Nathan Mauger never set out to be a hero or even an activist.

When he entered Washington State University, his goals were as self-centered and careerist as those of any student trying to ensure a toehold for himself upon graduation into America's shifting, post-millennial prosperity.

Mauger felt he had to get an edge, given his aspirations to be a journalist - a field that's been crowded with undergrads for decades. Languages were it.

He spent his first two years at the Beijing University of Physical Education, learning how to ask who, what, when, where, and why in Chinese as well as English.

Then he enrolled in Birzeit University in Israel-Palestine, with the intention of learning Hebrew and Arabic.

"I had no real agenda apart from learning languages and placing a few feature stories from overseas in local newspapers so I'd have them in my portfolio," Mauger explains. "But the situation there so shocked me, I had to get involved."

Finding out about a human rights group that was supplying food and water to the Palestinians who had been holed up in the Church of the Nativity, Mauger joined forces with them, and shared their fate: imprisonment at a variety of Israeli jails.

A two-week hunger strike did not sway the Israel government from putting the following condition on his release: "I'm not allowed to go to Israel-Palestine for 10 years."

But the 25-year-old from Spokane couldn't go back to his regular life, either. "It made me a firm antiwar activist - I'm really committed to the United States and righting the wrongs of our foreign policies."

So it happened that Mauger flew to Iraq on Wednesday as one of the first members of an International Peace Team organized by the humanitarian group Voices in the Wilderness to arrive in Baghdad.

Eventually, Mauger is to be joined by more than 100 other volunteers. But in the beginning he'll be more or less on his own - doing what is anybody's guess.

Where is less of a mystery.

He'll be where the bombs fall, according to Voice spokeswoman Kathy Kelly.

Volunteers will place themselves "where ordinary Iraqi people go - hospitals, schools, bridges and markets," Kelly said.

They'll station themselves at sewage, sanitation, electrical facilities and other areas of infrastructure upon which Iraqi civilians depend, as well as on roads between cities and towns, "in hopes of safeguarding road travel."

This presumes the United States will be more reluctant to conduct airstrikes in those places where Americans and Europeans are situated, which is a fairly safe bet, given our own deaths seem more real to us than others'.

As Mauger notes: "The international community has yet to be fully aware of the 25 million people collectively known as Saddam Hussein."

As in, "Let's go after Saddam" and, "Take Saddam out."

Would that Saddam were literally a tumor on the body politic that could be cut out.

But making light of Saddam by turning him into a metaphor denies the reality of the masses of civilians who would be murdered along with him - much as the phrase "collateral damage" did before we decided it wasn't PC.

Mauger hopes to write "as much as I possibly can" about what he sees for whoever will print it, "because we have to humanize their suffering and put a face on this war."

Time is on his side. According to Kelly, the Peace Team will stay "until such time as we could be assured that an outbreak of peace would supplant any efforts on the part of the U.S. government to wage war against Iraq."

An outbreak of peace - wouldn't that be different?

Even before Saddam Hussein offered to grant inspectors supposedly unlimited permission to look for nuclear weaponry, you felt the fix was in.

Now that the administration has expressed fears that inspections could throw its war off schedule, how could you doubt it? Or that members of Congress, fearing they won't get re-elected, will go along with the president's wishes to unilaterally attack Iraq, regardless of what the U.N. says.

Well, Nathan Mauger has bigger fears to fry, though he may put on a brave face.

"I'm not a jock, but I'm young and healthy enough - I can sleep anywhere, help out in any way that I'm needed," Mauger said.

The one thing he wasn't willing to do? Discuss the family that's waiting for him at home in Spokane and how they feel about their young man going off to war for who knows how long.

I don't blame him, really. It's a hackneyed line of questioning - a Norman Rockwell cliche that is as trite and diminishing of true sentiment and loss as those who call for America to "take out Saddam."

And calculate other people's deaths as "collateral damage."

Copyright © 2002 by The Hartford Courant

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