The Foreign Service Journal, February 2003

F O C U S F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 and American personnel from Embassy Jakarta, Assistant Regional Security Officer Timothy Dumas and Consular Officer Danielle Garbe, assisted Tom in the post-bomb- ing efforts in Bali. On Tuesday morning Tom executed the first Consular Report of Death for a resident American woman. Tuesday afternoon, he visited Sanglah Hospital Morgue for the first time. He was struck by the bomb’s devasta- tion. There were no cold storage containers and most of the dead were lined up in body bags on the grass and on the sidewalk behind the morgue. Other bodies had been taken inside the morgue for examination. It was impos- sible for him to count them. Although Tom had seen bodies in the “no man’s land” of Bosnia, nothing had pre- pared him for this. He began the search for more Americans among the dead. By the end of the week another American victim was identified. Tom had spent dozens of hours finding her, identifying the body, processing for her release from the morgue, and staying with her father while she was cre- mated. He grew very close to the American victim’s father in those few days as he watched him suffer the pains of mourning. The week had also brought Tom close to five other families who called or e-mailed trying to learn the status of their loved ones, presumed dead. Concurrently Linda McFadyen and Kerry Holmes- DeHaven, Tom’s counterparts in the East Asia Pacific Division of American Citizens Services, maintained daily contact with the families of the victims. The Emotional Toll After the second week in Bali, psychiatrists fromMain State and the Regional Medical Officer began calling Tom regularly, concerned about Tom’s and others’ expo- sure to the blood and carnage. In Washington, Linda, Kerry and their colleagues could also feel the emotional toll. They worked around the clock talking to the devas- tated families. Tom says he was too exhausted to be kept up by the graphic and vivid images of the bodies and the destruction, but he did lose sleep when he took the end- less rounds of calls from the victims’ families and from colleagues in the Bureau of Consular Affairs. These calls normally came between 9 p.m. and 12 a.m., every night. Tom says he came to expect them, and also to depend on them, calling Linda and Kerry his “true counselors.” He shared with them the progress of the day, and they shared together their hopes for the next. In addition to the support of consular officers from Washington, CA tapped specialized victim funding resources in the Justice Department to significantly expand the scope of U.S. government assistance to American victims and their families, and is now working with DOJ to ensure a coordinated, rapid response to the needs of future victims of terrorism overseas. CA per- suaded the DOJ ’s Office for Victims of Crime to activate the International Terrorism Victim Compensation Program, authorized by Congress in 2000 but not imple- mented until now. The ITVCP was created to compensate U.S. citizen victims of terrorism overseas for expenses such as medical treatment, mental health, loss of support, funer- als, and burials. CA also worked with the FBI’s Office of Victim Assistance and with state crime victim compensa- tion programs to obtain emergency assistance. CA arranged funds to pay the cost of returning the remains of the U.S. citizens killed in Bali as well as to pay for hotel bills and meals for the family of one Bali burn victim. Tom Daniels will forever be connected to the victims and their families, and to Bali. Despite the long hours and newfound sense of vulnerability to terrorism, Tom, formerly an attorney, says: “This is why I joined the Foreign Service — to make a difference. I knew that anyone could file divorces and bankruptcies, but not everyone could really make a difference in the world unless they were willing to sacrifice a little. I would not trade these last 20 days in Bali for anything. These days are as formative to me as the year I spent in Bosnia with the Army. In Bosnia I was just another sergeant; here I was the U.S. diplomat on the scene. I was the person to whom the desperate turned for help. This was why I came to Indonesia — I have no doubt.” Facing the Fire in Cote d’Ivoire A month earlier, I myself and another group of con- sular officers had been tested in Cote d’Ivoire. Consular officer Deborah Sisbarro had just arrived in Abidjan and was completing the second week of a relatively normal temporary duty stint to fill a staffing gap. Her husband and baby were in the U.S., so she stayed busy processing Diversity Visa applications — for the worldwide immi- grant visa lottery conducted annually — by day and catching up on leisure reading at night in her small apart- ment near the embassy. On Sept. 18, 2002, she went to bed thinking about the looming DV deadline and about how her mystery novel would turn out.