You're listening to Rough Translation from NPR and our special series Homefront with

reporter Quill Lawrence, all about the civilian military divide.

There's this question that I've been thinking about since we started this particular episode.

Who belongs in a war zone?

We were sitting in the lobby and it was such a scene, you know, you'd see Peter Jennings

and then you'd see Christian Almond Por and, you know, and everybody being really cool,

right?

Because everybody's just like, you know, I belong here, right?

Tara Sutton, freelance journalist, did not feel like she belonged in Baghdad when she

got there in 2003 at the start of the Iraq war.

And then up-bopped Marla, like, hi, I'm Marla.

Marla Rezeka in jeans and a long Afghan-style sheepskin vest.

She looked like a hippie, you know what I mean?

And she was skinny and her hair was kind of uncomed and she just like, bedraggled, cute,

but bedraggled and just sort of like floating around.

Like what are you doing here exactly?

The two women start talking and Tara, the freelance journalist, says she's there writing

an article about Iraqi children in war.

And Marla goes, I was just in Afghanistan and there's a lot of traumatized people there.

And I remember like, we were laughing.

We were just like, there's a lot of traumatized people in Afghanistan, like, no, you know?

And your thoughts were...

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