Choose Your Battle

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."