Love and War

Within weeks, like Jimmy and Lena and many other couples who meet under intense pressure—one partner far from home, the other in a home she cannot recognize—Rich and Zena felt they were in love. "That's the war," says Zena. "Everything goes fast." After so much pain and privation over so many years, many Iraqis were looking for nothing but peace. The American lieutenant colonel helped Zena find some semblance of it. "With Rich, I felt just safe to be with him."

For all the forces pushing Americans and Iraqis together in this war, though, even greater ones are driving them apart. The foremost is religion. In Iraq, as in most of the rest of the Middle East, Islam is not just the predominant faith, it is the core of the culture. It is the roots of history and the solid trunk of all traditions, a way to organize the course of a life and also the course of every day from sunrise to the hour of sleep. How many American soldiers understood those facts as they rolled into Baghdad? Few. Even among those couples who fell in love, the abyss of religious and cultural misunderstandings has been hard to cross. In times of enormous stress and fear, people reach back to their own faiths.

Who wouldn't pray under the sporadic thunder of mortar shells in the Green Zone, or when driving through Iraq's savage streets waiting to be blown apart by a hidden roadside bomb or a suicide driver? Leo Barajas certainly did. A contractor from Texas managing the reconstruction of Saddam's Republican Palace,he might not have attended church regularly at home, but he called on the Almighty often enough after Halliburton shipped him to Baghdad in the wake of the 2003 invasion.

Leo, at 34, was responsible for some 200 people. All of them were scared. Grown men would lose it. They would tell him they wanted out. He had to calm them. Then, he had to calm himself. He prayed for the ability to endure all he faced in Iraq. He prayed for the friends who had died there and for the three children he had by an earlier marriage back home. He didn't want to leave them fatherless. "I had to wake up by faith, sleep by faith and do my job by faith," he says.

His romance began when a co-worker recommended a young woman to work in Leo's office in August 2003. He remembers driving to the offices of a British contracting firm in the Green Zone to pick her up for an interview. "Hi, I'm Maria," she said as she jumped into his truck. "Are you Mexican?" he asked, thinking of his own heritage. "No, I just have a Christian name," she said. "My real name is Mariam. The translation is 'Maria,' like the Virgin Mary." A few days later, when he introduced her to a colleague, he joked that she'd stolen his heart. After a few weeks he realized that, indeed, she had.

Mariam, 21, is younger, taller and no less striking than her sister—Lena Ghadeer, who by that time was already engaged to Jimmy Ahearn. In that summer of 2003, the taboos against cross-cultural marriages seemed to be weakening.By the end of the year, when Leo was out of Iraq for a few weeks, the plans for another Ghadeer wedding were already well underway. Not until he got back did Mariam tell him he would have to convert to Islam.