Our little girl has gone. And my heart with her. I just returned from a week in Los Angeles, Salee’s first stop on her trip home to Iraq.

Sitting in LAX waiting for my flight home, as Salee, Abu Ali and Cole fly on to New York for a three day stop before heading to the Middle East, I think of the past week. Cole’s incredible passion for the cause filled the week with presentations and schedules to meet, but also many memories.

I’ll never forget Abu Ali’s eloquence when speaking about Iraq. I’ll never forget his face when he tells of a family near him, seven members killed in one bombing and a soldier coming to the hospital and saying “Sorry”. “SORRY?” Abu Ali says. “You killed seven people and all we hear is ‘sorry’? But that’s how it always is,” he adds sadly. He talks about Iraq before the invasion, how Shia and Sunni lived together peacefully, without a thought. “Sectarian violence? There wasn’t any,” he says. “We were friends.”

I won’t forget the day in the car when Salee was casually talking about her extended family, her many aunts and uncles. And how she’d so calmly say, “That Uncle is dead. Got shot by a soldier,” and points to her head. “Mama has five sisters. Or, four now. One was killed.”

Or the day we were in a restroom stall and she broke my heart with, “Ann have two babies,” and I replied “No, I only have one baby, Salee”, and she said, “Salee have two mamas. Ann have two babies.”

We’d spent a day on Catalina Island and she’d broken down crying on the boat ride back to LA. She told me then, “No cry at airport, Ann. Little cry. No big cry.”

On the cab ride to the airport I gave her the only piece of jewelry that I really cared about, a cheap silver ring from Mexico that I wore every day. She cried as she tried to give it back and then told me she’d wear it every day. I thought at the time that the ring would remind her of me, but I didn’t account for the pain in my heart every time I looked at my own ringless hand.

And, as everyone who knows her might have guessed, she did what she said she would at the airport. No big cry. She was brave, thinking of the future and her return trips here. “Don’t cry, Ann. Salee come back again and again and again…..”

Salee is taking my heart home with her to Fallujah. But not just mine. She carries with her the hearts of so many who’ve grown to love her these last few months. I wish those hearts filled with love could ensure her safety. But they can’t. Salee will only be truly safe when we end the carnage that our nation has brought to her homeland.

We have to work harder to end the war. For Salee. For Abu Ali. And for all of our brothers and sisters in Iraq.

How can we not? Our Salee and our hearts are there.