Jessica "Jess" Riggs
The Iron Idealist
Jess fits the image of someone who could run a special ops detail — but decided to pour her manic energy into something more useful. A Lutheran pastor in her 30s, she sports a canvas of ecumenical back tattoos that span the world's major religions. She is the operational spine of Fight4Peace, the one who recruits, trains, and carries most of the (im)moral weight when difficult decisions must be made.
Her defining tension is familial. Older brother Bo is an Army Captain entering the same country as Jess is entering — but for opposite reasons. Both were raised to believe in service, but they have different and irreconcilable definitions of what that means. The show lives in that gap.
Jess leads unarmed pacifists into Iraq without visible fear because, in her world, fear is contagious and she refuses to spread it. Beneath her commanding and righteous presence, she is uncertain about what is right and wrong in time of war. Her only certainty is that she cannot waver from the certainty of the mission — even if the mission kills her and others.
Series Arc: Jess begins as a woman of fierce control and becomes a woman of earned surrender. Near-death trauma, bodily injury, and intimate exposure to suffering deepen her faith beyond leadership and doctrine. She does not abandon her convictions; she inhabits them more fully. Her arc is a spiritual intensification in which control gives way to sacrifice, and certainty evolves into wisdom. War does not break her authority. It burns it into something more compassionate, costly, and real.
Jeremiah "Frog" Michaels
The Mystic Warrior
Frog arrives in the pilot as a question the show spends its first season answering. A tall, lanky, 30something Southerner wearing dreadlocks and burlap pants, at first he seems like an unserious bohemian drifter. Later, we see the suspicious poise of a trained warrior.
Warmth and humility make him instantly likable, a gentle eccentric defusing tensions with homemade snickerdoodles or infectious smile. Then, in a single unhurried motion, he disarms an AK-47-wielding Iraqi and calmly hands the weapon back. The question then becomes: who trained him, and why is he here? He is a believer in the pacifist mission and is present because his faith is a thing embodied, not performed. His composure under threat is extraordinary — the product of some prior life he has not disclosed.
He speaks Arabic and moves through the Middle East as if he has been there before. He is, in the most literal sense, a man of peace who is terrifyingly capable of the alternative.
Series Arc: Frog emerges as the show's quiet moral authority. What first reads as laid-back hippie evolves into command under fire. As the invasion escalates, the deeper man is revealed — tender, courageous, and unguardedly human. His defining movement is relational: he becomes a bridge between cultures, absorbing Iraqi fury without fear and earning trust not through rhetoric, but through presence. He begins as a wildcard and becomes the story's most instinctive ambassador of shared humanity.
Dr. Randall Katz
The Doomed Dissident
A brilliant but brittle American University professor in his late 50s, Katz is an atheist, a WWII baby, and a lifelong critic of state-sponsored violence. Late in an average career — emboldened by a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease — he springs from academia's sidelines convinced that words written and lectured no longer matter. In that defining moment he becomes an intellect short on patience who believes his life is short on time.
A policy wonk always in tweed coat and bifocals, he is inflated by smarts — seemingly fearful of nothing and no one. In truth, however, he is deathly afraid of everything and everyone, especially war, torture, and dictator regimes. Bolstered by shots of tequila and a cyanide tablet kept secret and hidden, he enlists in the pacifist mission with now-or-never urgency — and a whiff of martyrdom.
Parkinson's mixed with anger and regret have made him cantankerous, combustible, compelling, and deeply human. His journey into Iraq is as much about discovering realities about himself as it is about revealing the realities of war.
Series Arc: Katz begins as an intellectual firebrand convinced that moral clarity and international law are enough to curb Washington's worst instincts. He ends up sorely wrong — injured, terrified and fully dependent on Middle Eastern Muslims. Arrest, bombardment, near-death trauma and a flash of suicidal contemplation will educate the educator. His arc is not toward heroism in the conventional sense, but toward humility and a deeper wisdom grown from witness. By the end he is an educator who no longer lectures about suffering. He carries it.
Bo Riggs
Captain, U.S. Army, late 30s
Jess' older brother and former Arizona State QB whose football career ended at the Rose Bowl when a linebacker shattered his knee and, with it, his inflated sense of destiny. In Kuwait he is volcanic, conspiratorial, and increasingly unhinged — demanding a combat lead into Baghdad while spouting antisemitic grievances that unsettle even his closest ally. His real motive, buried beneath the rage, is his sister. He will cross into Iraq to protect her, and what he does there will jeopardize his military career.
T-Bone Bonner
Major, U.S. Army, early 40s
Bo's high school teammate, commanding officer, and the only person who can talk him off a ledge — temporarily. Compact, disciplined, and instinctively fair, T-Bone defeats Iraq's elite Fedayeen fighters in Rutba, then orders the rebuilding of the hospital his unit accidentally bombed. Locals will call him Mayor, out of respect. He is the American military's best diplomat and representative, which makes him both essential and endangered in the world the show inhabits.
Akram Al-Janabi
Iraqi fixer, 50s
Cultured, professional, and quietly moral, Akram has shepherded Western peace activists through Baghdad since Desert Storm, officially on behalf of the Ba'ath regime, unofficially on behalf of his own good conscience. When regime boss Kasim orders him to position the pacifists near bombing targets, Akram resists and eventually refuses — a decision that puts him in harm's way. He is secretly a Christian in a Muslim country at war with a Christian nation, and he is falling in love with the woman he is supposed to sacrifice to war.
Eugene "Cub" Bare
Wire reporter, late 30s
Cub arrives in Iraq carrying more baggage than his press credentials: a collapsing marriage, a recent affair, two children he feels he is failing, and an insatiable hunger for redemption. He tells himself he is going to Iraq to tell stories the mainstream media is missing. And he is. But he is also going because home has become unbearable and reporting offers relative calm and clarity. His self-identity is rooted more to job than family. He is a man in a moral spiral who has chosen a dangerous place to find his footing.
Abby McKenna
Founder of Fight4Peace, 50s
A soft-spoken L.A. schoolteacher who has broken U.S. sanctions and entered Iraq to help locals more times than Washington can track. Abby is the quiet engine behind the mission — unassuming until she isn't and fiery in the way of someone who chooses principle over comfort as if there is no other choice. She is Akram's love interest and his moral counterpart. She has been arrested by Washington and imprisoned for her activism. Nothing slows her. To her, jail is an occupational hazard — and badge of honor.
Samir Al-Rashidi
Ba'athist driver and Akram's underling, 20s
Young, warm, and happily naive when the series begins, Samir is caught between Akram's quiet resistance and Kasim's ruthless orders. He drives the pacifists to Baghdad because he believes in Akram's decency and, through it, in something larger than the regime. By season's end, a U.S. bomb wounds his four-year-old son Abbas — a boy with dreams that exceed the trappings of any one nation and proclaims to his father that he wants to grow up "to go, see, be, do." That is the lesson of this series, rendered in the life of one child.
Kasim Al-Fahim
Ba'ath Party section commander, 50s
Akram's boss and the series' Iraqi-side villain. Kasim views the American pacifists as instruments — useful only if the Pentagon's own weapons of mass destruction kill them. He dresses his orders in religious language he neither understands nor truly practices. As Samir tells Akram, his Quran is only decoration. Kasim is what radicalism becomes when it is illiterate and blindly obeys. He's dangerous not because he is adjacent to power, but because he thinks of himself as righteous based on scripture he cannot read.
Beth Bare
Former photojournalist, Cub's wife, 30s
Beth gave up an exciting career for children and, in turn, became a devout Evangelical who clings to church for comfort, relevance, and understanding. Beth sees everything — her husband's affair, his restlessness, his need to be somewhere other than home — and processes it with a wit sharp enough to draw blood. She was a seasoned world traveler until motherhood clipped her and church narrowed her vision inward — driven by a faith hardened into certainty. In her religious rigidity she is, in a benign sense, Kasim's Christian counterpart — a radical who would never recognize herself as one.
