JAD ABUMRAD: Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: Well, we're still on the subject of worth, but this is a totally different take.

JAD: Yeah, and this comes from our producer Matt Kielty.

MATT KIELTY: So next a slightly different story about worth. A story that, rather than being about how much we value our own lives, is about how much we value someone else's.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Right.

MATT: And it starts with BuzzFeed writer Gregory Johnsen.

JAD: So, okay, maybe you should start with what has now become sort of the infamous wedding—wedding drone strike. Is that ...

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Right.

JAD: Was that sort of where it started for you?

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Yeah. So this strike happens in a very rugged part of Yemen where there are no paved roads, no electricity. There's no running water.

MATT: It's Thursday morning.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: December 12, 2013. And ...

MATT: Early that morning, in a small village ...

GREGORY JOHNSEN: .. a group of guys, roughly 50 to 60 people.

MATT: Including a soon-to-be-married man, pile into a bunch of cars and they started driving.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: This is the convoy. The wedding convoy.

MATT: Now in the lead car of this convoy was this man.

[ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [speaking Arabic]]

MATT: His name is Abdullah Mohammed al-Tisi. We spoke to him through an interpreter in Yemen. And Abdullah told me it was his neighbor who was the groom to be married that day. And so they were all driving up to the bride's village. Abdullah said they got there a little before noon, ate lunch, recited wedding poems.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: After lunch ...

MATT: They grabbed the bride ...

GREGORY JOHNSEN: And just a few of her bridal attendants, a few females.

MATT: And they start driving back to the groom's village for the actual wedding ceremony. Now Abdullah said that ever since they'd left that morning, through lunch, all day long, they heard this humming.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: This sort of metallic whirring, this metallic thumping overhead.

MATT: No one in the convoy could see it, but they knew what it was. A drone.

ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [through interpreter] Some sound we'd been hearing all day.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: It's nothing new for people in rural parts of Yemen by this point. They don't think anything of it.

MATT: It's common to hear those sounds.

ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [through interpreter] Yeah, it's usually heard there.

MATT: So they keep driving.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Basically if you can imagine it, they're sort of winding through these wadis, these desert mountainous places.

ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [through interpreter] The road, he said, is mountainous.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: They're all strung out on this rutted-out little dirt track.

MATT: Eleven cars, single-file.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Finally they reach this little clearing.

MATT: Up near the top of this cliff where they all slowed down and started to bunch together because apparently one of the cars had gotten a flat. Some guys got out, fixed it, got back in their cars. And right at that moment ...

GREGORY JOHNSEN: The sound shifts somehow, and then the missiles start.

MATT: Four of them ...

GREGORY JOHNSEN: In quick succession. The shrapnel is just flying everywhere.

MATT: In a blink it's over.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: People are trying to figure out what has happened. All the screaming. There's fires that are burning.

MATT: And Abdullah, his car was torn up. He had shrapnel in his face.

ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [through interpreter] Two ones in his face. One in the right hand, left thigh. One on—in the back.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: And he says that once he saw there was smoke, his first thought was, "Where's my son?"

ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [through interpreter] He was—he was looking for his son.

MATT: His son was there?

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Yeah. A young man who'd been a few cars back from them.

ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [through interpreter] The fourth car on the convey. And he was married with two boys and one daughter.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Abdullah said he could move, so he got out of his car and stumbled back toward the fourth car to find his son.

ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [through interpreter] Yeah, he said he found him just next to the car before just he died. No, he didn't talk to him. Just he looked at him and just passed away.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: So it turns out that there are 12 dead. And typically what happens in Yemen is that as soon as someone is killed they're buried very, very shortly thereafter. What happens here is something different. The people in the convoy take the bodies of the dead and they take them back to Radaa.

MATT: This big town near where the drone strike occurred.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: There's a video I have ...

MATT: That's what you're hearing. Where you see some men take these 12 dead bodies ...

GREGORY JOHNSEN: And they line them up in the street on this bright blue tarp and they sort of wrap them in these cheap blankets. And so there's this huge crowd that just gathers around to stare at these dead bodies who are laid out in the street.

MATT: And at a certain point ...

GREGORY JOHNSEN: This very tiny, very leathery old Yemeni who's sort of holding onto the back of a pickup with one arm.

MATT: He stands over the dead.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Sort of swaying over the bodies and just lecturing the crowd on what happened. He's just screaming at them. And so you can hear his voice start to go hoarse. And he's screaming, "An American drone killed these. It was a massacre. These people are on their way to a wedding. Why did this happen? Why were they killed?"

JAD: Why did they target this—this convoy?

MATT: Well, according to the US government they had received intel that on that day in this convoy was an Al-Qaeda operative ...

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Named Shawqi al-Badani.

MATT: Who apparently had been planning attacks against the US.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: That's why they took the shot. And in fact, they say that he was wounded in this—in this wedding convoy strike.

ROBERT: And do we have any reason to believe that?

GREGORY JOHNSEN: I have no reason to believe it.

MATT: Greg spent weeks in Yemen, talked to survivors of the drone strike.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: Talked to people who were there. No one knows this guy.

MATT: Greg says the guy isn't really a member of either of the tribes that were involved in the wedding. And so to him ...

GREGORY JOHNSEN: It makes no sense that he would be there.

MATT: To him, this was a terrible mistake. But what really got me interested in Greg's reporting, which you can read on Buzzfeed.com, highly recommend it, is that he goes really deep into the question of, like, what the US did next. Because the question is like, what do you do in this case? How do you repair something like this? When you have two totally different cultures with two different traditions, how do you find a way to try to make this right?

JAD: I don't think you can, can you?

ROBERT: No.

JAD: I mean, historically do soldiers have an obligation to repair the damage they do?

MATT: No, there's no obligation. But what's happened is we've actually created an obligation for ourselves.

ROBERT: Hmm. Americans have?

MATT: Yeah. Yeah. This has a really long history. A history that's ...

JAD: You mean a legal—legally?

MATT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. A legal history.

ROBERT: Really?

GREGORY JOHNSEN: And there's a—there's a great law professor at Yale.

JAD: What's His name?

GREGORY JOHNSEN: His last name is Witt. It's John Witt.

JOHN WITT: That's me.

MATT: We ended up tracking down John Witt.

JOHN WITT: Hi, Matt. How are you?

MATT: To talk about how the US first started to try to right the wrongs in war.

ROBERT: So what is the foundation story of all this?

JOHN WITT: That starts with General Pershing in World War I.

MATT: So, 1917 ...

[NEWS CLIP: America is called to arms.]

MATT: The Great War ramps up. So we start shipping young men ...

[NEWS CLIP: Thousands of them. And millions more to follow.]

MATT: ... over to Europe, specifically France. And in charge of these men was a man named John J. ...

[NEWS CLIP: Pershing!]

JOHN WITT: Commander of American forces on the Western Front.

MATT: Stern man, handsome mustache. Bit of a maverick.

JOHN WITT: General Pershing's nickname was Blackjack. And ...

MATT: When he first arrives in France with his troops, General "Blackjack" Pershing ...

JOHN WITT: He's got this problem, which is that he has Jeeps.

[NEWS CLIP: Built in America, shipped to France, and manned by our men.]

GREGORY JOHNSEN: So World War I is the first war in which the US is shipping a lot of automobiles.

JOHN WITT: More than 100,000.

MATT: For the soldiers to drive. Cars, trucks, Jeeps.

JOHN WITT: And Jeeps are really great. They get his men from one place to another.

MATT: From Paris to Orléans to, I don't know, Marseilles.

JOHN WITT: But they also run into French farmers' chickens and cows. Children. Sometimes just the farmers themselves.

MATT: Were these random collisions or were there no roads?

JOHN WITT: I'm gonna bet there was some of everything. Sometimes it was probably just ordinary car accidents, and sometimes no doubt a little French wine was involved.

MATT: So this is Pershing's problem. He's trying to run a war overseas ...

JOHN WITT: And it wasn't any good for him to have grumpy civilians at his rear.

MATT: And so Pershing has an idea, which he actually borrows from the Brits. And that is he will use ...

JOHN WITT: Cash.

MATT: Money to right our wrongs.

ROBERT: Huh.

JOHN WITT: And so he goes to Congress and begs for a statute, and Congress obliges really quickly. There's no sign this is a controversial thing.

MATT: But it was a genuinely new thing, because for the first time in the history of war as far as we could tell, you had a state compensating individuals. Usually it's state to state, here you have state to individuals. And so the US government starts systematically paying money for the loss of a non-American life in war.

JAD: How much?

JOHN WITT: Jeez, I don't know.

MATT: It's actually surprisingly hard to find documentation mentioning specific amounts. But whatever the amounts were, it seems to have worked. Pershing wrote in his biography that these swift and prompt settlement of claims had a great effect upon the people. So it seemed to work really well.

JAD: And is this—I mean, is the idea here that, like, this is what we would do with the drone strike victims we talked about? That we'd pay them money?

MATT: Well, it's actually—it's a bit trickier than that, because the thing that Pershing got in World War I, it came with a catch.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: And that is that there's a combat exclusion.

MATT: In case you just walked in, that's Gregory Johnsen. And what he means is that this law, basically what it said is that we'll pay your claims if it didn't happen on the field of battle and it wasn't a combat situation. If it was combat and it was on the field of battle, then tough luck. That's just war.

GREGORY JOHNSEN: So if US soldiers were driving to a fight and they ran their car into somebody and they damaged that car or killed that person, those people would not be able to get compensation. Whereas if the US soldiers were driving to a bar and got in an accident, they would be able to get compensation.

MATT: But the problem is, once we get into these counterinsurgency wars.

JOHN WITT: Civilians are suddenly in the middle of the fray.

[NEWS CLIP: Charges have been made that troops killed as many as 567 South Vietnamese civilians during a sweep ...]

MATT: This is in a way the story of modern warfare.

[NEWS CLIP: Air raid sirens are beginning to sound over Baghdad.]

[NEWS CLIP: President Karzai says he's delivering his final warning to the US after a US airstrike accidentally killed more than a dozen mothers and children.]

MATT: By the time we get to Afghanistan and Iraq, the fighting is happening in cities, so there's no difference really between the battlefield and where people live. And so the line between what's combat-related and what's not combat-related, it starts to get blurry.

MARLA KEENAN: And so in 2003 in Iraq, what happened was there were actually people lining up. You know, there were civilian military operation centers, people started lining up outside of these saying, "My family has been harmed. I want help."

MATT: How many people? Do you remember?

JOHN TRACY: If I had to guess it was, you know, maybe around 80 people or so.

MATT: That's a ton of people.

JOHN TRACY: Yeah.

MATT: That's John Tracy. He was a military lawyer in Iraq in 2003, and before him Marla Keenan.

MARLA KEENAN: I'm Managing Director of Center for Civilians in Conflict.

ROBERT: So when they came with a complaint, what sort? Is it like, "You ran over my chicken, or you knocked out my window?"

MARLA KEENAN: No. No, no, no. much more serious.

JOHN TRACY: I mean, I think of cluster bombs. During the Shock and Awe campaign one of the types of bombs that we were using, or the Air Force was using, were what they call cluster munitions.

MATT: Basically John says, Air Force planes would fly over these targets and drop hundreds and hundreds of these tiny little ...

JOHN TRACY: ... bombs. Smaller than a Coke can.

MATT: And a lot of them would land in maybe a parking lot or a field. And they wouldn't explode.

JOHN TRACY: So on a number of occasions you'd have—mostly it was kids, right? Because the kids would see it and ...

MATT: They didn't know any better.

JOHN TRACY: ... they would just run over and kick it, and then that's when it would explode.

MATT: That's when it would detonate.

JOHN TRACY: Right.

MATT: Huh.

JOHN TRACY: I had a lot of those. Close to a dozen. And so that was a—that was a difficult one because well, it's combat because the Air Force dropped it because they were, you know, bombing the city.

MATT: Right.

JOHN TRACY: But at the same time, days, weeks, even months have gone by and this thing is just sitting in the ground. Couldn't we say it's not combat?

MATT: And this was a real question that John had to ask his boss. And then his boss asked his boss.

JOHN TRACY: They eventually sent the question up to the Army Claims Service, and they said, "No. It's combat."

MATT: Meaning they're not gonna pay.

MARLA KEENAN: Basically, like, we are in an armed conflict and this was an unfortunate incident, but an incident that happened during a lawful combat operation, and therefore we're sorry. And that's basically it.

JOHN TRACY: So I said no to a lot of people.

MATT: And so like in World War I with General Pershing, military officers they started lobbying their bosses for an expanded system so they could start making more payments. And eventually, the military does expand it. In fact, I talked to one of the military's top lawyers.

RICHARD GROSS: Brigadier General Richard C. Gross. I go by Rich. I'm the legal counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

MATT: And he told me that around 2006, paying out these kinds of condolence payments actually became sort of a key part of military strategy.

RICHARD GROSS: Absolutely.

MATT: Even had its own acronym.

RICHARD GROSS: MAAWS. M-A-A-W-S. It's Money As A Weapons System which, you know, I'm not sure that title resonates with everybody, but ...

MATT: It's an interesting phrase, for sure.

RICHARD GROSS: Yeah, exactly. But it's the idea that money can be used to—to win hearts and minds that help bring the population over.

MATT: And it just got me wondering how much money makes a good weapon?

MARLA KEENAN: Well, I haven't—like, the US military hasn't given me access to a database or anything like that, but through FOIAs and interviews I've seen different numbers.

MATT: Marla says that in 2006, the ACLU filed a FOIA request and eventually got their hands on hundreds of claims files. And in those files, what you see are a bunch of different numbers, but one that comes up again and again ...

MARLA KEENAN: $2,500.

JOHN TRACY: $2,500 by and large.

MATT: Now someone like John could have paid more, but that meant they'd have to run the claim up the chain of command.

JOHN TRACY: Exactly.

MATT: So it was almost like there were these ceilings.

JOHN TRACY: $2,500 for a life. $1,500 for property damage. And then eventually, the property damage amount got raised to $2,500 as well. And that—that didn't make any sense to me, that somebody could get so much for a Toyota Corolla, but you weren't—you were just gonna get the same amount for a lost life.

MATT: Like, I can't get over—I mean, $2,500 seems like just such a nominal amount. And the practicality of that money of, like, if you were to kill someone who is the—the breadwinner of a family, that $2,500 would not be able to support this family in any way.

MARLA KEENAN: Right. But we're not actually trying to pay full compensation, right? Like, we're not trying to say, "We think if this 20-year-old man had lived to be the average age in Afghanistan, that he—you know, that it would have been $60,843, right? Like, that's not the thing.

ROBERT: Do you ever—you know, we had people who were killed here in an attack.

[NEWS CLIP: The federal government is one step closer to cutting its first checks to families of those killed and injured on September 11.]

ROBERT: And those people have been compensated.

MARLA KEENAN: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: The levels of compensation to the New York victims is pretty high.

[NEWS CLIP: The range of payments for a death claim ranged anywhere from $250,000 to just under $7-million.]

ROBERT: Do you notice that?

MARLA KEENAN: I do. I do. But ...

RICHARD GROSS: It is to a large degree comparing apples and oranges.

MATT: That's General Gross again.

RICHARD GROSS: Because you're talking about a legal system ...

MARLA KEENAN: Where a country is paying their own victims ...

RICHARD GROSS: Versus condolences in an area where there's no legal obligation to make those payments in the first place.

MARLA KEENAN: So that's a very different type of monetary payment.

MATT: Well, yes, and no. Essentially, it's a person's life. And ...

MARLA KEENAN: Yeah.

MATT: I mean, I think there's an argument to be made that there's an empathy in the number that you come up with, in the amount that you pay for someone's life.

MARLA KEENAN: I totally get what you're saying. The $2,500—I think it's any amount of money. If I told you $10,000, would you feel better about it?

MATT: I'd feel a little bit better.

MARLA KEENAN: You would?

MATT: I think so. $10,000?

MARLA KEENAN: What does it get you, though? In the end, $10,000 doesn't buy anything more back than what you lost.

MATT: I don't know what $10,000 gets you exactly in Afghanistan, but my assumption is that it gets you a lot more than $2,500.

MARLA KEENAN: But does that really help you? Is that really what you want?

ROBERT: Is the money unimportant to you, really? It sounds like the money's really ...

MARLA KEENAN: I'm not a victim, so I don't know that I can answer that. To me, if it happened ...

MATT: And at this point, Marla told us a story about how before she got into this line of work ...

MARLA KEENAN: I had several friends who are journalists.

MATT: One of those friends was a man named Chris Hondros.

MARLA KEENAN: Yeah, he's a photojournalist. He was a photojournalist.

MATT: And back in 2011, Chris was on assignment in Libya, moving with a rebel group when they were fired upon. And Chris was killed.

MARLA KEENAN: Yeah.

MATT: And Marla says when she found out that happened ...

MARLA KEENAN: I wanted someone to explain to me why that happened. I mean, I just wanted someone to explain. I didn't—you know, like, I knew his family wasn't gonna get any money. I knew that these guys that shot a rocket-propelled grenade at him weren't gonna care. No one was gonna explain. But I wanted that.

ROBERT: And the money then becomes an occasion for you to say, like, not just, "I'm sorry," but, "Here's what happened?" It's the "here's what happened" part?

MARLA KEENAN: I think it's the token that's given with the apology and with the explanation.

ROBERT: But it's the apology and the explanation that matter to you.

MARLA KEENAN: Yeah, that's why we call it amends. Making amends.

JOHN WITT: One of the things that is true of money damages generally, is they're—they're our desperate effort to find some common language between the party paying and the—and the victim. Some Esperanto for communicating the meaning of what's happened in a language that the other side knows matters.

MATT: That's how John Witt puts it.

JOHN WITT: Because we see it everywhere we look. We see not just apologies. Sometimes not apologies at all. But we see the almighty dollar, which is both distressing and also we know it's meaningful.

MATT: But the problem is, in order for that Esperanto to work, it has to say the same meaning to both sides. Which for John Tracy wasn't really about the money at all. Or not just about the money. It was as much about the envelope that the money was in. Or that there was a real person there to hand it to them.

JOHN TRACY: I wasn't the one who raided their house. I wasn't the one who killed their daughter, but most of them, they—you know, just wanted to look at somebody who's in a uniform and say you really messed with my life.

MATT: And that opportunity is exactly what Abdullah Al-Tisi will never get. His son was killed by a drone he never saw operated by a man he'll never meet on behalf of a country that still doesn't admit it was a mistake. And so the money he got, which in the end he says was the equivalent of $30,000 US, way more than anyone got in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, all he can do without anything else to go on is just compare amounts.

ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [through interpreter] Oh, he can accept that only if—if he gets, you know, the payment equal to those, you know—to like in America. How you compensate someone who lost his son, for example. Killed.

MATT: If the payment was—if the payment was equal.

ABDULLAH MOHAMMED AL-TISI: [through interpreter] Yeah.

JAD: Producer Matthew Kielty.

ROBERT: Big thanks to Gregory Johnsen, writer-at-large for BuzzFeed who started us off on this adventure when he brought us the initial story.

JAD: And also thanks to BuzzFeed editor Steve Kandell.

ROBERT: And to Shahib Al-Masawa for helping Matt organize that interview in Yemen when the country's going through an awful lot of tumult, and he was able to get interviews that we didn't think he could get.

JAD: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you to him. Coming up? Bzzzzz ...

ROBERT: Bzzzzz ...

JAD: That's next.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]

[GREGORY JOHNSEN: Hi, this is Gregory Johnsen.]

[MARLA KEENAN: Hey, this is Marla Keenan.]

[JOHN WITT: Hi, this is John Witt.]

[JOHN TRACY: This is Jonathan Tracy.]

[GREGORY JOHNSEN: Radiolab is supported in part ...]

[MARLA KEENAN: ... by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

[JOHN WITT: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[GREGORY JOHNSEN: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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