‘We lost our embed reporter that day...’
Posted: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 4:04 PM
Filed Under:
John Rutherford
By John Rutherford, Producer, NBC News
WASHINGTON – Army Sgt. Jeffrey Hardaway, 35, of Killeen, Texas, hobbled on his crutches to a microphone to say a few words after receiving a Purple Heart recently at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
"First of all I'd like to thank my wife for putting up with me," he said to laughter and applause from a roomful of soldiers in Walter Reed's Joel Auditorium on Oct. 23.
"And second, I'd like to thank everyone here at Walter Reed for helping me ... ," he continued. "Thirdly, I'd like to, ah, what a lot of people don't know is we lost our embed reporter that day, and his name was Julio. He was from Spain, and, um ... "
At this point Hardaway lost his composure and broke down.
" ... I'm sorry," he said moments later. "He became a close friend. I wish I could say something to his family."
Hardaway was talking about Julio Parrado, 32, a correspondent for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo and an embedded reporter with the U.S. Third Infantry Division at the outset of the war in Iraq. He was killed on April 7, 2003, by the same missile that seriously wounded Hardaway.
After the Purple Heart ceremony, Hardaway talked some more about his friend Julio.
"Julio was with us for months," he told me. "He was like family. We got real, real close to him. That's why it was really hard on the whole unit when he was killed."
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| Julio Parrado, a reporter for El Mundo, who was killed during his military embed in Iraq on April 7, 2003. |
Hardaway described how Julio would send e-mails home for the American soldiers on his portable satellite computer.
"Everyone thought we were e-mailing them all through the war," he said.
But he explained Julio was really sending a mass e-mail to his newspaper's New York office, which would forward the e-mails on an individual basis to the soldiers' families.
"So that was a blessing for all of us," he said.
Hardaway asked me as a reporter to help him find an address for Julio's family so he could contact them.
"I would like to write his family a letter or something, because his family wasn't there when he was killed," he said. "I was."
Julio is survived by his father, also named Julio, mother Antonia, sister Ana, brother Juan Antonio and half-sister Carmen.
I was able to get their address in Cordoba, Spain, with the help of Carlos Fresneda of El Mundo in New York and Stefano Albertini of New York University, both friends of Julio's family. Julio had been based in New York for several years and had reported extensively for El Mundo on the aftermath of the 9/11 attack.
I asked Hardaway what he wanted to tell Julio’s family.
"I've been thinking about that," he said. "I just knew him temporarily, but he was a good person. I could tell that much. He was real friendly. I had been invited to go over to Spain to visit. He was just a generous, genuine person."
Julio Parrado is one of 153 journalists who've been killed in Iraq since the war began on March 19, 2003. Allied troop casualties during the same period have totaled 4,502.
