Choose Your Battle

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.