On April 4, the Marines cordoned off the city in what would become a weeks-long siege.

Many residents now rallied to the cause of the Fallujah insurgents, and, on April 5, a new battalion of several hundred Iraqi soldiers refused to join the Marines in assaulting the city.

The American occupation now faced its worst nightmare: "not just a two-front war . . . , but one in which each side was drawing strength from the other," as the Washington Post reported.

The two wings of the mushrooming insurgency now realized that American forces were seriously overstretched, and they started cooperating with each other tactically. Pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr began showing up in Sunni mosques. In the Sunni Triangle, the fighting spread to Ramadi, where twelve marines were killed on April 6 in an ambush and five-hour street battle. Ambushes, kidnappings, and roadside bombings sharply escalated.

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General Petraeus didn’t invent the successful strategy while out for one of his eight-mile runs, and then hand out the orders as though promulgating the Ten Commandments.

He did something far rarer and more difficult: he looked further down the ranks, and outside the armed forces entirely, searching for people who had already solved parts of the problem that the US forces were facing.

It’s not that David Petraeus was an empty vessel for the ideas of others. He commanded American forces in Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq, in 2003. Like McMaster, he ignored much of what he was being ordered to do by his superiors . . .

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Three things you must know about Navy SEAL Chris Kyle: he’s a family man; he’s a Christian; and, third, he’s capable of snuffing out your lights at 2,000 yards if you pose a threat to American warriors under his protection.

So feared was he by Islamic terrorists and insurgents that they christened him al-Shaitan, “the Devil,” and placed a bounty on his head.

He was known to other combat soldiers as The Legend.

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It is true that, throughout the inspections, I believed the Iraqis could have acted faster and shown more transparency.

I was never completely certain as to why they did not. In part, I believe they wanted to preserve their dignity: respect is the most valuable currency in Middle Eastern negotiations, and it would have been unacceptable for the Iraqis to appear intimidated or humiliated by the inspections.

It may have been the persistent suspicion that the UN inspections were an instrument for intelligence gathering, in preparation for war.

Or perhaps they simply believed that because there were no WMDs to be discovered, the truth would eventually prevail.

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War began when most of us were asleep, which is how most wars begin.

A few insomniacs at Camp New Jersey claimed to have heard the growl of Tomahawk cruise missiles 250 feet overhead as they motored toward Baghdad before dawn on Thursday, March 20. The vast majority, however, got word through the soldier grapevine or from television: several satellite dishes had sprouted around the camp. In the public-affairs tent, Bush’s announcement from the Oval Office replayed endlessly on the Samsung multisystem: “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance. . . . We will accept no outcome but victory.”

Trey Cate stared at the screen and murmured, “This is going to be a weird war. We’re going to live it and watch it at the same time.”

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McGinnis yelled again: “The grenade is in the truck!”

Then Newland could hear it ricocheting around the turret, a heavy metallic drum.

McGinnis tried to grab it so he could toss it back out before it blew, but he missed. He stood as if he were going to leap out of the top of the Humvee, but instead he dropped down from his fighting position into the truck.

Newland thought McGinnis was trying to escape the grenade. But he wasn’t. McGinnis had realized that his teammates hadn’t spotted it, and so he was chasing it.

Newland couldn’t move quickly enough to get out of the truck with its combat-locked doors, and none of the guys quite understood what was going on because McGinnis hadn’t dived out.

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