Through the summer of 2002 demands for war emanated from the White House and rolled across the land. That fall they grew to a deafening roar as the administration of George W. Bush prepared the nation to invade Iraq. Still, the hearts of many beat a hopeful response that Bush’s “preemptive” war would instead be a prevented war.
In retrospect, it might seem crazy to believe that ordinary people could keep the dogs of war leashed, but we truly did. And around the world millions more believed the same.
British rail workers began refusing to move war cargo. Italian unions called on members to lay down their tools in protest. In thousands of cities and small towns across the U.S., people marched and prayed. For once, a war faced global opposition before it began, never more clearly demonstrated than on February 15, 2003. On that single day, beginning in New Zealand and Australia, and sweeping westward across Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North and South America, over 10,000,000 people took to the streets to demand peace.
In those months before the invasion, hopes for peace also grew in Toledo, Ohio, a city of 300,000 on the western edge of Lake Erie. Along with hope, some of us also felt rising anger, frustration and resolve; vowing that this time, we would do more than hold a sign or attend a rally.
It was in this atmosphere that I concluded to do something that seemed more commensurate with the threat of war – to go to Iraq. I wasn’t sure exactly why, or even what I would do when I got there. But I was compelled to do something more and going to Iraq made sense. A friend referred me to an organization that in the course of seven years had sent over 70 delegations of U.S. citizens to Iraq to learn how U.N. sanctions were affecting its people, then return home and speak about what they saw. As invasion looked more likely, Voices in the Wilderness shifted their focus from sanctions to trying to prevent a war, renaming its delegations as Iraq Peace Teams (IPT).
By the time I heard of their work and applied to join a delegation, it was early January 2003, a little more than two months before 130,000 U.S. and British troops stormed out of Kuwait into Iraq. When friends and reporters in Toledo asked me what I would do in Iraq I replied that I was prepared to use my training as a Navy hospital corpsman to assist civilian casualties in case of war. Still hoping that would ultimately not be needed, I booked a flight and prepared to go.
As the days ticked by preceding my trip, word got around town. Local TV stations sent reporters to the house and right-wing radio talk show hosts had a field day. Voices in the Wilderness delegates routinely took boxes of medical supplies to Iraq in order to purposely violate the sanctions and make a political point, and people responded so enthusiastically to my request for over-the-counter medications that I added two more suitcases of these supplies to my luggage. One disturbed fellow phoned the house and recorded a death threat, claiming he was taking collections for a body bag, and hoped his son, then stationed in Kuwait, would run into me “after he kicks Saddam Hussein’s ass.”
After a stint in local politics, I had developed a pretty thick skin, and none of the negative comments bothered me very much. But the night before I left, lying in bed with my wife, thinking of how many U.S. and Iraqi soldiers were experiencing a similar “last night at home,” the phone rang. A friend called to tell us that a local TV station had run one of those unscientific call-in “polls,” asking the question: “Is Mike Ferner a traitor for going to Iraq?” A full 74% of my fellow citizens responding felt I should swing from the nearest yardarm.
My response was a crude admonition and a few deleted expletives. My wife, however, took the news to heart and in a moment was on the phone to the station’s newsroom, telling them, “How dare you accuse my husband of being a traitor? He served four years on city council. He served in the military. And thanks to you, our lives may be in jeopardy.” She later told me of receiving about a dozen hate calls and emails the first few days after I left, but those were eventually replaced by a far larger number of positive comments.
The Northwest Ohio Peace Coalition decided to hold a news conference on Saturday, February 1, the morning I left for the Middle East. As an indication of popular opposition to the war and how it would be covered by the news media, over 200 supporters came out for the news conference – and one local TV station.
That morning, people brought bags of medicines and supplies for me to take to Iraq, and pressed small donations into my hand as they said goodbye. One person I’d never met before introduced himself and wished me well. He said, “This trip will change your life.” I had no idea how true those words would become.
Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq takes its name from the unofficial term for that part of Baghdad, and by extension, all of Iraq, that lies outside the “Green Zone,” a heavily fortified area on the Tigris River that used to be home to Saddam Hussein and his elites, now headquarters for the U.S. operations in Iraq. One day at breakfast in the Agadir Hotel, Dan Pepper, a photographer, sat down to tell us the morning’s best story – an incident from the previous day when he was working in the Green Zone and ran into two Bechtel Corp. contractors. “They asked me where I lived in Baghdad, and when I told them a hotel on the other side of the Tigris, they asked excitedly, ‘You mean you live in the Red Zone? Could you take some pictures for us so we can see what it looks like?’”
Reading this modest volume will not provide you with the definitive political analysis of Iraq. But no one should be as ignorant about the lives of ordinary Iraqis as those Bechtel contractors. This book tells the story of a month I spent in Iraq just before the U.S. invasion as a member of a delegation of peace activists, and the two months I spent there a year later, as an independent journalist to write stories about ordinary people and how the war changed their lives…and mine.
