Love and War

There is, first, the matter of history. No event in the Middle East, no relationship, ever begins in the present. There is always a past. In Iraq, that is one long chronicle of conflict that has shaped the needs and expectations of the Iraqi people.

Zena Majeed was 6 years old when her first war began. She remembers the thrum of helicopters flying overhead as Saddam Hussein announced in September 1980 that Iraq was in a fight to the finish with Iran. Her father was working for a children's book company, but as a Reserve officer in the Army he was called to the front. Zena was 14 by the time he came home for good. Her second war came just two years later, when Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Americans launched Desert Storm. There followed more than a decade of international embargoes and personal privations as her parents sold off furniture, jewelry, anything that they had, just to survive and to buy books for Zena's medical studies. Then in 2003, soon after she took her degree, the countdown began to yet another war.

"We knew this was going to be the end. You could tell. You could see it in people's faces," says Zena, who has grown into a raven-haired beauty. On the receiving end of shock and awe, Zena lived through 20 days of constant terror. "I thought I was going to die from the fear," she says. "I was hiding under a blanket." Crazily she thought, "Oh, the blanket is going to protect me." Then she tried to hide in a small space between a refrigerator and the wall. "I just wanted to feel safe."

Wars push people together, says Benjamin Karney, a behavioral scientist with RAND Corporation, "so when there's a threat, a lot of people look for connections." This is especially true among soldiers, who face the constant threat of death. In a country as bloody as Iraq, it's also true of civilians.

When the bombing stopped, "there was no government, no security," Zena says. The precision-bombing campaign had, amazingly, left the capital mostly intact, but looters were tearing it apart. Bodies lay in the street. And then, there they were in front of her: the Americans. "We didn't know what these soldiers were going to do. We just tried to hide, especially the women and kids. And then we started hearing the good news: 'The Americans are friendly. They are going to help Iraq.' So, people started going out more often. And we started to see American soldiers helping people, and even helping direct traffic." The Iraqis responded. "People felt sorry for the soldiers with all this equipment loaded on them. So people took water, and then they took food."

Zena tried to continue her medical residency at a hospital in Samawah, more than four hours south of Baghdad, but American convoys often blocked the road, and finally she gave up. In early 2004 she got a job as an interpreter (a "terp" in soldier slang), working in the five-square-mile compound known as the Green Zone around the old presidential compound in the heart of Baghdad. It was supposed to be the safest place in the capital for soldiers, diplomats and government officials.She was translating for a medical and environmental unit of the U.S. Army in April that year, listening to a briefing about dental care to be presented at a local school, when Lt. Col. Richard Allinger walked in on the group. She remembers that the fit 52-year-old geologist from Spokane, Wash., looked much more serious than the other soldiers she'd met. "I thought he must be a general," she says now, laughing. Allinger saw her soft brown eyes and couldn't forget them.