chapter nine

Home Front

Ever since the Twin Towers came crashing down and the cloud of jihad fogged the land, the crop dusters swooping low over the San Joaquin Valley have taken on a new menace. Even here, tucked away in the farm fields of middle California, fear has settled into the ground. Harvest to harvest, one year to the next, we watch tens of thousands of illegal migrants stream into our vineyards and orchards to pick the crops. Not a single suicide bomber is ever among them. Still, we can never be certain if it is our vigilance or just dumb luck that keeps us safe.

I am a native of this valley, fine-tuned to its quirks, but it wasn’t until the fall of 2004 that I saw the fear take a different turn. On a Friday evening, as the nation debated whether George Bush or John Kerry would better keep the terrorists at bay, I came across a curious piece of theater playing out along the busiest intersection in Fresno. A group of antiwar protestors, no more than fifty by a generous count, huddled on one corner of Blackstone and Shaw, waving “Honk for Peace” signs. On the opposite corner, an equal number of evangelical Christians and right-wing Jews held up U.S. and Israeli flags and shouted “Jew haters” at the peaceniks. It didn’t occur to me, at least not that first day, to stop my car and ask how a quiet vigil against the war in Iraq could be seen as an act of anti-Semitism.

At the synagogue where my two sons had gone to preschool, members had begun to look at each other with suspicion in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. The more ardent conservatives at Temple Beth Israel were showing up in full military dress to guard the front gates. Their distrust had grown to such a pitch that even the top choice to be the new rabbi had the look of a traitor. In a meeting with temple elders, the unsuspecting rabbi was asked about peace in the Middle East, and he ventured the opinion that perhaps the leaders of Israel deserved the leaders of Palestine, seeing as they both had their birth in terror. The rabbi was promptly shipped back to South Carolina, never to be heard from again.

In an irrigated desert where they had come not to farm the loam but to sell dry goods, clothes, and jewels, Jewish families had blended so thoroughly into the landscape that the old-timers could recall only a single deli that served matzo ball soup a half century ago. Here, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, it was even more true that the temple meant everything. As the town’s only Reform congregation, Temple Beth Israel had stood out for decades as one of the few local institutions willing to raise a voice for liberal causes. Back in the 1960s, temple lefties marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and protested the Vietnam War. Though the majority of the synagogue’s thousand members still counted themselves as Democrats, not even the most liberal among them cared to march with Peace Fresno. The war in Iraq was a different war.

The temple’s loudest voices now belonged to a committed band of Republicans led by Stuart Weil, a frog farmer who ran the local branch of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful Washington lobbying group known as AIPAC. I had first spotted Weil on Blackstone and Shaw at a 2004 rally to reelect Bush, sporting a sign that read “Liberate the Iraqi People.” He was a fifty-two-year-old man with braces on his teeth and a ponytail that hung down from a bald crown. The ponytail wasn’t born of some midlife crisis. Like a religious man’s yarmulke, it was there to remind him of a constant presence. In his case, that presence wasn’t God but the Palestinian intifada, the never-ending assault of suicide bombings in Israel that had transformed his whole way of thinking, right down to his views on abortion.

A few days after the street corner rally, I found myself standing inside a corrugated tin shed in the middle of almond orchards and citrus groves, where Weil tended to a million African frogs of the dwarf variety. He was a quirky mix of energies. He refused to talk about the methods he used to propagate more of the Congo species than any other breeder in the world—frogs destined for fish tanks across North America. Yet he had no problem discussing the various means by which he was mating evangelical Christians and Jews in the same united fight against Democrats and Muslims. Tapping into the valley’s deep reservoir of Pentecostal churches, a legacy of the Dust Bowl migration, Weil made friends with preachers and ex-military men who were so passionate about Israel that they considered themselves part of an army of Christian Zionists.

I hadn’t known such a legion existed, at least not in California’s farm belt, until I turned the radio dial one evening to KMJ-AM and made the acquaintance of John Somerville. He was a retired marine colonel who lived in the hills above Fresno and clung to a worldview that had been decreed by God himself: nations that supported Israel received God’s blessing. Nations that crossed Israel received God’s curse. It was no more complicated than that. He believed the least hint of wavering on the part of the United States—any pressure to remove Jews from their biblical West Bank lands or carve out a Palestinian state—would be met with a hurricane-like calamity. He possessed the charts, natural disasters precisely linked to acts of betrayal against Israel, to prove it.

As I poked around the edges, I began to see that Ground Zero isn’t simply a massive crater hole in the earth of New York City. There are smaller pockmarks all across the nation. Strange as it sounds, the war on terror and the war in Iraq were playing out with a particular intensity in the raisin capital of the world. The locals saw no special irony in the fact that we were fighting for our piece of the Homeland Security pie with every bit the vigor of New York or Washington, D.C. If a case had to be made about our region ranking as a place of special needs, we could certainly make it. There was the Fresno factor, for one, our collective ability to master the exaggerated form. Where else in America could you take a twenty-minute drive and go from white suburbia with its brand-new schools, football stadiums, 8,000-square-foot houses, and giant evangelical compounds to the inner city with its gangs and drug-infested neighborhoods to the dead silence of the vineyards in winter’s hibernation? No other region produces more milk and more meth than our valley. If you want to examine the burgeoning political power of the exurbs, come here. If you want to study the hand-to-mouth subsistence of rural America, come here. If you want to see concentrated poverty unlike any other city—Fresno number one, New Orleans number two—or witness the nation’s highest per capita IV drug use, come to our inner city.

We are a strange place that God has walled off from the rest of California. Our separation has the effect of creating the illusion that fear couldn’t possibly reach here when in fact the opposite is true. Decades ago, Japanese Americans regarded the Central Valley as a place that might protect them from the fate of the internment camps. They left the cities and joined family members on farms only to discover that fear was even more irrational here. Their white neighbors swore that Japanese growers were placing white caps over their vegetables not to protect the crops from frost but to guide kamikaze pilots toward our military bases. As the trains arrived to take the Japanese to their Arizona camps, their fields were picked clean by the fear mongers. People still referred to the valley as “the other California,” and as far as politics went, it is true that we have more in common with Oklahoma City than with Los Angeles. Up and down Highway 99, the church was a kind of state. The mayor, police chief, and city manager of Fresno were all Promise Keeper Christians, men who didn’t hesitate to publicly invoke Jesus’ name to explain their success or scrub their past clean. Still, there was a farmer’s honesty, a rural genuineness, if not naïveté, that came with the land. Unlike people in the big city, folks in the valley didn’t bother to disguise their words. In coffee shops and greasy spoons, you could hear them talking about issues such as race, class, and immigration in the most raw and rancorous form, as if they were sitting in their own living rooms with only family around. In this way, the valley became my ideal place to watch the war on terror as it twisted and defined America.

Night after night during the buildup, Colonel Somerville did his best to sound reasonable. To break up any tedium, KMJ added the voices of Victor Davis Hanson and Bruce Thornton, two classics professors at Fresno State who had spent their careers punching holes in the cult of multiculturalism. Since 9/11, their shared premise—that Western culture need not apologize for its superiority—had morphed into a call for war against Islam. Hanson, a raisin farmer whose family had worked the same piece of dirt since 1872, had become the hawk of the month for the Bush administration. Culling the lessons of the ancient Greek battles (the Peloponnesian War took twenty-seven years and that didn’t count all the plagues), Hanson’s writings had the effect of providing a historical cover for invading Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney was so pleased that he invited Hanson to his house for dinner. Great nations, Hanson averred, need to wage great wars to remain great. As the statue of Saddam came tumbling down a few weeks later, it was hard to dispute Hanson’s boast that no campaign in the history of combat had gone so smoothly and with such dispatch.

The afterglow of “shock and awe” worked on us like a soporific. People, at least most of those who lived in our valley, had lost patience for any details beyond the declaration of “Mission Accomplished.” That a real war had replaced the doctored-up first one didn’t seem to register. What was happening now in Iraq, the image of one clear madman replaced by a hazy blob of insurgents and tribal lords, was little more than an abstraction. Yes, we had our own Navy air base rising out of the cotton fields, and poor kids from valley towns were signing up in strong numbers. If the SUVs were any clue— their rear ends magnetically dressed in “Support Our Troops” ribbons made in China—the war was everywhere. And yet it was nowhere. No homegrown kid, no Okie or Hmong or Mexican or Armenian, had come back in a flag-draped casket. You don’t belong to a place, William Saroyan once said, until one of your family has been placed into its ground. I wondered if maybe the same could be said of this war. It wasn’t going to be our war until we had given up one of our own. As spirited as those rallies tried to be on the corner of Blackstone and Shaw, they had the sound of something hollow. Then on a cold November morning in 2004, as President Bush was counting the “political capital” he had earned in his reelection and was making plans to spend it, I picked up the Fresno Bee and saw the news: two local boys from Buchanan High, best friends, had died in Iraq. On the eve of a massive battle to overtake Fallujah, the two Marines went out on a late-night mission that ended with a bomb blast.

 

Growing up in a valley where so many dreams were hemmed in by the fields, Jared Hubbard and Jeremiah Baro had the fortune of being suburban boys. Their fathers weren’t migrant farmworkers following the crops but a policeman and a loan officer who chose to live in Clovis, an old rodeo town where masses of white people from Fresno had fled. Here the schools were big and gleaming and the athletic teams among the finest in the state. But after graduating from high school, the football star and standout wrestler seemed unsure what to do next. One thing was certain. Wherever one would go, the other would follow. It was Jared and Jeremiah, spotter and sharpshooter, right up to that November 3 night in Ramadi, when an insurgent detonated a hidden bomb from afar. It must have hit just so because of the eight Marines walking along both sides of the road, only two—Hubbard and Baro—were killed.

The funeral was held on Veteran’s Day at a Catholic church in Fresno. The mourners included a congressman, state senators, the mayor of Clovis, the mayor of Fresno, scores of law enforcement officers from both cities, hundreds of family, friends, and teachers, and a dozen boys, now men, wearing their old Buchanan lettermen’s jackets. Past the strawberry fields and new housing tracts, in a cemetery that faced the Sierra, seven Marine riflemen fired three times each and a bugler played Taps. As their parents held tight the U.S. flags handed them, Lance Corporal Hubbard, twenty-two, and Corporal Baro, twenty-one, were buried side by side.

Not much separated the two fathers in those first weeks. Jeff Hubbard put up a new flagpole along the front walkway of his two-story stucco house, flying the U.S. flag on top and the Marine flag on the bottom. He was a big, stout man with a balding head and owlish glasses whose impulse was to hunker down and say, “Heck with the world. Let me grieve.” His wife, Peggy, believed it was important to share Jared’s story, so as a favor to her, he put aside his distrust of journalists and welcomed me into their home. He had only one condition: “Ask anything you want about Jared, but please don’t turn him into a political pawn. I know this war is controversial and we just came through a nasty election. But I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t. We supported his decision to join the fight.”

As they recalled that decision, they couldn’t help but wonder how things might have turned out had they raised their children with the goal of college. Whenever the subject of higher education came up, their three sons and one daughter pointed to members of the extended family who had found success without a college degree. Jared, the second son, showed the most interest and aptitude in school. In fact, his parents were under the impression that he was about to enroll at Fresno City College when he walked into the kitchen that day and blurted out that he was thinking of joining the Marines.

Jeff Hubbard had policed the neighborhoods of Clovis for almost thirty years, but he rarely played hard-nosed cop with his kids. Even when Jared came home with his eyebrows and tongue pierced, the disappointment he registered was a quiet one. This time, as Jared talked about feeling adrift, his father cautioned him. Take the military test and see how you score. If you score high, you can become an officer and skip the front line. Jared ended up acing the exam, but he still insisted on being a grunt. “How could I put my foot down?” said Jeff Hubbard. “He wanted to serve his country and go in with his best friend.” As we sat in the kitchen, I didn’t realize that their youngest son, Nathan, nineteen, had been listening to our conversation. He was lying on the couch just a few feet away, a guitar at his side. Suddenly he popped up, a smallish figure in a wool beanie and poncho, and gave a tug to his Abe Lincoln beard. He was out of school and between jobs, and he sensed an opening with his parents. “I’ve always thought about joining myself,” he said nonchalantly. “I’m just not going to talk about it right now.”

Peggy, a petite woman with a bob of blond hair, had been sitting quietly beside her husband. The few words she had spoken had come in a raspy whisper. Suddenly her voice grew loud and clear. “No. No way, Nathan. You’re not going.”

He took off the poncho and lifted his T-shirt sleeve. Above the bicep, he wore a tattoo of three interlocking ravens. The three brothers—he and Jared and the oldest, Jason, an undercover cop—had gotten the same symbol of Celtic fidelity etched into their arms. “There’s lots of things popping in my head. Go there and honor him and maybe a little vengeance pumping through my blood too,” he confided. “But I can’t do that to my family. I can’t put them through that.”

I thanked them for their time and drove a mile or two down the road to an apartment where the second father, Bert Baro, sat in front of a plasma TV he had hung high in the living room, a day and night flicker of Fox News. He was a small pit bull of a man who grew up fighting on the streets of Manila. As he watched the tube, he popped another beer and shook his head at the spectacle of the antiwar protestors. The fight against terror was a matter of will, he said, and communist doubters were breaking our will. “People say communism is dead in America. Bullshit. They’ve just changed their coats. How do you defeat the most powerful nation in the world? You do it from the inside.”

His wife, Terry, knew where he was going and tried with a half smile to stop him. “Bert . . .”

“I don’t care how advanced we are. I don’t care how Christian we are. We have to get medieval with these people.”

I wondered if what he had in mind was the treatment of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison.

“Abu Ghraib?” he sneered. “That’s not medieval. Yeah, we shamed them. So what? Yeah, we ran them around naked. So what? We didn’t go chopping their hands off. We didn’t go around castrating them.”

“That’s medieval?”

“Yeah, that’s medieval. That’s the difference.”

“Do you think we have the appetite for that?”

“When they start exploding bombs here, we’re going to be just like every other human being in the world. We’re going to act with the exact same methods. And I’m kind of hoping that bomb comes. Because I want to wake people up.”

 

How much of Baro was a show intended to flush out the “liberal” reporter in me, I couldn’t say. I saw no need, though, to tell him that my father’s father, Aram Arax, had been one of those communists in the 1940s. In a valley hostile to organized labor, it took little more than a subscription to the Daily Worker to turn a citizen into a subversive. Hoover’s men followed him to bookstores and a Labor Day picnic along the Kings River. “Subject Aram Arax was observed eating a shish kebab sandwich,” one entry read. Every year, FBI agents in Fresno wrote headquarters in Washington asking if they should continue to follow him. Every year, the bosses wrote back, “Yes.” They followed him for forty-five years, until he was blind and wearing diapers.

I didn’t bother telling Baro that my own lesson in jihad had come at an early age, at the knee of that same grandfather. Jihad is what brought my family to America. Grandpa was fifteen years old when the government of Ottoman Turkey began a genocide against its Armenian population. As he hid in an attic in Istanbul, more than a million Christian Armenians were being slaughtered by Muslim Turks and Kurds. “Where is your Jesus now?” they taunted, ravaging Armenian villages that had preceded their arrival by eight hundred years. As a kid, I wondered why my grandfather wrote his poems in Armenian and shouted his obscenities in Turkish. No word, he taught me, was more vulgar than giaour. It was the reason Armenians paid a special tax to the Turks and couldn’t bear arms or testify against a Muslim in court. It meant infidel.

Years later, I was rummaging through his desk when I discovered a half-written poem, “I Am Looking for a Turk.” It described his longing to find a Turk with the courage of poet Nazim Hikmet, a Turk who might be willing to stand beside him at the Martyrs Eternal Flame in Soviet Armenia. Never finding that Turk became one of the great disappointments in my grandfather’s life. A month before he died, I sat in the kitchen while Grandma made plans for Thanksgiving dinner. As she ran down the menu list, I innocently asked who was going to carve “the turkey.” Grandpa rose up out of his mist and began to shout. “Turkey? Turkey? You give me five thousand good men and I will kill those bastards.” He had forgotten that a secret army of young Armenians had tried to do just that in the decade prior, assassinating Turkish diplomats and bombing airports around the world. His fighters for justice had been hunted down by the FBI as terrorists.

What the genocide and Red Scare had in common, I reasoned, was fear. The pashas had manipulated the Turkish masses, selling over and over the notion that Armenians were conniving with Russia to destroy the Ottoman Empire. The communist peril, the enemy within, the dominos toppling in Southeast Asia, they too were rooted in the peddling of fear. Years later, when the CIA finally conceded that all those terrifying assessments of the Soviet military buildup had been embellished by the Armageddon brigade—men such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Pipes—it was too late. We had spent billions of dollars trying to keep up with a phantom.

None of this history offered much help, of course, on that morning of 9/11. My wife, an early riser, had come into our bedroom and awakened me. “You’re never going to believe what’s happening.” We sat, like everyone else, transfixed by the images on TV. We even let our three-year-old son Jake watch. On the third day, he grabbed his Legos and built two towers that he took to bed with him at night. A week later, sensing a new fear at Temple Beth Israel, I insisted that my wife pull Jake out of the preschool. I reminded her that we weren’t Jewish and had chosen the school mostly because it was safe and nurturing.

“You’re nuts,” she said. “We’re in Fresno. They’re not coming here.”

“How do you know where they’re coming?” I shot back. “This is America’s greatest farm belt.”

When the flag went up—on car antennas and back bumpers, on T-shirts and lapels, on houses in our neighborhood that never flew the flag before, so many flags that my eleven-year-old son Joseph wanted us to fly one too—I figured it was patriotism finding its most facile form. “The flag has become a cliché,” I explained to the kids. “And the easiest thing to hide behind is a cliché.” I knew it was more troubling than that when I began to see the mega churches selling flag and cross as one image, the blanket that swathed the crucified body. Driving along Highway 99, I came upon a car with two flags flapping in the wind, one from each window. As I pulled closer, I could see that it was a family of Sikhs inside, the father and sons wearing their customary turbans. The flag wasn’t just a declaration of loyalty for them. It had become a convenience, the cheapest and most direct way of proclaiming to the anti-Muslim bashers in our midst, “Don’t mistake us for them.”

 

I had watched in a kind of numbed state as we made our way, fugue-like, through the spring of 2002. The war on terror was doing strange things to the place where I grew up, but it took me a long time to discern any pattern. Had anyone asked me back then whether some larger movement was afoot, whether the religious and secular were merging and odd new alliances were forming out of fear, I wouldn’t have seen it. Over the next two years, right up to the Bush-Kerry election, I hardly had a clue that some kind of communal madness was playing out in my backyard.

Our biggest manufacturer, Pelco, didn’t punch out tractors but video surveillance systems that guarded some of the most important buildings in the world, the Twin Towers among them. President David McDonald, the born-again son of a Virginia preacher, was now richer than our richest farmer. If his two-hundred-acre estate in the foothills above Fresno seemed like déjà vu, there was good reason. McDonald had stolen the design of the spiral staircase from Gone with the Wind and the pool from Hearst’s castle. As for the elaborate security system that watched over Eaglecrest, documenting all but the domestic violence, he alone took credit.

In the weeks after 9/11, McDonald sprang to action like no other CEO in America. He published a special glossy edition of the company magazine filled with the heroism of the fallen and built a grand memorial garden outside his office window. For the dedication, he chartered five jetliners dubbed Hero 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 respectively and flew out more than a thousand firefighters and cops from New York City—nonstop booze the whole way. They stumbled past 403 empty chairs, each adorned with a yellow rose and the name of a fallen comrade, and huddled at the base of the memorial. Then the same firefighter who had raised the American flag over Ground Zero three months earlier raised a super-size version over Pelco. That night, McDonald treated 4,200 guests to a steak and scampi dinner under heated tents at Eaglecrest. What began as shared prayer ended with firefighters and their new friends from Fresno fornicating on a hillside studded with security cameras. The bill for the weekend was $1 million. As PR goes, it was a steal. McDonald was working to sell a new camera, one that could recognize the face of a terrorist, a lens that would be tucked into untold corners across America. “We learned September 11 that we cannot take freedom for granted,” he said. “We are more vulnerable than we ever thought.”

Under the cloak of the Homeland Security Act, Sheriff Richard Pierce created an antiterrorism unit that knew exactly where to set its sights: the ragtag members of Peace Fresno. The group’s leaders were so hungry for new recruits that they didn’t think to question the earnest young man named Aaron Stokes who showed up one day eager to assist. For two months, Stokes sat through planning meetings and passed out fliers at antiwar rallies, and then he vanished. The peace activists didn’t see his face again until several months later when the Fresno Bee ran a story about a fatal motorcycle accident. The photo of the victim was a dead ringer for Aaron Stokes. Only his name was Aaron Kilner, and he was a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the antiterrorism unit. What was an undercover cop doing at the cookie and green tea socials of Peace Fresno? The sheriff played coy. “For the purpose of detecting or preventing terrorist activities, the department may visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public.”

If Peace Fresno was feeling beleaguered, it had less to do with the cops than with the Jewish community, a onetime ally. Democrats at Temple Beth Israel had not only abandoned the antiwar cause, but a few were joining a pro-war movement under the banner “United We Stand with Israel.” At a kickoff rally at Woodward Park, Jews and Christians stood hand in hand on a grassy knoll, looking a little like bride and groom at a shotgun wedding. For the Christians, the union made all the sense in the world. Returning biblical Israel to the firm grasp of Jews, after all, was a vanguard of the Second Coming. The Jews, on the other hand, were willing to take their chances on Armageddon as long as the Christians supported Israel in the here and now. Leading the rally’s battle cry that day was an old Nazi hunter and retired Israeli general named Shimon Erem, who had driven up from Los Angeles to address the crowd. “Jesus tore down the walls of hatred which separated gentiles and Jews and made us one,” he shouted. “And anyone who fights against this defies Jesus Christ. We are one, and we are going to remain one.”

As if on cue, a few dozen peace activists came marching up the hill, only to run into a wall of Israel supporters. Scott Hawkins, who would later describe himself as a “Mormon Zionist,” noticed a sign in the crowd that called for a Palestinian homeland and went belly to belly with the biggest peacenik he could find. “You want to get past me?” he said. “I guarantee you there will be blood.” As the protestors retreated, his wife, Sandra Duffy Hawkins, a district director for the California Republican Assembly, began to shout. “Jew haters. Jew haters. You’re just like Hitler.”

Among the speakers that evening were Somerville, the retired Marine colonel from the radio, and Hanson, the classics professor at Fresno State. More than the others, Hanson had glimpsed in 9/11 a shot at taking his modest scholarly career into the stratosphere. He had grown up in a family of left-leaning Democrats; his mother, Pauline, a respected judge, was the first woman to sit on the state appellate court in Fresno. It didn’t seem to matter that the closest Hanson had come to war himself was a dormitory skirmish over the Vietcong flag while he attended UC Santa Cruz in the early 1970s. Or that he had made his name in the valley not as a war hawk but as a cranky farmer who wrote poignantly about the struggles of the yeoman agrarian. The weather, the insects, the price of a ton of raisins—he now had traded in all those vicissitudes for a new certainty.

“In the post-9/11 world, there is no margin of error when dealing with a madman,” Hanson had said. “Saddam Hussein is more dangerous to the civilian population of the United States than was either the more formidable Hitler or Tojo. Saddam simply requires a dozen sleeper agents with suitcases of anthrax to pollute with microscopic spores multimilliondollar high-rises, killing and infecting thousands.”

In the new world envisioned by Hanson, a reality he rendered in hyphens (Islamic-Fascist-Wahabist-Jihadist terror), the aims of the United States and Israel were no longer merely compatible. What had been a strategic alliance in the 1990s was now something much more sacred. Since 9/11, the two countries, much like Christians and Jews, were brothers in the same war against Islamic fundamentalism. What was good for the United States was good for Israel; what was good for Israel was good for the U.S. All lines were symmetrical lines. All roads ran parallel.

Hanson had signed up, media agent and all, with an ascending movement of neoconservative writers and policy wonks in Washington and New York who were pushing the notion that the United States and Israel could be made safer by waging preemptive war in the Middle East. The movement’s core consisted mostly of Jewish Americans and a few white Christians who called themselves, with no small hubris, the Project for the New American Century. Having been relegated to the sidelines during the Clinton years, they regarded the three thousand victims of 9/11 as their “I told you so.”

Professor Hanson’s new pals had written to President Bush in April 2002 to press this new reality. “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight. Israel’s victory is an important part of our victory. As you have said, every day that Saddam Hussein remains in power brings closer the day when terrorists will have not just airplanes with which to attack us, but chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.” The designers of the New American Century—William Kristol, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Eliot Cohen, William J. Bennett, Martin Peretz, Richard Pipes, Frank Gaffney, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Kenneth Adelman, Rich Lowry, Gary Bauer, Stephen P. Rosen, Donald Kagan, and R. James Woolsey—would soon have their war.

 

In January 2003, as the Marines prepared to storm Baghdad, the beaten down ranks of the valley’s antiwar movement gathered in a small hall at Cal State Fresno. They had come to hear a USC linguistics professor talk about her previous life as an Israeli peace activist. The theme of Hagit Borer’s lecture, though hardly novel, still had the capacity to wound. Zionism and democracy are incompatible, she declared, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is akin to apartheid. “If you say a Zionist state cannot be democratic, you’re immediately branded an anti-Semite,” Borer told the crowd. “And if you’re like me, you are branded a self-hating Jew.”

A small, frail man, who had been fidgeting in the front row, began to boil. Then he blurted out in Hebrew, “Yes, that’s what you are.”

“Excuse me?” Borer said.

“Self-hating Jew. Yes. That’s what you are.”

Borer decided to ignore the man and shifted her eyes to the middle of the room. She tried to take a question, but he persisted. He stood up and began shaking his finger, not at Borer this time, but at Vida Samiian, the dean of arts and humanities. It was Samiian who had organized the event with her husband, Sasan Fayazmanesh, a Fresno State economics professor. The couple had grown up in Iran and protested side by side against the Shah while students at UCLA in the late 1970s.

“It’s all your fault,” the man shouted at Samiian. “It’s all your fault.”

Samiian could hear the indignation in his heavily accented words, but she had no idea who the man was. John Krebs was a former county supervisor and Democratic congressman who had taken on corrupt developers and subsidy-grabbing farmers before his zeal sank his political fortunes in the late 1970s. His father had been an early Zionist who left Germany before the Holocaust and settled amid the Arab villages of British-controlled Palestine. When it came time to kick out the British and build a Jewish nation, Krebs joined an underground movement that rejected the terrorist tactics of more radical Jewish groups. After living a half century in the United States, he didn’t support the policies of Israel’s Likud government and no longer gave money to AIPAC. But the suicide bombings in Israel had bled away any sympathy he had for the Palestinians.

“Palestinian terror, Osama bin Laden terror, I don’t see any difference,” Krebs would later explain. “I see it as an anti-Western mentality.”

In this respect, Krebs’s logic was no different than the logic of the neoconservatives with whom he otherwise vehemently disagreed. The reality was that neither the PLO nor Hamas had ever staged an attack against the United States, either here or abroad. The lecture series at Fresno State tried to advance the idea that Arafat and bin Laden were different, that the Palestinian grievance against Israel was about dispossession and statehood, not Al Qaeda-like jihad. But for a speaker such as Borer even to imply that a Palestinian suicide bomber carried in his heart a different—daresay more authentic—cause was too much for even a Jewish liberal such as John Krebs to hear.

Krebs left the lecture intent on taking action against Fresno State. This is how he came to join forces with Stuart Weil, the frog farmer who headed the local AIPAC. With a stack of angry e-mails backing them, Krebs and Weil appealed to top university officials. President John Welty couldn’t very well cancel the remaining antiwar speakers or bar a planned Palestine Day. So in an effort to mollify the Jewish community, Welty freed up $7,000 to bring in a speaker with a very different view: Daniel Pipes, the Middle East scholar who had written, among other provocations, that “all Muslims, unfortunately, are suspect.” True to his word, Pipes had started his own Campus Watch website that drew up a list of university professors he believed were terrorist fellow travelers.

Samiian and Fayazmanesh feared that inviting Pipes wouldn’t be enough to quiet their critics. Sure enough, the neocon muckrakers began digging. High-speed grapevines buzzed with postings about “Cal State Palestine” and the two Iranian professors who, depending on the blog, were either Marxists or fascists or worn-out paranoids. No neocon was more vigilant about such dangers than David Horowitz, a 1960s liberal with Berkeley bloodlines who now ran FrontPageMagazine.com. Horowitz had a flair for outing un-American professors whose commie bios were just a mouse click away from the pictures of big-breasted coeds selling “Hippies Smell” T-shirts. Horowitz wasted no time sending a reporter to Fresno, or at least a reporter whose computer could google the word “Fresno.” The reporter found out that a little old lady, two decades dead, had bequeathed the money used by the university to pay for the pro-Palestinian lecture series. Dots connected to dots. Enough dots to declare that Mrs. Hamish (it apparently didn’t matter that her actual name was Harnish) was tied to the National Lawyer’s Guild. In the 1930s, according to FrontPageMagazine.com, the guild was funded by Joseph Stalin. Seventy years later, it had links to Saddam Hussein himself.

“One wonders if the farming community of Fresno, California, is well enough represented by this local community of Marxists and anticapitalists who run with and support the terrorists of the PLO,” the FrontPage story read. Before it was over, Professor Fayazmanesh would find himself on Sean Hannity’s website, beneath the headline “Terrorist Prof at California State University, Fresno.”

 

In the summer of 2005, as the news from Iraq shifted and folded, growing more optimistic and then more dim, I drove out to Clovis to visit Jeff Hubbard, the father of the slain soldier. He greeted me at the door in a “U.S.A. United We Stand” T-shirt and sat me down, as before, at the kitchen table. We talked about how football had shaped three generations of both our families. My younger brother was the head coach at our alma mater, and Hubbard was looking to get back to the Pop Warner ranks. His only hesitation was knowing that he’d be overwhelmed with old images of coaching Jared and the rest of the Garfield Cubs. “I don’t want to forget my son, but I don’t want to keep him so alive that I’m sitting here all day long in the past,” he said.

He hadn’t been to the cemetery in months even as his wife, Peggy, went every chance she could. She worked long hours at Vons arranging floral bouquets for customers and extra ones for the grave. When he did make it out there, the flowers always told him how long it had been since Peggy’s last visit. The flowers almost always were fresh. He would stare into the headstone at a son who had grabbed the best features from both of them and try to think of something to say. “When I’m saying stuff, it comes out like I’m talking to him. But I’m not really believing he’s hearing it. I know I’m just talking to myself. I don’t want to say that death is the final thing. I want to say I don’t know if it is or it isn’t. ‘Gone.’ I don’t know what that means.”

His wife had rejoined one of the mega churches on a long avenue of mega churches near their house. He was an agnostic and found no comfort behind the compound walls. “I mow the lawn. I weed the flower beds. I feed the fish, take care of the dog. Then the day is done.”

He understood how Bert Baro, the father of his son’s best friend and companion in death, had found solace in taking the hardest, pro-war line. It didn’t work for him. Night after night, as he replayed the explosion that took Jared’s life, sifting the details still coming in from his platoon, adding to them details of a war growing more costly and bloody by the day, he began to ask questions that he couldn’t share with Peggy. Did we sacrifice our son for a worthy cause? Was the desire to see that Jared died for something simply a formula for other sons dying for nothing? Honoring the dead by insisting on more dead was the worst kind of selfishness. And yet for all his doubt, he had a difficult time believing that the fictions that had gotten us into war made the war itself a lie. “I keep thinking that maybe there’s a reason for going to Iraq that our leaders just couldn’t share with us,” he said, shaking his head.

Over the next two hours, Hubbard and I wrestled with every aspect of the war. At first, it felt wrong to push the father of a dead soldier, and I apologized for treading on his grief with questions of politics, questions he had forbidden in our first meeting. But he said grief had done a funny thing. He had lost his patience with the Bill O’Reillys of the world, the way they spun their questions into loyalty oaths. More and more, he was turning to lengthy articles and books to find answers. He was searching for some ground, he said, that neither the left nor the right had found. He was searching even as he told himself that such a truth could never be grasped by the father of a dead soldier.

On the fireplace next to the kitchen table sat his son’s Marine Corps portrait, photos from the 2000 championship football team and the watch that, despite the bomb blast, was still telling perfect Iraqi time, eleven hours into the future. As I watched him steer from the clearness of that death to a place where everything became muddled, it occurred to me that I was not just seeing the real face of war but hearing the honest debate we never had as a nation. Watching his struggle, I felt as if I owed him a good look into my own struggle, first as a citizen and then as a journalist whose feelings about the war also had grown more confused over the past year.

I told him I was not unlike so many other Americans who had been reluctantly moved to the side of war when Colin Powell went before the United Nations and detailed the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal and ties to terror. That the evidence turned out to be false changed everything for me. The fiction wasn’t Bush or Cheney lying about the contents of a particular intelligence report. Rather, the way they picked and hyped only the intelligence that fit their desired end was a malicious disregard for the truth. The whole process became the lie. “The administration didn’t want a real debate,” I said. “Given the climate of 9/11, they knew that fear trumped everything. So they exploited our fears with mushroom clouds and biological clouds and clouds from our own crop dusters.”

He agreed that it wasn’t simply a matter, as the hawks would have it, that because those reasons turned out to be false, we could replace them with more valid reasons and, ex post facto, feel good again about the war. By not vetting those other reasons when they should have been vetted, before the war, we had lost the ability to vet them altogether. He wondered if his son would have volunteered to fight, if Americans would have even backed the invasion, if the air had been sucked clean of fear and the idea of exporting democracy had been the only imperative. Tragically, there was no way of knowing because he could never return to those prewar days and have that conversation with Jared. “I never believed that Saddam was connected to Al Qaeda. And I think the war is probably creating more terrorists than we’re killing right now,” he said. “But when you’re facing that kind of evil—people who want to destroy your way of life—you have to put down the gauntlet somewhere.”

Each night, after he stripped away the rhetoric on both sides, he was left with one question above the rest: “Can we win this war? I don’t mean the hype about exporting freedom. I don’t mean the simplifications like ‘we’re fighting over there, so the terrorists aren’t here.’ But is it doable to stabilize that country and help the Iraqis choose a better system? Not our system but their system.”

The more I listened, the clearer it became that for Hubbard, at least, the war had moved beyond the falsehoods of Bush and Cheney. It was now bigger than their ability to screw it up. He understood how the lies had brought their own just deserts, turning so many Americans against the war. Yet all the talk of bringing home the troops reminded him, oddly, of the Golden Gate Bridge over San Francisco. “Once you start, you don’t stop halfway over the bay just because it’s costing more than you projected and men have died along the way,” he said. “If the bridge can be built, you need to reach the other side.”

Before I left, I asked him about his youngest son, Nathan, who had seemed so lost during our last visit. Was he still talking about honoring Jared by going to Iraq? “I haven’t heard anything about it lately, and I kind of want to leave it alone. It’s hard to hold Jared in the light we hold him and then turn to his little brother and say, ‘If you choose the same path, it’s wrong.’ But he also needs to know that life has changed since Jared was killed. This family is not the same. This war is not the same.”

 

I stepped inside Stuart Weil’s giant tin shed expecting to hear the chirp of 1.2 million tiny frogs singing Congo love songs. As it turned out, a radio blared ranchero music, and the frogs did their chirping low and mostly at night. “Welcome to frog nirvana,” Weil said, shaking my hand. A female in the wild produced 50,000 eggs during her lifetime. Maybe two or three turned into frogs. Here, amid a labyrinth of open-air tanks, pumps, heaters, and filters, with no predator to elude except an occasional pathogen from the sky, that same female gave birth to 50,000 tadpoles. A crew of Mexican workers made sure the big boys, the breeders, got what they wanted. This left plenty of time for Weil to pursue his real passion: building a Christian-Jewish bulwark.

Since the launch of the war on terror, the balance of power inside Temple Beth Israel had shifted. Weil and his group of right-wingers had taken over important posts and were using the synagogue’s email list to promote lectures by gay-bashing Christians and pro-war Jews. Barry Price, a former temple president, was among a group of liberals not sure how to respond. A few years earlier, during a High Holiday address, Price had stood up to Weil’s group, voicing his concerns about their strong anti-Muslim sentiments and lust for war. “Some of the right-wingers got up and walked out,” Price recalled. “I was labeled a traitor. I was called ignorant and naive.”

The Iraq war had put temple lefties in a bind, raising questions they weren’t keen to address. Was the decision to topple Saddam Hussein motivated in part by America’s devotion to Israel? Was it relevant that several of the neoconservatives who pushed hardest for war inside the Bush-Cheney administration—top defense aides Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith and consultant Richard Perle—were Jews who had worked for years to marry the security concerns of the United States and Israel? “It was the one topic that people were most afraid to touch,” Price said. “The progressives in the temple had ceded the field to the vocal Jews on the right. We were cowed into silence.”

Sitting in his office in his khakis and tennis shoes, brow furrowed and head cocked, Weil now wondered if I might be betraying some prejudice for even raising the question that a love for Israel had motivated Jewish war hawks in the Pentagon. He rejected the notion as a new version of the old canard that Jews operate with dual loyalties. “Is that how your liberal friends talk when you’re together?” he asked, eyes narrowing. He stopped short of calling me an anti-Semite, if for no other reason than our seventeen-year-old daughters attended the same high school and were close friends. He believed the term “neoconservative” had become a liberal code word for “Zionist.” If the neoconservatives got us into war, the translation read: “The Jews did it.”

I was hoping Weil could tell me why merely raising such a question smacked of anti-Semitism. Why couldn’t Americans question our relationship with Israel when it was that relationship that caused so much of the Arab world to hate us? Was it anti-Semitic to suggest that our union with Israel made us less safe at home? Even the 9/11 Commission, for all its timidity, had found that our siding with Israel in the Palestinian conflict had made us a target. Yet delving into the matter somehow landed you on the Anti-Defamation League’s list of Jew haters.

Weil sat still and nodded here and there as I dug in deeper. To argue that Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle weren’t Zionists or that their desire to protect Israel didn’t color their advocacy of the war was to ignore their own resumes. Feith, for one, had been honored by the Zionist Organization of America for being a “pro-Israel activist.” This was just a few years before he set up the rogue operation in the Pentagon to gather the intelligence to sell the war.

I told Weil he needed to look no further than his own AIPAC to see how high the stakes had become. Federal agents suspected that top AIPAC officials, in the months leading up to the war, had been spying on behalf of Israel. The FBI probe was connecting back to the very unit headed by Feith and his gang.

“You really think that AIPAC is a den of spies?” he asked.

A part of me whispered to myself that it was best to leave it there. This wasn’t the time or the place. Our encounter, after all, was occurring several months before two professors would author a controversial study on the Israel lobby and its role in pushing for the invasion of Iraq and a similar attack on Iran. That study would grow into a national book and help bring the subject out in the open. Weil and I had no such cover. We were dealing with a topic that, at least for a Gentile pressing a Jew, seemed verboten. Even so, the air in frog barn remained friendly, and Weil followed every wince with a smile that told me we were still okay.

I explained that the federal probe into AIPAC was hardly the first time that neoconservative zeal for Israel had become a matter of national security. Among the more fervent hawks urging President Bush to remake the map of the Middle East were Stephen Bryen and Michael Ledeen. Both men were founding directors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and had joined the powerful American Enterprise Institute, the pro-Israel think tank. Back in the late 1970s, Bryen had to resign from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff after the FBI learned he was showing classified documents to his friends in Israeli intelligence. In the early 1980s, Ledeen used his own close ties to Israel to act as a middleman in the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, raising questions at the National Security Council about which country’s interests (Israel or the United States) he was serving. Two decades later, Ledeen had emerged as a shadowy figure in an elaborate scheme to link Saddam Hussein with yellowcake uranium from Niger—one of the principal falsehoods that led to the war.

“Where are you getting this stuff?” Weil asked, his face now twisted into a perturbed knot. “It’s all so conspiratorial.” It had been Bush and Cheney who made the call for war, he said, not any Jewish advisers whispering “Zionist commands” in their ears.

He was right, of course, that the vice president and president didn’t need much cajoling when it came to Israel’s security as a consideration for war. Before he took office, Cheney sat on the advisory board of JINSA, fully committed to its mission of cementing strategic U.S.-Israeli ties. As for Bush, his attachment went even deeper. His reverence for the Jewish state was the reverence of a born again.

Weil swiveled his chair around and turned his attention once again to his computer screen, sending one missive and then another into the Christian-Jewish ether. He said he was a man now free from the straitjacket of Temple Beth Israel. As chairman of the new local chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition, he no longer needed the rabbi’s blessing to promote his own causes. “I do everything now under the RJC. You’d be surprised how many prominent Jews support me with money but anonymously, because they don’t want to risk the wrath of the liberals.”

He had hope for me, as well. Just as the second Palestinian uprising had opened his eyes, he predicted a similar awakening would one day strike me. “You’re not beyond saving,” he said with a cackle. With a rescue in mind, he invited me to the 2005 Friend of Israel award dinner in Fresno the following night. At the previous year’s dinner, my first as his guest, Weil had promised to double the modest crowd of one hundred by “tapping into the evangelical community.” As I walked into this year’s affair, I could see that Weil had more than made good on his vow. Preachers and flocks from several big churches were spreading chopped liver on crackers with their new Jewish friends. Weil got up and enumerated the Republican Jewish Coalition’s recent events: a pastors’ forum and a speech by the evangelical former mayor of Fresno and a retreat with Bridges for Peace, a Christian Zionist group whose members believed that Hurricane Katrina was divine judgment on the U.S. for pushing Israel to resume talks with Palestinians.

Weil then introduced Bill Manders, the old KMJ radio host who had experienced his own awakening a few years back when Weil and friends sent him on a paid trip to Israel. Manders recalled how he had returned from his stay with a new-found appreciation for the challenges the Jewish nation faced. Iraq, as far as Manders was concerned, was only the first front in a much longer war. “When is someone going to step forward and say, besides me on the radio, why don’t we drop a nuclear bomb on Iran and blow them off the face of the earth?” The crowd applauded and shouted, “Yeah.”

The time had come to honor this year’s winner of the Friend of Israel award. It was none other than John Somerville, the short, well-built, old Marine colonel I first encountered on the radio three years earlier. He thanked Weil for the honor and made it plain that his passion for Israel came from the Bible but extended to the realms of politics and war. “A true friend is not knocked off his perch when Israel is denounced for rough treatment of the Palestinians or when an Israeli politician is found to have his hand in the till or when Mossad carries off a dirty trick,” he said. “A true friend of Israel does not have to rework the ethical arithmetic in order to reckon whose side he is supposed to be on. A true Christian Zionist has the requirement of faith to prefer the blessings of Israel to all others. To be a Christian Zionist is to be an unconditional lover of Israel and of the Jewish people.”

Was it our vigilance or dumb luck or some beautiful combination of the two that kept us safe? For the longest time, that’s how I had framed the question. As the anniversaries of 9/11 came and went, each one marking another year without incident, I began to consider another possibility. Maybe the threat wasn’t such a threat, after all. Maybe it had been hyped and sold like everything else. The calculation that we faced a greater risk simply because 9/11 had happened always struck me as wrong-headed. If thousands of migrants from Mexico were finding a way across the border, why hadn’t a single suicide bomber made the same trek? If our vigilance was as shoddy as Hurricane Katrina suggested, why not a single hijacker? Could it be that those nineteen men wielding box cutters were the best and brightest that Al Qaeda had to offer? Could it be that they got lucky that day, and we were now assuming a risk based on a once in a blue moon reality? Maybe the question of terror is like sizing up the threat we face from the San Andreas fault. Pressure builds and builds over decades until an earthquake finally erupts. Energy spent, the fault goes silent again, but for how long? In those periods of slumber, we do not alter our lives measurably because of fear of the Big One. We have found a way—call it healthy denial—that allows us to live with the awareness that the earth beneath will surely rupture again. Is it so hard to find that same perspective when it comes to terror? Then I turned on the TV and saw the foaming anger that the war in Iraq has unleashed in the Muslim world, and I went to bed understanding that we have made more real the very threat we feared. None of our vigilant deeds, none of the civil liberties we have so willingly tossed to the cause, matter in the wake of what we ourselves made true. The Muslims on the tube are insane, the war is a war of cultures, the war is a war without end.

In the fall of 2005, a news release from the Los Angeles Army Recruiting Battalion office came over my fax machine. It was headlined “To Serve Our Country,” and it announced the recruitment of two more valley boys into the military: Nathan C. Hubbard, nineteen, and Jason R. Hubbard, thirty-one. Their situation, the release noted, “is a special one.” Jason and Nathan’s brother, Jared, had joined the Marines in December 2001. During his second tour of duty, Jared “gave the ultimate sacrifice.” The statement included remarks from the man who had recruited the brothers. “Words can’t describe what they are doing,” said Darren Mayes. “This is the true meaning of service to our country.”

I hadn’t talked to Jeff Hubbard in several weeks, and the news knocked me back. Not only had his youngest son acted on his bravado and signed up, but so had his oldest boy, a sheriff’s detective with a wife and newborn son. The next day, I drove out to Hubbard’s house and found him alone watching a Monday night football game. There was nothing diminished about him, not his firm handshake or clear eyes or his sheer energy for talking. Because he had a philosophical side, I didn’t expect to find him in any sort of despair. Nevertheless, I wondered how a man who had lost so much and whose feelings about the war had grown more conflicted could possibly have given his blessing to two more sons signing up for Iraq.

Since the day the three Marines came knocking at the door ten months ago, he told me, he knew that one son, if not both, would follow in Jared’s footsteps. “They didn’t tell us, ‘Okay, we’re now driving over to the recruiter’s office.’ But we knew it was coming. Remember those conversations in the kitchen with Jared. Well, we had those same conversations with Nathan and Jason.”

A part of him wanted to tell them no, that they had already paid their price as a family, that if they were trying to honor their brother or pursue some silly notion of revenge, it wasn’t enough of a reason to go. It wasn’t enough to put him and their mother through a new round of torment. Instead, he sat immovable in his chair, dulling his words, finding a certain wisdom in his belief that it wasn’t right to hold one decision captive to another. What happened to Jared was its own world. Call it bad timing or bad luck or perhaps it had been God’s will. Each son, though, deserved his own hearing, apart from anything that had come before or might come after. So he listened as Jason and Nathan talked not about revenge but about duty in a time of war.

He told me this stoically, his face filled with resignation, as if the course of action of those around him, those he wanted to protect, was out of his control. “How do you try to change someone’s mind when you know that changing their mind is all about you, not them?” he asked.

This didn’t sound right to me. It sounded like either the most selfless gesture or the most selfish one. We had built enough rapport over the previous year that I decided to challenge him. “Jeff, this isn’t some tattoo or tongue piercing. You tell them, ‘You’re not going to do this. You’re not fricking doing this to me or your mom. Jason, you’ve got a new wife and baby. You’ve got a great job catching drug dealers. That’s your service to the country. And Nathan, you go to school and honor your brother because you know college was his dream. That’s your service.’ You just don’t go leaving it up to them.”

He flashed a knowing grin. “When you decide to draw a line in the sand with your kids, what do you do if they decide to disobey you? Where do you go from there? Did we tell them how we felt? Of course we did. ‘We would rather you wouldn’t do this. We have given a lot. You don’t need to do this.’ We said it all.”

“But you didn’t put your foot down. The prerogative of the father.”

“No. They told us they wanted to join to serve their country. For no other reason than it was the right thing to do. And I’m not going to let them do the right thing? The thing they believe in? I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let my questions become their questions.”

I pointed to the Army recruiter’s press release. “Now they’re using your sons for propaganda.”

“I realize that. ‘One brother dies and the other two follow him into war.’ It bothers me. But at the end of the day, I still believe in this war. I’m not happy with the manipulations. I’m not happy that some of those manipulations still continue. But I have to believe we’re trying to make that part of the world a better place. I still hold out hope that in ten or fifteen years I can walk the streets of Baghdad as an old man and say my son died for something. He really died for something.”

It was late, and he followed me out to the car. We shook hands, and I thanked him for not losing his patience, for keeping his door open to me and my questions. He leaned over and stuck his head into my half-open window. “There isn’t one clean answer,” he said. “You don’t think I know that?”

Maybe I had come for one clean answer, I wasn’t sure, but who was I to push him anymore? It was enough that his struggle, set against the carnival of patriots and prophets and fear mongers, was private and real.

I took the long way home that night, past the cemetery where the two boys were buried, past the strawberry fields being turned into suburbia, past the university where all eyes were now fixed on the Bulldogs Top 20 football ranking. I reached the corner of Blackstone and Shaw, where the pro-war demonstrators hadn’t staged a rally in months, and headed west toward Highway 99. In the vineyard rows, the grape growers had set down their bunches to make raisins, praying that rain would hold off for another three weeks. In the distant sky, the crop dusters were making another late-night run over the cotton fields. As I made a last turn toward the old fig orchard where we lived, the valley rested silent, almost at peace.

 

POSTSCRIPT

 

On August 22, 2007, a Blackhawk helicopter carrying Nathan Hubbard and thirteen other infantry scouts crashed just before dawn in an oil-rich province 180 miles outside Baghdad. His brother, Jason, had been in the air only thirty seconds when he was told that the Blackhawk, part of his Army platoon, had gone down. As his helicopter hurried to the scene, he could see the scorched earth and broken pieces, as well as the frantic rescue workers. He tried to tell himself that his youngest brother, the free spirit that the Army could not break, wasn’t dead. But all fourteen of them were dead. They held his funeral at the same church in Fresno where they had held Jared’s. Every seat, as before, was filled. Two years and nine months had passed since that day, and 2,589 more American soldiers had been added to the list of dead, but the pastor’s words had not changed. “He gave his life serving the cause of freedom in the global war on terrorism.” The sun through the stained glass spilled into the sanctuary, and the recorded voice of John Wayne recited a verse about the day an American boy became a man. “I promise I’ll go back to school when I’ve met my obligation, to you, my friends, my girl, my school, and most of all this nation,” the Duke chanted. “We’ve got to keep the Old Glory flying.” I was facing the front row, standing alongside the other Peeping Toms, but I couldn’t bring myself to look Jeff Hubbard in the eye. Our last encounter, the way I had pushed him, now came back with the echo of judgment. A major general who had come to pay his respects on behalf of the secretary of the Army rose to present the soldier’s Bronze Star to his parents. “Your son was willing to go the distance with any task,” he said. Peggy’s face was impassive, a mask of tranquility, and she could barely utter “thank-you.” Jeff stood straight and tall, wearing that same quiet look of resignation. I walked out of the church unsure how such a man, who lived without the benefit of sedatives, no pills or religion, drew his solace.

The route to the cemetery had been lined with red, white, and blue ribbons tied to lampposts and trees. A little after noon, in the 107-degree heat, the crowd gathered at the gravesite. Of all the brothers who had died in Iraq, only these two brothers, side by side again, had been brothers in blood. The bagpipes played, and the last Hubbard brother held his salute until the final note. The honor guard of seven fired three rounds each. Were these the same riflemen? The funeral attendant released twenty-one white doves. Were these the same doves? An Army officer stood over the coffin, folded the U.S. flag, and handed it to Peggy Hubbard. Was this the same flag?