Such rash optimism is what sets the new human shield movement apart from other peace activists in Iraq. Voices in the Wilderness, a peace group based in Chicago, has been sending sanctions-busting delegations to Iraq since 1996, and the group already has roughly 30 volunteers in Baghdad with their Iraq Peace Team, with more on the way. Most are committed to staying in the country for the duration of a war, but they emphatically reject the term "human shield," since they have no intention of, say, stationing themselves at water treatment facilities as bombs fall. Instead, they see themselves as some combination of guerrilla journalists determined to get the truth about war's carnage out to the world, humanitarian workers hoping to help imperiled civilians, and protesters making the ultimate statement about solidarity with the Iraqi people.

"I don't think human shields can stop a bombing, but we can affect how people discuss a war if we're getting stories and sending them home," says Jeff Guntzel, co-coordinator of the Iraq Peace Team.

Voices in the Wilderness is radical in its way, but it's also run professionally. The group, which has recently been inundated with hundreds upon hundreds of applicants, is carefully screening people who want to witness the war, choosing those who've seen battle or have worked in humanitarian emergencies. Among the current contingent is Charlie Litkey, a 72-year-old decorated Vietnam veteran, Andrea Tracy, a 29-year-old who worked with the United Nations in Sierra Leone refugee camps, and Chris Doucot, a 35-year-old Catholic pacifist who previously traveled to the front lines in Bosnia with a group of civilians trying to force a cease-fire.

Doucot has made seven trips to Iraq, and this time he has a specific mission -- he wants to get an Iraqi woman he befriended out of the country, along with her son, who was wounded by an American cruise missile that killed her other boy. Her traumatized husband, an Iraqi military veteran, has started beating her. Doucot wants to get the woman's son medical care, as well as to launch her on a speaking tour of the United States to tell Americans about the savagery of war.

Doucot and his family are committed activists. They live in voluntary poverty in a ghetto in Hartford, Conn., where they take in homeless people and work to confront local violence. He has two sons, 8 and 9, who understand what he's about to do. His astonishingly articulate 9-year-old, Micah, says, "Well, I'm going to miss him, but it's the right thing for him to do because innocent people are being mistreated."

He's done this sort of thing before. In 2001, Doucot brought a 10-year-old Palestinian girl from the occupied territories to America to have an operation to remove an Israeli bullet. In 1993, he was part of an international delegation led by an Italian priest that went to the front lines of the war in Bosnia. "We're sowing seeds," he says. "We might not be living in the harvest time but we're sowing seeds. A small army of nonviolence activists is a start, and without that start there will never be the eventuality of hundreds of thousands of civilians, trained in nonviolence, ending conflicts."

But Doucot says this longed-for pacifist army won't be much good without training. "Before anybody enters a situation like this, they have got to be fully prepared," he says. "If they're people of faith, they have to have done some praying about the seriousness of this. Once you get there, if you haven't done these things, when the shit hits the fan, the shit's going to hit your pants."

He's seen it firsthand. When he was in Bosnia, his group hooked up with a French organization that had recruited people by putting up fliers in Paris. "The first morning we heard mortar fire close by, the bulk of those people were not prepared for that and they lost their nerve," he says. They had control of most of the vehicles, communications and water, which they immediately packed up and drove away with. "It was a terrible hardship for the rest of us," he says.

It's partly to avoid such situations that Voices in the Wilderness spends more time discouraging volunteers than recruiting them. Sometimes, organizers forward applicants a letter written in January by Neville Watson, an Australian who returned to Iraq on Jan. 29.

Explaining that the current situation seems even more dangerous than the Gulf War, Watson wrote, "Once hostilities have started the chance of getting out are virtually nil ... I suppose what I am trying to say in a very convoluted way [is] that I do not rate our chance of survival very high. Anyone coming should seriously consider the likely possibility that they will not return."

Though volunteers with O'Keefe's group have to sign a statement acknowledging that possibility, it still sits curiously lightly on some of the Westerners flocking into Baghdad.

Jenny Norton, a 53-year-old self-employed jeweler and elder-care worker, decided to become a human shield on Jan. 23, the day a friend told her about the movement. "It was an immediate yes," she says. "It resonated through me. I didn't feel as if I chose it myself. It's almost as if it chose me." She volunteered through Become the Change, which forwarded her information to TJP. She flies from London to Amman on Feb. 21.

Norton lives on a small island in the San Juan archipelago off the coast of Washington state. She's never been to a Third World country, she knows no one from the Middle East and she hasn't been an activist since the '60s, when she had a boyfriend who was a conscientious objector. She usually ignores politics.

"Hearing about the angst in the world only caused me inner angst and frustration, so I chose not to pay attention to what's going on in the world, but lately it's been impossible not to," she says. Much of what she knows about Iraq comes from the Internet and from former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark's book "The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf." Asked what she thinks of Saddam, she replies, "Personally, I don't know enough about him to give you an educated opinion."

Norton, a divorced mother with three grown children who prefers to be called Sasha, never saw herself going to the other side of the world to try and thwart a war. "I live in the sweetest, simplest little cabin on seven acres of wooded property," she says. "I make my fire in the morning, play my concertina, do a little artwork, visit with my friends. I liked my life. I thought it was perfect."

But as America lumbers towards war, she says she's haunted by the fate of Iraqis. "My decision to go isn't a political one," she says. "It's that some of my brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers in a neighborhood on the other side of the world need some assistance and I'm available to do that." Her children, she says, support her.

Norton is scared, but the fear she describes is more an obstacle to self-actualization than a gut-churning awareness of mortality. "Life is risky business for all of us," she says. "If we focus our attention on just staying safe then we don't live. My only real fear is I'll return and slip back into complacency and forget to cherish life as I do now."

Of course, she still has reservations. On Tuesday, her desk chair slid out from under her and she hit her head on her desk. "As I felt my head hit, I thought, oh my gosh, I hope I don't have a concussion, but if I do I won't have to go. I felt both a sense of relief and a sense of huge disappointment. My ego kind of wants to stick around and doesn't want to experience discomfort."

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