When the United States and its allies in the war invaded Iraq in March 2003, Kathy Kelly, an activist from Chicago in her early 50s, was living in the Al Fanar hotel in Baghdad with about 18 other foreign peace workers and two extended Iraqi families who filled the seven-story hotel.

Kelly said that, during the bombing, she spent much of her time with the children of the families. The bombing near the Al Fanar was intense, she said, because the hotel sits near the Tigris River, where a number of Saddam Hussein’s military installations were located.

As what the Bush Administration dubbed the “Shock and Awe” campaign rolled on, Kelly said she noticed that the children were constantly gnashing their teeth. One young girl often wet herself.

When the Marines arrived in Baghdad, Kelly said, their vehicles filled the street below for as far as she could see. She and her fellow workers greeted them with bottled water and dates.

Kelly said she first approached a young man whom she had seen emerge from his vehicle, sit on its roof and open a book. She asked him what he was reading.

It was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He said he was making his way through it for the 13th time.

Kelly, who spoke to a large crowd in the Anheuser-Busch Auditorium on Monday night, said she and her colleagues bonded with the Marines as the troops settled into their work in Baghdad.

“There was a lot of conversation, a lot of exchange,” Kelly said. “In 10 days time, I never heard a crude word, I never heard a rude word.”

She recalled listening to their stories and praying with them late into the night.

“As the night wore on,” she recalled, “[one Marine] told many stories, and then his voice got really hushed, and he said, ‘You know, ma’am, there was one night when we didn’t know was they military or was they civilians, so we shot everybody. But I hope it never registers here,'” she said, and tapped her head as the Marine had. “‘I hope it never registers.'”

She said the Marines she spoke with told her that they wanted to help rebuild the country, but did not feel they had been given the proper tools, like Arabic language training, to do so. She also said she felt that not enough money and attention were being given to helping returning veterans.

Her tales of Baghdad in the first days of a war that has continued for more than two-and-a-half years were just some of the stories Kelly shared with students and faculty for close to two hours on Tuesday night.

Kelly’s time in Iraq, from October 2002 to April 2003, with a short break in December, was just one of many visits she made to that country since the early 1990s.

She traveled to Iraq as a delegate of Voices in the Wilderness, a group she founded in 1996 to “campaign – to end economic and military warfare against the Iraqi people,” according to the organization’s Web site. More than once, Kelly smuggled medicine into Iraq in violation of U.N. sanctions.

Kelly stressed the importance of being a pacifist in all aspect of life; she told students and faculty that a Jesuit university is the perfect place to live simply and incorporate the lessons of the Gospel into everyday living.

She cited the teaching of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., as examples of the way people should “simplify – our own lives so that we’re not part of a consumptive pattern that is almost insisting that other people turn over to us, at an unfair exchange rate, their resources.”

Kelly also spoke about witnessing the horrors of war in Iraq-from stumbling upon recently slaughtered rebels in the southern part of the country, who were killed by Saddam’s forces after Operation Desert Storm ended, to visiting a hospital after the 2003 war had begun and seeing children whose bodies had been mangled by U.S. bombs.

“Disarmament indeed,” she said to the stories of the wounded children.

Kelly was visiting Saint Louis University as a guest of the Theology Club, and her talk was co-sponsored by the Great Issues Committee, Pax Christi and the Doerr Center for Social Justice.

Kelly said she grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s, seeing problems like racism, class divisions and the Vietnam War and knowing something should be done about them but being too timid to raise her voice.

She eventually began her activism by working with the poor at a Catholic Worker site on the city’s north side. She has been sent to federal prison at least once for protesting weapons manufacturers in the United States. She encouraged audience members to contact her at [email protected].