The U.S. sends its best and brightest young people to Iraq.

From The National Review

“I can't sleep. I lie awake in my luxurious trailer and my mind is racing through possible scenarios. A few days ago there was a stretch where we were attacked several days in a row at 8am...like clockwork. Thankfully they have subsided since but for that stretch each morning my 'alarm clock' was a loud BOOM and a shaking trailer."

So begins an April 16 diary entry of 25-year-old Brendan Lund. Brendan and his cousin, Craig, are in Baghdad, working with the Iraqi Ministry of Finance in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). They're just two of the scores of young Americans who have volunteered since March 2003 to live in a war zone, sleep in bare-minimum trailers, work 16-hour days (or more), and wake up to rocket attacks — all in the name of building democracy in Iraq.

"Personally I looked at it as the right thing to do," Brendan says. "How can people my age who have this choice not want to go out and do this?"

In September 2001, fresh out of Carnegie Mellon, Brendan took a job at Merrill Lynch and found himself just minutes away from the World Trade Center on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. Stepping out of the subway, the Massachusetts native heard an enormous explosion as the first tower's cargo elevator crashed into the basement.

"What I took away from September 11 was a feeling of utter helplessness with regard to terrorist attacks," he says. "They could happen any time, anywhere."

Brendan describes 9/11 as a "subconscious motivation" for his decision to head out to Baghdad. He wasn't sure — still isn't — that there is a link between Saddam and al Qaeda, but "I think the U.S. understood and Bush understands that the war on terrorism is a war without fronts." In some ways, it took being in Iraq to convince Brendan — a registered Independent — of the importance of building democracy there: Seeing with his own eyes what Saddam wrought and interacting with Iraqis were powerful testimonies to the justice of liberating and rebuilding the country