Choose Your Battle
    By David Montgomery
    The Washington Post

    Monday 29 May 2006

She's a pacifist. He's a warrior. But even in the shadow of Iraq, their love soldiers on.

    One minute Stacy Bannerman is stuffing envelopes to promote an upcoming peace workshop. The next her husband, Lorin, unexpectedly appears in her office.

    "I got the call," he says.

    "What call?" she replies.

    Does she have to ask? Don't they both know their life is poised to turn completely strange at any moment? Possibly even tragic?

    "I'm going to Iraq."

    As his mouth says the words, his eyes watch her closely.

    "No. No. No."

    She dodges his attempt to hug. She doesn't want him to touch her yet, as if touching will make this news real.

    Yes, yes, yes: Lorin's National Guard unit just got called up. And in a deep part of him that he doesn't reveal to her this instant, he's kind of looking forward to it. Stacy, on the other hand, is a professional peace and justice activist. Her emotions are much closer to the surface, and she's freaking out.

    It's the fall of 2003, seven months after the war began, outside Seattle where they live. They are the warrior and the antiwarrior, and their years of living dangerously are about to begin.

    She watches him drive away in his new white Kia Sorento. The planet-hugger in her never approved of his buying that SUV. Now, as her man prepares for mobilization to the land of oil and blood, she sees the manufacturer's name and thinks: "Killed in action."

---

    The Bannermans are like nobody else and everybody else with this country at war. Stacy, 40, and Lorin, 45, dramatize an extreme version of the conversations, tensions, compromises and leaps of faith taking place across America in families, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and political parties. As the death count rises, public support for the war plummets, two black lines on a neat, precise graph.

    But in the places where people actually live their lives and wrestle with their differences, there are nuances in how they feel about the war and shades of gray in their reactions to each other. Only where there is no dialogue is there no nuance, and the warriors and antiwarriors think the worst of each other.

    Stacy and Lorin couldn't afford not to talk. Beneath their apparent polarization, they share a messy truth of nuances and grays. She is a pacifist, against all war, convinced this war was built on lies. Yet her admiration for those who choose to wear the uniform has only increased, even though she knows some soldiers - including, she would learn in anguished phone calls from Iraq, her husband - have been connected to the deaths of Iraqi civilians.

    She has become a second-tier celebrity in the peace movement. Overshadowed by the controversial wattage of Cindy Sheehan, Stacy is nevertheless a featured speaker in marches, rallies and caravans across the country, a leading advocate with the group Military Families Speak Out, which claims about 3,000 members. She recently published a book about her experience as a soldier's antiwar wife, "When the War Came Home."

    Lorin felt the almost boyish appeal of the military when he was young and signed up for the Guard while in college. During his year-long deployment in Iraq, he harbored increasing doubts over the reasons for the invasion but never wavered in his devotion to his mission. He is, he says, "glad" to have fought in Iraq, where he was a sergeant first class leading 34 soldiers in a mortar platoon. His mission - to beat back the insurgents lobbing rockets and mortar shells in his sector - was accomplished, and he earned a Bronze Star for, in the words of the citation, "incredible speed and deadly accurate response" in "taking the fight to the enemy."

    Just a good soldier, escaping the limelight that discovered his wife - unless you happened to be in the chow hall at Logistical Support Area Anaconda north of Baghdad in early March 2005 when "Hardball" came on, and you put two and two together. Chris Matthews was listening to this peacenik woman's opinion of the war: "I do have some anger about it, because I think a gross violation of the national trust has happened." A picture of her husband flashed on the screen, and he looked an awful lot like Bannerman, in the 81st Brigade, who sometimes got mail from home addressed to "Sgt. Sweet Bear."

    Lorin e-mailed Stacy a short while later: "Too many people saw it and let's just say that I've been trying to explain it. I am so glad that I was not in the chow hall when it came on. I love that you do these things, but at times I do not like having my picture all over the news, mostly because of the fact of where I am at and what I am doing right now. I heard it was good, and that you looked good."

    He tells Stacy his comeback to comrades who criticize her: "I am over here fighting so that the Iraqi people can have the right for freedom of expression, the same right that you have. Shuts them up every time.... I know that you are nutty in love with me, but please, try to use some restraint with the picture."

    Meanwhile, on the other flank of the relationship, Stacy was taking occasional hits from hard-core doctrinaire partisans of the peace movement. She received an anonymous note at a conference: "The concept of a peace activist being married to a military husband doesn't work for me, too much of a dichotomy. National Guard = Military = War = Death."

    "Clearly, the universe is having a very good time with this relationship," Stacy says. "This is about learning to live within paradox.... That takes a whole level of courage and commitment. On a day-by-day basis it's about what matters and holding on to what matters.

    "What matters is that Lorin is the love of my life.... What matters is that I remain true to myself. What matters is I'm big enough to let him do the same."

    Her Weekends

    The names of dead soldiers are being read aloud over a field of empty black boots on a section of the Mall one recent Saturday. A sad gong sounds and a procession of hundreds of protesters marches toward the Capitol. Stacy falls in line behind a father pulling a flag-draped coffin in honor of his fallen son.

    In town for a series of antiwar activities, she breaks from the march early for a debate with former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle being filmed for a PBS documentary. He was one of the intellectual advocates of toppling Saddam Hussein, and he and Stacy square off against a backdrop of the thousands of boots - a pair for each soldier killed.

    The next day, Mother's Day, Stacy rallies outside the White House with the women's peace group Code Pink. She wears her husband's desert camouflage cap. On the back, above the label that says "Bannerman," she has pinned his Combat Infantryman Badge.

    A typical weekend for an activist. Meanwhile, the owner of the cap and badge is back home in Kent, Wash. He is relaxing with Crimson and Kobe, their chows, after a string of busy weekends working his job as a food broker or drilling with his National Guard unit. They don't have children. He'll be back on Guard duty the following weekend.

    Lorin doesn't accompany Stacy on most of her activist excursions, though after he returned from Iraq, he went to the same touring boot exhibit when it came to Seattle. Stacy gave an antiwar speech, and Lorin planted himself among the boots representing the 10 members of his brigade who were killed. It was the second time Stacy ever saw him cry, the first being the morning he left for Iraq.

    "I don't think a lot of soldiers want to go to something like that because it is done by an antiwar peace activist group," Lorin says by telephone from their house while Stacy is protesting in Lafayette Square. "But for me more so than that, it was just going there, looking at this exhibit of all these boots and honoring the soldiers and their families and the loved ones left behind.... That was huge for me."

    When They Met

    They met seven years ago in Spokane at a fundraiser to fight hunger. He was helping manage food service that night in the convention center, and he spied her looking at him, looking away, looking back, consulting with a girlfriend, until finally they exchanged business cards.

    She had never married; he had been married once before. She was executive director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Family Outreach Center in Spokane, a position she would eventually leave amid controversy. (She filed a complaint with the Washington State Human Rights Commission alleging she suffered discrimination on the job because she was white; the matter was settled in 2002 for undisclosed terms.)

    They discovered they had a lot of values in common - a belief in diversity and a commitment to fairness and equal treatment based on the content of one's character.

    His father is African American and his mother is white and British. His parents met when his Air Force father was stationed in England.

    Stacy's parents are both teachers. So adamantly antiwar was her father that he had a lawyer draw up conscientious-objector documents for her brother when he was 7 to begin a paper trail in case he was ever called to serve.

    Stacy did not fall in love with a man in uniform. Lorin had quit the Guard after about 15 years of service. Once they were engaged, he decided to reenlist so he could reach 20 years and qualify for retirement benefits. Stacy was surprised. But this was before Sept. 11, 2001. She rationalized the Guard was a conventional outlet for a man like Lorin to peacefully serve his country.

    Pointed Words

    After he got the call to go to Iraq, and the months of preparation began, she did not always make his life easy. Sometimes, she said exactly the wrong thing.

    It would happen in moments when life within the paradox seemed unbearable, forces both political and personal wrenching their relationship. The horror of her husband waging what she considered an immoral war and maybe having to kill people - that was the political. The personal? She didn't want to lose him. If he weren't killed or maimed, would he come home the same? Would they as a couple be the same?

    Her private prediction: Nothing would ever be the same.

    In one of their long pre-deployment conversations, he said, "There may come a time when I've got someone at gunpoint, and I'll have to make a decision.... I can't be thinking of the enemy as human."

    "If that day comes," she replied, "and you're standing there, looking into that person's face, I want you to imagine that it's me."

    As soon as she said it, she regretted it. The pacifist found herself wondering, she later wrote, if she had planted the seed of doubt that would lead to a moment of hesitation, resulting in her husband's death. Is a pacifist supposed to have such regrets?

    Stacy still cringes, and Lorin hasn't forgotten either.

    "For me it was, 'You don't need to be saying things like that,' " he says. "It's not what I need to be thinking about. I don't need to have that moment of doubt."

    But, he adds, "there were times when she probably didn't say the right thing, but she said what was on her mind. That's something that you need to accept. This is where she's at, this is what she's going through."

    For his part, Lorin admits he couldn't help detaching himself emotionally from her. "I did notice a wall was coming up," he says. "I was focused on what I was getting ready to do, getting ready to be asked to do. Put my life on the line. And I had responsibilities for other people's lives."

    The thing that shocked her most was when he confessed that a part of him was looking forward to the war. At last, the real thing.

    "This is what I've trained for, this is now actually going to happen," he says. "There was a little bit of that in there, excitement, if you want to put it that way. Here I get to go do something I've been training for for the last 16 or 17 years."

    Stacy recalls her reaction: "Please tell me I'm not hearing this.... I can't believe he's talking about going to war like it's some great opportunity he doesn't want to miss."

    One thing she could understand: By the fall of 2003 when Lorin was called up, it was becoming apparent Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and Lorin was having some misgivings about the logic behind the war. But he had a duty, and he felt a deep loyalty and responsibility to his fellow soldiers. That was why he was going to war, and that was reasoning his activist wife accepted, even admired.

    "One of the qualities I am so drawn to is his profound sense of loyalty," Stacy says.

    Even when that loyalty is to fellow warmakers.

    Counting the Casualties

    While he was away, she kept the window blinds drawn. That way, she would not be able to see a government car pull up to announce another casualty. Therefore, in the superstitious logic of the home front, no car would ever appear.

    She kept track of the death count for soldiers from the Pacific Northwest. She calculated that region's average share of loss based on the casualty rate and guiltily estimated Lorin's chances improved whenever someone else was killed.

    "You cry for thinking that and feeling that way, but you do," she says.

    She went to a few family support meetings for Guard spouses, but felt little in common with most of them. The community she found a bond with was Military Families Speak Out.

    One evening after a movie she found three messages from Lorin on the answering machine. He sounded shaken.

    The fourth time he called, he told her about the accident. His unit was firing practice mortar rounds. The target area had been cleared. But then two civilians, ages 13 and 20, apparently on their way to school and work, wandered into the area and were killed.

    "It was just a huge eye-opener and shock," Lorin recalls now. "Some innocent people were killed, for what reason? I think about it. It was one of those things you have to put out of your mind. This happened, you have to continue."

    Stacy broods over this more, but keeps it to herself. "I don't have a place for that one yet," she says, her eyes suddenly tearing. An investigation later ruled the deaths an accident, Lorin told her, according to her book. A public-affairs officer with the 81st Brigade said he was unaware of the incident and declined to comment on any aspect of the book.

    One day in March 2005 - about a year after her husband left and less than two weeks after the "Hardball" appearance - the antiwarrior was behind the wheel of the Kia Sorento, driving to Fort Lewis to pick up the warrior, home from the war. The guard at the gate stared and stared. It took a while for Stacy to realize why.

    Next to Lorin's military sticker on the windshield she had propped up a sign that said "Bring Them Home Now."

    The Bombshell

    Stacy threw a welcome-home party, where she proudly read the citation for his Bronze Star. Later, as they were cleaning up, Lorin dropped the bombshell:

    He had calculated that even though he had about 20 years in the Guard, he needed a little more time to fully qualify for those retirement benefits. He told Stacy he was thinking of extending his service.

    Her reaction: "I suggest you get a very good divorce lawyer, because I won't do this again."

    Lorin promised there was no way he'd be deployed again. She said she'd heard that before. Each felt the other was betraying the common ground they had established in their war-and-peace marriage.

    Lorin recalls thinking: "I support you in what you're doing, and what you're believing, and I would like the same back."

    "War Is a Great Clarifier"

    Did the war change them?

    Instead of a divorce lawyer, they consulted a marriage counselor, who told them they had lost a year of their lives together and needed to grieve it. And Lorin did extend his service.

    Just the other day, Stacy was saying, "He's still the best man I know, but a little tiny bit of that sweetness is gone. Or I can't get to it anymore."

    And now, Lorin allows that maybe he's a little more "abrupt," particularly when confronted with the macho facades of men who've never been to war. "I look at them and go, 'If only you knew,' " he says. " 'I've been and done something you'll never be able to do.' "

    "I've never heard you speak in those terms previously," Stacy says to Lorin by speakerphone during one of her trips to Washington.

    On different sides of the country, and different sides of the war, they talk about his readjustment - the restless sleeping when he first got home, the instinctive check for his weapon when he climbed into the Sorento, the orders he issued in the house, which, Stacy noted dryly, "didn't work so well." In Iraq, he got so wired by the adrenaline rushes of living on a base nicknamed "Mortaritaville" that he began volunteering to go off base and patrol. But that craving has now faded.

    "I did not realize you were volunteering for it because you got the buzz!" Stacy says. "You see why I don't want you going back?"

    "I volunteered for it for several different reasons. The buzz was just one of the reasons why."

    "I know, Big Bear," she says.

    Lorin now refers to the war as "my year-long personal growth retreat." He learned time is precious because the rocket with your name on it might fall out of the sky at any minute.

    They are stronger, and Stacy has to admit that positive growth can come even from something as negative as war. "War is a great clarifier," she says.

    Going to Iraq probably drew Lorin closer to Stacy's position on the war. "Just some of the things I heard and saw changed my viewpoint," he says. "Soldiers are dying for what reason again?"

    But he also says: "On a personal level, yes I'm glad I went over there and had that experience as a soldier. Yes, I get to wear the Combat Infantryman Badge.... That's something special for us."

    For the warrior, the badge is an insignia that he saw action and risked his life for his country. The antiwarrior feels just as proud - and patriotic - when she borrows his cap and wears his badge on her long march for peace.