Scions of the Surge

Petraeus has institutionalized that knowledge. Herding a team of researchers at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, he was able to get his manual written and approved about three years after the invasion of Iraq, lightning speed in Pentagon time. But even Petraeus says that the much-lauded document can provide only principles to follow. The hard work is still being done in the streets of Baghdad. "What they're dealing with is much more complex and much more nuanced than what we were trained to do when I was a captain," he says. "You have to understand not just what we call the military terrain ... the high ground and low ground. It's about understanding the human terrain, really understanding it."

In February, three weeks after getting married (at a house on base that once belonged to General Custer, he notes wryly), Wright deployed to Baghdad with the First Infantry Division's First Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment—the Black Lions. He did not know whom, if anyone, he could trust. His company was sent into a battle-scarred neighborhood, Bayaa, where Sunnis and Shiites were killing each other. The Sunni insurgents sent in car bombs and the Shiite Mahdi Army was spearheading an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing, sometimes aided by the National Police, the Iraqi government's supposed peacekeepers. A bullet wrapped in paper would be dropped off at the homes of Sunnis, signaling them that they would be gunned down in their homes if they didn't leave. Sometimes as they left they would be gunned down anyway. The local Shiite militia blew up a treasured Sunni mosque. "The NP [National Police] watched it happen," says Wright. "Probably to make sure it was done right."

Wright's Delta company was caught in the middle of Sunni-Shiite fire fights. His soldiers learned to do the "dance," shifting positions and moving in zigzags in the street to throw off snipers. Within the first three months the company lost 10 of its 102 men; three were killed. Wright's only reliable friend in town was his interpreter, Ali (not his real name). Speaking his own kind of English, sprinkled with profanity and hip-hop slang, Ali was a marked man. At one time he was kidnapped by insurgents, hanged upside down and shocked with electric cables. Wright likes to joke that Ali could go over to the other side at any time. "He's one step away from shooting at us," Wright says, with a wry smile. But Ali was able to begin to recruit informants, who were given cell phones and SIM cards to help them stay in touch.

All across Baghdad, company commanders have become their own intelligence officers, running networks of informants and drawing directly upon surveillance imagery and other intel sources. They can "employ intelligence that previously was seldom available as low as battalion commander," Petraeus says. By necessity, these officers have also been given greater leeway to make decisions than their predecessors. Under his command, Petraeus says, "there is not only a tolerance for initiative and independent action, there is encouragement."

Implicit within that, he says, is "the empowerment of commanders at local levels … to make deals." By last summer, a deal struck with Sunni tribal sheiks—many of whose followers had joined the insurgency—had drastically reduced violence in once deadly Anbar province. American commanders began to try similar compromises in other areas, including several neighborhoods near Bayaa. Local fighters were put on the U.S. payroll and allowed to patrol their own neighborhoods, as long as they helped in the fight against radicals from Al Qaeda in Iraq and Shiite splinter groups. Nearly 80,000 of these militiamen—variously called "Concerned Local Citizens" or "Sons of Iraq" or Sahwa, "the Awakening"—are now paid by the Americans, at a cost of roughly $24 million a month. Some are Shiite but the vast majority are Sunni.

In Bayaa, the Shiite Mahdi Army, loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, was ascendant. Distinguishing between "reconcilables and irreconcilables," as Petraeus puts it, wasn't easy. In one case Wright was urged by residents to cooperate with a local Sadrist who had a reputation for violence. (Indeed, Wright had personally chased the man down a street after he fired an RPG at one of Wright's vehicles.) But Wright decided the man had too much blood on his hands and kept him in detention after he was arrested. Other calls were closer. The most important involved a Sadrist leader Wright refers to as "Mr. X."