cut evidence of a connection between al-Qaeda and the insurgency and the militia action in Iraq today."
•
Nick Berg came home on a military transport plane after all. His body was flown home to U.S. soil Wednesday.
The family had requested permission to meet the plane in Dover. It was denied.
They spent the week grieving inside their home under the intense scrutiny of worldwide media, condolences pouring in from around the globe, flower arrangements piling up in front of the house.
Occasionally, a family member would come out to ask the media to go away and to beg that they not attend the memorial service. Those requests were denied, too.
On Thursday, Michael Berg made angry comments about President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying they had as good as caused his son's death. He planted an antiwar sign in his yard.
While Nick Berg had supported this country's intervention in Iraq, Michael Berg vehemently opposed it. Long ago, they had just agreed to disagree.
On Friday morning, as flags throughout Chester County flew at half-mast, Nicholas Evan Berg was buried in Jenkintown.
That afternoon, hundreds of people filed into a West Chester synagogue to memorialize the man they had lost - grandson, son, brother, student, friend.
Yesterday morning, Michael Berg came out onto his front lawn one more time. He straightened the peace sign, which had blown over, and declared, "If peace is radical, I'm a radical."
He said he knew "in my heart that the vast majority of people in this country and in Iraq... want peace."
But, he said, "we're not politicians. We're not power-brokers... . We're people out here cutting our grass on a Saturday morning.
"What we want is peace, and what we want is our sons and our daughters back."
I dont think Mr. Berg and Nick agreed on politics at all, Nick Berg was a Bush supporter according to his friends. JMHO