Mind Field

The organization put up a wrought-iron fence to keep the swell at bay, and patients were ushered inside by volunteer chaperones, at least one of whom was a member of MacNair's Quaker group. Bullhorns blared, and neighbors complained about the near-constant ruckus. Threatened by a Missouri law that would deny state funding to family-planning centers that performed abortions, Planned Parenthood officials moved the Troost surgical center to Overland Park.

MacNair knew that protesting abortion was different from protesting war. Because the act of "violence" was initiated by women themselves, not by an enemy, showing pictures of bloody fetuses risked alienating her audience. So MacNair carried a sign with a generic message: "Abortion Hurts Women." Whereas her Vietnam-era pamphlets had illustrated the atrocities of Hiroshima, her leaflets now focused on the positives of keeping a child and included pictures of healthy babies.

"We felt women who were getting abortions were being cheated," she says. Abortion, she says, is a method of "discriminating against unborn children by treating them as if they aren't even human." It helps classify women as "reusable sex objects," she says, and encourages irresponsible men.

As MacNair's attachment to anti-war and anti-abortion protest groups proliferated, her boundaries among friendships, religion and political statements blurred.

"I don't really think she fit in," says Lynn Cheatum, a member of PeaceWorks who has worked with the War Resisters League, the American Friends Service Committee and the Kansas City Interfaith Peace Alliance, which MacNair also helped organize. "I'm not knocking her. I'm just saying I don't really think she fit in."

MacNair says the tension at Quaker meetings was palpable. "I got guff being pro-life. I got guff in a way that startled me. I got guff in a way that startled other Quakers ... I was really taken aback, because these were peace people, especially the Quakers, who prided themselves on being open-minded, and I called them on it," she says. "I felt intimidated."

In 1996, she retreated to UMKC as a Ph.D. candidate. She hoped to find academic proof of her belief that abortion was violence toward women.

"I wasn't going to be a pacifist. I was going to be a scientist," she says. MacNair knows the numbers -- the month-by-month increase in soldiers' deaths, the unexpectedly high U.S. casualty rate since Iraq gained sovereignty. And she knows that most of the fighting is close-quarters combat, with battles pitched on street corners.

The Army trains its soldiers to dehumanize their enemies. In the "Combat Training With Pistols" section of Army Field Manual FM 23-35, war-zone shooting is called "target engagement." The current Field Manual 22-51: Leader's Manual for Combat Stress Control and the VA's Iraq War Clinician Guide, released this past June to address the psychological impact of killing in error, list coping techniques for soldiers troubled by killing civilians or other Americans. But the Army's textbook War Psychology doesn't list killing the enemy on its list of 20 "Combat Stress Factors," which include fatigue, fear of death, maiming and loss of fellow soldiers. Dated February 6, 2004, the Clinicians Guide PTSD test asks only one four-part question:

Have you ever had any experience that was so frightening, horrible, or upsetting that, in the past month, you: Have had any nightmares or thought about it when you did not want to? Tried hard not to think about it; went out of your way to avoid situations that remind you of it? Were constantly on guard, watchful, or easily startled? Felt numb or detached from others, activities or your surroundings?

In July, a study by The New England Journal of Medicine showed that one-fourth of U.S. troops show symptoms of major depression, anxiety or full-blown PTSD -- 16 percent from the Iraq theater and 11 percent from Afghanistan. Fewer than half of those diagnosed with a mental disorder have sought care, according to the study. There's no way to compare these numbers with statistics from the Vietnam War; the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study was implemented ten years after those troops had returned. But the data looks especially bleak when coupled with a March Department of Defense survey that showed suicide rates among soldiers in Iraq are a third higher than the average among soldiers stationed elsewhere.

Col. Thomas Burke, the director of mental-health policy for the Department of Defense, tells the Pitch he is unfamiliar with MacNair's work and declines to comment on her theory. But he has said in interviews that the military chooses not to discuss the morality of killing when training soldiers.

In the dining room of her bungalow, framed, yellowed portraits of MacNair's ancestors hang opposite her computer desk. Recently, she downloaded a copy of form DD 2796, the post-deployment health assessment issued by the Department of Defense.

The survey asks basically the same questions posed after Vietnam, still avoiding the point-blank query "Did you kill someone?"