Close to home Close to home (March 26, 2003)

Fighting in Iraq touches some residents directly

by Don Kazak and Bill D'Agostino

Brian Dexter, 19, watches war scenes flicker across his television screen as he sits inside his barracks, ready for possible deployment to Kuwait. More than a thousand miles east, Alex Lesser is stationed in the Gulf, on the edge of the violent conflict Dexter views with trepidation. Meanwhile, Neil Holmdahl navigates a potentially dangerous body of water, not in the Middle East, but closer to home -- The San Francisco Bay.

As Holmdahl keeps an eye on potential terror targets, Kay Ferguson welcomes her husband, Andy, home from his most recent tour of duty in the Middle East. Over by Town & County Village Shopping Center, war protestors form a human billboard while others in town scramble to send a piece of home to soldiers in the Middle East. Saad Al's homeland may be little more than rubble when Operation Iraq Freedom is over. He only hopes his family, who lives in Baghdad, isn't anywhere near when the city collapses.

These are the tales of dozens of Palo Alto residents, who on the surface lead seemingly different lives. But their paths have become inevitably intertwined since bombs fell over Baghdad Wednesday. For this quaint community -- with its million-dollar mansions, manicured lawns and political skirmishes over City Council etiquette -- the war isn't exclusively fought and endured in the unforgiving Middle Eastern desert. It's right here, close to home for a mother whose 19-year-old boy is ready to deploy, a father whose son is now a military mechanic, a wife whose husband rescues pilots shot down in hostile territories and an Iraqi man who is strategizing how to get his mother far from Baghdad.

While the war is far from here, it's all too near for these people.