Love and War

In Baghdad in May 2003, amid the chaos, fear and hope (it is easy to forget how much hope there was in those early weeks when Americans and Iraqis began meeting face to face after years of tyranny and war), Jimmy and Lena were among the first to fall in love. He was a career officer in the U.S. Army—Capt. James Michael Ahearn from Concord, Calif., winner of two Bronze Stars, veteran of tours in Korea, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. She was from a middle-class Baghdad family that had seen better days. Lena Ghadeer, her divorced mother, her brother and four sisters were struggling to keep up appearances when American soldiers dragged Saddam's statue off its pedestal and turned their world upside down.

"You know, you're a really pretty lady," Jimmy told Lena the first day they met, courting her with the kind of straightforward gentility that Americans were known for back in the days of Gary Cooper and Clark Gable. He would bring food for her family and eat with them when he could. He warned away neighbors challenging the Ghadeers' claim to a house that Saddam had confiscated. Lena was 27 and Jimmy was 39. But such age gaps are common among Iraqi couples, and he was tall and fair—Lena still talks about his blue eyes—and he was kind. They had known each other less than a month, less time than it had taken for America to conquer Iraq, when he asked her to marry him. Then in another month he was gone, back to the United States. Not for another year would they have their wedding—on July 4, 2004, in Amman, Jordan. Then, as visa processing dragged on, it was almost another year still before Lena finally landed in America. In January 2006, Jimmy and Lena had a little girl. They named her Khadijah (after the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad) Mariam (after the mother of Jesus) Ahearn. The baby smiled like the future her parents dreamed of.

Such romances have been part of the American way of war for as long as anyone alive can remember. In the 1940s, wherever U.S. troops were deployed, whether among steadfast allies or recently conquered enemies, and regardless of culture, language, religion or the best efforts of the military hierarchy to prevent "fraternizing," soldiers and locals got married. "War brides" (and a handful of grooms) came to the United States from Britain and Australia, Italy, France and eventually Germany and Japan. Their stories were the stuff of comedy ("I Was a Male War Bride" with Cary Grant) and tragedy (James Michener's "Sayonara," about thwarted love in occupied Japan in the early 1950s). A reasonable estimate of the total number approaches 1 million from 50 different countries. Certainly there were hundreds of thousands. War brides from Japan, the Philippines, China and Korea, for instance, increased the population from those countries in the United States by 20 percent in just 17 years from 1947 to 1964. By the 1970s, thousands more spouses had been brought to American shores from Vietnam and, sadly, like Miss Saigon, many other partners were left behind.

What is striking about the Iraq War is not that couples have met and fallen for each other and succeeded like Jimmy and Lena in getting married. It's that so few of them have. State Department records show that after more than four years of occupation, only about 2,400 visas have been granted to Iraqi spouses and fiancées. Many of those may be marriages to Iraqi-Americans. (Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon breaks down the figures in detail.) Among the rest—several hundred—the few love stories between American soldiers and Iraqi civilians that have happy endings are ones of enormous patience as well as the enormous passion needed to bridge chasms of language and history, politics, religion, insurgency and, yes, terror. Many of the Iraqis interviewed for this story asked that only part of their names or their nicknames be used to identify them, fearing that their families still in Iraq or living as refugees might be targeted. Those couples living in Baghdad are even more afraid. Every one of them has seen the clash of civilizations up close and personal.

This is not just a different kind of war, it's also a different kind of American military than existed 40 or 50 years ago—one that may talk about engaging hearts and minds, but spends many of its resources trying to keep them at a distance. The insistent demands of "force protection" and the insidious efficiency of the insurgents' bombs and booby traps have isolated the American soldier from the population he or she was once tasked to liberate. We may not lament the lack of bars, dance halls and whorehouses for today's troops. But in Iraq there's hardly any human contact at all that isn't at the point of a gun.

In 2003 and early 2004, when many of these love stories began, Iraqis and Americans could relate as people do anywhere, looking each other in the eye, shaking hands, sometimes holding hands. Today, more often than not, they are separated by blast walls or windshields thicker than the glass in a Sea World shark tank. In that sense, too, the dwindling number of couples who beat the odds to be together tells the sad, tortured tale of the American experience in Iraq.