The war came to a sudden stop.

Col. Darel Maxfield flew home to Spokane this spring and abruptly, his life changed. No more explosions. No more artillery fire. No more sand.

Maxfield recently met me at Old European, where he ordered a stew omelet and mentally scanned the dining room for rifles. His brain was still walking guard duty in Iraq. Like many returning soldiers, he arrived home in one piece, but not necessarily unscathed.

Last summer Maxfield and I met through an e-mail program designed to connect soldiers serving in Iraq with journalists from their hometown newspapers. I felt wary of how the military might be crafting its message; Maxfield wondered if he could possibly trust a member of the “liberal media.”

But one August morning our conversation began in earnest when my phone rang and Maxfield was on the other end – via satellite phone from Besmaya Range Complex in Iraq.

He’d lost a soldier a few weeks before and saw another gravely wounded. Ten more were injured. Iraq was a mess. Enemies headed out of Baghdad to Iran through Diyala province, where they stopped to launch rockets and mortars into his complex. “God willing and I live long enough to look you in the eye,” he said into the phone, “I will tell you: There are no easy answers.”

Soon I was added to his list for group e-mails, which were addressed to a collection of family, friends and colleagues back home. Like messages to anxious relatives perched in an ICU waiting room, they provided intermittent assurance he was still alive.

Just after Christmas, his tone grew darker. He’d arranged to deliver a package of holiday greetings from Spokane schoolchildren to a nearby village school. Enemies apparently attacked the school in retaliation. When an American patrol returned, it found the school shot out and empty, the families scattered.

But finally, as Maxfield supervised the training of several thousand Iraqi soldiers with new M-16 rifles, the violence lessened and spring began to arrive in Iraq. As the days melted away, an Iraqi colonel, his counterpart there, honored him by naming the base’s main entrance “Maxfield Road.”

Maxfield flew out of Besmaya an hour after midnight on April 16. It was 99 degrees. Four days later, he was home.

Here, the city’s lush green foliage astounded him. “I cannot tell you how wonderful the water and the air is,” he told me over breakfast. “I just can’t.”

He read the newspaper in the mornings, bemused at the vehement complaints about the condition of the city’s streets. “The roads may be bumpy,” he said, “but God Almighty, they don’t blow up.”

The night before our breakfast he watched the news on television. It showed no pickup trucks arriving in Spokane filled with twisted and mangled dead bodies. No rockets fell on anybody’s head. No helicopters swooped in as gunships.

One recent morning, Maxfield gazed out the window of his North Side home at Linwood Elementary School. As he watched children play kickball, unafraid and surrounded by brilliant green leaves, tears came to his eyes.

“It was one of those moments you would never see in another part of the world,” he said. “There were no soldiers. There was no overhead cover. They were just safe.”

Maxfield sent an e-mail to his friends recently requesting them not to ask him about politics. He’s tired of the acrimony. Tired of talking about it.

Instead, over breakfast he told me about his 6-year-old son’s death to cancer years ago. That memory profoundly influenced his work in Iraq. “I owe it to every Iraqi mother to train her son so that she does not grieve the way I watched my wife grieve her son,” he said. “I would not wish that on anyone. Not even my enemy’s mother.”

Last week, Maxfield, a member of the Army Reserves, headed back to Ferris High School, where he teaches social studies. Abruptly, he stopped hosting dignitaries at Besmaya, chatting with U.S. senators or drinking tea with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki. No one here sharply salutes his orders. Only he understands the way danger still lurks in his nervous system, reverberating like an echo.

And so the latest installment of the conversation between the “liberal” columnist in Spokane and the “conservative” colonel in Iraq wound to a close.

The conversation has both enlarged my perspective on this war and deepened my respect for those who fight it. Maxfield says it’s reminded him of the importance of diverse voices having the right to speak freely.

I’m still not convinced that this war ever should have begun. He’s still not convinced that question even matters.

This is the one that haunts him now: “We’re here. So how the hell do you get home?

“How,” the colonel repeated softly and slowly, “do you get home?”