Josh Stieber was in middle school when 9/11 was on the news; he vowed to enlist in the army after graduating high school, and sure enough, by 2007, he was deployed to BaghDad.    What he saw transformed him:

I had grown up hearing ideas like “love your enemies”, “return evil with good”, and “judge not lest you be judged”. But I treated these sayings that the central figure of my religion taught as if they were just nice sounding lines, but not practical. But slowly, my excuses started to fade away. I learned that the military trains people to hate and dehumanize entire people groups, not showing sadness for the difficult task of “removing evil”. I learned that the Iraqis weren’t waiting for us with open arms; in our towns, men, women, and children protested our presence. I learned innocent people die. I learned that it doesn’t matter what uniform you have on, it’s about what’s inside. And sadly, the military tries to rob you of what’s inside and the result is people treating killing like a joke and showing little care for human life.

It took a few wake up calls and the examples of other historical figures like Gandhi, Tolstoy, and MLK for me to run out of excuses for not living up to the man I claimed I believed in. He said “love as I have loved you”. And the things I was doing and contributing to were showing just the opposite. After times of desperation and depression, the answer I found was love; it’s stronger than fear, hate, suffering, and death.

By April 2009, he had left the army, and engaged on a bike ride to spread some love:

If I am saying no to war, I want to find out what to say yes to. I want to take a negative and invest it into a positive. In a country where war is preached from the churches, I want to do a little to remember the man who those churches are built for, the man who visited the orphans, served the poor, clothed the naked, fed the hungry… and loved. So that’s what I’ve set out to do and I hope that that love is contagious.

The other one was Conor. David Albert describes his remarkable story like this:

He was a Marine patrol leader, charged with searching houses in Fallujah and then Ramadi, arresting “suspected terrorists”, etc.

He had much to say about military misconduct and was troubled by this for sometime. One day, he was ordered to search an entire block in Ramadi. On his orders, they went house to house, destroying furniture, breaking windows, terrorizing the entire population. (he has many stories about that as well). They found absolutely nothing. They finally came to the last house. Surprising to him, when he opened the door, it entered a small courtyard, with a magnificent lawn, and beautiful flowers (this, in the middle of the desert). Well, he ordered his men into the house, told them to break everything, while he swept the courtyard for weapons. He didn’t find any, and took a shovel, and started to dig things up.

In a few minutes, a middle-aged man, wearing a dishdasha, came out of the house that was being wrecked, with a tray, and served them and the rest of the men tea. In perfect English, he asked Conor about his life, where he was from, whether he had any siblings, what he really liked to do, how Iraq was treating him. Not even a hint of bitterness or anger in his voice.

That was the day Conor decided to leave the military.

Both Josh and Connor are sharing their stories on the "Contagious Love Experiment" ... when two Iraq Vets found out that love conquers fear and hate, they began to spread it by journeying across the country.