Choose Your Battle

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.