The good soldier
Bob Zangas finally got the chance to practice journalism.
And it cost him his life.
By Cheryl Nedderman

Bob Zangas poses next to an Iraqi flag on a Baghdad rooftop. He shared his thoughts and photos of Iraq at zangasiniraq.militarypages.com

"I am still not worried about my personal safety. Am I brave? No, I don’t think so. Is it naiveté? Most probably. But, golly, there is a job to do, and we all can’t hide under our shell and expect to get it done. Besides, I get danger pay, and I must earn it!”
– Lt. Col Robert Zangas

Since he graduated from the University of Colorado School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1982, Robert “Bob” Zangas (‘82), 44, hoped he would work in journalism. His wife, Brenda, says photography was one of his life passions.

But family pressure directed the Broadcast News major into the military. Following his father, Chuck, a military pilot, Zangas joined the Marines out of college, and by the time he retired late last year, he was a well-respected lieutenant colonel in the Marine Reserves. He never came close to working in journalism. In civilian life he was a Qwest software salesman in suburban Pittsburgh.

That all changed last winter, however, when shortly after a tour of duty in Iraq and his retirement from the military, Zangas was appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the temporary governing body in Iraq, to help restore and rebuild Iraqi television and radio stations. Zangas was thrilled with the appointment and soon found himself on a plane back to Iraq.

“This time, however, I am a civilian: wearing civilian clothes, growing my hair, and singing Kumbya [sic] on my guitar. That means I’ll be hanging out with members of the media, journalists and other folks bent on spreading the news about what is happening here in Iraq.  I may even get a chance to do some good!” wrote Zangas in his first entry of a Web log that he maintained during his four-month stint in Iraq.

His brother, John, an attorney who represents war veterans for the American Legion in Washington, D.C., admits that their family was worried when he chose to go back to Iraq.

“After all, it was his third time in the country,” he says, noting that he also served in the Gulf War. “But he volunteered to go back and loved what he did so much. How could you argue? I think he finally found the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Brenda Zangas, who lives in Pittsburgh, agrees. “Bob had come full circle,” she says. “He finally started coming into what he had always wanted to do.”

Zangas said his blog, zangasiniraq.militarypages.com, was his opportunity to show people what Iraq is really like, “what you don’t see on the headline news stories.”

But the blog, his first journalistic endeavor, was also his last. On March 10, Zangas, coalition staffer Fern Holland and their interpreter were gunned down in their Jeep in the town of Hilla, about 50 miles south of Baghdad. Holland, a Washington, D.C., attorney, was working to establish women’s rights in Iraq.

Zangas and Holland were the first two U.S. civilian casualties in Iraq.

According to news reports, the four men arrested in connection with the slayings were police officers trained by U.S. forces. The men reportedly were working in conjunction with a loyalist of imprisoned Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, raising new suspicions that insurgents were infiltrating Iraqi security forces.

Polish troops working in the region reportedly said that the police officers stopped Zangas and his colleagues at a checkpoint and shot them to death. The FBI is still investigating the incident.

One of the last photos he posted was of U.S. trained Iraqi police officers at a checkpoint, describing them as "these brave guys."

Ironically, in the last entry of his blog, Zangas posted a photograph that he took of three Iraqi police officers he had passed at an earlier checkpoint. The caption read, “I did slow down at a checkpoint to get a shot of these brave guys. They are more of a target than Americans these days. Friendly to a ‘T.’ ”

John Zangas says his brother always managed to find the “positive side of people.” But, as reflected by the eulogies and comments made about Zangas since his death, it was he who was “friendly to a ‘T.’ ”

Sheila Mullan, a reporter at Market News International in New York, was one of Zangas’ classmates at CU. She lived in Nichols Hall, now Cheyenne Arapahoe, with Zangas in their freshman year. “He was a fabulous guy with a million-dollar smile, sparkling blue eyes, a great sense of humor, kindness, decency and just a good sense of how to live his life as a decent fellow,” she says.

Zangas, tall with dark hair, had an athletic physique. He was an avid jogger, a habit he learned as a child living on military bases, one that he continued while in Iraq. Zangas had one daughter and two sons: Shannon, 10; Scott, 5, and Jacob, 3. John Zangas says that Bob Zangas’ blog, while written for a larger audience, was really intended as a letter to his children. John Zangas says that is why he included photographs of Iraqi families, particularly fathers and their children.

“First and foremost,” Brenda Zangas says, “Bob was a dad. He loved his children more than anything. But he was also a humanitarian, a gentle and likable person.”

An uphill battle

My particular job will be getting them all the tools that they will need to make their job somewhat easier. I’ll be spending a lot of money to outfit them with everything from computers to video cameras. The media is such a huge player in the way the new government will be portrayed. I feel quite lucky in that I am right in the thick of things. Which brings me to my first sentence. I’m just ‘Bob.’ I have to remember that.”

Zangas initially went to Iraq to teach the members of the Iraqi media about free press. “Picture this,” he wrote. “Saddam’s government told them what to say, when to say it and how to say it, etc. Most often, the folks in Baghdad said it for them and just had the local guys air it on television, radio or in the newspapers.”

Just how “free” the new press is in Iraq, however, has come under some scrutiny. The online news source Indymedia reported that Paul Bremer, leader of the CPA and former U.S. envoy to Iraq, ordered press censorship in an effort to combat growing anti-American sentiment in Iraq. The report said Zangas condoned an Iraqi television station’s failure to cover a demonstration by Shiite clerics, saying that broadcasting the protest against U.S. troops “doesn’t really fit into our philosophy.”

After a few weeks in Iraq, Zangas realized that he would need to do far more than just teach Iraqis the elements of reporting. He first had to repair the infrastructure so that what they reported could be broadcast. On his blog, he posted photographs of makeshift, soundproof studios, cassette recorders, circa 1970, and dangerously cluttered electrical poles. About the electrical system in Iraq, he wrote, “They buy some wire, find a ladder, run the wire into their homes, and they are in business.”

In one blog entry, Zangas told of the “Arabic Grapevine,” the local oral communication network in Iraq. “Yes there are phones. Yes we can get the Internet. But nothing is as fast as the Grapevine,” he joked.

Bob Zangas frequently posted photos on his Web pages. Families and children, like the one here of a father and his daughters, were favorite subjects.

Making sense of the clutter and providing more up-to-date alternatives became Zangas’ passion, but it was also his nemesis. In the final few entries in his blog, he admitted frustration with the Iraqi people. Wondering if he was making any difference at all, he wrote, “If you give something or do something for an Iraqi, he will just want another or something more.”

Still, John Zangas recalls how his brother used his money to buy pens and writing pads for the children of Aziziyah, the town where he was stationed. He even bought some of them new shoes. “People in town regarded him as the town mayor,” his brother says. “Ordinary people wouldn’t have functioned well there, but his early exposure to foreign countries gave him respect and understanding.”

International beginnings

“I have a different perspective on this place. I work with people from all over the world and Americans who have been all over the world. But I seem to be the only one who has a burning desire to get out into town and the outlying villages and get up and close to the sights and smells of the Iraqi people.”

Bob Zangas was born in William Country, Va., into a military family. When he was a teen-ager, a military assignment took his family to Iran. Brothers Bob and John attended high school at the American School of Isfahan, an English-speaking school for the children of American and British contractors and soldiers.

John Zangas says that while they were in Iran, the two would frequent the outdoor markets. It was there, taking pictures of the markets, that Bob Zangas developed his affinity for photography, his brother says, adding that he also developed an interest in Arabic culture while living in Iran.

The Zangas brothers spent their childhood running physical fitness tests with their father’s Marine platoon. John remembers Bob always trying to outdo the soldiers. “It was kind of known in our family that Bob would someday join the Marines,” says John, himself a Marine for six years. “We both joined around the same time. He stayed around, perhaps too long.”

As a teenager in Iran, and later as a CU student, Bob Zangas proved that he had the thrill-seeking approach to life necessary to motivate one to go to Iraq three times. Zangas family legend says that on a trip from Iran to Cairo, Egypt, Zangas and his childhood friend scaled the Great Pyramid of Giza. When the two reached the summit after three hours of climbing, they launched a Frisbee from the top of the pyramid. Sheila Mullan, Zangas’ classmate at CU, also recalls vividly when Zangas and a friend climbed the walls of Nichols (Cheyenne Arapahoe) Hall. “I still can’t figure out how they did it,” she says. “It was a steep brick wall with no footholds.”

Zangas loved to climb, run and being outdoors – activities he pursued all his life. On one excursion in Colorado, Zangas took his brother to St. Mary’s Glacier. The two stood at the edge of a cliff, looking down at the cold water of the lake below. John Zangas says he was too scared to jump. But Bob, he recalls, looked at him and said, “You only live once,” and jumped in.

Weeks before he was killed in Iraq, Zangas wrote a comment printed in the CU Buff Alum notes. Alums were asked to explain why they are proud to a graduate of CU. “Colorado is beautiful – the weather, the people, the scenery,” he wrote. “When I tell people I graduated from the University of Colorado, I talk about CU and the beautiful memories. I think the listeners of my story become envious.”

Just before his death, Zangas was in touch with faculty members at the CU School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He ex-changed e-mails, getting advice about what to teach Iraqi journalists and updating them about his activities in the country.

In an e-mail to Meg Moritz, associate dean and professor in the journalism school, he wrote, “Iraq is mostly exotic with a lot of contrasting sights: Dirty, smelly in parts; palm trees and that perfect picnic spot in other parts. The people are the best part, however. They are generous and friendly. They seem so genuine.”

Bravery and honors

“So, today, I risked my personal safety and attended another meeting with passionate Iraqi people! (Medal of Honor, here I come!)”

Zangas was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom, the civilian equivalent of the Medal of Honor, for his service with the CPA in Iraq.

He had shown evidence of bravery and leadership throughout his life. Marcella Bombardieri, a journalist for The Boston Globe who was in Iraq covering the war, credits Zangas with saving her life. Bombardieri reports that she and four other journalists were surrounded by a mob of Iraqi protesters. In an article for the Globe, she writes that Zangas, then working for the CPA, intervened, calmed the crowd and, according to her reports, saved their lives. John Zangas says he didn’t know about the incident until he read about it in the paper. He notes that his modest brother rarely sought recognition for his achievements. In addition to family and friends, more than 100 Marines attended Zangas’ funeral in Level Green, Pa., on March 18. John Zangas says his brother would have been embarrassed by the turnout.

In an e-mail interview, Staff Sgt. Eric Johnson, a Marine from Alexandria, Va., who served in Iraq with Zangas during the Gulf War, says, “He was an excellent leader, trusted by his men, and that is the highest compliment you can give an officer.”

Anthony J. Rivera, another Marine from Virginia who served under Zangas during the Gulf War, agrees. “He was someone who was respected by his peers and subordinates alike. But he really connected with his subordinates, unlike most military leaders of his rank. Junior Marines felt comfortable enough around him that they would joke with him and looked forward to going out on missions with him.”

Marine Col. Steven E. McKinley gave the eulogy at Zangas’ funeral. “He was a great guy. Indeed, he was,” he said. “We are a better world for having had Bob a part of it. We will never forget you, Bobby.”

“My heart goes out,” says John Zangas, “to all the families who will have to go through what we did.”