Love and War

The American invasion had brought with it a promise of freedom and also of prosperity. "We thought, 'Oh, we are going to have a good life, finally'," Zena Majeed remembers thinking soon after the Americans came. "We started to have dreams like we were going to be, maybe, Hong Kong with those tall buildings, or like the United Arab Emirates." But the most important freedom, from fear, was neglected, and the prosperity never materialized. People "got tired," says Zena. "They thought, 'Oh, we are going to lead a different life!' And then eight months later there was nothing. No electricity. Nothing." When insurgent attacks against "the foreign occupier" began in earnest in October 2003, says Zena, "some people were happy."

The insurgency has divided Americans from Iraqis like no fatwa, no scolding mother ever could. By the time Rich Allinger started courting Zena in the spring of 2004, a sense of siege had descended on the Green Zone, where the blast walls grew ever higher to protect against suicide bombers. Members of the unit that preceded Allinger's "could walk freely," he remembers. "They could put on civilian clothes, go out and have dinner with their Iraqi counterparts, shop, go to teahouses. But by the time we arrived we could not go out unless we were in a force- protection convoy with a gun truck in front and in the back." Whenever he walked outdoors with Zena, he had to wear a helmet and full body armor. She wore nothing but her street clothes.

Any Iraqi who works with the Americans, much less dares to fall in love with one, is likely to be hunted down by insurgents or militias. "LH," a Shiite who got a job interpreting for the U.S. military in November 2005, was nearly kidnapped that fall. His brother had been shot by insurgents in 2004 but survived. A friend wasn't so lucky. His body was found with a broken hand, bullet holes in the legs and a drill hole in the back of the head. And yet, LH allowed his friendship with Army medic Vanessa Kirk to grow, and in 2006, when they had known each other for a year, he proposed.

Vanessa, a Navajo who had grown up in the arid Southwest, felt comfortable in the harsh climate of Iraq and at ease with the differences between cultures. But as she fought for nine months to bring her fiancé back to the United States, she saw that fear and suspicion would pursue the couple no matter where they were. "You would have to be a rock to deal with some of the people that I had to deal with," she says. "I even had one woman [Immigration officer] tell me that we were at war with Iraq and 'you're trying to get an Iraqi into the United States'."

As the original mission of the war—to liberate a people—became a mockery, many individual relationships became almost personal crusades. For Rich Allinger, there was a tension between the efforts to do good for the Iraqi people and the encroaching evil of violence all around. "We were just doing wonderful things, rebuilding hospitals, visitingschools. And then right on the other side of that would be the rockets and the mortars and the suicide bombs and then you'd walk into the hospital and you'd see a 19-year-old boy with his legs in a red bag. And it was very painful, very hard to deal with."

Sgt. Sean Blackwell of the Florida National Guard was posted on guard duty at the Iraqi Health Ministry in the spring and summer of 2003. Even then, he watched each day as bodies were taken to the nearby morgue: mangled, burned, riddled with bullet holes; they came one after another, he thought, like parts on a factory line.