Alba told me last year that Stanisci, a father of three and the husband of her dad's sister, signed up for the Army Reserve in California because "he's Northern Italian, and he heard he could get a free trip to Italy."

Instead, like thousands of other men and women on active duty and in the Reserves and National Guard, he got a free trip to a war zone.

"I just don't have a great feeling about what we're doing in Iraq," Alba told me last July. "I don't know why we're there."