Fun in a Flak Jacket

April 1, 2004. In Iraq, it was the day after four American contractors were dragged from their jeeps, beaten, murdered, beheaded and hung from a bridge. In Los Angeles, it was an average day for me and my family. We sat around the dinner table that night. My 11-year-old daughter chattered as always about school, about cello practice, about her role in the upcoming play.

My husband interrupted to announce, happily: “Hey. Guess what? I’m going to Iraq.” He’s 47 years old. He was too young for Vietnam and he’s too old to enlist now.

“We’re taking the show there. A two-hour special.” He’s the series producer on a very popular reality television program. It’s a good show. He doesn’t marry midgets or auction off babies or make anyone eat slugs. Until that moment, I thought it was a show he could be proud of.

Our 15-year-old listens to National Public Radio in the car pool on the way home from school. “Did you hear what happened in Fallouja?” he said.

“We’ll be fine,” his dad told him. “We have 12 special ops soldiers who will stay with us, protect us at all times.”

“Good to know our military resources are being used so wisely,” I said.

Our daughter was close to tears. She was terrified for her dad. Our son as well. But I was angry.

My husband and I had started dating when I was working for Mondale for President and he was on the Ferraro vice-presidential campaign. We’ve raised our kids to be politically active, not just aware, and we’ve taken them to every march, every rally, every speech against the war in Iraq.

“Why?” our son asked. “Why are you going?”

“I’ll wear a flak jacket. It’ll be fun.”

“Fun?” I exploded.

“It’ll be great for the show.”

That night I looked at him across the table and, after 20 years together, had not a clue who he was. The man I married would know it was morally wrong for him to use the Iraq war as the backdrop for a TV contest, to take craft services to a country where most people don’t have electricity, where thousands have died, where they hate us for trying to ram our culture down their throats.

He said he would be doing it for the troops. Five soldiers would be selected as contestants. They would have a budget and a limited time to turn an Army-issue Humvee into a high-speed vehicle.

Why not do a cooking show in Biafra?

Hundreds of thousands of dollars would be spent on consumer whimsy in a country we had almost destroyed. He reminded me that it wasn’t as if the network would spend that money in a better way; they’d never use it to build new schools in Fallouja, for example.

How could he not see this as tacit approval of the war; that producing a two-hour special filled with shining, happy faces of our troops was as despicable as the Halliburton ads of the soldier on the phone home. It’s not real.

He reads the newspaper. He knows that the troops are wondering why they’re there; they’re angry that no one will tell them when they can go home; they’re fighting for their lives. These are not carefree men and women, but that’s what his two-hour special would portray.

“Maybe not,” he replied. “Maybe we’ll do something more meaningful.” Right. Maybe the network will go out on a limb, risk losing its commercial sponsors and show the truth in Iraq. On a Humvee makeover show.

The kids had left the room by this point. They huddled in my daughter’s bedroom, listening to us scream at each other. I couldn’t make him see that it was more than worry; I was frightened for him, of course, but more than that, I was horrified at the thought of his doing this. What had happened to him? When had the show blinded him to our values?

He tried to appease me. He would grow a beard because men with beards are safer there. They would stay within the Green Zone. They would have their special ops guys.

“And if you die anyway,” I said, “at least you will have died for what truly makes America great: television.”

Then he looked at me, my liberal, enlightened husband, and said, “You’re just thinking like a chick.”

I walked out my front door. I sat in a bar and wondered whether I would ever go back. If we didn’t have children, I think that night could have done us in.

Two weeks later the Pentagon nixed the plan to do the show in Iraq. The Army was “too busy,” suddenly, to look after a TV host and his producer and crew. It had other things to think about.

The furor in my house has died down, but the chasm hasn’t closed completely -- the kids and me on one side, my husband on the other.

Diana Wagman’s most recent novel, “Bump” (Carroll & Graf), has just been published in paperback.