bint el ba7rain
May 17th, 2004, 12:34 PM
HE WAS not like anyone else his friends from West Chester had ever known - an adventurous dreamer, a driven idealist, part philosopher and part inventor who was bored with college but could rig together a sophisticated alarm system for his summer camp cabin from aluminum foil and a Walkman.
But when 26-year-old Nick Berg walked into the kettle of paranoia and violence that is Iraq, people suddenly didn't see the same guy his buddies from Henderson High knew. Suddenly, Berg's stubborn wanderlust made him a target of suspicion - a religious Jew riding around Mosul in a taxi with a copy of the Koran.
Some U.S. soldiers even wondered if the patriotic Berg was "a wannabe freedom fighter."
Who was the real Nick Berg?
The entire world has now seen the shocking way that the idealistic young man from the Philadelphia suburbs died - beheaded on videotape by ruthless terrorists who claimed his slaying was revenge for American prison abuses.
But there are still as many questions as answers regarding the way that Berg lived - what exactly he was doing in Iraq, why our allies in Iraqi threw him in jail while the FBI investigated him, and what happened in his final days.
With the help of his best friends, Berg's own e-mails and a Pennsylvania soldier familiar with the details of his detainment in Mosul, the Daily News has pieced together a clearer picture of Berg's life in Iraq.
The New York Times is reporting this morning that Berg also sent a lengthy e-mail to his family after he was detained. Among the questions asked, he wrote, were: "Why was I in Iraq? Did I ever make a pipe bomb? Why was I in Iran?"
The Times said he conjectured that their questions arose from some Farsi literature and a book about Iran that he had. Berg wrote that after four days he was transferred to a cellblock that included prisoners charged with petty offenses and suspected "war criminals."
"Word had spread due to the presence of certain items amongst my stuff that I was Israeli," Berg wrote. "So I felt a bit like Arlo Guthrie walking into a jail full of mother rapers and father stabbers as an accused litterbug."
On April 7, the day after he walked out of the Mosul jail on his own terms, he wrote a friend: "I'm currently trying to pick things up with the business and the local contacts, all of whom think I'm the biggest flake in the world now, as well as plan my return trip, which has been complicated by...military closures."
Three days later, Berg disappeared.
In Iraq, an eccentric young man with his own ideas about life became a kind of Rashoman-like figure - the same person perceived by the various players in radically different ways.
His friends insist that Berg's real story is simpler than it looked - that in the most cynical place on earth, he was merely trying to help.
"He was extremely upbeat and optimistic about his work there. He was excited about being able to help," said Tom Clardy, a network analyst in Hershey, Pa., who'd known Berg since seventh grade. "He wanted to go because he felt he had an obligation to help rebuild the infrastructure."
"He was looking for the real thing," added Jake Vaccaro, another close friend and grad student at the University of North Carolina. "He wanted real experiences, not filtered, secondhand experiences."
Berg's eccentricities were well-known to those who knew him from Chester County's Henderson High, where he built award-winning science projects and was known for his keen sense of humor.
Luke Lorenz, 28, a close friend and now a grad student at Penn State, has saved a message from Berg on his answering machine. "What he said was, 'Luke, I just had this vision. I had this idea. I wanted to run it by you but I don't have a lot of time. I've gotta go check out some Roman mythology.' "
In college, Berg's restlessness almost got the better of him. He attended Cornell, Drexel, even the University of Oklahoma, but never earned his bachelor's degree.
Lorenz was at Lock Haven University in upstate Pennsylvania. "When he was in Cornell he started having wanderlust and he would ride his bike from Cornell toward Lock Haven, which is about 130 miles and I'd usually pick him up at Williamsport so he'd make it 100 miles," he recalled. "I remember it was actually weighing on him, what he wanted to do. He had this idea to go to Africa and help people there. He just wasn't getting things accomplished in college."
So Berg went to Uganda. "He was working with designing bricks - which are called stabilized soil," Lorenz said. Berg returned much thinner and told friends he'd given a lot of his food away.
His next venture was Prometheus Methods Tower Service Inc., which builds, maintains and inspects communications towers. He ran the business out of a farm in Lancaster County owned by his foreman, Scott Hollinger. Berg - listening to news or hard rock like Led Zeppelin while shunning TV - typically worked some 60 to 70 hours a week.
"Nick was a worker. That was his life. He didn't have a girlfriend. He loved to work," Hollinger said. "He loved to climb towers. He was passionate about climbing anything. He and his dad would go rock climbing. There's freedom up there. No one is breathing down your neck."
The difficult job also played into Berg's sense of risk. "He was all about adventure," Hollinger said. "We would drive six hours to a job and on the way, he'd see cable towers or telephone poles and he'd say, 'We've got to pull over.' " Then the two would hop out of the car and climb the towers.
Berg would often impersonate Arnold Schwarzenegger. "He'd say, 'Just do it. Climb it.' " Often, when he climbed a tower, he'd hang an American flag on top. Very religious, he also often wore a yarmulke, even under his hard hat.
Berg also believed strongly in the American mission in Iraq, and last fall he started studying business opportunities there.
With a limited knowledge of Arabic and with a distant relative - possibly an uncle by marriage - living in Mosul, Berg spent January and February in Iraq and then returned for a second time in March.
He inspected radio towers that had been struck by helicopters during the war, and worked near the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in an ominous case of foreshadowing. He traveled through the dangerous Iraqi countryside but rarely conveyed his concerns to his friends in his frequent e-mails.
"My presence near Moffak [his relative] has made him more concerned (about his own safety and probably mine too) than I've been the entire time I've been here," he wrote his friend Dave Skalish, an engineer at WPHT (1210-AM) here in Philadelphia, in January. "Mosul is very calm - except for the checkpoints, you can't really tell there is an occupation."
But Berg might have been slow to realize by his second visit that things had deteriorated in Iraq.
On March 24, Berg was arrested while riding in a taxi in downtown Mosul. The military source in Iraq, who spoke with the Daily News by telephone, said he was jailed because unescorted Americans aren't usually seen downtown and "they didn't know what to do with him."
He said police were suspicious because of "his demeanor," and authorities also wanted to know why he had the Koran and a book that the source said may have been called "The Jewish Problem" or "The Jewish Solution."
Hollinger said it wouldn't be surprising that Berg was found with the Koran and various books in Iraq. "It would have surprised me if he wasn't studying up on the culture of that land," he said. "He was an avid reader. He always did his homework and wanted to learn about the culture of the country he was in."
The source said it's unclear exactly why Berg spent close to two weeks in jail. Although he insisted that Berg was under Iraqi control, the FBI also questioned Berg three times and visited his parents back in West Chester.
"He'd made some contact with Arab kids at the University of Oklahoma - that's what the FBI was checking into...a guy from Oklahoma," the source said. He said the FBI wanted to know if the Oklahoma connection was "why he came over here."
He said the Oklahoma contact was "related to somebody who was involved in 9/11." But he didn't know if that person was jailed al Qaeda supporter Zacarias Moussaoui, who attended the University of Oklahoma close to when Berg was there in 2000.
Hollinger said he knew Berg had attended the University of Oklahoma and made friends with some Arabs or Muslims. He made friends with people from every culture and religion. "He told me there was some type of identity mixup - either with ID or e-mails, something along those lines," Hollinger said. "He said he was contacted by some prominent officials."
On April 6, after Berg's parents filed suit seeking his release, he was visited in jail by an American delegation that took him aside in a small room.
"He refused to accept any money to go home," the source said. "He refused to accept an airplane ticket. He refused any escort.
"He didn't want us. He said, 'You don't understand these people like I do. You're here for a reason - and so am I.' "
His friends say that while he was in jail, Berg had no way of knowing that four American contractors had been burned and hanged from a bridge in Fallujah, or that the situation in Iraq was sliding downhill.
"I don't think he understood the gravity of the situation because he was in prison and didn't know what was going on outside," Hollinger said.
After his release, Berg went to a Baghdad hotel and decided he would try to come home after all. But he still wanted to do things his own way - spurning an offer from U.S. consular officials for help in leaving from Jordan. He said he would leave from Kuwait - but never got there.
"So he believed in people," Lorenz said, "and that's one of the sad things about this whole situation because people are using this video to incite more anger."
But when 26-year-old Nick Berg walked into the kettle of paranoia and violence that is Iraq, people suddenly didn't see the same guy his buddies from Henderson High knew. Suddenly, Berg's stubborn wanderlust made him a target of suspicion - a religious Jew riding around Mosul in a taxi with a copy of the Koran.
Some U.S. soldiers even wondered if the patriotic Berg was "a wannabe freedom fighter."
Who was the real Nick Berg?
The entire world has now seen the shocking way that the idealistic young man from the Philadelphia suburbs died - beheaded on videotape by ruthless terrorists who claimed his slaying was revenge for American prison abuses.
But there are still as many questions as answers regarding the way that Berg lived - what exactly he was doing in Iraq, why our allies in Iraqi threw him in jail while the FBI investigated him, and what happened in his final days.
With the help of his best friends, Berg's own e-mails and a Pennsylvania soldier familiar with the details of his detainment in Mosul, the Daily News has pieced together a clearer picture of Berg's life in Iraq.
The New York Times is reporting this morning that Berg also sent a lengthy e-mail to his family after he was detained. Among the questions asked, he wrote, were: "Why was I in Iraq? Did I ever make a pipe bomb? Why was I in Iran?"
The Times said he conjectured that their questions arose from some Farsi literature and a book about Iran that he had. Berg wrote that after four days he was transferred to a cellblock that included prisoners charged with petty offenses and suspected "war criminals."
"Word had spread due to the presence of certain items amongst my stuff that I was Israeli," Berg wrote. "So I felt a bit like Arlo Guthrie walking into a jail full of mother rapers and father stabbers as an accused litterbug."
On April 7, the day after he walked out of the Mosul jail on his own terms, he wrote a friend: "I'm currently trying to pick things up with the business and the local contacts, all of whom think I'm the biggest flake in the world now, as well as plan my return trip, which has been complicated by...military closures."
Three days later, Berg disappeared.
In Iraq, an eccentric young man with his own ideas about life became a kind of Rashoman-like figure - the same person perceived by the various players in radically different ways.
His friends insist that Berg's real story is simpler than it looked - that in the most cynical place on earth, he was merely trying to help.
"He was extremely upbeat and optimistic about his work there. He was excited about being able to help," said Tom Clardy, a network analyst in Hershey, Pa., who'd known Berg since seventh grade. "He wanted to go because he felt he had an obligation to help rebuild the infrastructure."
"He was looking for the real thing," added Jake Vaccaro, another close friend and grad student at the University of North Carolina. "He wanted real experiences, not filtered, secondhand experiences."
Berg's eccentricities were well-known to those who knew him from Chester County's Henderson High, where he built award-winning science projects and was known for his keen sense of humor.
Luke Lorenz, 28, a close friend and now a grad student at Penn State, has saved a message from Berg on his answering machine. "What he said was, 'Luke, I just had this vision. I had this idea. I wanted to run it by you but I don't have a lot of time. I've gotta go check out some Roman mythology.' "
In college, Berg's restlessness almost got the better of him. He attended Cornell, Drexel, even the University of Oklahoma, but never earned his bachelor's degree.
Lorenz was at Lock Haven University in upstate Pennsylvania. "When he was in Cornell he started having wanderlust and he would ride his bike from Cornell toward Lock Haven, which is about 130 miles and I'd usually pick him up at Williamsport so he'd make it 100 miles," he recalled. "I remember it was actually weighing on him, what he wanted to do. He had this idea to go to Africa and help people there. He just wasn't getting things accomplished in college."
So Berg went to Uganda. "He was working with designing bricks - which are called stabilized soil," Lorenz said. Berg returned much thinner and told friends he'd given a lot of his food away.
His next venture was Prometheus Methods Tower Service Inc., which builds, maintains and inspects communications towers. He ran the business out of a farm in Lancaster County owned by his foreman, Scott Hollinger. Berg - listening to news or hard rock like Led Zeppelin while shunning TV - typically worked some 60 to 70 hours a week.
"Nick was a worker. That was his life. He didn't have a girlfriend. He loved to work," Hollinger said. "He loved to climb towers. He was passionate about climbing anything. He and his dad would go rock climbing. There's freedom up there. No one is breathing down your neck."
The difficult job also played into Berg's sense of risk. "He was all about adventure," Hollinger said. "We would drive six hours to a job and on the way, he'd see cable towers or telephone poles and he'd say, 'We've got to pull over.' " Then the two would hop out of the car and climb the towers.
Berg would often impersonate Arnold Schwarzenegger. "He'd say, 'Just do it. Climb it.' " Often, when he climbed a tower, he'd hang an American flag on top. Very religious, he also often wore a yarmulke, even under his hard hat.
Berg also believed strongly in the American mission in Iraq, and last fall he started studying business opportunities there.
With a limited knowledge of Arabic and with a distant relative - possibly an uncle by marriage - living in Mosul, Berg spent January and February in Iraq and then returned for a second time in March.
He inspected radio towers that had been struck by helicopters during the war, and worked near the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in an ominous case of foreshadowing. He traveled through the dangerous Iraqi countryside but rarely conveyed his concerns to his friends in his frequent e-mails.
"My presence near Moffak [his relative] has made him more concerned (about his own safety and probably mine too) than I've been the entire time I've been here," he wrote his friend Dave Skalish, an engineer at WPHT (1210-AM) here in Philadelphia, in January. "Mosul is very calm - except for the checkpoints, you can't really tell there is an occupation."
But Berg might have been slow to realize by his second visit that things had deteriorated in Iraq.
On March 24, Berg was arrested while riding in a taxi in downtown Mosul. The military source in Iraq, who spoke with the Daily News by telephone, said he was jailed because unescorted Americans aren't usually seen downtown and "they didn't know what to do with him."
He said police were suspicious because of "his demeanor," and authorities also wanted to know why he had the Koran and a book that the source said may have been called "The Jewish Problem" or "The Jewish Solution."
Hollinger said it wouldn't be surprising that Berg was found with the Koran and various books in Iraq. "It would have surprised me if he wasn't studying up on the culture of that land," he said. "He was an avid reader. He always did his homework and wanted to learn about the culture of the country he was in."
The source said it's unclear exactly why Berg spent close to two weeks in jail. Although he insisted that Berg was under Iraqi control, the FBI also questioned Berg three times and visited his parents back in West Chester.
"He'd made some contact with Arab kids at the University of Oklahoma - that's what the FBI was checking into...a guy from Oklahoma," the source said. He said the FBI wanted to know if the Oklahoma connection was "why he came over here."
He said the Oklahoma contact was "related to somebody who was involved in 9/11." But he didn't know if that person was jailed al Qaeda supporter Zacarias Moussaoui, who attended the University of Oklahoma close to when Berg was there in 2000.
Hollinger said he knew Berg had attended the University of Oklahoma and made friends with some Arabs or Muslims. He made friends with people from every culture and religion. "He told me there was some type of identity mixup - either with ID or e-mails, something along those lines," Hollinger said. "He said he was contacted by some prominent officials."
On April 6, after Berg's parents filed suit seeking his release, he was visited in jail by an American delegation that took him aside in a small room.
"He refused to accept any money to go home," the source said. "He refused to accept an airplane ticket. He refused any escort.
"He didn't want us. He said, 'You don't understand these people like I do. You're here for a reason - and so am I.' "
His friends say that while he was in jail, Berg had no way of knowing that four American contractors had been burned and hanged from a bridge in Fallujah, or that the situation in Iraq was sliding downhill.
"I don't think he understood the gravity of the situation because he was in prison and didn't know what was going on outside," Hollinger said.
After his release, Berg went to a Baghdad hotel and decided he would try to come home after all. But he still wanted to do things his own way - spurning an offer from U.S. consular officials for help in leaving from Jordan. He said he would leave from Kuwait - but never got there.
"So he believed in people," Lorenz said, "and that's one of the sad things about this whole situation because people are using this video to incite more anger."