Petra Salazar was asleep in her University of New Mexico dorm room when the dreaded phone call came on a cold December morning.
"Specialist Salazar, your name has been called to leave with the Sixty-Four Deuce to Iraq," the National Guard officer told her when she answered the phone. "Have all your equipment ready."
The 20-year-old student had decided only days earlier she would not go to Iraq to fight for the U.S. military. She was getting a discharge, and she told the officer she was refusing her deployment orders.
Salazar is tall, with long brown hair and round glasses that make her look more like a student than a soldier. She joined the New Mexico National Guard as a senior at Espanola Valley High School. Even before she signed up, she was an opinionated student with an independent spirit who loved a good argument about abortion or American foreign policy. And her views were usually left-of-center.
During her one-weekend-a-month and two-weeks-ayear training with the 3631st Maintenance Company at the National Guard Armory in Espanola, Salazar was known as the "hippie" of the unit. She was the one who went to protests, pored over Internet lists of Afghan civilian dead and argued with her conservative comrades about their support for President Bush.
But in December 2003, as the Iraq war dragged into its ninth month, the contradictions of being a radical in the U.S. military became too much for Salazar to bear. She detested the president, and didn't want to fight in a war she considered unjust and illegal.
"Ever since the shift of focus from Osama to Saddam, I knew he was going to exploit 9/11, and I knew the day would come when I was going to have to leave," Salazar said. "It was an oil war to begin with. It had nothing to do with freeing the Iraqi people. How many people profited from 9/11 and this war? It's Bush and his people who are profiting off of blue-collar military labor."
Radical, liberal soldier that she was, Salazar also fit the blue-collar demographic of the typical military volunteer, and there were aspects of military life she found appealing. The National Guard offered Salazar a chance to earn money for college. She learned a skill: fixing vehicles and heavy equipment. It promised the opportunity to travel. And it gave her a chance to test her physical stamina.
But her favorite aspect of military life, the camaraderie, was the hardest to give up when Salazar was granted conscientious objector status and discharged from service.
"Your buddies are the only thing you're supposed to have," she said. "You feel that you let them down. It did feel like a betrayal of their trust."
The breaking point came for Salazar when her unit received a visit from an Army colonel, who briefed them on combat conditions in Iraq. He told the Guard members that most of them would be serving as mechanics, and coached them on preparing their families for the emotional impact of separation.
By then, participation in the war was no longer an abstract concept; it was an impending reality.
Salazar cried when she first met with her officers to tell them she wanted out. She explained that even it if meant accepting a dishonorable discharge she couldn't fight in Iraq.
They urged her to stay in. You gave up your right to have strong political beliefs when you signed up, they told her. And besides, you're fighting for your commanding officer and your fellow soldiers, not the president.
To make them understand how strongly she felt, she told them unequivocally: "You do not want somebody who's sympathetic to the enemy to go over there."
To get out, she had to meet with a priest, and sign a stack of forms showing she understood the consequences of her actions. Finally, her personnel officer told her the Guard was going to get her out "on friendly terms". She received an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector.
"I know I got a break," Salazar said. "It usually doesn't work out so nicely for people to get out."
No one should have the perception that Salazar got off easy, said Maj. Kimberly Lalley, a spokeswoman for the New Mexico National Guard. Only two or three out of about 5,000 National Guard members have gotten out of the military service since the Iraq war began.
Across the nation, requests for conscientious objector status have steadily risen since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but most of those requests have been denied, said J.E. McNeil, director of the Washington-based Center on Conscience & War.
"After September 11, our organization was getting about one or two calls a week," she said. "Now, it's closer to two or three a day. One guy said: 'I was pulling the trigger of my weapon and praying to God that I would miss, and I can't do it anymore.' Another guy who was in Iraq said his commander ordered him to hold his boot over the head of a two-month old baby to force his parents to talk."
Even though Salazar has been given conscientious objector status, she could pay some consequences for her decision to avoid military duty. The Defense Department could choose to make her repay the college tuition money she received from the Guard over the past three years, Lalley said. The Guard covers the full cost of tuition for its members to attend any state university.
More sobering is the possibility that she could still be called up for deployment under the military's Individual Ready Reserve program. The program was used to compensate troop shortages during the 1991 Gulf War, and has been reactivated during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Individual Ready Reserve calls up soldiers for deployment from a database. Former National Guard members who are called don't have the luxury of serving with their local units.
"You're at risk if you leave before you've fulfilled your service obligation, and if you have a specialty that they need," Lalley said.
For the most part, Salazar's military life is over. On Monday, she boarded a flight to Graz, Austria, to study Spanish and German at Karl Franzen University.
Still, the possibility of being called up by the Individual Ready Reserve is always at the back of her mind. She is younger than most military veterans, and as a combat-trained 20-year old her skills and physical fitness are in demand.
Her name is in a national database somewhere in Georgia, and this time she is only a demographic profile, not the opinionated radical her local superiors knew to be politically unsuited to fight in a controversial war.
She doesn't like to consider the odds. Yet if she were called up, her response would be the same.
"There is no way in hell they could make me go fight Bush's war," she said. "All the consequences are very material, but none of them mess with my sleep."