I journeyed to Alawadi’s adopted hometown of El Cajon in Southern California to find out more about her death. El Cajon is a microcosm of Iraq, but an Iraq that no longer exists. More than 40,000 Iraqis are struggling to build a new life there, having fled persecution in their homeland. One local described to me a community where “There’s Chaldeans, Yazidis, Mandaeans. There’s Shi’a, Sunni, Kurds. There’s Assyrian and Armenian.”

The first wave of immigration came in the late 1970s on the eve of the devastating Iran-Iraq War. Others, including Alawadi and her family, fled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, mainly Shi’a who unsuccessfully tried to overthrow a wounded Saddam Hussein at the urging of the senior Bush administration. The third wave was courtesy of the junior Bush’s 2003 invasion, which spawned Islamist militias that have decimated Iraq’s Chaldean Christians, Mandaeans (followers of John the Baptist) and Yazidis (a 4,000-year-old syncretic religion). Out of the millions of Iraqi refugees from the most recent U.S. war, 59,000 have landed on American soil.

Many have found their way to El Cajon. They tell of harrowing escapes from kidnappings, bombings and death squads, years in refugee camps and life savings spent to hopscotch from country to country. Recent arrivals come bearing deep traumas and have landed in a depressed economy where they often sink into joblessness, squalor and depression. They have also discovered not everyone is welcoming.

“There is a hate crime problem in El Cajon,” says Basma Coda, an Iraqi-American who works at the Chaldean-Middle Eastern Social Services. “We have documented six physical attacks since 2007 in which Iraqi refugees were beat up and had broken bones. All had to go the hospital. They were all over 50, and one was a 75-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease.” (The El Cajon police department did not return calls about the alleged crimes.)

“There are a lot of anti-Islamic groups and know-nothings here,” says California State University professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism in San Bernardino. Nonetheless, he and other hate-crime monitors are skeptical of some of the alleged details of Alawadi’s death. “Why are the police so quick to say it is an isolated incident? That suggests to me they are looking at other motives. There is the possibility this could be some sort of personal attack or revenge attack.” Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups nationwide, says that when he first heard about the threatening notes, “I raised an eyebrow. It’s too perfect. It’s highly unusual to have notes that spell out the motive on paper.” As for the crime itself, Potok says, “It is quite unusual to invade someone’s home, especially a woman, and violently beat her to death in the dining room.”

Indeed, in the days after her death several revelations called the hate-crime allegation into question. On April 4, an affidavit for a search warrant about the murder was “accidentally released,” according to the New York Times. The San Diego Union-Tribune, which first received the document, claimed it shows a “family in turmoil and cast doubt on the likelihood that her slaying was a hate crime.” Alawadi was said to be planning on leaving her husband, based on blank divorce papers found in her vehicle. Last November, police investigating reports of two people possibly having sex in a car found Fatima with a 21-year-old man. After her mother was called to pick her up, Fatima allegedly jumped out of the moving car at 35 mph. While being treated at a hospital for her injuries the court records state, “Police were informed by paramedics and hospital staff that Fatima Alhimidi said she was being forced to marry her cousin and did not want to do so she jumped out of the vehicle.”

The document also mentions “a neighbor reported seeing a skinny dark-skinned male running west from the area of Alawadi’s house” on the morning of the murder. According to the affidavit, as of March 27, the police had not confirmed the whereabouts of Kassim Alhimidi, Alawadi’s husband, at the time of the murder. And curiously, “a handwritten note was located at the scene that the family denied seeing before.”

Yet some in the community are still skeptical because there is no suspect, motive or murder weapon. Hanif Mohebi, director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says, “There are definitely questions that are brought up by the article, but we should not jump to a conclusion unless there is a real fact provided. Our community is not immune to these issues.”

Some observers worry that the new information in the Alawadi case will be misused. Hanif Mohebi says, “From the beginning we were very cautious about the murder because we are all human beings, and this could go any way. The Islamophobes will exploit this. If there is something that advances their agenda, they will most definitely use it.” Right on cue, Geller and Spencer began their postulations about “honor killings.”

Potok also stresses that, whoever murdered Alawadi, the rise in Islamophobia is genuine. The Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked a 200 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate groups nationwide from 10 such groups in 2010 to 30 in 2011. Potok attributes the spread to “the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy in 2010 that was really ginned up by opportunistic activists and politicians … This is a classic case of words having consequences.”

The rumors of notes, in particular, have unsettled Iraqi immigrants to El Cajon. The notes have hurled them back to wartime horrors they seem unable to escape. After the United States occupied Iraq, a favored tactic of extremist militias was to deliver a note to intended victims warning them to leave or be killed. Families would receive letters because a child or husband was collaborating with U.S. forces, or perhaps they were the wrong ethnicity or religion in the wrong part of town. Religious minorities were sometimes given the “option” of converting to Islam.

Basma Coda says, “We have threatening notes in our office that people brought from Iraq.” The notes say things like, “You are an infidel. You are a sinner. You deserve to die. If you don’t leave by a certain time, you and children will die.” Often they would be given a specific day or time to leave. Coda says, “The Iraqi refugees in El Cajon every day they live their fear. They live their trauma. The future is unknown for these refugees.” She says her social service organization is trying to help them, “but one incident like Alawadi’s murder takes them back to the trauma they experienced.”

On March 30, I attended an outdoor prayer service and candlelight vigil for Alawadi. I met one of her neighbors from Iraq. Abbas Almeali, 42, clad in traditional Iraqi garb and headdress, said he knew Shaima and her family from Samawa, the closest city in southern Iraq to the Saudi Arabian border. He fled in March 1991 after the revolt failed, but “was proud to be part of the uprising.” He said Alawadi’s father was tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime and her uncle was hung during the uprising. “She was a nice girl, she had no problems with anyone,” Almaeli said.

Kamyar Hedayat, a medical doctor of Iranian heritage, spoke at the vigil. Hedayat said as he has practiced critical care for children, “I’ve watched children die, and I know how death affects families.” Hedayat said, “It is ironic that a woman who escaped the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein and the bombs of George Bush, Sr., lost her life in San Diego seeking safety and civility.”

Michelle Fawcett contributed to this report.

A man consumed with war, words and images, Busch served two combat tours in Iraq. He proved himself both exceptionally thoughtful and also terribly overconfident. In his first tour, beginning in April 2003, he was the commanding officer of a light armored reconnaissance unit, in a village near Iran. In his second tour, in an exploding Ramadi in 2005, Busch had the impossible job of trying to rebuild a town — and gain its trust — while insurgents and sniper fire added to the general lawlessness and lack of any power structure.

Oh, and in between those two tours, Busch returned home to play Sgt. Anthony Colicchio on “The Wire.” The military man who emphasized listening to Iraqis and learning what he didn’t know played a fictional Baltimore police officer of the exact opposite variety. The over-aggressive Colicchio loved nothing more than making arrests to show toughness and to pump up the Western District’s stats. He’s not interested in getting to know the streets he patrols, and he’s disgusted by covert efforts to legalize the drug trade in a part of Baltimore dubbed “Hamsterdam.”

In an interview this week, Busch said real-life frustrations in Iraq fueled Colicchio’s rage. But the challenge in Iraq, he says, was making sure those frustrations never, ever revealed themselves when working with Iraqis. Both roles, he said, were essentially acting jobs. We also talked about Robert Bales and how soldiers handle pressure, where the war plans went wrong and whether the Marines need more Vassar alums.

You were a student at Vassar during the first Gulf War, the 100-hour action that pushed Iraq out of Kuwait. You write about feeling disappointed that it was over so quickly – that this looked like your generation’s shot at war. You very much wanted to go to war.

I thought that. I pushed the extremes throughout my youth, as you can see from some of the small stories even as a child. I was always venturing into what I either considered unexplored territory or what I considered unwise territory to explore.  And war was certainly one of those things. Its mere existence is entirely an environment of threat. Although, as you learn in war, with the randomness of death, preparation is only partially useful. Looking forward to it, you think that you could develop skills which would make you impervious. I painted myself in that idea, that I had survived the poor wisdom of my youth, and it must be because I had certain endurance. I wanted to believe that that could be extended into an environment as ferocious as war. I covered myself in a certain invulnerability in my first tour as a commander, mostly because my Marines expected it.

There’s a vivid scene in the book where your helicopter is going down, and you see the side of a cliff rushing toward you, the small details of land getting clearer and clearer. But you have Marines in the back of the helicopter facing the other direction who don’t know what is happening. So you just calmly smiled at them.

What else can you do in the face of death but smile.

Some people might scream. 

I’m not a screamer. There’s a certain calm that comes with both a belief that you are invulnerable and a belief that you’re doomed.  It leads to a lack of anxiety: One you can’t affect, and the other you can’t be affected.

And that’s the change you describe during your two tours in Iraq. The first time, there’s an eerie confidence. But the second time, death is omnipresent.

Yes, between the two tours that became very pronounced. My first tour I was wearing it for show; I created my own myth and believed in it. My second tour I was wounded almost immediately and we were taking incredible casualties and Ramadi was just a caustic environment in 2005. It was entirely random; every day you expected that it was going to be your day. We almost had this fatalistic humor about it all. We’d walk out the door and say, “Oh, I’m probably going to be killed today, so you can have my uniforms.” People weren’t surviving.

This is post-insurgency, and in the capital of the Sunni province of Anbar. It was a very bloody time, and you suggest our presence didn’t help, which in some ways is a startling admission from a Marine.

It was teeming not just with insurgents — actual Sunnis which were fighting for their own destiny — but it was also overrun with Syrians who were real pure jihadists. They came across the border to fight and die – they came there for us. Many of them were funded by Saudis. So there was a strange triangle of danger created all around our mere presence. And what we would look at was the families. There were children living there and parents who wanted what everyone wants – a secure day, food on the table. And not to fear that something collateral will happen to them, either by insurgents or by us. It was hard to watch that every day, knowing that they were under threat because we were under threat. And that our job was to protect them and we really couldn’t.

Let me back up for a moment. Your memoir has nine chapters, structured among elements like water, metal, stone and blood. You recount stories involving those materials from your youth, and then connect those materials to your war stories. So how did your childhood prepare you for what you saw when you weren’t playing games?

Endless fascination. I think it was endless fascination that prepared me for everything in my life. I was always paying attention. I was put here to observe and build upon my fascinations.

You make it sound simple. But there’s another scene in the book where you are called to mediate an emergency council meeting in Jassan. Water had been diverted to Saddam Hussein’s family. The town wanted a pipe sealed so their water flow would improve. The people did not know what to do, and insurgents were threatening the village’s leaders and sent a message during the meeting that they would also kill you. How does a young American in that situation know what to do?

It’s my Lawrence of Arabia moment.

It’s also a moment where you teach the meaning of democracy. You empower them to put the matter to a vote, and then act. You see people hungry to solve problems together, and excited to find the power within themselves to do that. That’s in some ways what we said we would do there — and exactly what didn’t happen often enough.

It was my place not to impose that, but to let that native urge be successful. I just felt very early that they wanted direction, and the worst thing that I could do would be to give it, because that would make me in charge. That would make me the ruling class. What had been removed was any sense of structure – the Baath party had been dissolved at that point, and had not been replaced with anything. There was a huge vacuum and all that had been put into it was us. And I knew that our mistakes would be made by creating a dependency upon a new state order that was perhaps not sustainable. I had nothing to offer except advice and bullets. That’s what I had. We couldn’t even get our mail at the time. What I wanted to do was find native solutions to native problems that I could only reinforce their answers to their problems, in some ways.  And that was a big moment I wish I could have celebrated in some ways because it was their choice and it was just that brief moment where they felt like they were in charge of their destiny – they felt like they had done something. They had the power to achieve justice, and they did it against all the odds. We had to replace rule of law in a place that is entirely lawless.

So you pay attention. I just followed my fascinations. Why is the water not running? Where does the water come from? Let’s follow that. And we did. You begin to reverse engineer everything just by seeing what’s wrong at the end. I wouldn’t say that I was good at anything.

Good questions. Too bad we didn’t ask them more often.

We could have saved a lot of time and a lot of loss if we had done so. What I feel the most regret about is that I left those people. We had that place almost stabilized in some ways, and though it was not in any way efficient or in any way without corruption, there was a possibility of being quietly transformative in some of those communities.

How do you see what went wrong?

We tried to define them. It’s what we do. We’re Americans. We find ourselves in a position that’s generally comfortable and our vision can only extend so far as us, and who wouldn’t want to be like us. So, if we just offer this, then it will be accepted and embraced. We don’t have a lot of respect for cultural traditions because we barely have any.

And honestly, our own history, if you watch how we achieved our great comfort, it’s pretty ugly. We’d like to criticize everyone for their stages toward democracy but if you look at ours – we didn’t let women vote, we didn’t let blacks vote, we had slaves. We had issues. We eradicated an entire native population almost.  I went into the place knowing that I was the one with the least information, and so it was my job to spend as much time listening and not talking as I could. I wanted to make sure I kept track of the details, the names. I was rebuilding family trees because the environment was built out of family trees.

Unless you’re going to come in there like the British empire and establish infrastructure and reform an entire place in its image, then you’re going to be wholly ineffective. We are definitely not the British empire in the way that we do business. We went in there awkwardly, we built mistakes upon mistakes. And after a while, you know, we wore ourselves down being wrong about things. It just took a little perspective, and some specialists. The people in the State Department knew all about Iraq. I would have liked to have had them in my vehicle.

All that failure, all that pressure, the consecutive tours. Not everybody handles pressure the way you were able to. What do you think happens when a soldier snaps, like Sgt. Robert Bales in Afghanistan, and allegedly goes on a shooting rampage and kills 17 people.

I can’t diagnose him. We have people that do horrible things all the time. Everyone deals with stress in their own way. There were ideologues over there. There were people who were on crusades. You just name it – look at everyone’s background.

Is this the right way to put a military together? When you look at the background you had, and the very different way you approached problem-solving and building relationships with people, those don’t necessarily seem to be the skills most valued by the military right now. You were a visual artist from Vassar. You probably had many cultural issues to overcome. But would a more diverse military be beneficial? Even some sort of mandated public service of some sort

What I found intriguing was that I met America in the Marines. At Vassar, I met a certain intellectual group. Vassar doesn’t teach you how to do anything. Literally. You come out of Vassar with no skill other than that if you find yourself in any situation you’ll be able to think your way out of it. It’s a critical thinking environment. To constantly question, to constantly try to resolve, and to resolve by not talking over the problem but by engaging in it. Collectively in some ways.  The military obviously has a very hierarchical system, but I didn’t see them any differently. I took the discipline of critical thinking, much to the chagrin of certain people, and I employed it.

Now that led to its own kind of hubris in your second tour, when you thought what had been effective among the Shia might also work with the Sunni. It didn’t.

I said, well, I don’t understand anything that’s happening here, which should tell me something. Shut up and find out. I deluded myself into thinking that because I had been effective in that area, which was very rural, Shia, on the Iranian border, with completely different feelings, that when I went for my second tour in Ramadi, the opposite side of the country, Sunni, I thought I could apply these great collective, cooperative ideas of building a city to a place that was a shooting gallery. And I was exposed for being the most wrong person, ever. It was just one step short of delusional that I could take these ideas and apply them effectively to a place, thinking, Well, this has been effective in a small scale, on a small range, with almost no money. We repaired buildings, we established critical infrastructure, we fixed water lines. We did an awful lot of stuff in a small place and they liked it.

With the irony, of course, that we fixed what we blew up.

Right. I thought that if you give something to someone that they realize is of great value to them, then they will defend it and, in doing so, they will embrace some of the stability that comes with preserving things instead of destroying them. We knew very well what the Taliban did and what the insurgents could do, which was destroy things. They didn’t build things for people; they blew them up. Our message was, “We didn’t do that.” And of course, in order to fight them, we blew things up. So our message was lost in our own struggle, and we never could achieve the support of the locals because we could prove nothing. We couldn’t give them the one thing that was needed for all these things to be effective, which was security, peace. We couldn’t do it. And because they knew we couldn’t do it, they were forced to side with those who would use extreme measures.

“Hopelessness” is certainly a word that comes to mind. I mean, we fought the city every day, as one captain said when we were there. You don’t fight the Battle of Ramadi, you fight Ramadi every day.

An impossible bureaucracy, corrupt institutions, intractable problems — it’s almost like a David Simon TV show.  And in between tours in Iraq, you established an acting career, and played a Baltimore policeman on “The Wire.” How did one experience affect the other?

Sgt. Colicchio fed off that second tour of Iraq where I was so frustrated. Colicchio is the opposite, he has a very black-and-white sense of justice. There is no gray for him, and of course, Iraq was entirely gray. So I got to air all the things I had to bury while I was there.

What was the timeline like on the acting roles, and your military service?

Interestingly, I had just come back from my first tour when I got the role of Colicchio. And for a year, 2004, I did Season 3. Immediately at the end of the filming schedule, I went to Ramadi. For 2005, I came back just in time for the beginning of Season 4 and rushed to grow out some hair on my face. It was literally at the end of one experience and the beginning of a very different one.

How do you handle that psychologically — to go from a real war zone into playing a police officer?

It was all an acting of a certain kind. When you play a role, there is some of you in it, and the rest is what you’re burying yourself in to create a character. I did that in Iraq. I didn’t think I could be killed. I had to prove that by acting that way. And I did the same thing with Colicchio; Colicchio  was airing a lot of frustration I truly felt, that I kept to myself, and he gave it a voice. So it’s interesting that I think the war informed Colicchio in some ways, and then going back, I was once again placed in that environment where I had to create a certain person who was both real and partially imagined to deal with that environment. I couldn’t actively and visually be frustrated with Iraqis, because that was insulting. Even if they were saying the most outrageous stuff imaginable. It’s an area of conversation, most of which is a lie. Asking questions about the lie, you begin to get pieces of the truth, and eventually, you create something close to what’s really going on.

Makiya was no academic advocate, however. He returned to Iraq to set up an NGO, and was an advisor to the Iraq interim governing council. He oversaw the drafting of a prototype Iraqi constitution, which called for a secular, democratic state. He argued with Chalabi about pushing Iraq into a civil war. He has been back to Iraq “many times” since the 2003 invasion, he says.

Now Makiya is back as a pundit, talking about Iraq’s neighbor to the west, Syria, a country increasingly engulfed in civil war. All efforts to reached negotiated solution have failed and the government’s attacks on its opponents, armed and unarmed, have widened. An estimated 8,000 civilians have been killed in the past year. In challenging President Bashar al-Assad’s entrenched dictatorship, the Arab Spring has suffered its most violent repression.

Makiya has written a powerful article  for the New Republic, calling international intervention in Syria a “moral and human imperative.” “There is a moral and a human imperative to act that is larger than any nation’s interests and larger than any strategic calculation,” he writes. “That is so obvious it is an embarrassment to have to say it. This is how I thought about intervention in Iraq 20 years ago and it is how I think about what needs to be done in Syria today.”

But, of course, the disaster of the Iraq war that Makiya supported causes many to draw the opposite conclusion: that America should avoid intervening in the Middle East militarily, at least unless it is directly attacked. For Makiya the mistake came not in 2003, but 1991, the year that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered after they rose up to overthrow Saddam Hussein, while President George H.W. Bush and his Allied Coalition sat by, despite having urged the uprising. Many Iraqis understandably felt betrayed. But the first President Bush, unlike his son, had few illusions about America’s ability to govern Iraq after getting rid of Saddam.

Makiya spoke to Salon about these ideas in a recent phone conversation. He wrote the TNR piece, he says, because he has a “sense of déjà vu” that the world is making the same mistakes that it did in 1991. In 1991, the case for intervention was “much, much greater,” Makiya says. The population had risen in opposition, the Iraqi army was devastated, and help was nearby. No help was given.

“The result was, not only did you have an immediate crushing of the uprising, but in the two to four months following that, as the regime retaliated, the result was some 200,000 dead,” he says.

The single biggest problem in Iraq is the devastation that resulted from the failure of the state following the 1991 uprising, Makiya says. “A state that I described as semi-totalitarian in ‘Republic of Fear’ turned into a criminal state. Sanctions took a huge toll, and institutions crumbled. They were totalitarian institutions, to be sure, but they had functioning health and education systems. The infrastructure for all that collapsed.” By the time the Americans did invade, in 2003, “the institutions are a shell of their former selves, and the entire thing collapsed like a house of cards,” he says. That is the lesson Makiya believes we should learn from Iraq. “It’s not a case of intervening too much or too little,” he argues, “but when it happens that matters.”

Makiya says that “what we are looking at in Syria is very similar.” Aside from the failures of the Arab Spring, the cost will be not just victims who have already been killed. The cost of keeping Syrian leader Basher al-Assad, he says, will be “hundreds of thousands dead,” as the regime retaliates over the long term. Not letting that happen is Makiya’s imperative, he says.

His plan relies on the leadership not of the United States, but of Turkey. A safe haven for the Syrian opposition should be established that would be policed by Turkish troops and funded by Arab countries. “Establish a place where the Syrians can be safe from the bombardment and killing machine of Assad, No. 1. No. 2, give them a chance to organize their future.” America uses its political capital, not its military capital, to establish a safe haven protected by the Turks. “It just requires political will, but that is the crucial first step before we can talk about arming the Syrian opposition and finding out who the opposition is. That’s where I would start.”

The solution may not be so simple. The rebels are determined to bring Assad down. Will those protecting them prevent the government’s overthrow? With much of the country targeted, a no-kill zone will have to engulf much of the country. At that point, the Assad government may simply make war on the Turks, lest the government lose control of a majority of the populace. Why the Turks would sign on to such an open-ended venture is unclear.

Hanging over all this is the specter of Iraq. How one evaluates that war often determines how one views the prospect of further involvement in Syria. Makiya still believes the war was worth it; indeed, he wishes it came in 1991.

“2003 didn’t come out of nowhere. It directly follows the tragic outcome of 1991, which only looked on paper like a victory because Saddam Hussein was kicked out of Kuwait.” For the Iraqis who faced retaliation and 13 years of crippling sanctions, it was not a victory at all. “From an Iraqi point of view, containment didn’t work.” For all the horrors of the war and the many mistakes America made,  Makiya says, “Iraqis have a future. They have elections, they are starting to learn politics because their institutions were destroyed by 30 years of Saddam Hussein, and there is hope.”

Many Iraqis disagree with that argument. According to November 2011 polling conducted by Zogby, a full one-half of Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis say they are “worse off” as a result of the war. Eighty-eight percent and 81 percent of Sunni and Shia Arabs, respectively, say “personal safety and security” has worsened. Those figures, of course, do not include the feelings of the many Iraqis dead from the war, nor of the more than 5 million refugees that resulted from the conflict.

Moreover, the war was an unmitigated disaster for the United States. Whatever benefits were accrued from the removal of Saddam Hussein were outweighed by the deaths of 4,486 American troops, the expenditure of at least $1 trillion, the erosion of U.S. credibility and international support, and the bolstering of Iranian power.

Nonetheless, Syria is not Iraq, which was at worst a potential threat to the United States. Syria is undoubtedly a humanitarian crisis. But Makiya concedes Syria is like Iraq in another way: We don’t know much about it.

“It turns out we don’t know an awful lot about what happens after 30 years of a totalitarian regime. We didn’t really understand the legacy of pain and brutalization that this kind of situation in Iraq and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in Syria, have gone through,” he admits.

Trying to replace a dictatorship is something the United States should avoid, given its disastrous history in the region. Only the people of Syria can do that and the world community may have to protect them in order to avoid an even great massacre and a wider war. Makiya’s plan hinges on Turkey taking a leading role. It’s difficult to see how it would work but such a scheme may be the only hope Syria has left.

But Shanksville was far away. It was raining and cold and I kept pedaling. I was wet, breathing hard, my ass hurt and heart felt like it could burst. I wanted to stop. But that was out of the question. I wasn’t going to let the other cyclists down.

I looked down at the Garmin mileage tracker on the handlebars of my road cycle. It read: “790.”

In just 121 miles, it would hit “911.” Then the champagne would flow.

In my 12 years as a journalist this moment ranks high in terms of unusual situations that I’ve been in. Here I was, supposedly reporting and the battery for the tiny HD camera attached to my bike had run out. Walkie-talkie contact with my director of photography, “Blood Diamonds” author Greg Campbell, was long lost.

Alone with my thoughts and too tired to talk or do anything constructive for the film, I kept spinning my legs. I wondered if I ought to be on the back of a motorcycle, armed with a camera and helping Greg. Or maybe I should be in a van, waving my arms and squinting at horizons, sipping a perpetual cup of lukewarm coffee and looking like a film director.

It was a moment of doubt. I wondered, “Was I still making a difference to this film?”

It was also a moment of pain with pain. I was, as cyclists say, bonking, or hitting a proverbial wall of fatigue after riding hundreds of miles, including several days with a small group of cyclists through Tropical Storm Lee. The proverbial wall became a real one: this damn hill. On any other ride, I may have quit.

But today, most of the cyclists around me were hurting just as bad. As Dexter Durante, an Army master sergeant who was blinded when a small bit of C-4 explosive detonated in his face during a training accident, told me, cycling is like a bad relationship – the kind so bad that it’s good for you, if that makes sense. “You know, she hurts so bad,” he says in his poetic way. “Yet still, she’s addictive, you know. I can’t stop loving her. I’m all into her, even when I’m climbing up them hills.”

For years I’ve reported on the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including here at Salon. In two investigations, reporter Mark Benjamin and I revealed that troops with severe psychological trauma had been mistreated by commanders when they returned from brutal war deployments. Some were drummed out of the Army without adequate access to benefits, like help for their PTSD, at a time when suicides were hitting record highs.

Now, I was pulling a new thread in this story that has sweeping ramifications for not just a generation of American troops, but also their communities. Troops are fighting to recover from their wounds. If there are enough of them, they may alter the stereotype that many returning veterans are hardcore substance abusers who can become violent and dangerous.

I met young privates, hard-nosed sergeants, fresh-faced officers, Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and Special Forces officers. They were all joining cycling rides  – whether they were wounded warriors or not. Neither rank nor branch of service matters. When former Army Chief of Staff George W. Casey, a retired four-star general, joined the trek in September, he told everyone to call him “George.”

Vietnam vets I met along the way were almost jealous of this – in a melancholy sort of way. More than one told me they wished there was something like this for them when they returned from war back in the 1960s and 1970s. One told me he was so inspired by the young riders that he was now, after all these years, starting to address long-lingering psychological issues, including simmering, vague anger, head-on. Everyone I met, it seemed, was having nightmares. And everyone was finding a way to talk about them.

This is what John Wordin, a former pro cyclist and executive director of the Ride2Recovery nonprofit, wanted. Hundreds of troops, clad not in camo and boots, but superhero-like Lycra and clicky shoes, all riding together, helping one another by literally lending a hand by placing their palm on the back of the rider next to them (or on the push-bar of a hand cycle or recumbent). This makes hills easier. Moreover, they could talk about their problems with people who understand.

As I pedaled for hundreds of miles last summer and fall through several East Coast states and Normandy, France, I received a few pushes myself. I returned the favor and began to push others. Somewhere in there, riders began to trust us and tell their stories on camera.

In the film, troops talk about how their post-traumatic stress disorder evolved. Wives share what they thought when their husbands lost their legs. Riders speak about the darker places in their souls. Suicide was a subject that came up.

Then we’d ride some more. Then came laughter.

Besides the obvious benefits of cardio exercise, weight loss and muscle gain, bicycling creates a “runner’s high,” a rush of endorphins and a sense of euphoric bliss. As Tony Dragovich, a doctor at the pain clinic for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, tells me, “You relieve your own pain by doing this. So it becomes a self-fulfilling pain treatment.” The activity can be so powerful, he says, that riders with severe pain have kicked their dependence on prescription pills.

For some riders, there’s a new addiction: speed. After a grueling climb comes the reward of a fast descent in which bicycles can hit speeds of up to 60 mph. My mini bike computer has told me I’ve hit speeds in the high 50s many times and I can only say that it is seriously fun and scary all at once.

There are crashes. I saw one unfold before my eyes. As a small group of riders zoomed down a hill in Pennsylvania as part of a ride to meet up with a larger contingent of riders at ground zero in New York on Sept. 10 last year, three riders tumbled on the road when a stick got caught in someone’s spokes. One rider, Dick Brock, a gray-haired man who just rides because he loves being around veterans, needed a hip replacement.

That event was on my mind as we closed in on mile 911 in the suburbs outside the Pentagon in late September. I was also thinking about Army Sgt. 1st Class Justin Minyard, a 9/11 first responder and rider who came up with the idea of the 911-mile journey to honor the victims of 9/11. He couldn’t make it because of a medical issue and not being there was something he said he’d probably regret for a long time.

When we hit 911, champagne was everywhere, all over everyone. I’ve never poured champagne over anyone for a story. This was not any old story.

Several of the soldiers and Marines I rode with now call Greg and me friends. We made friends. As one sergeant wrote to me, “For a bunch of wounded guys and gals to accept and let you into our circle may not seem like a lot but it is. We are very protective of whom we tell and how we tell it. We created a special bond that I know that I will never forget.”

That’s the kind of solidarity that I want every average American to know is out there for them if they take the time to care. There are a lot of positives to having a military where men and women voluntarily agree to serve, but the system has also led to a divide. Many families seem blissfully unaware of the challenges faced by military families, including their tragic losses.

Whether you were for or against the wars, I’m here to tell you times are changing and war is winding down. The troops are coming home in droves and many have experienced horrific moments. Soldiers and their loved ones often tell me they are somehow different than when they left, changed in a sad sort of way, like the excitement of life is gone and can’t be recaptured. They are seeking their old selves – their true selves. They are looking for the persons they were before they went into combat. I am honored that I was there to catch a glimpse of the spark returning to their eyes.

To see the trailer for the film “Recovering,” click here.

Echoes of the “who lost China?” debate can be heard in many of the complaints over the recent U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Columnist Charles Krauthammer, as he so often does, led the charge, with a column titled, creatively, “Who lost Iraq?” When Obama took office, Krauthammer wrote, “He was handed a war that was won … He blew it.” Condemning Obama for leaving our allies in Iraq “exposed to Iranian influence,” Krauthammer lamented, “Just this past week, Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurds — for two decades the staunchest of U.S. allies — visited Tehran to bend a knee to both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” Left unmentioned was the fact that many of America’s allies in Iraq have had close relations with Iran for decades. Barzani  has visited Tehran before.

The GOP presidential candidates soon followed suit, in similarly disingenuous terms. Calling the withdrawal a “naked political calculation,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said of the administration, “Either they failed to do it, either by virtue of ineptitude, or they decided that it wasn’t that important — politically or otherwise.” Obama had “lost the war.” Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum told CBS that Obama had “lost the war in Iraq” and that now “we have Iran having broadened its sphere of influence.”

Taking to the Senate floor to register his displeasure, prominent Iraq war supporter Sen. John McCain said, “It is clear that this decision of a complete pullout of United States troops from Iraq was dictated by politics and not our national security interests.” The thing is, McCain is not wrong about the politics, but he is wrong about whose politics. The pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq was dictated by politics — Iraqi politics. It’s overwhelmingly clear that the Iraqi people wanted U.S. troops out of their country, and, whatever else they may have said in private, Iraqi parliamentarians weren’t willing to publicly disagree with them on that.

Confronted with this point while on a panel at the Halifax International Security Forum last November, McCain was strikingly dismissive of the very democratic processes that he had supported forcibly installing. “We’ve got troops in Kuwait, and we didn’t have to pass it through their parliament!” he insisted.  One wonders how McCain will be able to deal with a more democratic Middle East where governments, more accountable to the will of their people, will not be as willing to toe the U.S.’s line.

In a Wall Street Journal piece in December, Fouad Ajami, another big supporter of the war, similarly condemned the withdrawal. “A president who understood the stakes would have had no difficulty justifying a residual American presence in Iraq,” Ajami wrote, as if all it would have taken to keep U.S. troops in Iraq was a president who was really, truly committed to making the Iraqis see things our way.

As with so many other claims about the American intervention in Iraq, these arguments are not reality-based. Brett McGurk, who served as a senior advisor to three U.S. ambassadors in Baghdad, helped negotiate the 2008 withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government. He also attempted to negotiate a new agreement in 2011 that would’ve allowed a residual U.S. force to stay.

It wasn’t possible, as he explained in a Washington Post Op-Ed. “The decision to complete our withdrawal was not the result of a failed negotiation,” McGurk wrote, “but rather the byproduct of an independent Iraq that has an open political system and a 325-member parliament.”

Trying to force an agreement through that parliament would have been “self-destructive,” he wrote. “That had nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with Iraqi pride, history and nationalism. Even the most staunchly anti-Iranian Iraqi officials refused to publicly back a residual U.S. force — and in the end, they supported our withdrawal.”

As for the claims that Iran would benefit from the U.S. withdrawal, the fact of the matter is that Iraq became “exposed” to Iranian influence the moment the Bush administration removed Saddam Hussein.  For years Saddam had served as the biggest check on Iranian power in the region. It was the Bush administration, supported by the likes of Krauthammer and Ajami, that created an Iraqi government largely run by Iran’s partners and clients. Paradoxically, removing the U.S. presence from Iraq could actually serve to diminish Iranian influence there, by removing one of the drivers of resentment that Iran has exploited in recent years to its advantage.

Whatever the merits of the conservative attacks on Obama’s pullout, it is worth noting how little traction they have gotten in the media and in the presidential campaign. The anti-pullout talking points have been delivered and repeated with frequency and discipline that conservatives regularly exhibit, but Americans just aren’t interested in hearing it, at least not right now. Polls continue to show about three-quarters of Americans support Obama’s decision to withdraw troops, with around two-thirds believing that the war was not worth the costs and consequences.

The continuing violence in Iraq (which is itself driven by enduring political tensions that call into question the “success of the surge” narrative) will be offered as evidence of Obama’s alleged bungling of a war that was won for him. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies (which were very much apparent when President Bush was still in office) will be presented as proof of Obama’s alleged failure to commit the necessary resources to the building of Iraqi democracy.

In reality, these things should be taken as evidence of the limits of U.S. military power to create the outcomes we would like. While Americans currently aren’t buying what the Iraq war’s remaining advocates are selling, it’s important to keep reminding everybody what’s in the snake oil.