Peace by Pieces

"I don't want it to be another country with better plumbing," he says.

Before the invasion, members of his family, some of whom still live in Iraq, were divided on the prospect of war. Some thought removal of Hussein was worth the price of invasion. Others questioned the legitimacy.

Shallal thinks toppling the dictator could have been achieved peacefully with more time. The violence, he says, undermines U.S. claims to be doing anything good for Iraq. Life in Baghdad for his cousins is more primitive and dangerous than under Hussein, he says.

The presence of American troops is breeding more terrorists, making America less safe, he says, so bring the troops home now.

"The U.S. is only creating more conditions for civil war," he says. "The Iraqis need to figure this out for themselves."

From War to Peace

Tia Steele's path leads to Charlie Anderson, who came home in one piece, physically. He has donated his own boots to the exhibit.

"These boots were worn during the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Crawford, Texas," he says.

Navy Petty Officer Anderson, 28, was a hospital corpsman assigned to a Marine tank battalion. He says five men he felt close to were killed. He stands in the field of boots with his head bowed and wipes his eyes. He flinches at the bang of nearby construction equipment.

He had a job stocking shelves in Ohio when he enlisted a decade ago hoping for a better future. He kept reenlisting: He felt he didn't have a choice with a wife and daughter and no immediate prospects outside the service.

When the war came, he supported it without much thought. He couldn't believe his country would launch it without good reason and hard evidence. Turning against the war was a slow process.

"To admit that everything we gave up in order to do this was for nothing, that's a hard sell," he says.

Seeing the country for himself, he became dubious of the supposed terror threat to the U.S. homeland, "as if Hassan with a bookstore on Haifa Street is going to wreak havoc on Sylvania, Ohio." The alternative justification of planting democracy seemed futile to him. "Then I was pinned down to weapons of mass destruction," he says.

Ha.

He joined Iraq Veterans Against the War before his discharge in March. The group claims about 300 members and is growing quickly after public exposure this summer alongside Cindy Sheehan. In comparison, Vietnam Veterans Against the War took about two years to form and another couple years to gain traction, Anderson says.

Anderson has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Now he is a student in Virginia Beach and an activist.

He sees yellow ribbon magnets on cars, he hears talk about how you have to "support the troops." He wants to ask the ribbon people if they ever wrote a soldier to tell him? He wants to ask, How much support was there to send the troops with proper armor? As some come home battered, how much support is there for the budget of the Veterans Administration?

Anderson says American troops are "phenomenal people who are willing to sacrifice everything" to complete a mission, but in Iraq "the mission keeps morphing."

"What is the mission? Tell me what the mission is."

A Distant Echo

A bare stage with nine actors. The theater is the room with the mural and the hovering prayer to let America be America. An audience of about 70 fills nearly every seat.

An actor playing a troubled FBI interrogator says:

"Some of these techniques, I don't want to see, or be a part of. I took an oath to the Constitution to uphold the laws against enemies both inside the U.S. and out. . . . The [Pentagon] guy got really upset. He said he took the oath, too. I told him that we must have different interpretations, then."

"Fear Up" is set in Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay. It's nonfiction, drawn from testimony, memoirs and journalistic sources, like that quote from a recent New Yorker article.

A few days before opening night, the two assemblers -- not playwrights, exactly -- meet in a Capitol Hill coffee shop over a laptop and do final tinkering. One -- Karen Bradley, 54, director of graduate studies in dance at the University of Maryland -- had demonstrated against the Vietnam War as a college student, and she recalls the possibility and power in the movement then. She detects something similar in the air now.

"People are angry, but they're focused," she says. "It's not blind rage. People are sober, and very determined."

Part of Bradley's evidence that Something Is Happening is that she knows so many people who have never demonstrated before who are on their way to Washington for this weekend. People like Michael Kahn, 46, an oncologist from outside Chicago. ("This is a critical point for our country," he says.) And Susan Krueger, 44, a mother who home-schooled her children in small-town Michigan. ("We have to make a big noise and a continuous noise," Krueger says.)

The other creator of "Fear Up" -- Marietta Hedges, 44, assistant professor of acting at Catholic University -- reaches back to the same point of reference.

"The September 24 demonstrations could be a pivotal turning point like you remember from the Vietnam War," she says.

But knowing when Something Is Really Happening has always been tricky. Hedges was in London when hundreds of thousands marched for peace shortly before the invasion, in an effort to forestall war. It was a stirring experience. Hedges remembers what a woman marching beside her said: "I think we're going to stop this war. I think we're going to prevent it from happening."