Special Report

Maj. Jim Hawkins, 41
Unit: Montgomery

Maj. Jim Hawkins pulls a small silver cross on a chain out of his fatigues and holds it up.

The cross is important to him. It is a talisman and a reminder.

An Iraqi shopkeeper gave it to him, as a gesture of thanks, and Hawkins hasn’t taken it off since.

Hawkins is a 41-year-old Alabama National Guard training officer now based in Montgomery, but he served in Iraq with the Army Corps of Engineers.

He worked on reconstruction projects, rebuilding a country battered by war with a shattered infrastructure. Reconstruction is how you provide stability, he said.

It’s a different kind of war.

Seventy of his Iraqi coworkers were killed during the eight months Hawkins served in Iraq.

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Hawkins remembers the day his 24-year-old Iraqi secretary, whose pictures show a smiling, stylish young woman, told him “when I get killed, make sure you have nice pictures of me for the memorial.”

“They came to work every day in the face of immense threats,” he said. He grew to admire their courage.

The faces and voices of those colleagues have stuck with him.

“I want to get this finished, want Iraq to survive, want them to get their country back,” he said.

Hawkins prints out an e-mail he sent to friends and family. Attached to it was a commentary an Iraqi coworker wrote.

“These are not a people of terror (although terror lives among them),” Hawkins wrote. “These are the people who gave the world Hammurabi and written law…To know J. Anajar was to know Iraq and to know hope for its people.”

Anajar’s commentary is three pages of determination and pride. “There is one thing they believe in: Life must go ahead for a better future for their country. They believe that every night must be followed by a bright day.”