Though the notion of impending fatality looms over the heads of our soldiers overseas, they go about their duties, forcing curfews and kicking in doors during daily house-to-house searches.

Here in the U.S., only 34 percent of people think the war is worth fighting. Bumper stickers and lawn signs advocating the removal of soldiers abound. But beyond the armored tanks and camouflage uniforms often associated with hatred and vengeance, two men have found something more. They’ve found compassion.
             
On their website, contagiousloveexperiment​.wordpress​.com, Josh Stieber and Conor Curran keep a blog. The entries within it aren’t typical stories of the humdrum lives of everyday bloggers. Their entries are posted from Kansas to Montana to Seattle. This is because, for the past half year, Stieber and Curran have been biking through the country. They’ve been giving speeches at churches, schools, and community meetings, which are intended to educate people about the power of compassion and the positive transforming change it can make as it passes from person to person.

In 2001, Stieber was 13 years old, growing up near Washington, D.C. After September 11, Stieber visited the Pentagon and saw, in person, how much damage had really been done. For months after the attacks, he would watch the morning news before school to better understand the situation.

Stieber grew up hearing sayings such as “love your enemies” and “return evil with good.” He treated these sayings as if they were just “nice sounding lines, but not practical.” He thought that strong military action was the only way to help his country, and never questioned this idea. Stieber was deployed to Baghdad in February of 2007 when he was only 19.

Upon arriving and experiencing the war first hand, his attitudes toward the military and its teachings slowly changed. “[The military] tells you how to think and what to do and to just follow orders,” Stieber explained. “There are no moral implications to it; it’s just simply listening to what you’re told.”

Fourteen months later, in April 2008, Stieber returned to the United States with a year left in his contract. His wanted to walk from his home in Maryland to the military pay headquarters and give the money he owed back to them, telling them that he didn’t want to participate in war any longer. “If I needed to finish my enlistment in prison to live out my beliefs,” he said, “Then that’s where I needed to be.” 

Stieber wanted to go on a journey, but he realized he was focusing too much on the negative aspects of his experience. Instead, he thought that if he wanted to say that war was the wrong answer, he needed to say what the right answer was.

“I wanted to do more than just write a check and mail it off somewhere,” he said, and began researching organizations and charities. “I wanted to really learn about what these different charities do and also to help spread their work,” he explained. He was eventually released from his military contract through conscientious objection (in which individuals can legally refuse to participate as combatants in war). Afterwards, Stieber decided to start his trip by walking to Boston.

Boston, Mass. is the home to the headquarters of the organizations Oxfam America (finding solutions to poverty, hunger and injustice), and Bikes Not Bombs (promoting bicycle technology as an alternative to war and environmental destruction). Along with visiting these organizations, which Stieber found inspiring, he also set up a meeting in Boston with Noam Chomsky, a notable linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, author, political activist, professor at MIT — and the man who pointed out that the term “war on terror” doesn’t make sense; war is physical, and terror is an idea.

After Boston, Stieber walked west to Toledo, Ohio. While staying in Toledo, he met Conor Curran, the son of the couple he had been staying with. Within a couple minutes of meeting each other, they had decided to continue the trip together.

Curran grew up in a religious household, guided by strict Christian morals and values. By age 16, he started to reject his faith, seeing the Christian church as an “entity completely separate and perverted from values it preached from the Bible.” Curran stopped looking for spiritual fulfillment, and started experimenting with drugs and extreme sports. He started college, but soon dropped out, getting more and more involved in drugs.

Curran decided to join the Marines. “The worst thing that could happen to me, death, was already where I was quickly headed anyways,” Curran wrote in their blog. “So why not join?”

He enlisted four years ago at the age of 21, and served two tours in Iraq, the first clearing roadside bombs between Fallujah and Ramadi, and the second as an infantryman in Ramadi. Curran returned to the U.S. in November 2007.

From Toledo, Stieber and Curran walked to Cincinnati where they bought bikes. “Walking and biking shows the power that an individual can have,” Stieber said. “We can cross the country with the power of our own two legs.”

Stieber researches peace and community groups, schools, and churches for each town they visit to find locations where they can speak and sleep. They usually stay in civilian homes, or coffee shops, but when Google and couchsurfing​.org don’t provide any useful locations, Stieber and Curran camp.

In Baghdad, Stieber’s battalion was living in a factory in the industrial area. Roadside bombs were big threats. When a bomb went off, Stieber and his battalion were told to shoot everyone in the surrounding area. Stieber eventually lost his job as a gunner because he refused to.

Iraqi children were given a broad range of treatment. Some soldiers would kick soccer balls around with them. Some would shoot them with slingshots.
“I’d like to say that even if everything went according to script [in Iraq], the ideas behind [what] went on over there in the first place were worth speaking out about,” Stieber said. “It’s about living out what you feel is right and wrong, not making excuses to try to live up to a system and not turning blind eyes to things. [It’s about] being able to think for yourself and maintaining your humanity.”

Maintaining humanity proves to be a difficult task for most war veterans. Psychological problems are all too common; according to MSNBC, one in eight returning soldiers suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. According to Stieber, such trauma exists because soldiers are made into military machines and have “tried to turn themselves into something that a human being can’t be.”      
       
Stieber worked through his psychological trouble while he was still in Iraq. He tried to analyze why he became upset and frustrated, and sought to change himself when he discovered that he knew what he was doing was wrong.

“[I sought] to do things because I thought they were right and wrong, not because I was worried about who was looking over my shoulder,” Stieber said. “I soon began to find inward peace from this and knew I could put my beliefs into action and try to live my life a different way.”

For Curran, change came when he returned to the U.S. Upon returning, he noticed anger “well up inside” him, and he realized this was because he found himself instantly judging everyone he came across.

“I saw the potential in each person I passed in the street to carry out harm or some type of negative action,” he wrote on the blog. “I realized I had been living my life preparing myself to handle anything negative another may do to me.” Curran decided from that point that he would no longer judge anyone he met; instead, he would love them “and see what happens.”

For Curran, and most other soldiers, harm was brought about nearly every day. Dying wasn’t something that would happen far off in the future, a thought to cast aside and think about later. It could’ve been right around the corner at any second.

“Looming death over our heads was common,” he said. What was uncommon for Curran was when he’d encounter and interact with Iraqi civilians.
“When I was tearing through this Iraqi guy’s house, he came out and served me tea,” Curran explained. “These acts of love and compassion sometimes would be shown, and that was the most world changing thing apart from the destruction.”

“[War] just brings things that we all have in the back of our minds to the front,” Curran said. It’s common to be afraid of death, to be afraid of not fitting in, and being uncomfortable. Curran explains that going to war makes soldiers face these fears and makes them realize the power these fears can have over their lives.
Stieber said that the biggest fear he had overseas was the meaningless — when he saw how arbitrary things could really be.

“The line between life and death and right and wrong can be blurred so often that all the assumptions that I had fell apart,” Stieber said. “For awhile, that was my fear — that life had no meaning. It really took me a while to find that I had been attaching so much of my meaning to what other people had told me.”     
        
Both Curran and Stieber have strong opinions on how one should go about deciding to enlist. They should question why they want to join and ask themselves if the military really does make the world a better place, or if it just creates more enmity, distrust, and vengeance.

“We have an assumption that violence will solve our problems,” Stieber declared.

They want to illustrate that there are other paths to take. “There are a lot of good guys who want to spend their lives serving and trying to create a better place,” Curran stated. “But they think the only way is to join the military. That idea quickly goes away once you get in and see that it doesn’t change the world for the better.” Curran warns to not solely talk to recruiters, but talk to people who’ve been there also.

Stieber and Curran want people to be informed of the issues at hand. They want to stress the fact that our day to day lives can affect people all over the world. “For me it started with the Iraqi man,” Curran noted. “With this one afternoon and this man showing me love when I was destroying his life.”

“Inform yourself of the issues at hand … Start with what’s around you … local dedication can reach across great distances.” These statements are some of the few which are posted under the “Practical Ideas” link of Stieber and Curran’s blog. Stieber writes that, in a country where war is preached from the churches, he wants to do more to remember the man for whom those churches were built; who visited the orphans, served the poor, clothed the naked, fed the hungry, and simply just loved.

“So that’s what I’ve set out to do,” Stieber wrote. “And I hope that love is contagious.”