When Ward VanLerberg left Kansas and headed off to the Middle Eastern city of Erbil to build 50 schools, he was careful to tell his family that he was going to the capital of “Kurdistan,” and all was well until his daughter googled his destination and announced to the family that Kurdistan is in Iraq. His wife wept, bidding him goodbye, and commenced waiting for him to return home in a coffin.

Three days following Mrs. Van’s last farewell, I run into Ward on the elevator at the International Hotel in Erbil, and he asks me if I’d care to join him at the buffet, and what I say is no. Did I fly 7,000 miles from Chicago to talk to a guy from Kansas City? I’m here to get a look at the 1,000-kilometer oil pipeline running from Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, to Ceyhan, Turkey, and this friendly construction contractor is not a pipeline. But then I feel sorry and ask if I can join him after all, and I tell him that when I left home, I bet my wife cried more than his.

This morning, the two deceased husbands sit in the Atrium Coffee Shop at the Erbil International Hotel (known locally as the Sheraton though it isn’t one), a 10-story establishment with three additional restaurants, a nightclub, and a buffet to rival any on earth. We eat cornflakes with yogurt and omelets to order. Fresh-squeezed O.J. on request. “My family just didn’t get it,” Ward says. “This place is happening. There’s no war here in Kurdistan. No war whatsoever.”

To be sure, security at the “Sheraton” is tight—first a baggage search at the checkpoint before the gated parking lot, next a metal detector and pat-down at the lobby’s entrance, where patrons absolutely have to check their weapons. Since a number of private security contractors stop in for the buffet or take meetings here or even live here in posh quarters—with 24-hour room service and a view, perhaps, of the excavation site from which will rise the future Nishtiman Shopping Mall, one of the largest in the Middle East, or of the American or Italian Villages (little-box, lawnless developments for future foreign residents) or a distant view of the yet-unnamed airport’s colossal terminal, also under construction—at any given time the desk drawer at the security station rattles with loaded handguns, and here and there in the lobby bulky, physically formidable young Euros sport empty holsters on their hips.