Do you support or oppose U.S. military action in Iran? In an NPR PBS News Marist poll,

conducted in the initial days of the war, just over half of Americans said they're against it.

And whether you support or oppose the war, straightforward questions like this don't always

capture the complicated feelings many Americans have about the conflict.

And that's perhaps even more true for Americans whose family roots trace back to Iran.

There was this immediate rush of something, you know, joy maybe, but it was definitely mixed emotions.

That's Iranian-American writer Nick Maffy, describing the moment he heard

that Iran's longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Hamenei, was killed during U.S. Israeli

airstrikes. The ground you'd been standing on your whole life just shifted, and I felt that.

So there was certainly hope, but I was immediately sober about it. I knew anything good that

might come from this would be born on the back of enormous bloodshed and misery.

In a recent essay for the Wall Street Journal, Mathi explained how, for many Iranian Americans,

their sense of exile had become a big part of their identity.

Every piece of Iranian diaspora culture was built on the bedrock of the regime's permanence.

It gave exiles their shape. You, your family, and your closest friends were here because

that was there, and that was not going to change. On Saturday, February 28th, that changed.

As the war began, Mafi says he felt something like vertigo.

The diaspora is navigating a feeling that has no precedent in our collective experience.

The possibility that exile might end, not the certainty, the possibility.

Impossibility, after 47 years of permanence, turns out to be the most disorienting thing of all.

Consider this.

For Iranians living in the U.S., the war against Iran was initially greeted with hope.

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