Part of the reason Norton feels confident about going ahead with the trip is that she's sanguine about the shields' chance of averting war. She says Uzma Bashir, a volunteer TJP organizer, told her there would be 1,000 shields in Baghdad. "It takes a lot of us to be a presence," she says. "I'm optimistic enough to risk my life."

Norton is also under the impression that if things go wrong, TJP will take care of her. "I remember reading somewhere in some of the communications from someone in the office that if we're not effective and we need to get out, there is a plan. I don't know what the plan is. It will be part of our training, I assume."

But there is no training and there is no plan. "We're simply offering people a method by which they can get to Iraq," says Franck. "We offer them no exit strategy and they're fully aware of that. I'm pretty confident that the majority of them have had serious thoughts and questioned their own mortality, but the humanity of the situation requires them to share the Iraqis' fate should that be the fate that the Western powers impose upon them." Franck, an artist and musician, has decided he doesn't have the courage to go to Iraq himself.

The almost casual way in which O'Keefe's group is leading inexperienced people into a war zone is what led Lawrence Rockwood to disassociate himself from them. Rockwood, an adjunct history professor at California State University at San Marcos, about 35 miles north of San Diego, is a former counterintelligence officer who was court-martialed after he defied his superiors to document human rights violations in Haiti's National Penitentiary during the American intervention in 1994. He's since become an impassioned human rights activist. Rockwood took a leave of absence from his university to help TJP with logistics, but was somewhat shocked by the group's blithe attitude toward the practicalities of survival in Baghdad.

He describes TJP's approach to logistics as "spontaneous," saying, "I have nothing against being spontaneous, but how are people going to get fed? How are they going to get water? How are they going to communicate? There's a cellphone that works in Iraq, but they had never heard of that."

Rockwood still believes in the human shield idea. "American politicians don't want Americans killed by American bombs, and putting a human shield there goes directly to that issue," he says. "People in targeting cells will be far less indifferent towards potential civilian casualties."

Yet he believes such potential civilian casualties deserve to know what they're getting into. "I think people going with Ken should at least have more of a leadership than Ken provides," he says. "One of the reasons I wanted to get involved is that I wanted to at least mitigate some of the chaos that's going to happen." When he felt that the chaos was getting too overwhelming, he pulled out. Now he's encouraging people to try to go with Voices in the Wilderness instead.

Meanwhile, volunteers with Voices in the Wilderness survey the influx of merry martyrs with a combination of solidarity and dismay. The area where most hotels are is getting hectic, Granby says, as the foreigners stream in. "We're trying to be hands-off with a lot of the delegations coming in," he says. "Someone strapping themselves to a bridge or a water treatment plant, obviously that's not being taken into consideration by the Pentagon."

At the same time, though, he maintains a kind of wary admiration for what they're trying to accomplish. The phone line from Baghdad crackling, he says, "As much as it might be useless or there might be too many people here, you have to respect the spirit of it."

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