At the beginning of the war five years ago, I went on the Navajo reservation with a friend who is a Santa Fe rug trader. His wife had attached a "No War" sign to the back of his Volvo station wagon. We drove up through the peculiar stretch of northern New Mexico, where signs announce Anasazi ruins and there are abandoned gas stations. The land is like Iraq: arid, windy, eroded, unspectacular.

Farmington, the small town on the edge of the Navajo land, was bustling: red Halliburton trucks were everywhere. Farmington, which sits near the nation’s second largest deposits of natural gas, is one of the headquarters for Halliburton. On the Navajo reservation, which covers 26,000 square miles of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, there is uranium.

The rug dealer friend is a Mormon. We were meeting his friend, another Mormon, whose family has owned the Trading Post at Shiprock for five generations.

The Shiprock trader took one look at the "No War" sign and said:

“You’d better take that off. That’s not how they feel up here.”

The Navajo are always the first to enlist in any war.

The next day, the young Shiprock trader drove us into the reservation. There were no sign-posts, no road names. Pre-fabricated houses had squat adobe Hogans in front of them, ceremonial huts. A sandstorm blew shifting sands across the road.

For more than 150 years, Mormon traders have financed the weavers, mainly women, through the winter, and in the early spring the women bring the finished rugs to the Trading Posts, and from there dealers buy them for their shops in Sedona, Phoenix or Santa Fe. Navajo rugs are not cheap; they have graduated from being merely crafts to a rare position somewhere between tradition and fine art. A rug by a master weaver can take up to six months to make, and sell for up to $80,000. It was the end of winter, and the Shiprock trader was anxious to visit his stars, and get a jump on the work. Our friend, the foremost dealer of modern Navajo rugs in Santa Fe, wanted to be there with him.

We pulled off the road and drove toward a small house. The Shiprock Trader stopped the car. This was the best, most accomplished and well-known of the weavers, he said. Louise. Collectors were waiting to see what she was working on. He himself didn’t know. That was why we were there. I started to open the door. “No,” he said : “The Navajo way is to wait in the car until the person you are visiting has noticed you are there.” The pink sand whipped and whistled around us, and after a while, a small woman, Louise, opened the door of her house. We clambered out, fought off the tiny grains of sand, and trooped in. On the wall was a large color photograph of three young people in uniform.

We followed Louise to the room where she works. The two dealers were electric with curiosity. She was the best, known for her earth tones, dancing figures, perfect shapes.

On the big loom was a half-finished rug.

The dealers registered uncomprehending shock.

The rug was an American flag.

Draped over the loom was another, smaller flag, with ‘God Bless America’ written on it, and a bright gold fringe. Louise touched it, “It’s from Wal-Mart, I wanted to get the stars and stripes right,” she said.

The Shiprock dealer was thinking. “There are probably some Texan collectors who’d…”

“This isn’t for sale,” she said. “This is for my brother-in-law. His daughter is in the army. She’s in Iraq. My daughter’s in the Air Force. I’m making this to pray for them.”