Choose Your Battle

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.