A month ago, I received an e-mail from Sa’ad Al-Izzi, the translator who was my constant companion when I was in Iraq in July reporting about Mainers stationed there.

“Do you remember when you asked me who is my favorite writer, and I told you that he was George Orwell because of his novel ‘1984’ in which he described ingeniously how we used to live in Iraq before the war?” Al-Izzi wrote. “Well, he still is, and even greater for describing what we are going through now in his masterpiece ‘Animal Farm.'”

Al-Izzi is one of a handful of people – soldiers and civilians, Americans and Iraqis – I have kept in touch with since my trip to Iraq last summer.

Tara Saleem, a 25-year-old Muslim woman trained as an architectural engineer, was working as a secretary for the Coalition Provisional Authority when we met. I was sitting in a waiting room with bombed-out walls when we struck up a conversation. I complimented her on her beauty and asked if she ever wore an abaya, the traditional black covering of Muslim women.

“No one can make me wear the veil,” she said. “That is between God and me.”

Recently she wrote to tell me her architectural skills are being used to design a housing complex and support facilities for USAID.

“The situation here in Baghdad is really bad. Everything is bad,” she wrote. “Why is Iraq still like a plaza of battle? Most Iraqi people just want to live a peacefully normal life. I hate living in Iraq before the war, and after I wish if I can live in another place which is normal. I believe everything will be better in Iraq but I also believe that this will take time and this is not for my generation.”

Fortunately, every soldier I interviewed in Iraq is still alive, including two young soldiers from northern Maine who are now stateside.

Army Sgt. Brian Beaulieu, 22, has returned to his family’s home in Madawaska, and is working at his father’s store as a cashier and maintenance man. On the front lines during the invasion, Beaulieu had his first exposure to combat in the early days of the war. When I asked him what it was like to take up arms, he responded with candor.

“At the time it wasn’t difficult,” he said. “You kill or get killed. But now that I think back on it, I can wager both sides. It’s a pretty bad condition to be in.”

Beaulieu, who completed his four years of active duty in January, had acquaintances among the Iraqi people while he was living in Baghdad, but he never really trusted them, he admitted. The enemy and the ally could look identical.

“We had to transition between war and peacekeeping. It was pretty awkward,” he said.

Two months ago, Beaulieu signed up with the Maine Army National Guard’s 152nd Field Artillery Unit. He hopes to carry out his duties in Caribou and attend college in the fall. He has adjusted to “normal” life again, he said, but his sleep is still disturbed. One morning, he woke up to find everything ripped off his bedroom walls and piled neatly in the middle of the room, yet he has no recollection of doing this. As he put it: Sometimes he is “jumpy” at night.

Beaulieu hopes he is done with Iraq, but he has heard a rumor that his unit might be called to active duty. He will go, of course. It’s his soldier’s duty.

“I didn’t really like it,” he said of the Middle Eastern country. “The people are probably nice, but after what I went through, I don’t care for it very much. I don’t feel like going back over there.”

Army Spc. Adam Belhumeur, who is from Caribou and is now at Fort Stewart in Georgia, did not return my calls or answer e-mail. I did, however, speak to his mother.

“He finally matured,” said Kim Sweeney of her son. “He needed to do that. He woke up over there. If he had to go back? Well, that’s part of his job. I’d just keep my fingers crossed that he’d come back in one piece. Hey, everybody that goes over has to face that.

“Some make it back. Some don’t,” she said.

One of my fondest memories of visiting a Maine soldier takes place at a former Iraqi police academy in Baghdad, where I sat with Staff Sgt. Sean Parisian and watched a group of soldiers play volleyball in the courtyard below. Parisian grew up in Eliot, where he enjoyed hunting in the forests and swimming in the ocean as a boy. We daydreamed about how refreshing it would be to plunge into one of Maine’s lakes during the pounding heat of that afternoon. In May, Parisian will have been in Iraq for one year, minus a one-month medical leave in Germany last August.

“Then I caught the next possible flight back to Baghdad,” he wrote in a recent e-mail. “The heat in August was unbelievable. The winter here was pretty mild by Maine standards. I notice that Maine had their worst winter in many years. I wish I was there for that.”

I wish he were, too.

“Stay in touch,” he wrote at the end of his letter. “And when the lobster comes into season, eat a couple for me.”