Scions of the Surge

A doctor's son, Tim Wright was a Latin scholar with a 3.8 average in high school. Admitted to Princeton, he chose to go to West Point instead. "People looked at me like I had a third eye," Wright says, but he was drawn to the discipline of the U.S. Military Academy. He became a squared-away soldier, demanding of his troops yet sleeping and eating with them, and sharing their privations and dangers. His gung-ho attitude earned him the nickname "Captain America" from some of his grunts, half in jest, half out of respect.

But Wright is not the warrior he expected to be or that he was first trained to be. When he became a young infantry officer out of West Point in 2000, he entered an Army whose mission was to win wars by overwhelming force. This was the Army that blasted its way into Baghdad in less than three weeks in the spring of 2003. It is also the Army whose guns-blazing tactics helped fuel an angry insurgency, and that quickly became bogged down—worn, bloodied and baffled—by IEDs and street fighting in Iraq.

Wright, 30, was a captain in Baghdad last spring when the situation seemed bleakest. Walking down a street in the tormented neighborhood of Bayaa, chatting with a private named Oscar Sauceda,

Wright watched as Sauceda was hit in the head by a sniper's bullet. "He was dead before he hit the ground," Wright says, choking up at the memory. The captain wondered if he had failed his soldier by not clearing a nearby building. "That's the tough thing about this job," says Wright, blinking back tears. "If you f––– up, sometimes people die." Less than three weeks later, one of his company's Humvees was hit by a roadside bomb. Wright's staff sergeant, Matt Lammers, lost both legs and his left arm. Wright was crestfallen when he saw Lammers in the hospital. Baghdad seemed hopeless then. "It makes you think," Wright says, recalling his feelings at the time. "Is this place too far gone?"

Many Americans were asking that question last spring and summer. While it's too soon to say Iraq has turned the corner, the violence in Baghdad and most of the country has since declined precipitously. Much of the credit has gone to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander who has changed the way the U.S. Army fights. "You can't kill your way out of an insurgency," Petraeus told NEWSWEEK, in an interview in his Baghdad headquarters last month. He has moved soldiers out of their secure megabases and into small outposts deep inside once alien and hostile neighborhoods, and he has ordered his men out of their armored convoys. "Walk … Stop by, don't drive by," says Petraeus, reading from a "guidance" he is drafting for his soldiers. The objective, he repeats over and over, is no longer to take a hill or storm a citadel, but to win over the people.

But this new way of war needs a new kind of warrior, and it needs tens of thousands of them. Five years into the longest conflict the U.S. military has fought since Vietnam, young officers like Tim Wright have been blooded by multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've learned, often on their own, operating with unprecedented independence, the intricacies of Muslim cultures. Faced with ineffective central governments, they have acted as mayors, mediators, cops, civil engineers, usually in appalling surroundings. Most recently, and hardest of all, they've had to reach out and ally themselves with men who have tried and often succeeded in killing their own soldiers. Brought up in rigid, flag-waving warrior cultures that taught right from wrong, black from white, they've had to learn to operate amid moral ambiguity, to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations of their enemies.