London ? When tour bus owner Joe Letts was asked if he wanted to go to Iraq to be a human shield, he hardly hesitated.

A left-leaning, war-hating man of 52, Letts had been to Iraq in 1991 after the first Gulf War and was appalled at what war and sanctions had done to Iraq’s people. He wanted to do what he could to stop it from happening again.

So he loaded up his two red double-decker British buses with some 50 fellow human shields. They embarked on a grueling, three-week, 3,000-mile journey to Baghdad and arrived Feb. 15 — the day millions of others around the world marched for peace.

After spending just a few weeks in Iraq, Letts and the others are back. For some, a stint as a human shield has been disillusioning and disappointing.

A young American on the trip, Ohioan Daniel Pepper, 23, was surprised to learn firsthand from a Baghdad taxi driver that dictator Saddam Hussein was hated in Iraq.

Other former shields were disappointed that Iraqi officials refused to let them shield their preferred sites, hospitals and schools — and instead, directed them to food storage and utility sites, including one with a large military camp around it.

“Cold fear” prompted Godfrey Meynell, 68, a “church-and-queen Tory” from Derbyshire, to return. “One thinks of various excuses when one goes about one’s gardening,” he said recently, “but that’s my view.”

Other ex-human shields say the experience was a positive one, even if the folks at home concluded they were traitors, apologists for Saddam or lunatics with a death wish.

“The purpose was not to die,” Letts said. “We weren’t intending to be martyrs but to win a political battle, we’re almost a guerrilla rear-action movement against the war.”

In fact, though Letts and his unusual double-decker brigade have left Iraq, an estimated 150 more shields from the United Kingdom, United States and elsewhere have gone there to take their place.

At the same time, they did not want to actually lend support to Saddam Hussein’s murderous regime.

While Saddam’s “sad treatment of his own people has been dreadful,” Meynell said, “to some extent our interests overlapped. We both wanted to stop the war happening, and insofar as he used me to stop the war that was all right by me, so long as he respected my human rights.”

Pepper, the American, said he was not really a human shield but joined the others both to photograph the mission and to make an antiwar statement of his own.

When riding in a Baghdad taxi one day, the driver asked where Pepper was from. Pepper said America, adding, “Bush is bad. Down with Bush.” Then the driver started talking about how evil Saddam was. “I think he said ‘Kill Saddam,'” Pepper recalled. “It scared the hell out of me. If anyone knew (the conversation) had taken place, I could have been killed.”