The Fall of the Warrior King

[wtmusic]

The story of Colonel Nathan Sassaman--the poster child for why we're failing in Iraq.

"It's like Jekyll and Hyde out here," Sassaman said at the time. "By day, we're putting on a happy face. By night, we are hunting down and killing our enemies."

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"After a time, the insurgents came to fear him more than they did the others. When Sassaman left Balad, the attacks would increase; when he returned, they would fall away. Once, when Sassaman was returning from a mission in Samarra, insurgents fired a single mortar round into his compound, as if to welcome him back. He responded by firing 28 155-millimeter artillery shells and 42 mortar rounds. He called in two airstrikes, one with a 500-pound bomb and the other with a 2,000-pound bomb. Later on, his men found a crater as deep as a swimming pool.

"You know what?" Sassaman told me. "We just didn't get hit after that."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/magazine/23sassaman.html